THE HISTORICAL JESUS
A SURVEY OF POSITIONS
BY
JOHN M. ROBERTSON
[ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]
London:
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1916
CONTENTS
PAGE
[Preamble] xi
Chapter I.—[THE SNARE OF PRESUPPOSITION]
Presupposition in science. The Copernican theory. The reception of Galileo, Harvey, and Darwin. Blinding effects of scholarship. The theological record. Mutations of Christian opinion. Defence of the belief in witchcraft. Leibnitz and Newton. Criticism of the Pentateuch. Parvish, Astruc, Voltaire, Colenso, and the professional scholars 1
Chapter II.—[MODES OF CONSERVATIVE FALLACY]
Persistence of the theological temper. Each abandoned position first defended with the same fierceness. Saner forms of conservatism. Persistence in presupposition. Canon Inge on Jesus and Paul. The logical hiatus. Mill’s precedent. His dithyrambic mood and critical inadequacy. Disregard of the documentary evidence. Need to face the real problem. The sociological process. Mill’s dictum contrasted with those of Newman and Baur 6
Chapter III.—[ILLUSIONS AS TO GOSPEL ETHIC]
Mill’s method and mind non-historical. “The historic sense.” Dr. J. E. Carpenter’s. The concept of “sublimity.” God portraiture. Its limitations. The Gospel ethic. Significance of the contradictions. The parable of the Good Samaritan. Incompetent verdicts of theologians. The story of Lycurgus and Alcander. Plutarch on forgiveness of enemies. Fanaticism of Christian estimates of antiquity 18
Chapter IV.—[THE METHOD OF BLUSTER]
The historic problem. Its treatment by a Unitarian cleric. The method of bluster. The real and the pretended character of the Gospel according to Mark. Wellhausen’s estimate. Actual features of primitive and popular myth-lore. Biography in Plutarch. Mr. McCabe on the Marcan residuum. The gospel figure. Doctrinal determinants 30
Chapter V.—[SCHMIEDEL AND DEROGATORY MYTH]
Collapse of the thesis of “human characteristics.” The myth and the historicity of Herakles. The more considerate thesis of Schmiedel: argument from “derogatory” episodes. Kalthoff on the human characteristics in Ruth and Jonah. Confusion of the new argument. Jesus introduced in Mark with divine characteristics. The Unitarian blunder as to “conventional” and “unconventional” hero-worship. Jewish and Pagan heroes and Gods alike put in “derogatory” positions. Herakles, Dionysos, and Apollo. Need to apply anthropological, mythological, and hierological as well as N. T. scholarship. Grounds for a Christian myth of the Founder as opposed by his family 44
Chapter VI.—[THE VISIONARY EVANGEL]
B. Weiss’s “Primitive Gospel.” Its characteristics common to Mark. The enigma of the evangel of the Twelve. That problem never rightly realized by the exegetes. The allegorical explanations to be withheld from the people. Complete deficit of historical matter. The evangel of the Twelve a myth. Real origin in a rite, not in an evangel. The last hypothesis: a political evangel that could not be later avowed. Incompatibility of this view with the Gospels. Composition of the record. Why the Primitive Gospel lacked the Tragedy. Breakdown of the traditionary explanation. Orthodox avowals of anomaly 51
Chapter VII.—[THE ALLEGED CONSENSUS OF SCHOLARS]
Resort to the myth-theory forced by the data. Unitarian attitude to that. Appeal for acceptance of the “consensus of scholars.” No such consensus ever attained. Dalman on his fellow-specialists. His own presuppositions. Pretensions to solve historical problems through philology. Distinction between pedantry and science. Candour of Schmiedel. Inadequacy of his method. Resistance of scholarship to scientific thought. Colenso and the Zulu and the orthodox resistance. Attack on the New Testament scholars by Professor Blass 62
Chapter VIII.—[CONSERVATIVE POSITIONS]
Modifications of conservative attitude. Lack of good faith or of comprehension. Samples of misrepresentation. The Unitarian attitude. Treatment of myth-solutions: the Myth of the Temptation. Dr. Thorburn’s orthodox solution. Mythology and psychology. Psychic determinants of resistance to new views. Attitude to “healing powers” ascribed to Jesus. Force of presupposition. Davidson’s “must.” 74
Chapter IX.—[BLASS AND FLINDERS PETRIE]
The attempt to find an “impersonal” test of the documentary basis. Dr. Flinders Petrie on The Growth of the Gospels. Theory of selection and compilation from logia. Acceptance of any item as early. The argument of Blass as to possibility of real predictions. Case of Savonarola. Nature of the problem. Political anticipation versus prophecy. Investigation of the Savonarola case. His earlier prophecies, conditional and absolute 82
Chapter X.—[THE SAVONAROLA FALLACY]
Comparison between Savonarola’s prediction of the Sack of Rome and the gospel prophecy of the Fall of Jerusalem. Normality of Savonarola’s vaticinations. Historical blunder of the Blass school as to medieval warfare. Frequency of sacrilege in Christian war. The Christian sack of Constantinople 93
Chapter XI.—[THE “LOGIA” THEORY AND THE HISTORICAL TEST]
Blass on the gospel prophecy: analysis of the texts. Their arbitrary handling by Blass. The “Nucleus” theory of Dr. Petrie. Its arbitrary implications. Impersonal method of selection not followed by impersonal inference from the results. The logia theory much more compatible with the myth-theory than with the tradition. Test cases 104
Chapter XII.—[FAILURE OF THE “LOGIA” THEORY]
The scientific inference. Omission and invention of logia necessarily to be inferred as well as selection. Implicit abandonment of certain prophecies, and resulting incoherence of the argument. Reversion to the fundamental issue between supernaturalism and reason. Final futility of the attempt to vindicate the documents. Possibilities as to currency of written logia. Illustration from Islam. The mass of incompatibilities in the Gospel Teaching. Possibilities of genuine self-contradiction. Carlyle and Ruskin. Mohammed. The gospels not thus explicable. Damaging implications of the logia theory. Variety of “Christs.” Papias. Baruch and Enoch 113
Chapter XIII.—[RESURGENCE OF THE HISTORIC PROBLEM]
The actually recovered logia of Oxyrhynchus. Their incompatibility with Dr. Petrie’s assumption of historic genuineness for all. The real process of composition in Luke’s gospel. Motives for invention. The myth of the Seventy Disciples a sample and test case. Inadequacy alike of the documentary theory and that of scattered logia 123
Chapter XIV.—[ORTHODOXY AND THE “ORAL” HYPOTHESIS]
The “oral” hypothesis of the Rev. A. Wright. His approximations to the “liberal” chronology as against the Blass school. His candour. Hypothesis of fifty-two Lessons. Another “selection” theory—selection from oral traditions locally cherished. Wide departures of Mr. Wright from his theory. Unaccountableness of apostolic information. The tradition as to baptism. Problem of the duration of the Ministry, and of the one or four visits to Jerusalem. The oral hypothesis, like the others, more compatible with the myth-theory than with the tradition. Stand on the Resurrection 129
Chapter XV.—[THE METHOD OF M. LOISY]
M. Loisy and the “liberal” school. His attitude to the myth-theory. His certitudes. Disclaims biography, and produces one. His treatment of the legend. The problem of the multitude of healings. Collapse of the assumption in the case of Nazareth. Inconsistency of M. Loisy’s method, and weakness of his solutions. His acceptance of the Joseph legend. “The carpenter.” Difficulty set up by Origen. The myth solution. “The son of Mary.” Dilemma set up by later passages. Problem of the Messianic declaration of Peter. Impossibility of the personality set up by Petrine and anti-Petrine records 141
Chapter XVI.—[THE TRIAL CRUX]
Lax treatment of the main problems by M. Loisy. Acceptance of the non-historical as historical. The Purification of the Temple. The Agony. Approximation to the true solution. The priestly Trial. Virtual abandonment of the narrative by M. Loisy. Illicit reconstruction. Successive retreats of the “liberal” school. Surrender of (1) the Trial before Herod, (2) the Johannine record, (3) the Trial before the priests. Stand on the Trial before Pilate. Untenableness of that. The Roman Trial admittedly a loose tradition. Impossible as recorded. A clear solution supplied by the myth theory. Irreconcilable character of the Triumphal entry and the unanimous hostility of the people before Pilate. The Barabbas story admittedly unhistorical. Its presence accounted for only by the myth-theory 161
Chapter XVII.—[THE JESUS-FIGURE OF M. LOISY]
The dilemma of the Evangel of the Twelve. M. Loisy on the Teaching of Jesus as preparative for the cult. Destructive effect of his admissions as to the teaching of Paul. His attitude towards the myth-theory. Demanding definiteness, he rests in the indefinite. His self-contradictions. His ascription of originality to quoted teachings. Incompatibility of his Teacher and his Messiah. The teaching as to divorce not that of one expecting a new order. Its prior currency. Bases of the gospel ethic. The Good Samaritan documentarily a late creation 173
Chapter XVIII.—[THE PAULINE PROBLEM]
M. Loisy on the testimony of Paul. His misconception as to its bearings on the myth-theory. Van Manen helped by his own thesis to accept the historicity of Jesus. The myth-theory quite independent of the dating of the Epistles. Importance of noting that, early or late, they are interpolated. M. Loisy’s treatment of the documentary problem. Van Manen’s strong case against the Epistles. Need to revise the details of the chronology. Also to orient the myth-theory aright. Inadequacy of the theories of Kalthoff and Kautsky 185
Chapter XIX.—[THE HISTORY OF THE DISCUSSION]
Prospects of controversy. Slow advance of the “liberal” view. Identity of the final positions of Strauss and Loisy. Tentative beginnings of the myth-theory. Effects of persecution and of Strauss’s final dialectic. Schweitzer on the evolution “from Reimarus to Wrede.” Bruno Bauer. Claims for “the German temperament.” Need for a truly scientific temper. Effects of Bauer’s flaws of mood and method. Schweitzer’s amenity and candour. Demonstrates the shortsightedness of German specialism. Schweitzer’s ignorance concerning the myth-theory in its later developments. His laxities in research. His own thesis 193
Chapter XX.—[THE GROUND CLEARED FOR THE MYTH-THEORY]
The issue as between Schweitzer and Wrede. Each destroys one half of the “liberal” case for historicity. Schweitzer confutes Wrede, and then puts a still more untenable view. His acceptance of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem as historical. His Jesus hailed not as a Messiah but as Elias. Schweitzer’s new view of the Betrayal. Judas a revealer of his Master’s private claim to be Messiah. The multitude supposed to be thus cleared of the charge of fickleness. Schweitzer’s fallacy as to Messianic claims being blasphemous. His service to criticism by clearing the ground. His final ethical and sociological confusion. The fortunes of the myth-theory in England. Early adumbrations. Difference in modern spirit and method, resulting from establishment of anthropology as a science. Lyell and Tylor. Schweitzer’s scientific temper. The myth-theory. The battleground of the future. Positions of Sir J. G. Frazer. Countervailing declarations by supporters of the myth-theory. The question one of science, not sentiment 201
[Conclusion] 211
[Index] 217
PREAMBLE
The problem of the historicity of the Jesus of the Gospels has been discussed by me in large sections of two bulky books, which in other sections deal with matters only indirectly connected with this, while even the sections directly devoted to the problem cover a good deal of mythological and anthropological ground which not many readers may care to master. The “myth theory” developed in them, therefore, may not be readily grasped even by open-minded readers; and the champions of tradition, of whatever school, have a happy hunting-ground for desultory misrepresentation and mystification. It has been felt to be expedient, therefore, by disinterested readers as well as by me, to put the problem in a clearer form and in a more concise compass. The process ought to involve some logical improvement, as the mythological investigation made in Christianity and Mythology had been carried out independently of the anthropological inquiry made in Pagan Christs, and the theory evolved may well require unification. In particular, the element of Jewish mythology calls for fuller development. And the highly important developments of the myth theory by Professor Drews and Professor W. B. Smith have to be considered with a view to co-ordination.
To such a re-statement, however, certain preliminary steps are necessary. The ground needs to be cleared (1) of à priori notions as to the subject matter; (2) of mistaken opinions as to a supposed “consensus of critics”; and (3) of uncritical assumptions as to the character of the Gospel narratives.
Writers who have not gone very deeply into problems of normal history, however they may have specialized in the Biblical, are still wont to assert that the historicity of non-supernatural data in the Sacred Books is on all fours with that of the subject matter of “profane” history. Indeed it is still common to hear it claimed that the Resurrection is as well “attested” as the assassination of Julius Cæsar, or even better. In exactly the same tone and spirit did the traditionalists of a previous generation assert that the stoppage of the sun and moon in the interest of Joshua was better attested than any equally ancient historical narrative. Those who have decided to abandon the supernatural reduce the claim, of course, to the historicity of the Trial and Crucifixion; but as to these they confidently repeat the old formulas. Yet in point of fact they have made no such critical scrutiny of even these items as historians have long been used to make, with destructive results, into many episodes of ancient history—for instance, the battle of Thermopylæ and the founding of the Spartan constitution by Lycurgus. Men who affect to dismiss the myth theory as an ungrounded speculation are all the while taking for granted the historicity of a record which is a mere tissue of incredibilities.
It has been justly remarked that serious risk of error is set up even by the long-current claim of naturalist critics to “treat the Bible like any other book.” Even in their meaning the phrase should have run: “like any other Sacred Book of antiquity”; inasmuch as critical tests and methods are called for in the scrutiny of such books which do not apply in the case of others. But inasmuch, further, as the Christian Sacred Books form a problem by themselves, a kind of scrutiny which in the case of other books of cult-history might substantially reveal all the facts may here easily fail to do so.
The unsuspecting student, coming to a narrative in which supernatural details are mingled with “natural,” decides simply to reject the former and take as history what is left. It is the method of the amateur mythologists of ancient Greece, derided by Socrates, and chronically resuscitated in all ages by men seeking short cuts to certitude where they have no right to any. If the narrative of the Trial and Crucifixion, thus handled, is found to be still incredible in point of time-arrangement, the adaptor meets the difficulty by reducing the time-arrangement to probability and presenting the twice redacted result as “incontestable” history. All this, as will be shown in the following pages, is merely a begging of the question. A scientific analysis points to a quite different solution, which the naïf “historical” student has never considered.
He is still kept in countenance, it is true, by “specialists” of the highest standing. The average “liberal” theologian still employs the explanatory method of Toland; and anthropologists still offer him support. Thus Sir James Frazer, by far the most learned collector of mytho-anthropological lore in his age, positively refuses to apply to the history of the Christian cult his own express rule of mythology—formulated before him[1] but independently reiterated by him—that “all peoples have invented myths to explain why they observed certain customs,” and that a graphic myth to explain a rite is presumptively “a simple transcript of a ceremony”; which is the equivalent of the doctrine of Robertson Smith, that “in almost every case the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth,” and of the doctrine of K. O. Müller that “the mythus sprang from the worship, and not the worship from the mythus.” What justification Sir James can give for his refusal to act on his own principles is of course a matter for full and careful consideration. But at least the fact that he has to justify the refusal to apply in a most important case one of the best-established generalizations of comparative mythology is not in this case a recommendation of the principle of authority to scientific readers.
General phrases, then, as to how religions must have originated in the personal impression made by a Founder are not only unscientific presuppositions but are flatly contradictory, in this connection, of a rule scientifically reached in the disinterested study of ancient hierology in general.
It is a delusion, again, to suppose, as do some scholarly men, that there is such a consensus of view among New Testament scholars as to put out of court any theory that cancels the traditionalist assumption of historicity which is the one position that most of them have in common. As we shall see, the latest expert scholarship, professionally recognized as such, makes a clean sweep of their whole work; but they themselves, by their insoluble divisions, had already discredited it. Any careful collection of their views will show that the innumerable and vital divergences of principle and method of the various schools, and their constant and emphatic disparagement of each other’s conclusions, point rather to the need for a radically different theory and method. A theory, therefore, which cancels their conflicts by showing that all the data are reducible to order only when their primary assumption is abandoned, is entitled to the open-minded attention of men who profess loyalty to the spirit of science.
There is need, thirdly, to bring home even to many readers who profess such loyalty, the need for a really critical study of the Gospels. I have been blamed by some critics because, having found that sixty years’ work on the documents by New Testament scholars yielded no clear light on the problem of origins, I chose to approach that by way (1) of mythology, (2) of extra-evangelical literature and sect-history, and (3) of anthropology. The question of the order and composition of the Gospels, in the view of these critics, should be the first stage in the inquiry.
Now, for the main purposes of the myth-theory, the results reached by such an investigator as Professor Schmiedel were quite sufficient; and though at many points textual questions had to be considered, it seemed really not worth while to discuss in detail the quasi-historical results claimed by the exegetes. But it has become apparent that a number of readers who claim to be “emancipated” have let themselves be put off with descriptions of the Gospel-history when they ought to have read it attentively for themselves. A confident traditionalist, dealt with hereinafter, writes of the “pretentious futilities into which we so readily drop when we talk about them [the Gospels] instead of reading them.” The justice of the observation is unconsciously but abundantly illustrated by himself; and he certainly proves the need for inducing professed students to read with their eyes open.
Early in 1914 there was published a work on The Historical Christ, by Dr. F. C. Conybeare, in which, as against the myth hypothesis, which he vituperatively assailed, a simple perusal of the Gospel of Mark (procurable, as he pointed out, for one penny) was confidently prescribed as the decisive antidote to all doubts of the historicity of the central figure. The positions put were the conventional ones of the “liberal” school. No note was taken of the later professional criticism which, without accepting the myth-theory, shatters the whole fabric of current historicity doctrine. But that is relatively a small matter. In the course of his treatise, Dr. Conybeare asserted three times over, with further embellishments, that in the Gospel of Mark Jesus is “presented quite naturally as the son of Joseph and his wife Mary, and we learn quite incidentally the names of his brothers and sisters.” Dr. Conybeare’s printers’ proofs, he stated, had been read for him by Professor A. C. Clark. I saw, I think, fully twenty newspaper notices of the book; and in not a single one was there any recognition of the gross and thrice-repeated blunder above italicized, to modify the chorus of uncritical assent. A professed Rationalist repeated and endorsed Dr. Conybeare’s assertion. Needless to say, not only did Dr. Conybeare not mention that Joseph is never named in Mark, he never once alluded to the fact that in the same Gospel Mary is presented as not the mother of Jesus; and the brothers and sisters, by implication, as not his brothers and sisters.
When aggressive scholars and confident reviewers thus alike reveal that they have not read the Gospels with the amount of attention supposed to be bestowed on them by an intelligent Sunday-school teacher, it is evidently inadvisable to take for granted any general critical preparation even among rationalistic readers. Before men can realize the need for a new theoretic interpretation of the whole, they must be invited to note the vital incongruities (as apart from miracle stories) in each Gospel singly, as the lay Freethinkers of an earlier generation did without pretending to be scholars.
Those Rationalists are ill-advised who suppose that, in virtue of having listened to latter-day publicists who profess to extract a non-supernatural “religion” from the supernaturalisms of the past, they have reached a higher and truer standpoint than that of the men who made sheer truth their standard and their ideal. Really scholarly and scrupulous advocates of theism are as zealous to expose the historical truth as the men who put that first and foremost; it is the ethical sentimentalists who put the question of historic truth on one side. The fact that some men of scientific training in other fields join at times in such complacent constructions does not alter the fact that they are non-scientific. The personal equation even of a man of science is not science. On these as on other sides of the intellectual life, “opinion of store is cause of want,” as Bacon has it.
Some of us who in our teens critically read the sacred books first and foremost to clear our minds on the general question of supernaturalism, and then proceeded to try, with the help of the documentary scholars, to trace the history of religion as matter of anthropology and sociology, had the experience of being told by Professor Huxley, whose own work we had followed, that we were still at the standpoint of Voltaire. Later we had the edification of seeing Huxley expatiate upon topics which had long been stale for Secularist audiences, and laboriously impugn the story of the Flood and the miracle of the Gadarene swine in discursive debate with Gladstone, even making scientific mistakes in the former connection.
In view of it all, it seems still a sound discipline to treat all opinions as for ever open to revision, and at the same time to doubt whether the acceptance of any popular formula will place us in a position to disparage unreservedly all our critical predecessors. If we find reason to dismiss as inadequate the conclusions of many scholars of the past, orthodox and heterodox, we are not thereby entitled to speak of the best of them otherwise than as powerful minds and strenuous toilers, hampered by some of their erroneous assumptions in the task of relieving their fellows of the burden of others.
It is precisely the habituation of the professional scholars to working in a special groove that has so retarded the progress of New Testament criticism. The re-discussion of the historicity question that has followed upon the modern exposition of the myth-theory has involved the reiteration by the historicity school of a set of elementary claims from the long-discredited interpolation in Josephus and the pagan “testimonies” of Suetonius and Tacitus; and Professor W. B. Smith has had to meet these with a detailed rebuttal such as used to be made—of course with less care and fullness—on the ordinary English Secularist platform forty or even seventy years ago. Less advanced scholars once more begin to recognize the nullity of the argument from the famous passage in the Annals of Tacitus,[2] which was clear to so many unpretending freethinkers in the past; and to other Gelehrten vom Fach it has to be again pointed out that the impulsore Chresto of Suetonius, so far from testifying to the presence of a Christian multitude at Rome under Nero—a thing so incompatible with their own records—is rather a datum for the myth-theory, inasmuch as it posits a cult of a Chrēstos or Christos out of all connection with the “Christian” movement.
The passage in Josephus was given up long ago by hundreds of orthodox scholars as a palpable interpolation, proved as such by the total silence in regard to it of early Fathers who would have rejoiced to cite it if it had been in existence. The device of supposing it to be a Christian modification of a different testimony by Josephus is a resort of despair, which evades altogether the fact of the rupture of context made by the passage—a feature only less salient in the paragraph of Tacitus. But even if there were no reason to suspect the latter item of being a late echo from Sulpicius Severus, who is assumed to have copied it, nothing can be proved from it for the historicity of the Gospel Jesus, inasmuch as it does but set forth from a hostile standpoint the ordinary Christian account of the beginnings of the cult. Those who at this time of day found upon such data are further from an appreciation of the evidential problem than were their orthodox predecessors who debated the issue with Freethinkers half a century ago.
I have thought it well, then, to precede a restatement of the “myth-theory” with a critical survey in which a number of preliminary questions of scientific method and critical ethic are pressed upon those who would deal with the main problem aright; and a certain amount of controversy with other critical schools is indulged in by way of making plain the radical weakness of all the conventional positions. The negative criticism, certainly, will not establish in advance the positive theory: that must meet the ordeal of criticism like every other. But the preliminary discussion may at once serve to free from waste polemic the constructive argument and guard readers against bringing to that a delusive light from false assumptions.
A recent and more notorious exhibition of “critical method” by Dr. Conybeare has satisfied me that it is needless to offer any further systematic exposure of the nullity of his treatise, with which I had dealt at some length in The Literary Guide. His memorable attack upon the Foreign Secretary, and his still more memorable retractation, may enable some of his laudatory reviewers to realize the kind of temper and the kind of scrutiny he brings to bear upon documents and theories that kindle his passions. All that was relevant in his constructive process was really extracted, with misconceptions and blunders and exaggerations, from the works of a few scholars of standing who, however inconclusive their work might be, set him a controversial example which he was unable to follow. In dealing with them, I have the relief of no longer dealing with him. As to the constructive argument from comparative mythology, anthropology, and hierology, attacked by him and others with apparently no grasp of the principles of any of these sciences, objections may be best dealt with incidentally where they arise in the restatement of the case.
For the rest, I can conceive that some will say the second year of the World War is no time for the discussion even of a great problem of religious history. I answer that the War has actually been made the pretext for endless religious discussions of the most futile kind, ranging between medieval miracle-mongering and the lowest forms of journalistic charlatanism, with chronic debates on theism and on the military value of faith and prayer. The newspaper discussions on theism, in particular, reveal a degree of philosophic naïveté on the theistic side which seems to indicate that that view of the universe has of late years been abandoned by most men capable of understanding the logical problem. When dispute plays thus uselessly at the bidding of emotion there must be some seniors, or others withheld from war service, who in workless hours would as lief face soberly an inquiry which digs towards the roots of the organized religion of Europe. If the end of the search should be the conviction that that system took shape as naturally as any other cult of the ancient world, and that the sacrosanct records of its origin are but products of the mythopœic faculty of man, the time of war, with its soul-shaking challenge to the sense of reality, may not be the most unfit for the experience.
[1] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 179, note. [↑]
[2] That is, even supposing the Annals to be genuine. Professor W. B. Smith speaks of a contention “of late” that they are forged by Poggio Bracciolini, but refers only to the work of Ross, 1878. The thesis has been far more efficiently maintained in a series of works by Hochart (1890, etc.), which are worth Professor Smith’s attention. [↑]
THE HISTORICAL JESUS
Chapter I
THE SNARE OF PRESUPPOSITION
He who would approach with an alert mind such a question as that of the historic actuality of the Gospel Jesus would do well to weigh a preliminary warning. Though after four hundred years of chronic scientific discovery all men are supposed to know the intellectual danger of a confident and foregone rejection of new theories, it is scarcely likely that the vogue of such error is at an end. After all, apart from the special experience in question, and from the general effect of the spread of “science,” the average psychosis of men is not profoundly different from what it was in the two centuries which passed before the doctrines of Copernicus found general acceptance. Not many modern novelties of thought can so reasonably be met with derision as was the proposition that the earth moves round the sun.
Let the ingenuous reader try to make the supposition that he had been brought up in ignorance of that truth, and without any training in astronomy, and that in adolescence or mature years it had been casually put to him as a non-authoritative suggestion. Would he have been quick to surmise that the paradox might be truth? Let him next try to imagine that he had been educated by an eccentric guardian in the Ptolemaic creed, which accounted so plausibly for so many solar and stellar phenomena, and that until middle life he had been kept unaware of the Copernican heresy. Can he be sure that, meeting it not as an accredited doctrine but as a novel hypothesis, he would have been prompt to recognize that it was the better solution? If he can readily say Yes, I know not whether his confidence is enviable or otherwise. Reading in Sylvester’s translation of the Divine Weeks of Du Bartas, which had such vogue in the days of James VI, the confident derision and “confutation” of the heliocentric theory, I really cannot be sure that had I lived in those days I should have gone right where Bacon went wrong.
To a mere historical student, not conscious of any original insight into the problems of nature, there ought to be something chastening in the recollection that every great advance in the human grasp of them has been hotly or hilariously denounced and derided; and that not merely by the average ignoramus, but by the mass of the experts. It was not the peasants of Italy who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope—they were not invited to; it was the academics, deep in Aristotle. It was not the laity who distinguished themselves by rejecting Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood; it was all the doctors above forty then living, if we can believe a professional saying. And it was not merely the humdrum Bible-readers who scouted geology for generations, or who laughed consumedly for decades over the announcement that Darwin made out men to be “descended from monkeys.” That theory, as it happened, had been unscientifically enough propounded long before Darwin; and, albeit not grounded upon any such scientific research as served to establish the Darwinian theory in a generation, yet happened to be considerably nearer rationality than the Semitic myth which figured for instructed Christendom as the absolute and divinely revealed truth on the subject. A recollection of the hate and fury with which geologists like Hugh Miller repelled the plain lesson of their own science when it was shown to clash with the sacred myth, and a memory of the roar of derision and disgust which met Darwin, should set reasonable men on their guard when they find themselves faced by propositions which can hardly seem more monstrous to this generation than those others did to our fathers and grandfathers.
It is difficult, again, without suggesting contempt of that scholarship which as concerning historical problems is the equivalent of experimental research in science, to insist aright upon the blinding tendency of pure scholarship in the face of a radically innovating doctrine. Without scholarly survey no such doctrine can maintain itself. Yet it is one of the commonest of experiences to find the accredited scholars among the last to give an intelligent hearing to a new truth. Only for a very few was skill in the Ptolemaic astronomy a good preparation towards receiving the Copernican. The errors of Copernicus—the inevitable errors of the pioneer—served for generations to establish the Ptolemaists in theirs. And where religious usage goes hand-in-hand with an error, not one man in a thousand can escape the clutch of the double habit.
Hence the special blackness of the theological record in the history of culture. In the present day the hideous memory of old crimes withholds even the clerical class as a whole from the desire to employ active persecution; but that abstention—forced in any case—cannot save the class from the special snare of the belief in the possession of fixed and absolute truth. Since the day when Tyndale was burned for translating the Sacred Books, English Christians have passed through a dozen phases of faith, from the crassest evangelicalism to the haziest sentimentalism, and in all alike they have felt, mutatis mutandis, the same spontaneous aversion to the new doctrine that disturbs the old. Who will say that the stern Tyndale, had he ever been in power, would not have made martyrs in his turn? The martyr Latimer had applauded the martyrdom of Anabaptists. The martyred Cranmer had assented to martyrdoms in his day, though a man forgiving enough in respect of his own wrongs. And if the educated Christians of to-day have reached a level at which they can recognize as old delusions not only the beliefs in relics and images and exorcisms, once all sacrosanct, but the “literal” acceptance of Semitic and Christian myths and miracle-stories, to whom do they think they owe the deliverance? To their accredited teachers? Not so.
No false belief from which men have been delivered since the day of Copernicus has been dismissed without strenuous resistance from men of learning, and even from men of vigorous capacity. The belief in witchcraft was championed by Bodin, one of the most powerful minds of his day; Glanvill, who sought to maintain it in England after the Restoration, was a man of philosophical culture and a member of the Royal Society; and he had the countenance of the Platonist Henry More and the chemist Boyle. So great a man as Leibnitz repulsed the cosmology of Newton on the score that it expelled God from the universe. It was not professional theologians who invented the “higher criticism” of the Pentateuch, any more than they introduced geology. Samuel Parvish, the Guildford bookseller, who discovered in the days of Walpole that Deuteronomy belonged to the seventh century B.C., is not recorded to have made any clerical converts; and Astruc, the Parisian physician who began the discrimination between the Jehovistic and Elohistic sources in Genesis in 1753, made no school in his country or his time. Voltaire, no Hebraist, demonstrated clearly enough that the Pentateuchal tale of the tabernacle in the wilderness was a fiction; but three toiling generations of German specialists passed the demonstration by, till a Zulu convert set the good Bishop Colenso upon applying to the legend the simple tests of his secular arithmetic. Then the experts began slowly to see the point.
Chapter II
MODES OF CONSERVATIVE FALLACY
To all such reminders the present-day expert will reply, belike, that he does not need them. He, profiting by the past, can commit no such errors. And yet, however right the present members of the apostolic succession of truth-monopolists may be, there is an astonishing likeness in their tone and temper over the last heresy to that of their predecessors, down to the twentieth generation. Anger and bluster, boasting and scolding, snarl and sneer, come no less spontaneously to the tongues of the professional defender of the present minimum of creed than they did to those of the full-blooded breed of the ages of the maximum, or of Calvin and Bonner. From the defence of the “real presence” of the God to that of the bare personal existence of the Man is a long descent; but there is a singular sameness in the manner of the controversy. As their expert ancestors proved successively the absolute truth of the corporal presence in the wafer, or the humanity of the Son against those who dubbed him merely divine, or his divinity against those who pronounced him merely human, or the inerrancy of the Gospels against the blasphemers who pointed out the contradictions, or the historic certainty of the miracles and the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection and the Ascension against the “materialists” who put such Christian myths on a level with Pagan, so do the expert demonstrators of the bare historicity of the now undeified God establish by vituperation and derision, declamation and contempt, the supreme certainty of the minimum after all the supernatural certainties are gone. Even as Swiss patriots undertook to demonstrate “somebody” and “something” behind the legend of William Tell when it had ceased to be possible to burn men at the stake for exposing the apple-myth, so do the descendants of the demonstrators of the real presence now go about to make clear the real existence.
I speak, of course, of the ruck of the vindicators, not of the believers; and Professor Schmiedel and M. Loisy, I trust, will not suspect me of classing them with men many of whom are as hostile to them as to the thesis which those scholars seek by rational methods to confute. Professor Schmiedel has even avowed that a proof of the non-historicity of the Gospel Jesus would not affect his inner religious opinions; and such high detachment has been attained to by others. That civilized scholars credit, and might at a pinch maintain in debate, the historicity of the Gospel Jesus as calmly as they might the historicity of Lycurgus against its impugners, I am well aware. And to such readers, if I have the honour to obtain any, I address not a warning but an appeal. There is an attitude towards the problem which incurs no reproach on the score of tone and temper, and which will naturally recommend itself all the more to men of real culture, but which yet, I think, only illustrates in another way the immense difficulty of all-round intellectual vigilance. Let me give an example in an extract from a rather noteworthy pronouncement upon the question in hand:—
Of Paul’s divine Master no biography can ever be written. We have a vivid impression of an unique, effulgent personality. We have a considerable body of sayings which must be genuine because they are far too great to have been invented by His disciples, and, for the rest, whatever royal robes and tributes of devotion the Church of A.D. 70–100 thought most fitting for its king. The Gospels are the creation of faith and love: faith and love hold the key to their interpretation. (Canon Inge, art. “St. Paul” in Quarterly Review, Jan., 1914, p. 45.)
I am not here concerned to ask whether the closing words are the expression of an orthodox belief; or what orthodoxy makes of the further proposition that “With St. Paul it is quite different. He is a saint without a luminous halo.” The idea seems to be that concerning the saint without a nimbus we can get at the historical truth, while in the other case we cannot—a proposition worth orthodox attention. But what concerns the open-minded investigator is the logic of the words I have italicized. It is obvious that they proceed (1) on the assumption that what non-miraculous biography the Gospels give is in the main absolutely trustworthy—that is to say, that the accounts of the disciples and the teaching are historical; and (2) on the assumption that we are historically held to the traditional view that the Gospel sayings originated with the alleged Founder as they purport. It is necessary to point out that this is not a licit historical induction. Even Canon Inge by implication admits that not all the Gospel sayings have the quality which he regards as certifying authenticity; and on no reasonable ground can he claim that the others must have been “invented by the disciples.” The alternative is spurious. No one is in a position to deny that any given saying may have been invented by non-disciples. In point of fact, many professional theologians are agreed in tracing to outside sources some tolerably fine passages, such as the address to Jerusalem ([Mt. xxiii, 37]; [Lk. xiii, 34]). The critics in question do not ascribe that deliverance to inventive disciples; they infer it to have been a non-Christian document. Many other critics, again, now pronounce the whole Sermon on the Mount—regarded by Baur as signally genuine—a compilation from earlier Hebrew literature, Biblical and other. Which then are the “great” sayings that could not be thus accounted for? Without specification there can be no rational discussion of the problem; and even the proposition about the exegetic function of “faith and love” affects to be in itself rational.
The plain truth would seem to be that Canon Inge has formed for himself no tenable critical position. He has merely reiterated the fallacy of Mill, who in his Three Essays on Religion (pp. 253–54) wrote:—
Whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left; a unique figure, not more unlike all his precursors than all his followers, even those who had the direct benefit of his personal teaching. It is of no use to say that Christ as exhibited in the Gospels is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is admirable has been superadded by the tradition of his followers. The tradition of followers suffices to insert any number of marvels, and may have inserted all the miracles which he is reputed to have wrought. But who among his disciples or among their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St. Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort; still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than that the good which was in them was all derived, as they always professed that it was derived, from the higher source. What could be added and interpolated by a disciple we may see in the mystical parts of St. John, matter imported from Philo and the Alexandrian Platonists and put into the mouth of the Saviour in long speeches about himself such as the other Gospels contain not the slightest vestige of, though pretended to have been delivered on occasions of the deepest interest and when his principal followers were all present; most prominently at the last supper. The East was full of men who could have stolen (!) any quantity of this poor stuff, as the multitudinous Oriental sects of Gnostics afterwards did. But about the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality combined with profundity of insight which, if we abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific precision where something very different was aimed at, must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in his inspiration, in the very first rank of men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer, and martyr to that mission, who ever existed on earth, religion [sic] cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity.... Add that, to the conception of the rational sceptic, it remains a possibility that Christ actually was what he supposed himself to be—not God, for he never made the smallest pretension to that character, and would probably have thought such a pretension as blasphemous as it seemed to the men who condemned him—but a man charged with a special, express, and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue....
Ein historischer Kopf hatte er nicht, is a German economist’s criticism of Mill which I fear will have to stand in other fields than that of economics. The man who wrote this unmeasured dithyramb can never have read the Gospels and the Hebrew books with critical attention; and can never have reflected critically upon his own words in this connection. The assumption that “the fishermen of Galilee” could not have attained to thoughts which are expressly alleged to have been put forth by an untaught carpenter of Galilee is on the face of it a flight of thoughtless declamation. Had Mill ever critically read the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, he must have been aware that the main precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, which are presumably among the unspecified objects of his panegyric, were all there beforehand. Had he taken the trouble to investigate before writing, he could have found in Hennell’s Inquiry (1838), which popularized the old research of Schoettgen; in Nork’s Rabbinische Quellen und Parallelen (1839); and in Les Origines du Sermon de la Montagne by Hippolyte Rodrigues (1868), a copious demonstration of the Jewish currency of every moral idea in the Christian document, often in saner forms. And he ought to have known from his own reading that the doctrine of forgiveness for injuries, which appears to be the main ground for the customary panegyric of the Sermon, was common to Greeks and Romans before the Gospels were compiled. From the duty of giving alms freely—which is repeatedly laid down in the Old Testament—to that of the sin of concupiscence and the wrongness of divorce for trivial causes, every moral idea in the Sermon had been formulated alike by Jews and Gentiles beforehand.[1] And if it be argued that the compilation of such a set of precepts with a number of religious dicta (equally current in non-Christian Jewry) is evidence of a special ethical or religious gift in the compiler, the answer is that precisely the fact of such a compilation is the disproof of the assertion in the Gospels that the whole was delivered as a sermon on a mountain. A sermon it never was and never could be; and if the compiler was a man of unique character and qualification he was not the Gospel Jesus but the very type of which Mill denied the possibility!
That the Gospel ethic is non-original becomes more and more clear with every extension of relevant research. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written between 109 and 106 B.C. by a Quietist Pharisee, is found to yield not only origins or anticipations for pseudo-historic data in the Gospels but patterns for its moral doctrine. Thus the notion that the Twelve Apostles are to rule over the tribes in the Messianic kingdom is merely an adaptation of the teaching in the Testaments that the twelve sons of Jacob are so to rule.[2] There too appears for the first time in Jewish literature the formula “on His right hand”;[3] and a multitude of close textual parallels clearly testify to perusal of the book by the Gospel-framers and the epistle-makers. But above all is the Jewish book the original for the doctrines of forgiveness and brotherly love. Whereas the Old Testament leaves standing the ethic of revenge alongside of the prescription to forgive one’s enemy, the Testaments give out what a highly competent Christian editor pronounces to be “the most remarkable statement on the subject of forgiveness in all ancient literature. They show a wonderful insight into the true psychology of the question. So perfect are the parallels in thought and diction between these verses [Test. Gad, vi, 3–7] and [Luke xvii, 3]; [Matt. xviii, 15, 35], that we must assume our Lord’s acquaintance with them. The meaning of forgiveness in both cases is the highest and noblest known to us—namely, the restoring the offender to communion with us, which he had forfeited through his offence.... We now see the importance of our text. It shows that pre-Christian Judaism possessed a noble system of ethics on the subject of forgiveness.”[4]
Here the tribute goes to a Pharisee; in another connection it redounds to the other butt of Christian disparagement, the Scribes. As our editor points out, the collocation of the commands to love God and one’s neighbour is even in Luke ([x, 25–27]) assigned not to Jesus but to a Scribe. But this too is found in the Testaments. “That the two great commandments were already conjoined in the teaching of the Scribes at the time of our Lord we may reasonably infer from our text,[5] which was written 140 years earlier, and from the account in Luke.”[6] And here too, a century before the Christian era, we have a Jewish predication of the salvation of the Gentiles,[7] in the patronizing Jewish sense.
It is only for men partly hypnotized by sectarian creed that there can be anything surprising in these anticipations. The notion that Sacred Books contain the highest and rarest thought of their respective periods is a delusion that any critical examination of probabilities will destroy. Relatively high and rare thought does not find its way into Sacred Books; what these present is but the thought that is perceptible and acceptable to the majority, or a strong minority, of the better people; and it is never purified of grave imperfection, precisely because these never are. Perfect ethic is the possession of the perfect people, an extremely rare species. The ethic of the Testaments, which is an obvious improvement on that of average Jewry, is in turn imperfect enough; even as that of the Gospels remains stamped with Jewish particularism, and is irretrievably blemished by the grotesquely iniquitous doctrine of damnation for non-belief.
Such asseverations as Mill’s, constantly repeated as they are by educated men, are simply expressions of failure to comprehend the nature and the possibilities of life, of civilization, of history. The thesis is that in a world containing no one else capable of elevated thought, moral or religious, there suddenly appeared a marvellously inspired teacher, who chose a dozen disciples incapable of comprehending his doctrine, and during the space of one or many years—no one can settle whether one or two or three or four or ten or twenty—went about alternately working miracles and delivering moral and religious sayings (including a doctrine of eternal hell-fire for the unrepentant wicked, among whom were included all who refused to accept the new teaching); and that after the execution of the teacher on a charge of blasphemy or sedition the world found itself in possession of a supernormal moral and religious code, which constituted the greatest “moral reform” in the world’s history. The very conception is a chimera. In a world in which no one could independently think the teacher’s moral thoughts there could be no acceptance of them. If the code was pronounced good, it was so pronounced in terms of the moral nature and moral convictions of those who made the pronouncement. The very propagandists of the creed after a few generations were found meeting gainsayers with the formula anima naturaliter Christiana.
Christianity made its way precisely because (1) it was a construction from current moral and religious material; and because (2) it adopted a system of economic organization already tested by Jews and Gentiles; and (3) because its doctrines were ascribed to a God, not to a man. Anything like a moral renovation of the world it never effected; that conception is a chimera of chimeras. While Mill, the amateur in matters of religious research, who “scarcely ever read a theological book,”[8] ascribed to Christian morality a unique and original quality, Newman, the essentially religious man, deliberately affirmed with the Rationalists that “There is little in the ethics of Christianity which the human mind may not reach by its natural powers, and which here or there ... has not in fact been anticipated.”[9] And Baur, who gave his life and his whole powers to the problem which Mill assumed to dispose of by a dithyramb, put in a sentence the historic truth which Mill so completely failed to grasp:—
How soon would everything true and important that was taught by Christianity have been relegated to the order of the long-faded sayings of the noble humanitarians and thinking sages of antiquity, had not its teachings become words of eternal life in the mouth of its Founder![10]
And a distinguished Scottish theologian and scholar has laid it down that
there is probably not a single moral precept in the Christian Scriptures which is not substantially also in the Chinese classics. There is certainly not an important principle in Bishop Butler’s ethical teachings which had not been explicitly set forth by Mencius in the fourth century B.C. The Chinese thinker of that date had anticipated the entire moral theory of man’s constitution expounded so long afterwards by the most famous of English moral philosophers.[11]
[1] See the collection of illustrations in Mr. Joseph McCabe’s Sources of the Morality of the Gospels (R. P. A., 1914), and his excellent chapter on “The Parables of the Gospel and the Talmud.” [↑]
[2] The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, ed. by R. H. Charles, 1908, pp. lxxx, 97, 122, 213, 214. [↑]
[5] Id. Test. Iss. v, 2; [Dan. v, 3]; Iss. vii, 6. [↑]
[8] Bain, J. S. Mill, p. 139. [↑]
[9] Letter to W. S. Lilly, cited in his Claims of Christianity, 1894, pp. 30–31. [↑]
[10] Das Christenthum ... der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, 1853, pp. 35–36. (Eng. trans, i, 38.) [↑]
[11] Prof. Flint in “St. Giles Lectures” on “The Faiths of the World,” 1882, p. 419. [↑]
Chapter III
ILLUSIONS AS TO GOSPEL ETHIC
Strictly speaking, the whole problem of the moral value and the historical effects of Christianity lies outside the present issue; but we are forced to face it when the question of the truth of its historic basis is dismissed by a professed logician with a rhetorical thesis to the effect that “religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on” the personality of which he is challenged to prove the historicity. Mill answers the challenge by begging the question; and where he was capable of such a course multitudes, lay and clerical, will long continue to be so. For Mill the problem was something extraneous to his whole way of thought. Broadly speaking, he never handled a historical problem, properly so called. Other defenders of the historicity of Jesus, in turn, charge a want of historic sense upon all who venture to put the hypothesis that the Gospel Jesus is a mythical creation. The charge has been repeatedly made by men who can make no pretence of having ever independently elucidated any historical problem; and in one notable case, that of Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter, it is made by a scholar who has committed himself to the assertion of the historicity of Krishna. Such resorts to blank asseveration in such matters are on all fours with the blank asseveration that the Gospel Jesus, in virtue of the teachings ascribed to him, is a figure too sublime for human invention.
The slightest reflection might obtrude the thought that it is precisely the invented figure that can most easily be made quasi-sublime. Is it pretended that Yahweh is not sublime? Is the Book of Job pretended to be historical? The Gospel Jesus is never shown to us save in a series of statuesque presentments, healing, preaching, prophesying, blessing, denouncing, suffering; he is expressly detached from domestic relationships; of his life apart from his Messianic career there is not a vestige of trace that is not nakedly mythical; of his mental processes there is not an attempt at explanation save in glosses often palpably incompetent; and of his plan or purpose, his hopes or expectations, no exegete has ever framed a non-theological theory that will stand an hour’s examination. Those who claim as an evidence of uniqueness the fact that he is never accused by the evangelists of any wrong act do but prove their unpreparedness to debate any of the problems involved. A figure presented as divine, in a document that aims at establishing a cult, is ipso facto denuded of errancy so far as the judgment of the framers of the picture can carry them. But all that the framers and redactors of the Gospels could achieve was to outline a figure answering to their standards of perfection, free of what they regarded as sin or error. Going to work in an age and an environment in which ascetic principles were commonly posited as against normal practice, they guard the God from every suggestion of carnal appetite; and the dialecticians of faith childishly ask us to contrast him with ancient Pagan deities whose legends are the unsifted survivals of savage folklore. As if any new Sacred Book in the same age would not have proceeded on the same standards; and as if the religious Jewish literature of the age of Christian beginnings were not as ascetic as the other. But inasmuch as the compilers of the Gospels could not transcend the moral standard of their time, they constantly obtrude its limitations and its blemishes. Had Mill attempted anything beyond his dithyramb, he would have been hard put to it to apply his ecstatic epithets to such teachings as these:—
Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law [of Moses].
Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire. [Compare [Matt. xxiii, 17]: “Ye fools and blind”; and [Luke xii, 20]: “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.”]
Whosoever shall marry her [the woman divorced without good cause] shall commit adultery.
Give to him that asketh thee.
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth. Seek ye first [God’s] kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things [that were to be disregarded] shall be added unto you.
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves. [Compare the warning against saying, Thou fool.]
Go not into any way of the Gentiles, and enter not into any city of the Samaritans.
Whosoever shall not receive you, ... as ye go forth out of that house or that city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city.
I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.
Think not that I come to send peace on the earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.... He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.
It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you [Chorazin and Bethsaida; because of non-acceptance of the teacher].... It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for you.
Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.
Therefore speak I to them in parables, because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
In the end of the world the angels shall ... sever the wicked from the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire.
In vain do they worship me, teaching as their doctrines the precepts of men.
Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? [retort for the employer who pays the same for a day’s work and for an hour’s].
If ye have faith and doubt not ... even if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea, it shall be done.
And his lord commended the unrighteous steward because he had done wisely.... And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when it shall fail, they may receive you into the eternal tabernacles.
I say unto you that unto everyone that hath shall be given; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors.... So also shall my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not everyone his brother from your hearts.
When such a mass of unmanageable doctrines is forced on the notice of the dithyrambists, there promptly begins a process of elimination—the method of Arnold, to which Mill would doubtless have subscribed, denying as he did that Jesus ever claimed to be the Son of God. Whatever is not sweetly reasonable in the Gospels, said Arnold, cannot be the word of Jesus; let us then pick and choose as we will. And justly enough may it be argued that we have been listening to different voices. It cannot be the same man who prohibited all anger, vetoing even the use of “Thou fool,” and then proceeded to vituperate Scribes and Pharisees in the mass as sons of hell; to curse a barren tree; and to call the erring “Ye fools and blind”—any more than it was the same man who said, “I am meek and lowly in heart,” and “A greater than Solomon is here,” or annulled precepts of the law after declaring that not a jot or tittle of it should pass away. But with what semblance of critical righteousness shall it be pretended that in a compilation thus palpably composite it was the teacher who said all the right things and others who said all the wrong, when as a matter of documentary fact the better sayings can all be paralleled in older or contemporary writings? That challenge is never so much as faced by the dithyrambists; to face it honestly would be the beginning of their end.
Some seem prepared to stake all on such a teaching as the parable of the Good Samaritan, which actually teaches that a man of the religiously despised race could humanely succour one of the despising race when religious men of the same race passed him by. Is the parable then assimilated by those who stress it? Can they conceive that a Samaritan could so act? If yes, why cannot they conceive that a Samaritan, or another Jew than one, could put forth such a doctrine? Here is a story of actual human-kindness, paralleled in a hundred tales and romances of later times, a story which, appealing as it does to every reader, may reasonably be believed to have been enacted a thousand times by simple human beings who never heard of the Gospels. Yet we are asked to believe that only one Jewish or Gentile mind in the age of Virgil was capable of drawing the moral that the kindly and helpful soul is the true neighbour, and that the good man will be neighbourly to all; so rebuking the tribalism of the average Jew.
When, fifteen years ago, I wrote of “the moderate ethical height of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is partly precedented in Old Testament teaching [[Deut. xxiii, 7]—an interpolation; cp. the [Book of Ruth]],” Dr. J. E. Carpenter indignantly replied: “The field of Greek literature is open; will Mr. Robertson take the Good Samaritan and from Plato to Plotinus find his match?” And the Rev. Thomas James Thorburn, D.D., LL.D., in his later work Jesus the Christ: Historical or Mythical? (1912), wrote (p. 68):—
Dr. Estlin Carpenter has invited (we believe, in vain!) Mr. Robertson to produce an equal to this same parable out of the whole range of Greek literature, which undoubtedly contains the choicest teaching of the ancient world.
Dr. Thorburn in his bibliography cited the first and second (1912) editions of Pagan Christs; he thoughtfully omitted, in launching his “we believe, in vain!”, to ascertain whether there had been a second edition of Christianity and Mythology, in which any reply I might have to make to Dr. Carpenter might naturally be expected to appear, that critic having challenged the proposition as put in the first edition. A second edition had appeared, in 1910, and there I had duly given the simple answer which the two learned Doctors of Divinity, so conscious of knowing all Greek literature from Plato to Plotinus, were unable to think of for themselves. The field of Greek literature, as Dr. Carpenter justly observes, is open; and it would have been fitting on his part to perambulate a little therein. The demanded instance lay to the hand of unlearned people in so familiar an author as Plutarch—in the tale of Lycurgus and Alcander. As Dr. Thorburn and Dr. Carpenter, however, must be supposed to have been ignorant of that story, it may be well to tell it briefly here.
Lycurgus having greatly exasperated the rich citizens by proposing the institution of frugal common meals, they made a tumult and stoned him in the market-place, so that he had to run for sanctuary in a temple. But one of his pursuers, a violent youth named Alcander, caught up with him, and, striking him with a club as he turned round, dashed out one of his eyes. Lycurgus then stood calmly facing the citizens, letting them see his bleeding face, and his eye destroyed. All who saw him were filled with shame and remorse. They gave up Alcander to his mercy, and conducted Lycurgus in procession to his house to show their sympathy. He thanked them and dismissed them, but kept Alcander with him. He did him no harm, and used no reproachful words, but kept him as his servant, sending away all others. And Alcander, dwelling with Lycurgus, noting his serenity of temper and simplicity of life and his unwearying labours, became his warmest admirer, and ever after told his friends that Lycurgus was the best of men. In one version of the tale Lycurgus gave back his freedom to Alcander in presence of the citizens, saying, You gave me a bad citizen; I give you back a good one.
If our Doctors of Divinity are unable to see that this represents a rarer strain of goodness than the deed of the Good Samaritan, they must be told that they are lacking in that very moral judgment upon which they plume themselves. Forever sitting in the chair of judgment, defaming all who dissent from them, they are ethically less percipient than the cultured laity. Thousands of kindly human beings, I repeat, have succoured wounded strangers, even those of hostile races; and the tone held over the Gospel parable by some Christians is but the measure of their misconception of human nature. Their sectarian creed has bred in them a habit of aspersing all humanity, all character, save the Christian, thus stultifying the very lesson of their parable, the framer of which would fain have taught men to transcend these very fanaticisms. They will not be “neighbours” to the pagan to the extent of crediting him with their own appreciation of magnanimity and human-kindness; they cannot even discuss his claim without seeking arrogantly to browbeat his favourers. Forever acclaiming the beauty of the command to forgive injuries, they cannot even debate without insolence where they know their sectarian claims are called in question. And I shall be agreeably disappointed if they proceed to handle the tale of Lycurgus and Alcander without seeking to demonstrate that somehow it falls below the level of the Gospels, where, as it happens, the endurance of violence and death by the God-man is in effect presented as God-like. But for that matter, even the oft-cited saying “Father, forgive them,” occurs only in Luke of all the Gospels, and, being absent from two of the most ancient codices, betrays itself as a late addition to the text. It may be either Jewish or Gentile. For Plutarch, the Spartan tale is something edifying and gratifying, but he makes no parade of it as a marvel; and in his essay Of Profiting by our Enemies he speaks of the forgiveness of enemies as a thing not rarely to be met with:—
To forbear to be revenged of an enemy if opportunity and occasion is offered, and to let him go when he is in thy hands, is a point of great humanity and courtesy; but him that hath compassion of him when he is fallen into adversity, succoureth him in distress, at his request is ready to show goodwill to his children, and an affection to sustain the state of his house and family being in affliction, who doth not love for this kindness, nor praise the goodness of his nature? (Holland’s translation.)
Had that passage appeared in a Gospel, how would not our Doctors of Divinity have exclaimed over the moral superiority of Christian ethic, demonstrating that it alone appealed to the heart! In actual fact we find them denying that such passages exist. The most disgraceful instance known to me appears to implicate an Austrian theologian. In the “Editor’s Forewords” to the Early English Text Society’s volume of Queen Elizabeth’s Englishings there is a note on Plutarch’s De Curiositate, àpropos of Elizabeth’s translation of that essay:—
In De Curiositate, as well as in his other writings, Plutarch proves himself to be a true Stoic philosopher, to possess first-rate moral principles and great fear of God.... His religious views sometimes remind us, like those of Seneca, of Christian teaching; but here there is always one important omission—viz., the commendation of charity or brotherly love; of this Christian virtue the stoic, so virtuous in his own relations, knows absolutely nothing.
At the close of the “Forewords” the Editor, Miss Caroline Pemberton, mentions that “The comments on the writings of Boethius and Plutarch are by Dr. J. Schenk, of Meran, Tyrol.” To Dr. Schenk, then, must apparently be credited the high-water mark in Christian false-witness against paganism. Either he did or he did not know that Plutarch in other writings had given full expression to the ethic of brotherly love. If he did not know, he was not only framing a wanton libel in sheer ignorance but giving a particularly deadly proof of his own destitution of the very virtue he was so unctuously denying to the pagan. A man devoid not merely of charity but of decent concern for simple justice poses as a moral teacher in virtue of his Christianism; even as the professional encomiasts of the parable of the Good Samaritan demonstrate their own blindness to its meaning, playing the Levite to the Pagan.
Plutarch, so much better a man than his Christian critic, was in turn no innovator in ethics. As every student knows, such doctrines as those above cited from him are far older than the Christian religion. Five centuries before the Christian era Confucius put the law of reciprocity in the sane form of the precept that we should not do unto others what we would not that they should do unto us. Are we to suppose that the rule had been left to Confucius to invent? Christians who cannot conform to it are not ashamed to disparage the precept of Confucius as a “negative” teaching, implying that there is a higher moral strain in their formula which prescribes the doing to others what we would wish them to do to us. There, if any difference of code be really intended, we are urged to confer benefits in order to have them returned. If no difference is intended, the disparagement is mere deceit. In the ancient Hindu epic, the Mahâbhârata, it is declared that “The Gods regard with delight the man who ... when struck does not strike again,” and that “The good, when they promote the welfare of others, expect no reciprocity.” How long are we to listen to the childish claim that moral maxims which in India were delivered millenniums ago by forgotten men were framable in Seneca’s day only in Syria, and there only by one “unique and effulgent” personality, whose mere teaching lifted humanity to new heights? Had no nameless man or woman in Greece ever urged the beauty of non-retaliation before Plato?
If clerics cannot rise above the old disingenuous sectarian spirit, it is time at least that laymen should. The more historic comprehension a man has of the ancient world, of Plutarch’s world, with all its sins and delusions, the less can he harbour the notion of the moral miracle involved in the thesis of the unique teacher, suddenly revealing to an amazed humanity heights of moral aspiration before undreamt of. And any considerate scrutiny of the logia of the Gospels will inevitably force the open-minded student to recognize multiplicity of thought and ideal, and compel him to seek some explanation. An effort to detach a possible personality by the elimination of impossible adjuncts is the next natural step.
Chapter IV
THE METHOD OF BLUSTER
For anyone who will soberly and faithfully face the facts there must sooner or later arise the problem, Is there any unifying personality behind this medley of many sets of doctrines, many voices, many schools? Even if it were possible to piece together from it a coherent body of either ethical or religious thought, and jettison the rest, is there any reason to believe that the selected matter belongs to the Gospel Teacher with the Twelve Disciples, crucified on the morning after the Passover under Pontius Pilate? When the crowning doctrine of sacrament and sacrifice is seen to be but the consummation of a religious lore beginning in prehistoric and systematic human sacrifice, and traceable in a score of ancient cults, is it possible to claim that the palpably dramatic record of Last Supper, Agony, Betrayal, Trial, and Crucifixion is a historic record of a strange coincidence between cult practice and biography? And if that goes, what is left? If, says Loisy, the condemnation of Jesus as pretended Messiah by Pilate “could be put in doubt, one would have no motive for affirming the existence of Christ.”[1] And it can!
Some, assuming to settle the problem by rhetoric, in effect stand for a “personality” without any pretence of establishing what the “personality” taught. And this inexpensive device will doubtless long continue to be practised by the large class who insist upon solving all such problems by instinct. An example of that procedure is afforded by an article headed “A Barren Controversy,” by the Rev. Frederick Sinclair, in a magazine entitled Fellowship, the organ of the Free Religious Fellowship, Melbourne, issue of March, 1915. The controversy is certainly barren enough as Mr. Sinclair conducts it. His religious temper is of a familiar type. “It is a hard task to prove the obvious,” he begins; “and no obligation is laid on us to examine and refute the evidences alleged in support of this or that cock-and-bull theory.” We can imagine how the reverend critic would have shone in the sixteenth or the seventeenth century, disposing of the Copernican theory, which so presumptuously assailed “the obvious.” True to his principles, he does not hamper himself by meeting arguments or evidence. “Mythical theories about Christ have about as much scientific value and importance as the theories of the Baconians about Shakespeare. They ... are products ... of that perverted credulity which will swallow anything, so long as it is not orthodox; and they are best met by the method of satire adopted by Whately in his ‘Historic Doubts’ on Napoleon.” And yet our expert renounces that admirable instrument in favour of the simpler procedure vulgarly known as “bluff.” He is in reality a good example of the psychosis of the very Baconism which he contemns, and which he would probably be quite unable to confute. An æsthetic impression of “reality” derived from a hypnotized perusal of Mark, and a feeling that only one man could deliver such oracles, are the beginning and end of his dialectic and scholarly stock-in-trade; even as a consciousness that Bacon must be the author of the Plays, and that the actor Shakespeare could not have written them, is the beginning and end of the ignorant polemic of the Baconists.
To do him justice, it should be noted that Mr. Sinclair warns his readers both before and after his case that his handling of the theme and their preparation for estimating it leave a great deal to be desired by those who care to see applied “the method of careful criticism.” Still, he is satisfied that it is “adequate to the particular question we have been considering.” And this is how Mr. Sinclair has considered:—
Anyone who will pay this controversy the compliment of a few hours’ consideration is advised to bring his own judgment to bear on it in the following way: Let him begin by taking a copy of St. Mark’s Gospel, which is the earliest of the four, in either of the English versions, and read it through, pencil in hand, striking out all the miraculous or quasi-miraculous stories. Then, gathering up what remains, let him read it, first as a whole, then singly, episode by episode, always keeping the eye of the imagination open, dismissing as far as possible any prepossessions, and letting the author make his own impression, without the interfering offices of critic or commentator. Having done this, let the reader ask of himself of each story: Is this a story which seems to belong to actual life, to be told of a real human being, with distinct individuality, or is it rather a literary invention, designed to add something to a conventional figure? Does the narrative move with the freedom and variety of life, or does it fit into a conventional, symmetrical design? Does the writer’s style and method arouse the suspicion of literary artifice? Must one say of this or that story that its reality is the reality of life, or of an art which cunningly counterfeits life?
The open-minded reader, I trust, will hardly need to be told that what is here done is to set a false problem and ignore the real issue. Mr. Sinclair either cannot understand that issue or elects to evade it. Probably the former is the explanation. No critic of the Gospels, so far as I remember, ever suggested that any of them “cunningly counterfeits life”; and certainly no one ever pretended that Mark[2] exhibits a “conventional, symmetrical design,” though Wilke argued that it “freely moulded the traditional historical material in pursuance of literary aims,” and B. Weiss praises its literary colouring. It is a heap of unreal incident, fortuitously collocated,[3] and showing nothing approaching to symmetrical design. “Conventional” raises another question; in this as in all the Gospels there is plenty of convention.
Let us but follow for a little the simple method of selection prescribed by Mr. Sinclair, and see what we get. What we are to make of [Mark i, 1–9], is far from clear. It sets forth the advent of John as the fulfilment of a prophecy—i.e., a miracle; and it describes his mission in the baldest conceivable summary, save for the sentence: “And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and had a leathern girdle about his loins, and did eat locusts and wild honey.” Is this “convention” or “reality”? I am not inclined to call it “literary artifice,” unless we are to apply that description to the beginning of the average nursery tale, as perhaps we should. What must strike the inquiring reader is that if we were to have a touch of “reality” about the Baptist we should be told something about his inner history, his antecedents, and what he preached. What we are told is that “he preached, saying, There cometh after me he that is mightier than I.... I baptized you with water; but he shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
If this part of the narrative has not been “struck out” by Mr. Sinclair’s neophytes as plainly belonging to the miraculous, the next five verses presumably must be. The non-miraculous narrative begins at v. 14:—
Now, after that John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye, and believe in the Gospel [not a word of which has been communicated].
And passing along by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net in the sea; for they were fishers. And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men. And straightway they left the nets, and followed him. And going on a little further, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who also were in the boat mending the nets. And straightway he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and went after him.
This “episode,” for Mr. Sinclair, “seems to belong to real life, to be told of a real human being with distinct individuality.” For critical readers it is a primitive “conventional” narrative, told by a writer who has absolutely no historic knowledge to communicate. Of the preaching of the Saviour he has no more to tell than of the preaching of the Baptist. Both are as purely “conventional,” so far, as an archaic statue of Hermes. Of “the freedom and variety of life” there is not a trace; Mr. Sinclair, who professes to find these qualities, is talking in the manner of a showman at a fair. The important process of making disciples resolves itself into a fairy tale: “Come and I will make you fishers of men; and they came.” A measure of “literary artifice” is perhaps to be assigned to the items of “casting a net,” “mending the net,” and “left their father in the boat with the hired servants”;[4] but it is the literary art of a thousand fairy tales, savage and civilized, and stands for the method of a narrator who is dealing with purely conventional figures, not with characters concerning which he has knowledge. The calling of the first disciples in the rejected Fourth Gospel has much more semblance of reality.
If the cautious reader is slow to see these plain facts on the pointing of one who is avowedly an unbeliever in the historic tradition, let him listen to a scholar of the highest eminence, who, after proving himself a master in Old Testament criticism, set himself to specialize on the New. Says Wellhausen: “The Gospel of Mark, in its entirety, lacks the character of history.”[5] And he makes good his judgment in detail:—
Names of persons are rare: even Jairus is not named in [codex] D. Among the dramatis personæ it is only Jesus who distinctively speaks and acts; the antagonists provoke him; the disciples are only figures in the background. But of what he lived by, how he dwelt, ate, and drank, bore himself with his companions, nothing is vouchsafed. It is told that he taught in the synagogue on the Sabbath, but no notion is given of the how; we get only something of what he said outside the synagogue, usually through a special incident which elicits it. The normal things are never related, only the extraordinary.... The scantiness of the tradition is remarkable.[6]
The local connection of the events, the itinerary, leaves as much to be desired as the chronological; seldom is the transit indicated in the change of scene. Single incidents are often set forth in a lively way, and this without any unreal or merely rhetorical devices, but they are only anecdotally related, rari nantes in gurgite vasto. They do not amount to material for a life of Jesus. And one never gets the impression that an attempt had been made among those who had eaten and drunk with him to give others a notion of his personality.[7]
Wellhausen, it is true, finds suggestions of a real and commanding personality; but they are very scanty, the only concrete detail being the watching the people as they drop their offerings into the collecting-chest! “Passionate moral sensibility distinguishes him. He gives way to divine feeling in anger against the oppressors of the people and in sympathy with the lowly.” But here too there is qualification:—
But in Mark this motive for miracles seldom comes out. They are meant to be mainly displays of the Messiah’s power. Mark does not write de vita et moribus Jesu: he has not the aim of making his person distinguishable, or even intelligible. It is lost for him in the divine vocation; he means to show that Jesus is the Christ.[8]
Then we have a significant balancing between the perception that Mark is not history, and that, after all, it is practically all there is:—
Already the oral tradition which he found had been condensed under the influence of the standpoint from which he set out. He is silent on this and that which he can omit as being known to his readers—for instance, the names of the parents of Jesus (!). Nevertheless, he has left little that is properly historical for his successors to glean after him; and what they know in addition is of doubtful worth....
Why is not something more, and something more trustworthy, reported of the intercourse of the Master with his disciples? It would rather seem that the narrative tradition in Mark did not come directly from the intimates of Jesus. It has on the whole a somewhat rude and demotic cast, as if it had previously by a long circulation in the mouth of the people come to the rough and drastic style in which it lies before us.... Mark took up what the tradition carried to him.
Such is the outcome of a close examination by an original scholar who takes for granted the historicity of Jesus. It is a poor support to a pretence of finding a lifelike narrative.
If the reader under Mr. Sinclair’s tutelage will at this point vary his study somewhat (at the cost of a few extra hours) by reading samples of quite primitive folk-lore—say the Hottentot Fables and Tales collected by Dr. Bleek, in which the characters are mostly, but not always, animals; or some of the fairy tales in Gill’s Myths and Songs of the South Pacific—and then proceed to the tale of Tom Tit Tot, as given by Mr. Edward Clodd in the dialect of East Anglia, he will perhaps begin to realize that unsophisticated narrators not only can but frequently do give certain touches of quasi-reality to “episodes” which no civilized reader can suppose to have been real. In particular he will find in the vivacious Tom Tit Tot an amount of “the freedom and variety of life” in comparison with which the archaic stiffness and bareness of the Gospel narrative is as dumb-show beside drama. And if he will next pay some attention to the narrative of Homer, in which Zeus and Hêrê are so much more life-like than a multitude of the human personages of the epic, and then turn to see how Plutarch writes professed biography, some of it absolutely mythical, but all of it on a documentary basis of some kind, he will perhaps begin to suspect that Mr. Sinclair has not even perceived the nature of the problem on which he pronounces, and so is not in a position to “consider” it at all. Plutarch is nearly as circumstantial about Theseus and Herakles and Romulus as about Solon. But when he has real biographical material to go upon as to real personages he gives us a “freedom and variety of life” which is as far as the poles asunder from the hieratic figures of the Christian Gospel. Take his Fabius Maximus. After the pedigree, with its due touch of myth, we read:—
His own personal nickname was Verrucosus, because he had a little wart growing on his upper lip. The name of Ovicula, signifying sheep, was also given him while yet a child, because of his slow and gentle disposition. He was quiet and silent, very cautious in taking part in children’s games, and learned his lessons slowly and with difficulty, which, combined with his easy obliging ways with his comrades, made those who did not know him think that he was dull and stupid. Few there were who could discern, hidden in the depths of his soul, his glorious and lion-like character.
This is biography, accurate or otherwise. Take again the Life of Pericles, where after the brief account of parentage, with the item of the mother’s dream, we get this:—
His body was symmetrical, but his head was long out of all proportion; for which reason in nearly all his statues he is represented wearing a helmet; as the sculptors did not wish, I suppose, to reproach him with this blemish.... Most writers tell us that his tutor in music was Damon, whose name they say should be pronounced with the first syllable short. Aristotle, however, says that he studied under Pythocleides. This Damon, it seems, was a sophist of the highest order....
The “biographer” who so satisfies Mr. Sinclair’s sense of actuality has not one word of this kind to say of the youth, upbringing, birthplace, or appearance of the Teacher, who for him was either God or Supreme Man. Seeking for the alleged “freedom and variety of life” in the narrative, we go on to read:—
And they go into Capernaum; and straightway on the sabbath day he entered into the synagogue and taught. And they were astonished at his teaching: for he taught them as having authority, and not as the scribes. And straightway there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit—
and straightway we are back in the miraculous. Mr. Joseph McCabe, who in his excellent book on the Sources of the Morality of the Gospels avows that he holds by the belief in a historical Jesus, though unable to assign to him with confidence any one utterance in the record, fatally anticipates Mr. Sinclair by remarking that “If the inquirer will try the simple and interesting experiment of eliminating from the Gospel of Mark all the episodes which essentially involve miracle, he will find the remainder of the narrative amazingly paltry.” To which verdict does the independent reader begin to incline? Thus the “episodes” continue, after three paragraphs of the miraculous:—
And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose up and went out, and departed into a desert place, and there prayed. And Simon and they that were with him followed after him; and they found him, and say unto him, All are seeking thee. And he saith unto them, Let us go elsewhere into the next towns, that I may preach there also; for to this end came I forth. And he went into their synagogues throughout all Galilee, preaching and casting out devils.
It would seem sufficient to say that Mr. Sinclair, with his “freedom and variety of life,” is incapable of critical reflection upon what he reads. In the opening chapter we have not a single touch of actuality; the three meaningless and valueless touches of detail (“a great while before day” is the third) serve only to reveal the absolute deficit of biographical knowledge. We have reiterated statements that there was teaching, and not a syllable of what was taught. The only utterances recorded in the chapter are parts of the miracle-episodes, which we are supposed to ignore. Let us then consider the critic’s further asseveration:—
It will be observed that certain distinct traits appear in the central figure, and that these traits are not merely those of the conventional religious hero, but the more simple human touches of anger, pity, indignation, despondency, exultation; these scattered touches, each so vivid, fuse into a natural and intelligible whole. The Jesus of Mark is a real man, who moves and speaks and feels like a man (!)—“a creature not too bright or good for human nature’s daily food”—
a notable variation from the more familiar thesis of the “sublime” and “unique” figure of current polemic. Looking for the alleged details, we find Jesus calling the fifth disciple: “He saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose and followed him”—another touch of “freedom and variety.” Then, after a series of Messianic utterances, including a pronouncement against Sabbatarianism of the extremer sort, comes the story of the healing of the withered hand, with its indignant allocution to “them” in the synagogue: “Is it lawful on the sabbath day to do good, or to do harm, to save a life or to kill?” Here, in a miracle story, we have an intelligible protest against Sabbatarianism: is it the protest or the indignation that vouches for the actuality of the protesting figure? Nay, if we are to elide the miraculous, how are we to let the allocution stand?
These protests against Sabbatarianism, as it happens, are the first approximations to actuality in the document; and as such they raise questions of which the “instinctive” school appear to have no glimpse, but which we shall later have to consider closely. In the present connection, it may suffice to ask the question: Was anti-Sabbatarianism, or was it not, the first concrete issue raised by the alleged Teacher? In the case put, is it likely to have been? Were the miraculous healing of disease, and the necessity of feeding the disciples, with the corollary that the Son of Man was Lord of the Sabbath, salient features in a popular gospel of repentance in view of the coming of the Kingdom of God? If so, it is in flat negation of the insistence on the maintenance of the law in the Sermon on the Mount ([Mt. v, 17–20]), which thus becomes for us a later imposition on the cultus of a purely Judaic principle, in antagonism to the other. That is to say, a movement which began with anti-Sabbatarianism was after a time joined or directed by Sabbatarian Judaists, for whom the complete apparatus of the law was vital. If, on the other hand, recognizing that anti-Sabbatarianism, in the terms of the case, was not likely to be a primary element in the new teaching, that its first obtrusion in the alleged earliest Gospel is in an expressly Messianic deliverance, and its second in a miracle-story, we proceed to “strike out” both items upon Mr. Sinclair’s ostensible principles, we are deprived of the first touch of “indignation” and “anger” which would otherwise serve to support his very simple thesis.
[1] Jésus et la tradition évangélique, 1910, p. 45. [↑]
[2] It should be explained that in using, for convenience sake, the traditional ascriptions of the four Gospels, I do not for a moment admit that these hold good of the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John of the tradition. In not one case is that tradition historically valid. [↑]
[3] The Rev. A. Wright (N. T. Problems, 1898, p. 15) pronounces it “completely unchronological.” Sanday acquiesces (id., p. 177). [↑]
[4] Such details, imposed on an otherwise empty narrative, suggest a pictorial basis, as does the account of the Baptist. Strauss cites the Hebrew myth-precedent of the calling of Elisha from the plough by Elijah. [↑]
[5] Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 1905, p. 51. [↑]
Chapter V
SCHMIEDEL AND DEROGATORY MYTH
From this point onwards, every step in the investigation will be found to convict the Unitarian thesis of absolute nullity. It is indeed, on the face of it, an ignorant pronouncement. The characteristics of “anger, pity, indignation, despondency, exultation,” are all present in the myth of Herakles, of whom Diodorus Siculus, expressly distinguishing between mythology and history, declares (i, 2) that “by the confession of all, during his whole life he freely undertook great and continual labours and dangers, in order that by doing good to the race of men he might win immortal fame.” Herakles was, in fact, a Saviour who “went about doing good.”[1] The historicity of Herakles is not on that score accepted by instructed men; though I have known divinity students no less contemptuous over the description of the cognate Samson saga as a sun myth than is Mr. Sinclair over the denial of the historicity of Jesus.
So common a feature of a hundred myths, indeed, is the set of characteristics founded on, that we may at once come to the basis of his argument, a blundering reiteration of the famous thesis of Professor Schmiedel, who is the sole source of Mr. Sinclair’s latent erudition. “The line of inquiry here suggested,” he explains, “has been worked out in a pamphlet of Schmiedel, which will be found in the Fellowship library.” But the dialectic which broadly avails for the Bible class will not serve their instructor here. The essence of the argument which Professor Schmiedel urges with scholarlike sobriety is thus put by Mr. Sinclair with the extravagance natural to his species:—
Many [compare Schmiedel!] of the stories represent him [Jesus] in a light which, from the point of view of conventional hero-worship, is even derogatory; his friends come to seize him as a madman; he is estranged from his own mother; he can do no mighty work in the unsympathetic atmosphere of his own native place.
The traditionalist is here unconsciously substituting a new and different argument for the first. Hitherto the thesis has been that of the “vividness” of the record, the “human touches,” the “speaking and feeling like a real man,” the “freedom and variety of life.” Apparently he has had a shadow of misgiving over these simple criteria. If, indeed, he had given an hour to the perusal of Albert Kalthoff’s Rise of Christianity, instead of proceeding to vilipend a literature of which he had read nothing, he would have learned that his preliminary thesis is there anticipated and demolished. Kalthoff meets it by the simple observation that the books of Ruth and Jonah supply “human touches” and “freedom and variety of life” to a far greater degree than does the Gospel story considered as a life of Jesus; though practically all scholars are now agreed that both of the former books are deliberately planned fictions, or early “novels with a purpose.” Ruth is skilfully framed to contend against the Jewish bigotry of race; and Jonah to substitute a humane ideal for the ferocious one embalmed in so much of the sacred literature. Yet so “vividly” are the central personages portrayed that down till the other day all the generations of Christendom, educated and uneducated alike, accepted them unquestioningly as real records, whatever might be thought by the judicious few of the miracle element in Jonah.
It is thus ostensibly quite expedient to substitute for the simple thesis of “vividness” in regard to the second Gospel the quite different argument that some of the details exclude the notion that “the author” regarded Jesus as a supernatural person. But this thesis instantly involves the defence in fresh trouble, besides breaking down utterly on its own merits. In the early chapters of Mark, Jesus is emphatically presented as a supernormal person—the deity’s “beloved Son,” “the Holy One of God,” who has the divine power of forgiving sins, is “lord even of the sabbath,” and is hailed by the defeated spirits of evil as “the Son of God,” and the “Son of the Most High God.” Either the conception of Jesus in [Mark vi] is compatible with all this or it is not. If not, the case collapses, for the “derogatory” episode must be at once branded as an interpolation. And if it be argued that even as an interpolation it testifies at once to a non-supernaturalist view of the Founder’s function and a real knowledge of his life and actions, we have only to give a list of more or less mythical names in rebuttal. To claim that the episode in [Mark vi, 1–6], is “derogatory from the point of view of conventional hero-worship,” and therefore presumptively historical, is to ignore alike Jewish and Gentile hero-worship. In the Old Testament Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Judah, Moses, Aaron, Samson, David, and Solomon are all successively placed in “derogatory” positions; and the Pagan hero-worshippers of antiquity are equally with the Jewish recalcitrant to Mr. Sinclair’s conviction of what they ought to do.
Professor Schmiedel is aware, though Mr. Sinclair apparently is not, that Herakles in the myth is repeatedly placed in “derogatory” positions, and is not only seized as a madman but actually driven mad. The reader who will further extend Mr. Sinclair’s brief curriculum to a perusal of the Bacchæ of Euripides will find that the God, who in another story is temporarily driven mad by Juno, is there subjected to even greater indignities than those so triumphantly specified by our hierologist. Herakles and Dionysos, we may be told, were only demigods, not Gods. But Professor Schmiedel’s thesis is that for the writer of Mark or of his original document Jesus was only a holy man. On the other hand—to say nothing of the myths of Zeus and Hêrê, Arês and Aphroditê, Hephaistos and Poseidon—Apollo, certainly a God for the framers of his myth, is there actually represented as being banished from heaven and living in a state of servitude to Admetus for nine years. A God, then, could be conceived in civilized antiquity as undergoing many and serious indignities. These simple à priori arguments are apt to miscarry even in the hands of careful and scrupulous scholars like Professor Schmiedel, who have failed to realize that no amount of textual scholarship can suffice to settle problems which in their very nature involve fundamental issues of anthropology, mythology, and hierology. As Professor Schmiedel is never guilty of browbeating, I make no disparagement of his solid work on the score that he has not taken account of these fields in his argument; but when his untenable thesis is brandished by men who have neither his form of scholarship nor any other, it is apt to incur summary handling.
Elsewhere I have examined Professor Schmiedel’s thesis in detail.[2] Here it may suffice to point out (1) as aforesaid, that the argument from derogatory treatment is not in the least a proof that in an ancient narrative a personage is not regarded as superhuman; (2) that a suffering Messiah was expressly formulated in Jewish literature in the pre-Christian period;[3] and (3) that there are extremely strong grounds for inferring purposive invention—of that naïf kind which marks the whole mass of early hierology—in the very episodes upon which he founds. The first concrete details of the Founder’s propaganda in Mark, as we have seen, exhibit him as clashing with the Judaic environment. In later episodes he clashes with it yet further. The “derogatory” episodes exhibit him as clashing with his personal environment, his family and kin, concerning whom there has been no mention whatever at the outset, where we should expect to find it. All this is in line with the anti-Judaic element of the Gospel. If at early stages in the larger Jesuine movement there were reasons why the Founder should be represented as detaching himself from the Mosaic law; as being misunderstood and deserted by his disciples; and as disparaging even the listening Jewish multitude (concerning whom [Mark, iv, 10] sq., makes him say that “unto them that are without, all things are done in parables, that seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest haply they should turn again, and it should be forgiven them”), is there anything unlikely in his being inventively represented as meeting antipathetic treatment from his family?[4] At a time when so-called “brothers of the Lord” ostensibly claimed authority in the Judæo-Gentile community, an invented tale of original domestic hostility to the Teacher would be as likely as the presence of authorities so styled is unlikely on the assumption that the story in Mark was all along current. The very fact that allusions to the family of the Lord suddenly appear in a record which had introduced him as a heavenly messenger, without mention of home or kindred or preparation, tells wholly against the originality of the later details, which in the case of the naming of “the carpenter” and his mother have a polemic purpose.[5]
[1] Note the identity of terms, εὐεργετῶν in Acts (x, 38), εὐεργετήσας in Diodorus. [↑]
[2] Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 441 sq.; Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 229–236. A notably effective criticism is passed on the thesis in Prof. W. B. Smith’s Ecce Deus, p. 177 sq. Mr. Sinclair, of course, does not dream of meeting such replies. [↑]
[3] What else is signified by [Acts iii, 18]; [xvii, 3]? [↑]
[4] Dr. W. B. Smith sees in the story a mere symbolizing of the rejection of Jesus by the Jews. This may very well be the case. [↑]
[5] Dr. Flinders Petrie even infers a “late” reference to the Virgin-Birth. The Growth of the Gospels, 1910, p. 86. This Loisy rejects. [↑]
Chapter VI
THE VISIONARY EVANGEL
All this applies, of course, to the “Primitive Gospel” held to underlie all of the synoptics, Mark included—a datum which reduces to comparative unimportance the question of priority among these. As collected by the school of Bernhard Weiss,[1] the primitive Gospel, like Mark, set out with a non-historical introduction of the Messiah to be baptized by John. It then gives the temptation myth in full; and immediately afterwards the Teacher is made to address to disciples (who have not previously been mentioned or in any way accounted for) the Sermon on the Mount, with variations, and without any mount. In this place we have the uncompromising insistence on the Mosaic law; and soon, after some miracles of healing and some Messianic discourses, including the liturgical “Come unto me all ye that labour,” we have the Sabbatarian question raised on the miracle of the healing of the man with the dropsy, but without the argument from the Davidic eating of the shewbread.[2]
There is no more of the colour of history here than in Mark: so obviously is it wanting in both that the really considerate exegetes are driven to explain that history was not the object in either writing. In both “the twelve” are suddenly sent—in the case of Mark, after a list of twelve had been inserted without any reference to the first specified five; in the reconstructed “primitive” document without any list whatever—to preach the blank gospel, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” with menaces for the non-recipient, the allocutions to Chorazin and Bethsaida being here made part of the instructions to the apostles.
What, then, are the disciples supposed to have preached? What had the Teacher preached as an evangel of “the Kingdom”? The record has expressly represented that his parables were incomprehensible to his own disciples; and when they ask for an explanation they are told that the parables are expressly meant to be unintelligible, but that to them an explanation is vouchsafed. It is to the effect that “the seed is the word.” What word? The “Kingdom”? The mystic allegories on that head are avowedly not for the multitude: they could not have been. Yet those allegories are the sole explanations ever afforded in the Gospels of the formula of “the Kingdom” which was to be the purport of the evangel of the apostles to the multitude. They themselves had failed to understand the parables; and they were forbidden to convey the explanation. What, then, had they to convey?
And that issue raises another. Why were there disciples at all? Disciples are understood to be prepared as participants in or propagandists of somebody’s teaching—a lore either exoteric or esoteric. But no intelligible view has ever been given of the purpose of the Gospel Jesus in creating his group of Twelve. If we ask what he taught them, the only answer given by the documents is: (1) Casting out devils; (2) The meaning of parables which were meant to be unintelligible to the people: that is, either sheer thaumaturgy or a teaching which was never to be passed on. On the economic life of the group not one gleam of light is cast. Judas carried a “bag,” but as to whence came its contents there is no hint. The whole concept hangs in the air, a baseless dream. The myth-makers have not even tried to make it plausible.
The problems thus raised are not only not faced by the orthodox exegetes; they are not seen by them. They take the most laudable pains to ascertain what the primitive Gospel was like, and, having settled it to the satisfaction of a certain number, they rest from their labours. Yet we are only at the beginning of the main, the historic problem, from which Baur recalled Strauss to the documentary, with the virtual promise that its solution would clear up the other.
A “higher” criticism than that so-called, it is clear, must set about the task; and its first conclusion, I suggest, must be that there never was any Christian evangel by the Christ and the Twelve. These allegories of the Kingdom are framed to conceal the fact that the gospel-makers had no evangel to describe; though it may be claimed as a proof of their forensic simplicity that they actually represent the Founder as vetoing all popular explanation of the very formula which they say he sent his disciples to preach to the populace. An idea of the Kingdom of God, it may be argued, was already current among the Jews: the documents assert that that was the theme of the Baptist. Precisely, but was the evangel of Jesus then simply the evangel of John, which it was to supersede? And was the evangel of John only the old evangel, preached by Pharisees and others from the time of the Maccabees onwards?[3] Whatever it was, what is the meaning of the repeated Gospel declaration that the nature of the Kingdom must not be explained to the people? There is only one inference. The story of the sending forth of the twelve is as plainly mythical as is Luke’s story of the sending forth of the seventy, which even the orthodox exegetes abandon as a “symmetrical” myth; though they retain the allocution embodied in it. What is in theory the supreme episode in the early propaganda of the cult is found to have neither historical content nor moral significance. Not only is there not a word of explanation of the formula of the evangel, there is not a word of description of the apostles’ experience, but simply the usual negation of knowledge:—
And the disciples returned and told him all that they had done, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name. And he said, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven; behold I have given you power to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy; notwithstanding, in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.... ([Luke x, 17–20], with “the disciples” for “the seventy”).
And this is history, or what the early Christian leaders thought fit to put in place of history, for Christian edification. The disciples, be it observed, had exorcized in the name of Jesus where Jesus had never been, a detail accepted by the faithful unsuspectingly, and temporized over no less unsuspectingly by the “liberal” school, but serving for the critical student to raise the question: Was there, then, an older cult of a Jesus-God in Palestine? Leaving that problem for the present, we can but note that the report in effect tells that there was no evangel to preach. To any reflecting mind, it is the utterance of men who had nothing to relate, but are inserting an empty framework, wholly mythical, in a void past. Themselves ruled by the crudest superstition, they do but make the Divine Teacher talk on their own level, babbling of Satan falling from heaven, and of treading on serpents. All the labours of the generations of laborious scholars who have striven to get to the foundations of their documents have resulted in a pastiche which only the more clearly reveals the total absence of a historic basis such as the Gospels more circumstantially suggest. In the end we have neither history nor biography, but an absolutely enigmatic evangel, set in a miscellany of miracles and of discourses which are but devices to disguise the fact that there had been no original evangel to preach. If the early church had any creed, it was not this. It originated in a rite, not in an evangel.
One hypothesis might, indeed, be hazarded to save the possibility of an actual evangel by the Founder. If, taking him to be historical, we assume him to have preached a political doctrine subversive of the Roman rule, and to have thereby met his death, we could understand that, in a later period in which the writers connected with the movement were much concerned to conciliate the Romans, it might have been felt expedient, and indeed imperative, to suppress the facts. They would not specify the evangel, because they dared not. On this view the Founder was a Messiah of the ordinary Jewish type, aiming at the restoration of the Jewish State. But such a Jesus would not be the “Jesus of the Gospels” at all. He would merely be a personage of the same (common) name, who in no way answered to the Gospel figure, but had been wholly denaturalized to make him a cult-centre. On this hypothesis there has been no escape from the “myth-theory,” but merely a restatement of it. A Jesus put to death by the Romans as a rebel Mahdi refuses to compose with the Teacher who sends out his apostles to preach his evangel; who proclaims, if anything, a purely spiritual kingdom; and who is put to death as seeking to subvert the Jewish faith, the Roman governor giving only a passive and reluctant assent. On the political hypothesis, as on the myth-theory here put, the whole Gospel narrative of the Tragedy which establishes the cult remains mythical. We have but to proceed, then, with the analysis which reveals the manner of its composition and of its inclusion in the record.
It is admitted by the reconstructors that the primitive Gospel had no conclusion, telling nothing of Last Supper, Agony, Betrayal, Crucifixion, or Resurrection. It did not even name Judas as the betrayer. And they explain that it was because of lacking these details that it passed out of use, superseded by the Gospels which gave them. As if the conclusion, were it compiled in the same fashion, could not have been added to the original document, which ex hypothesi had the prestige of priority. Why the composer of the original did not add the required chapters is a question to which we get only the most futile answers, as is natural when the exegetes have not critically scrutinized the later matter. Thus even Mr. Jolley is content to say:—
The omission of any account of the Passion or Resurrection is natural enough in a writing primarily intended for the Christians of Judæa, some of them witnesses of the Crucifixion, and all, probably, familiar with the incidents of the Saviour’s Judæan ministry, as well as with the events preceding and following the Passion, especially when we remember that the author had no intention (!) of writing a biography.[4]
Here the alleged fact that only some had seen the Crucifixion, while all knew all about the ministry, is given as a reason why the ministry should be described and the Crucifixion left undescribed and unmentioned!
The problem thus impossibly disposed of is really of capital importance. Any complete solution must remain hypothetical in the nature of the case; but at least we are bound to recognize that the Primitive Gospel may have had a different conclusion, as it may further have contained matter not preserved in the synoptics. That might well be a sufficient ground for its abandonment by the Christian community; and some such suspicion simply cannot be excluded, though it cannot be proved. But whatever we may surmise as to what may have been in the original document, we can offer a decisive reason why the existing conclusion should not have been part of it. That conclusion is primarily extraneous to any gospel, and is not originally a piece of narrative at all.
Bernhard Weiss ascribes to Mark the original narrative of the closing events, making Matthew a simple copyist—a matter of no ultimate importance, seeing that it is the same impossible and unhistorical narrative in both documents. Like all the other professional exegetes, Bernhard Weiss and his school have failed to discern that the document reveals not only that it is not an original narrative at all, but that it could not possibly be a narrative. “It was only in the history of the passion,” writes Weiss, “that Mark could give a somewhat connected account partly of what he himself had seen and partly of what he gathered from those who witnessed the crucifixion.”[5] Whether “passion” here includes the Agony in the Garden is not clear: as it is expressly distinguished from the crucifixion, which Mark by implication had not seen, the meaning remains obscure. Like the ordinary traditionalists, Weiss assumes that “after Peter’s death Mark began to note down his recollections of what the Apostle had told him of the acts and discourses of Jesus.” Supposing this to include the record of the night of the Betrayal, what were Mark’s possible sources for the description of the Agony, with its prayers, its entrances and exits, when the only disciples present are alleged to have been asleep?
It is the inconceivable omission of the exegetes to face such problems that forces us finally to insist on their serious inadequacy in this regard. They laboriously conduct an investigation up to the point at which it leaves us, more certainly than ever, facing the incredible, and there they leave it. Their work is done. That the story of the Last Night was never framed as a narrative, but is primarily a drama, which the Gospel simply transcribes, is manifest in every section, and is definitely proved by the verses ([Mk. xiv, 41–42]) in which, without an intervening exit, Jesus says: “Sleep on now, and take your rest.... Arise, let us be going.” The moment the document is realized to be a transcript of a drama it becomes clear that the “Sleep on now, and take your rest” should be inserted before the otherwise speechless exit in verse 40, where the text says that “they wist not what to answer him.” Two divergent speeches have by an oversight in transcription been fused into one.
That the story of the tragedy is a separate composition has been partly perceived by critics of different schools without drawing any elucidating inference. Wellhausen pronounces that the Passion cannot be excepted from the verdict that Mark as a whole lacks the character of history. “Nothing is motived and explained by preliminaries.”[6] But “we learn as much about the week in Jerusalem as about the year in Galilee.”[7] And the Rev. Mr. Wright gets further, though following a wrong track:—
The very fact that S. Mark devotes six chapters out of sixteen to events which took place in the precincts of Jerusalem makes me suspicious. Important though the passion was, it seems to be narrated at undue length. The proportions of the history are destroyed.[8]
Precisely. The story of the events in Jerusalem is no proper part either of a primary document or of the first or second Gospel. In its detail it has no congruity with the scanty and incoherent narrative of Mark. It is of another provenance, although, as Wellhausen notes, quite as unhistorical as the rest. The non-historicity of the entire action is as plain as in the case of any episode in the Gospels. Judas is paid to betray a man who could easily have been arrested without any process of betrayal; and the conducting of the trial immediately upon the arrest, throughout the night, the very witnesses being “sought for” in the darkness, is plain fiction, explicable only by the dramatic obligation to continuous action.
[1] See the useful work of Mr. A. J. Jolley, The Synoptic Problem for English Readers, 1893. [↑]
[2] Yet B. Weiss had contended (Manual, Eng. tr. ii, 224) that [Mark ii, 24] ff., [28], “must be taken from a larger collection of sayings in which the utterances of Jesus respecting the keeping of the Sabbath were put together ([Matt. xii, 2–8]).” [↑]
[3] Cp. Dr. R. H. Charles, The Book of Jubilees, 1902, p. xiv. [↑]
[5] Manual of Introd. to the N. T., Eng. tr. 1888, ii, 261. [↑]
[8] Some N. T. Problems, 1898, p. 176. [↑]
Chapter VII
THE ALLEGED CONSENSUS OF SCHOLARS
Such is the historical impasse at which open-minded students find themselves when they would finally frame a reasoned conception of the origin of the Christian religion. The documentary analysis having yielded results which absolutely repel the accepted tradition, however denuded of supernaturalism, we are driven to seek a solution which shall be compatible with the data. And some of us, after spending many years in shaping a sequence which should retain the figure of the Founder and his twelve disciples, have found ourselves forced step by step to the conclusion that these are all alike products of myth, intelligible and explicable only as such. And when, in absolute loyalty to all the clues, with no foregone conclusions to support—unless the rejection of supernaturalism be counted such—we tentatively frame for ourselves a hypothesis of a remote origin in a sacramental cult of human sacrifice, with a probable Jesus-God for its centre in Palestine, we are not surprised at being met by the kind of explosion that has met every step in the disintegration of traditional beliefs from Copernicus to Darwin. The compendious Mr. Sinclair, who makes no pretension to have read any of the works setting forth the new theories, thus describes them:—
The arguments of Baconians and mythomaniacs are alike made up of the merest blunders as to fact and the sheerest misunderstanding of the meaning of facts. Grotesque etymologies,[1] arbitrary and tasteless emendations of texts, forced parallels, unrestrained license of conjecture, the setting of conjecture above reasonably established fact, chains of argument in which every link is of straw, appeals to anti-theological bias and to the miserable egotism which sees heroes with the eyes of the valet—these are some of the formidable “evidences” in deference to which we are asked to reverse the verdicts of tradition, scholarship, and common sense. They have never imposed on anyone fairly conversant with the facts. Those who have not such knowledge may either simply appeal to the authority of scholars, OR, BETTER STILL, SUPPORT that authority by exercizing their own IMAGINATION AND COMMON SENSE.
That tirade has seemed to me worth preserving. It is perhaps a monition to scholars, whose function is something higher than vituperation, to note how their inadequacies are sought to be eked out by zeal without either scholarship or judgment, and, finally, without intellectual sincerity. The publicist who alternately tells the unread that they ought to accept the verdict of scholars, and that it is “better still” to “support” that verdict by unaided “imagination and common sense,” has given us once for all his moral measure.
Dismissing him as having served his turn in illustrating compendiously the temper which survives in Unitarian as in Trinitarian traditionalism, we may conclude this preliminary survey with a comment on the proposition that we should take the “verdict of scholars.” It has been put by men, themselves scholars in other fields, whom to bracket with Mr. Sinclair would be an impertinence. But I have always been puzzled by their attitude. They proceed upon three assumptions, which are all alike delusions. The first is that there is a consensus of scholars on the details of this problem. The second is that the professional scholars have a command of a quite recondite knowledge as regards the central issue. The third is that there is such a thing as professional expertise in the diagnosis of Gods, Demigods, and real Founders in religious history. Once more, the nature of the problem has not been realized.
Let us take first the case of a real scholar in the strictest sense of the term, Professor Gustaf Dalman, of Leipzig, author of “The Words of Jesus, considered in the light of Post-Biblical Jewish Writings and the Aramaic Language.”[2] To me, Professor Dalman appears to be an expert of high competence, alike in Hebrew and Aramaic—a double qualification possessed by very few of those to whose “verdict” we are told to bow. By his account few previous experts in the same field have escaped bad miscarriages, as a handful of excerpts will show:—
M. Friedmann, Onkelos und Akylas, 1896, still holds fast to the traditional opinion that even Ezra had an Aramaic version of the Tora. In this he is mistaken.
H. Laible, in Dalman-Laible’s Jesus Christ in the Talmud, etc., incorrectly refers it [the phrase “bastard of a wedded wife”] to Jesus. The discussion treats merely of the definition of the term “bastard.”
Adequate proof for all three parts of this assertion [A. Neubauer’s as to the use of Aramaic in parts of Palestine] is awanting.
F. Blass ... characterizes as Aramaisms idioms which in some cases are equally good Hebraisms, and in others are pure Hebraisms and not Aramaisms at all.
P. W. Schmiedel ... does not succeed in reaching any really tenable separation of Aramaisms and Hebraisms.
Resch entirely abandons the region of what is linguistically admissible.... And the statement of the same writer that this ... “belongs very specially to the epic style of narration in the Old Testament” is incomprehensible.
The idioms discussed above ... show at once the incorrectness of Schmiedel’s contention that the narrative style of the Gospels and the Acts is the best witness of the Greek that was spoken among the Jews. The fact is that the narrative sections of the Synoptists have more Hebrew features than the discourses of Jesus communicated by them.
Such a book as Wünsche’s Neue Beiträge, by reason of quite superficial and inaccurate assertions and faulty translations, must even be characterized as directly misleading and confusing.
The want of due precaution in the use made of [the Jerusalem Targums of the Pentateuch] by J. T. Marshall is one of the things which were bound to render his efforts to reproduce the “Aramaic Gospel” a failure.
Harnack supposes it to be an ancient Jewish conception that “everything of genuine value which successively appears upon earth has its existence in heaven—i.e., it exists with God—meaning in the cognition of God, and therefore really.” But this idea must be pronounced thoroughly un-Jewish, at all events un-Palestinian, although the medieval Kabbala certainly harbours notions of this sort.
Holtzmann ... thereby evinces merely his own ignorance of Jewish legal processes.
Especially must his [R. H. Charles’s] attempts at retranslation [of the Assumptio Mosis] be pronounced almost throughout a failure.
[Even in the pertinent observations of Wellhausen and Nestle] we feel the absence of a careful separation of Hebrew and Aramaic possibilities.... He [Wellhausen] must be reminded that the Jewish literature to this day is still mainly composed in Hebrew.
These may suffice to illustrate the point. Few of the other experts escape Dalman’s Ithuriel spear; and as he frankly confesses past blunders of his own, it is not to be doubted that some of the others have returned his thrusts.[3] Supposing then that this body of experts, so many of them deep in Aramaic, so opposed to each other on so many issues clearly within the field of their special studies, were to unite in affirming the historicity of the Gospel Jesus, what would their consensus signify? Simply that they were agreed in affirming the unknown, the improbable, and the unprovable, while they disputed over the known. Their special studies do not give them the slightest special authority to pronounce upon such an issue. It is one of historic inference upon a mass of data which they among them have made common property so far as it was not so already, in the main documents and in previous literature. Dalman, who takes for granted the historicity of Jesus and apparently of the tradition in general, pronounces (p. 9) that
the actual discourses of Jesus in no way give the impression that He had grown up in rural solitude and seclusion. It is true only that He, like the Galileans generally in that region, would have little contact with literary erudition.
If Professor Dalman cannot see that the proposition in the first sentence is extremely disturbing to the traditional belief in its Unitarian form, and that the second is a mere petitio principii which cannot save the situation, other people can see it. His scholarship gives him no “eminent domain” over logic; and it does not require a knowledge of Aramaic to detect the weakness of his reasoning. Fifty experts in Aramaic carry no weight for a thinking man on such a non-linguistic issue; and he who defers to them as if they did is but throwing away his birthright. When again Dalman writes (p. 60) that “Peter must have appeared ([Acts x, 24]) from a very early date as a preacher in the Greek language,” he again raises an insoluble problem for the traditionalists of all schools, and his scholarly status is quite irrelevant to that.
When, yet again, he writes (p. 71) that “what is firmly established is only the fact that Jesus spoke in Aramaic to the Jews,” his mastery of Aramaic has nothing to do with the case. He is merely taking for granted the historicity of the main tradition; and until he faces the problems he has ignored (having, as he may fairly claim, been occupied with others), and repelled the criticisms which that tradition incurs, his vote on the unconsidered issue has no more value to a rational judgment than any other. I have seldom read a scholarly treatise more satisfying than his within its special field, or more provocative of astonishment at the extent to which specialism can close men’s eyes to the problems which overlap or underlie theirs.
And that is the consideration that has to be realized by those who talk of scholarship (meaning simply what is called New Testament scholarship) settling a historical problem which turns upon anthropology, mythology, hierology, psychology, and literary and historical science in general. On these sides the scholars in question, “Wir Gelehrten vom Fach,” as the German specialists call themselves in the German manner, are not experts at all, not even amateurs, inasmuch as they have never even realized that those other sciences are involved. They have fallen into the rôle of the pedant, properly so-called, who presumes to regulate life by inapplicable knowledge. And even those who are wholly free of this presumptuous pedantry, the sober, courteous, and sane scholars like Professor Schmiedel, whose candour enables him to contribute a preface to such a book as Professor W. B. Smith’s Der vorchristliche Jesus, to whose thesis he does not assent—even these, as we have seen, can fail to realize the scope of the problem to the discussion of which they have contributed.
Professor Schmiedel’s careful argument from “derogatory” episodes in the gospel of Mark, be it repeated, is not merely inconclusive; it elicits a rebuttal which turns it into a defeat. Inadequate even on the textual side, it is wholly fallacious on the hierological and the mythological; and no more than the ordinary conservative polemic does it recognize the sociological problem involved. For those who seek to study history comprehensively and comprehendingly, the residuum of the conservative case is a blank incredibility. Even Dalman, after the closest linguistic and literary analysis, has left the meaning of “the Kingdom of God” a conundrum;[4] and the conservative case finally consists in asserting that Christianity as a public movement arose in the simple announcement of that conundrum—the mere utterance of the formula—throughout Palestine by a body of twelve apostles, who for the rest “cast out devils,” as instructed by their Teacher. The “scholarship” which contentedly rests facing that vacuous conception is a scholarship not qualified finally to handle a great historical problem as such. It conducts itself exactly as did Biblical scholarship so long in face of the revelations of geology, and as did Hebrew scholarship so long over the problem of the Tabernacle in the wilderness.
Deeply learned men, in the latter case, went on for generations solemnly re-writing history in the terms of the re-arranged documents, when all the while the history was historic myth—perceptible as such to a Zulu who had lived in a desert. And when the Zulu’s teacher proved the case by simple arithmetic, he met at the hands alike of pedants and of pietists a volley of malignant vituperation, the “religious” expert Maurice excelling many of the most orthodox in the virulence of his scorn; while the pontifical Arnold, from the Olympian height of his amateurism, severely lectured Colenso for not having written in Latin.
Until the scholars and the amateurs alike renounce their own presumption, their thrice stultified airs of finality, their estimate of their prejudice and their personal equation as a revelation from within, and their sacerdotal conviction that their science is the science of every case, they will have to be unkindly reminded that they are but blunderers like other men, that in their own specialties they convict each other of errors without number, and that the only path to truth is that of the eternal free play and clash of all manner of criticism. It is an exceptionally candid orthodox scholar who writes: “It is a law of the human mind that combating error is the best way to advance knowledge. They who have never joined in controversy have no firm grasp of truth. Hateful and unchristian as theological disputes are apt to become, they have this merit, that they open our eyes.”[5] Let the conservative disputants then be content to put their theses and their arguments like other men, to meet argument with argument when they can, and to hold their peace when they have nothing better to add than boasts and declamation.
Before the end of the nineteenth century the very school which we are asked to regard as endowed with quasi-papal powers in matters of historical criticism was declared by one of its leading representatives in Germany to have been on a wrong track for fifty years. In the words of Professor Blass:—
Professor Harnack, in his most recent publication, even while stating that now the tide has turned, and that theology, after having strayed in the darkness and led others into darkness (see [Matt. xv, 14]) for about fifty years, has now got a better insight into things, and has come to a truer appreciation of the real trustworthiness of tradition, still puts Mark’s gospel between 65 and 70 A.D., Matthew’s between 70 and 75, but Luke’s much later, about 78–93.[6]
And Blass, who dates Luke 56 or 60, goes on:—
Has that confessedly untrustworthy guide of laymen, scientific theology, after so many errors committed during fifty years, now of a sudden become a trustworthy one? Or have we good reason to mistrust it as much, or even more than we had before? In ordinary life no sane person would follow a guide who confessed to having grossly misled him during the whole former part of the journey. Evidently that guide was either utterly ignorant of the way, or he had some views and aims of his own, of which the traveller was unaware, and he cannot be assumed now to have acquired a full knowledge, or to have laid those views and aims wholly aside.
Thus does one Gelehrter vom Fach estimate the pretensions of a whole sanhedrim of another Fach. Blass is a philologist; and incidentally we have seen how another philologist, Dalman, handles him in that capacity. Elsewhere, after another fling at the theological scholars—with a salvo of praise to Harnack for his Lukas der Arzt—and a comment on the fashion in which every German critic swears by his master, he avows that “we classical philologists ... have seen similar follies among ourselves in fair number.”[7] It is most true; and the philologists are as much divided as the theologians.
Of course, it is not by philology that Blass has reached the standpoint from which he can contemn the professional theologians. He is really on the same ground as they, making the same primary assumptions of historicity: the only difference is that while they, following the same historical tradition, yet scruple to accept prophecies as having been actually made at the time assigned to them, and feel bound to date the prophecy after the event, the consistent philologist recognizes no such obligation in the present instance, and puts a rather adroit but very unscholarly argument on the subject, with which we shall have to deal later. But for those to whom the exact dating of the Gospels is a subsidiary problem, his argument has only a subsidiary interest; and the fact that he unquestioningly agrees with his flouted theological colleagues in accepting the historicity of Jesus gives no importance to their consensus.
If, as he says, they are in the mass utterly untrustworthy guides on any historical issue (an extravagance to which, as a layman, I do not subscribe), their agreement can be of no value to him where he and they coincide. After telling Harnack that men who have confessedly been astray for fifty years have no right to expect to be listened to, he makes much of Harnack’s support as to the historicity of the Acts—a course which will not impose upon thoughtful readers. All the while, of course, Professor Blass is simply applying a revised historical criticism to a single issue or set of issues, and even if he chance to be right on these he has set up no new historical method. No more than the others has he recognized the central historical problem; and he must be well aware that that reversion to tradition announced by Harnack, and at this point acquiesced in by him, cannot for a moment be maintained as a general critical principle in regard to the New Testament any more than in regard to the Old. All that he can claim is that many theologians have confessedly blundered seriously on historical problems. But that is quite enough to justify us in admonishing the mere middlemen and the experts alike to change the tone of absurd assurance with which they meet further innovations of historical theory.
[1] I have wasted a good deal of time in reading and in confuting the Baconians, but only in one or two of them have I met with any etymologies. Their doctrine had no such origin, and in no way rests on etymologies. Not once have I seen in their books an appeal to anti-theological bias, and hardly ever an emendation, though there are plenty of “forced parallels.” Nor are etymologies primary elements in any form of the myth theory. Mr. Sinclair seems to “unpack his mouth with words” in terms of a Shakespearean formula. [↑]
[2] Eng. trans. by Prof. D. M. Kay, 1902. [↑]
[3] Wellhausen notably does—Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 1905, pp. 39–41. Dr. R. H. Charles, who in his masterly introduction to the Assumption of Moses indicates so many blunders of German scholars, may be reckoned quite able to criticize Dalman in his turn. [↑]
[4] Cp. Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, 1909, pp. 65–66. [↑]
[5] Rev. A. Wright, Some New Testament Problems, p. 212. [↑]
[6] Blass, Philology of the Gospels, 1898, p. 35. [↑]
[7] Die Entstehung und der Charakter unserer Evangelien, 1907, p. 9. [↑]
Chapter VIII
CONSERVATIVE POSITIONS
It is only just to confess that the conservatives are already learning to employ some prudential expedients. Met by the challenge to their own nakedly untenable positions, and offered a constructive hypothesis, diversely elaborated from various quarters, they mostly evade the discussion at nearly every point where the impossible tradition is concretely confronted by a thinkable substitute, and spend themselves over the remoter issues of universal mythology. Habitually misrepresenting every argument from comparative mythology as an assertion of a historical sequence in the compared data, they expatiate over questions of etymology, and are loud in their outcry over a suggestion that a given historical sequence may be surmised from data more or less obscure. But to the question how the evangel could possibly have begun as the record represents, or how the consummation could possibly have taken place as described, they either attempt no answer whatever or offer answers which are worse than evasions. One professional disputant, dealing with the proposition that such a judicial and police procedure as the systematic search for witnesses described in the Gospel story of the Trial could not take place by night, “when an Eastern city is as a city of the dead,” did not scruple to say that the thesis amounted to saying that in an Eastern city nothing could happen by night. This controversialist is an instructor of youth, and claims to be an instructed scholar. And his is the only answer that I have seen to the challenge with which it professes to deal. Loisy agrees that the challenge cannot be met.
To the hypothesis that there was a pre-Christian cult of a Jesus-God, the traditionalist—above all, the Unitarian, who seems to feel the pinch here most acutely—retorts with a volley of indignant contempt. He can see no sign of any such cult. In the mind’s eye he can see, as a historic process, twelve Apostles creating a Christian community by simply crying aloud that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, excommunicating for the after life those who will not listen, and all the while assiduously casting out devils. His records baldly tell him that this happened; and “we believe in baptism because we have seen it done.” But whereas, in the nature of the case, the reconstruction of the real historic process must be by tentative inference from a variety of data which for the most part the records as a matter of course obscured, he makes loud play with the simple fact that the records lack the required clear mention, and brands as “unsupported conjecture” the theorem offered in place of the plain untruth with which he has so long been satisfied.
In his own sifted and “primitive” records we have the narration of the carrying of the Divine Man to a height (“pinnacle of the temple” only in the supposed primitive Gospel) by Satan for purposes of temptation. For a mythologist this myth easily falls into line as a variant of the series of Pan and the young Zeus at the altar on the mountain top, Pan and Apollo competing on the top of Mount Tmolus, Apollo and Marsyas, all deriving from the Babylonian figures of the Goat-God (Capricorn) and the Sun-God on the Mountain of the World, representing the starting of the sun on his yearly course. That assignment explains at once the Pagan myths and the Christian, which is thus shown to have borrowed from the myth material of the Greco-Oriental world in an early documentary stage. Challenged to evade that solution, he mentions only the Pan-Zeus story, says nothing of the series of variants or of the Babylonian original, and replies that he is