THE JESUS PROBLEM
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
[THE HISTORICAL JESUS: A Survey of Positions].
CHRISTIANITY AND MYTHOLOGY. Second edition.
PAGAN CHRISTS. Second edition.
[A SHORT HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY]. Second edition.
[A SHORT HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT]. 2 vols. Third edition.
THE DYNAMICS OF RELIGION. (Out of print.)
STUDIES IN RELIGIOUS FALLACY. (Out of print.)
LETTERS ON REASONING. Second edition.
THE JESUS PROBLEM
A RESTATEMENT OF THE MYTH THEORY
BY
J. M. ROBERTSON, M.P.
[ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]
London:
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C. 4
1917
CONTENTS
PREFATORY NOTE
Most of the propositions in mythology and anthropology in this book are founded on bodies of evidence given in the larger works of the author. It seemed fitting, therefore, to refer to those works instead of repeating hundreds of references there given. Readers concerned to investigate the issues are thus invited and enabled to do so. For brevity’s sake, Christianity and Mythology is cited as C.M.; Pagan Christs as P.C.; and the Short Histories of Christianity and Freethought as S.H.C. and S.H.F. respectively. In the first three cases the references are to the second editions; in the last case, to the third. The Evolution of States is cited as E.S. Another work often referred to is Sir J. G. Frazer’s great thesaurus, The Golden Bough, which is cited as G.B., the references being to the last edition. Other new references are given in the usual way. The Ecce Deus of Professor W. B. Smith is cited in the English edition.
Passages in brackets, in unleaded type, may be passed at a first perusal by readers concerned mainly to follow the constructive theory. Such passages deal controversially with counter-polemic.
THE JESUS PROBLEM
Chapter I
THE APPROACH
As was explained in the preamble to The Historical Jesus (1916), that work was offered as prolegomena to a concise restatement of the theory that the Gospel Jesus is a mythical construction. That theory had been discursively expounded by the writer in two large volumes, Christianity and Mythology and Pagan Christs, and summarily in A Short History of Christianity, the argument in the two former combining a negative criticism of the New Testament narrative with an exposition of the myth-evidence. Criticism having in large part taken the form of a denial that the records were unhistorical, it was necessary to clear the ground by showing that all the various attempts of the past generation to find in the gospels a historical residuum have entirely failed to meet critical tests. Those attempts, conflicting as they do with each other, and collapsing as they do in themselves, give undesigned support to the conclusion that the gospel story is without historic basis.
It remains to restate with equal brevity the myth-theory which, long ago propounded on a very narrow basis, has latterly been re-developed in the light of modern mythology and anthropology, and has in recent years found rapidly increasing acceptance. Inevitably the different lines of approach have involved varieties of speculation; Professors Drews and W. B. Smith have ably and independently developed the theory in various ways; and a conspectus and restatement has become necessary for the sake of the theory itself no less than for the sake of those readers who call for a condensed statement.
This in turn is in itself tentative. If the progressive analysis of the subject matter from the point of view of its historicity has meant a century and a half of debate and an immense special literature, it is not to be supposed that the theory which negates the fundamental assumptions of that literature can be fully developed and established in one lifetime, at the hands of a few writers. The problem “What really happened?” is in fact a far wider one for the advocate of the myth-theory than for the critic who undertakes to extract a biography from the documents. In its first form, as propounded by Dupuis and Volney, the myth-theory was confined simply to certain parallelisms between Christian and Pagan myth, and to the astronomical basis of a number of these. From this standpoint the actual historic inception of the cult was little considered. Strauss, again, developed with great power and precision the view that most of the detail in the gospel narrative is myth construction on the lines of Jewish prophecy and dogma. But Strauss never fully accepted the myth-theory, having always assumed the existence of a teacher as a nucleus for the whole. As apart from the continuators of Dupuis and Volney, it was Bruno Bauer who, setting out with the purpose of extracting a biography from the gospels, and finding no standing ground, first propounded a myth-theory from that point of view.
His construction, being the substantially arbitrary one of a hypothetical evangelist who created a myth and thereby founded the cultus, naturally made no headway; and its artificiality strengthened the hands of those who claimed to work inductively on the documents. It was by reason of a similar failure to find a historic footing where he had at first taken it for granted that the present writer was gradually led, on lines of comparative hierology and comparative mythology and anthropology, to the conception of the evolution of the Jesus-cult from the roots of a “pre-Christian” one. The fact that this view has been independently reached by such a student as Professor W. B. Smith, who approached the problem from within rather than by way of the comparative method, seems in itself a very important confirmation.
What is now to be done is to revise the general theory in the light of further study as well as of the highly important expositions of it by Professor Smith and other scholars. An attempt is now definitely made not merely to combine concisely the evidence for a pre-Christian Jesus-cult, but to show how that historically grew into “Christianity,” thus substituting a defensible historical view for a mythic narrative of beginnings. And this, of course, is a heavy undertaking.
The question, “What do you put in its place?” is often addressed to the destructive critic of a belief, not with any philosophic perception of the fact that complete removal is effected only by putting a tested or tenable judgment in place of an untested or untenable one, but with a sense of injury, as if a false belief were a personal possession, for the removal of which there must be “compensation.” In point of fact, the destructive process is rarely attempted without a coincident process of substitution. Even to say that a particular text is spurious is to say that some one forged or inserted it where it is, for a purpose. That concept is “something in its place.” Some Comtists, again, are wont to commit the contradiction of affirming that “no belief is really destroyed without replacement,” and, in the next breath, of condemning rationalists who “destroy without replacing.” Both propositions cannot stand.
If it be meant merely to insist that explanation is replacement, and that explanation is a necessary part of a successful or complete process of destruction, the answer is that it is hardly possible even to attempt to cancel a belief without putting a different belief in its place; and that it is nearly always by way of positing a new belief that an old one is assailed. The old charge against rationalism, of “destroying without building up,” is historically quite false. Almost invariably, the innovator has offered a new doctrine or conception in place of the old. True, it might not be ostensibly an equivalent, for the believer who wanted an equivalent in kind. An exploded God-idea is not for me replaceable by another God-idea: the only rational “replacement” is a substitution of a reasoned for an authoritarian cosmology and ethic. But in the way of reasoned replacements the innovators have been only too quick, in general, to formulate new conceptions, new creeds. They have really been too eager to build afresh, and many untenable formulas and hypotheses are the consequences.
These very attempts, naturally, are constantly made the objects of still more hasty counter-attack. Every form of the myth-theory with which I am acquainted, whatever its defects, has been the result of much labour, and even if astray can be fairly pronounced “hasty” only in the sense that it proves to be inadequate. It is not so with most of the counter-criticism. The reader may rest assured that it is not possible for any exposition of the new theory to be as “hasty” as is usually its rejection.[1] Professional theologians who cast that epithet are in general recognizably men who believed their hereditary creed before they were able to think, and have at no later stage made good the first inevitable omission.
Myth-theories, sound or unsound, are the attempts of students who find the record incredible as history to think out, in the light of the documents and of comparative mythology and hierology, the process by which it came to be produced; and even as all myth is but a form of traditionary error, so any attempt to trace its growth runs the risk of error. It is one thing to show, for instance, that the Pentateuch cannot have been written by “Moses,” seen to be a non-historical figure: it is another thing to settle how the books were really made. In such cases, the “something in the place” of the tradition is to be ascertained only after long and patient investigation and counter-criticism. So with the investigation of the fabulous history of early Rome. After several scholars had set forth grounded doubts, the problem was ably and systematically handled by the French freethinker Louis de Beaufort in 1738. Early in the nineteenth century, Niebuhr, confidently undertaking “with the help of God” to get at the truth, and falsely disparaging Beaufort’s work as wholly “sceptical,” effected a reconstruction which has since been found to be in large measure unsound, though long acquiesced in by English students.[2] In such matters there is really no finality. If well-documented history must in every age be rewritten, no less inevitable is the re-writing of that which is reached only by processes of inference. And the gospel problem is the hardest of all. Still more than in the case of the Pentateuch problem, many revisions will probably be needed before a generally satisfactory solution is reached.
There is nothing for it but to trace and retrace, consider and reconsider, the inferrible historic process. Met as he is by alternate charges of reckless iconoclasm and “hasty” construction, the proper course for the holder of the myth-theory is to repeat with dispassionate vigilance both of his processes—to show first that the progressive effort to extract from the gospels a tenable biography has ended in complete critical collapse, revealing only a tissue of myth; and then to attempt to indicate how the pseudo-history came to be compiled: in other words, how the myth arose. Such has been my procedure in the preceding volume and in this.
It may of course be argued that the previous negative criticism of the gospel record is indecisive; that the avowal of Loisy: “If the trial and condemnation of Jesus, as pretended Messiah, could be put in doubt, we should have no ground for affirming the existence of the Christ,” does not commit other inquirers, or that the historicity of the trial story has not really been exploded; that the nullity of the alleged Evangel has not been established; or that the complete destruction of previous biographical theories claimed by Schweitzer for himself and Wrede has not been accomplished. The answer is that these issues are not re-opened in the following chapters. They were carefully handled in the previous volume, to which I have seen no attempt at a comprehensive and reasoned answer.
[The latest attack I have seen comes from a former antagonist, who appears to lay his main complaint against the book on the ground that it “omits to notice the theory of the synoptic problem which appears in every modern text-book,” that is, “the two-documents hypothesis.” And there emerges this indictment:—
As the theory has a vital bearing on the relative values of different strata of tradition, Mr. Robertson cannot afford to ignore it. If we apply to himself the crude principle he applies to Paul and the evangelists, to wit, that if they don’t mention a thing they don’t know it, we must assume that Mr. Robertson is still ignorant of the very elements of the problem he is professing to solve. Since he has no clear or tenable view of the documents and their relations to one another, he obviously cannot answer the historical questions they raise.[3]... Presumably he omits to mention it because he does not see its significance.[4]
Before coming to the main matter, it is necessary to elucidate the charge as to a “crude principle” applied to Paul and the evangelists. The “principle” really applied was this, that if “Paul” in all his writings, apart from two interpolated passages, shows no real knowledge whatever of the gospels, and no knowledge whatever either of the life or the teachings of Jesus as there recorded, we are compelled to infer either that these details were not in any form known to Paul, or that, if he knew them, he did not believe them. It is not a matter of his not knowing “a thing”: that is the sophism of the critic; it is a matter of his not knowing anything on the subject. And so with the synoptics and the fourth gospel. When one side relates something vital to the record, of which the other side shows no knowledge whatever[5]—as, for instance, great miracles—we are bound to infer that the silent side, when it is the earlier record, either did not know or did not believe the story. Or, again, when John alleges that the disciples baptized freely and the synoptics make no mention of it, it is clear that we cannot suppose them, in the alleged circumstances, to have been ignorant of such a fact; while, if they are supposed to have known it and yet to have kept silence, their credit as historians is gravely shaken. The “principle,” in fact, is that of critical common-sense; and the critic’s version of it is a forensic perversion.
On the next issue, it is perhaps well to explain to the lay reader that the “two-documents hypothesis” is simply what Schmiedel—with a very justifiable implication—named “the so-called theory of two sources,” a mere aspect of “the borrowing hypothesis” which constitutes the main substance of the bulk of the documentary discussion of the gospels in the last century, and which is simply the most obvious way of attempting to explain the documentary phenomena. It dates from Papias. As the critic asseverates, it is the theory of the text-books in general. And for the main purposes of historic comprehension, it is neither here nor there. The theory of two sources cannot possibly cover all the data, even from the biographical point of view. The effect of Schmiedel’s article—a model of critical honesty and general good sense which his successors might usefully strive to copy in those regards—is to show that the hypothesis is quite inadequate even as a documentary theory; and from the point of view of the rational student it is simply neutral to the vital question, What really did happen, in the main? He who has realized that the Entry, the Betrayal, the Last Supper, the Agony, the Trials, and the Crucifixion, are all as mythical as the Resurrection, is not at that point concerned with the dispute as to priority among the gospels, or any sections of them. No documentary hypothesis can possibly make the myth true.
At the vital point, in fact, the two-documents hypothesis is not even ostensibly applicable: the synoptic narrative is one primary narrative, subjected to minor modifications. It is admitted by Harnack to have been absent from “Q,” the Logoi “source” held to have been drawn upon by Matthew and Luke. And that one narrative, as I have argued, is not in origin a “gospel” narrative at all, but the simple transcript of a mystery-drama, with almost the minimum of necessary narrative insertion. If the exegete could bring himself to contemplate rationally my hypothesis, he might find his documentary labours lightened.[6]
It is doubtless true that the determination of the earlier as against the later form of a minor narrative episode, or of a teaching, is often essential to the framing of a true notion as to its mode of entrance; and such determination I have attempted many times. But the notion that historicity is a matter of priority of documents is, as Schmiedel sees, the fallacy of fallacies. Prisoned in that presupposition, exegetes defending the record achieve inevitably the very failure they impute: they are “ignorant of the very elements of the problem they are professing to solve”—that is, the problem of what really happened. They cannot realize the conditions under which the gospels were compiled. They construct what they think a “clear or tenable” view of the documents by the process of evading the considerations which make it untenable or inadequate, and then demand that their documentary formula shall be met by one in pari materia. The answer to them is that their psychological as well as their historical assumptions are false. Things did not happen in that way. And two versions of a palpable myth do not make for its historicity. There are two or more versions of most myths.
The indictment before us, in short, is an illustration of the mode of theological fence discussed above. You undertake to show that the most alert presentments of a given historical conception fail to stand critical tests, and you are met with the reply: “We are not concerned to discuss the presentments you deal with, which are not generally accepted: we demand that you discuss instead the documentary theory which in those presentments is treated as obsolete. If you do not do this, you show you are incompetent.” When on the other hand the critical significance of an older theory is indicated, the reply is made that that theory is “obsolete.” One theory is too new, another is too old, for discussion. All the while, the theory founded-on for the defence is really the oldest of all. It was in fact the obvious inadequacy of the familiar documentary hypothesis that dictated our discussion of more up-to-date theories, as it had elicited these. If our exegete’s favourite hypothesis had had any power of satisfying independent students, we should not have had such treatises as those of the Rev. Dr. Wright and Dr. Flinders Petrie, or the searching analysis and commentary of M. Loisy, to say nothing of the vigorous Dr. Blass.
In dealing with such writers, and particularly in following the “real” procedure of M. Loisy on the main issues of historical fact, I took what seemed to me the candid controversial course. To resort instead to a mere exposure of the obvious insufficiency of the “two-documents hypothesis” would be like arguing as if Genesis were the only alternative to the Darwinian theory. Dr. Wright’s “oral hypothesis” is a vivid and interesting revival of what, as I pointed out, had long ago been the “predominant” view.[7] Our exegete nevertheless affirms that I regard it “as something new in England.” To the lay reader I would again explain the situation thus handled. Theological discussion on the gospels has moved in cycles, by reason of the invariable presupposition as to historicity, which was a main factor in the partial failure of the mythical theory as introduced by Strauss. As I expressly stated, the oral hypothesis was before Strauss “well established.” Then ensued the age-long discussion of documentary hypotheses. At the close of the nineteenth century we find Schmiedel saying:
Lastly, scholars are also beginning to remember that the evangelists did not need to draw their material from books alone, but that from youth up they were acquainted with it from oral narration and could easily commit it to writing precisely in this form in either case—whether they had it before them in no written form, or whether they had it in different written form. In this matter, again, we are beginning to be on our guard against the error of supposing that in the synoptical problem we have to reckon merely with given quantities, or with such as can be easily ascertained.[8]
If I had written that, I should doubtless be told that I regarded the oral hypothesis as “new.” Dr. Schmiedel, it is to be hoped, may escape the aspersive method of my critic. In point of fact, a return to the oral hypothesis was inevitable in view of the insufficiency of the other. Unfortunately it has been made on the old and fatal presupposition of the historicity of the myth; but, as made by Dr. Wright, it seemed well worth critical consideration. My critic disparages that and other propaganda as “commanding no large measure of assent anywhere.” My testimony, I fear, will not help Dr. Wright; but I will say that I found him an honest and extremely interesting writer, admirably free from theological malice, and above all exhibiting a thoroughly independent hold of his thesis. What amount of assent he has secured is an irrelevant issue. I can only say that I found him very readable. The scholarly and intellectual status of Dr. Flinders Petrie, again, is such as perhaps to make it unnecessary to say—as against similar disparagement in his case—that a thesis seriously and vigorously embraced by him as superseding the older documentary and oral hypotheses alike, seemed to me well entitled to consideration.]
The examination of the recent positions of independent writers seeking to construct a documentary theory has, I think, sufficed to safeguard the honest lay student of the myth-theory against the kind of spurious rebuttal set up by those who, themselves innocent of all original research, pretend that the fundamental historicity of the gospels is established by a “consensus of scholarship.” There is no consensus of scholarship. I observe that M. Loisy, to whom I devoted special study, is journalistically disparaged by the Very Rev. Dean Inge. That disparagement—which, I also observe, I have the undeserved honour to share—will not impose upon serious students, who will realize that Dean Inge, himself transparently unorthodox, has no resource in such matters but to disparage all who labour with any measure of rational purpose to put concrete conclusions where church dignitaries inevitably prefer to maintain rhetorical mystification. For the purposes of serious students, M. Loisy is an important investigator, Dean Inge a negligible essayist.
It is true that one of the positions I discussed—that of the school of Weiss—is not “new.” But in that case the reason for selection was not merely that it was one of the efforts to reach something less neutral than the “two-documents hypothesis,” but that it is in substance the position of some of the most recent and most virulent English critics of the myth-theory. It is in fact the gist of the polemic of Dr. Conybeare. I have shown, accordingly, that the thesis of a primary biography is psychologically absurd in itself; and, further, that like all the other documentary hypotheses it has been left high and dry by the latest German exegetes, who, expressly assuming the historicity of a Jesus, and founding on the gospels for their case, reduce these to a minimum of tradition at which M. Loisy must stand aghast. It is in England, in short, that the biographical school, as represented by Dean Inge and Dr. Conybeare, is seen to be most entirely out of touch with the movement of rational criticism.
It is in England, too, that we find the most uncritical reliance put upon the “impression of a personality” said to be set up by the gospels. This argument is still used without any attempt at psychological self-analysis, any effort to find out what an impression is worth. A generation or two ago, exactly the same position was taken up in regard to the fourth gospel: both the Arnolds, for instance, were confident that the vision of Jesus there given was peculiarly real. Critical study has since forced all save the sworn traditionalists and the mere compromisers to the conclusion that it cannot be real if there is any substantial truth in the presentment of the synoptics. Slowly it has been realized that the methods which produce a vivid impression of “personality” are methods open to fictive art, and differ only in detail from the methods of the Bhagavat Gîta or the methods of Homer. If a strong impression of a personality be a certificate of historicity, what of Zeus and Hêrê, Athênê and Achilles, Ulysses and Nestor? Most critics who handle the problem seem to work in vacuo, without regard to the phenomena and the machinery of fictive literature in general, even when they are moved to accept a hypothesis of fiction.
The vision presented in the fourth gospel is prima facie more lifelike than that of the synoptics, because its main author is more of an artist than his predecessors. It has been justly affirmed by Professor W. B. Smith that
The received notion that in the early Marcan narratives the Jesus is distinctly human, and that the process of deification is fulfilled in John, is precisely the reverse of the truth. In Mark there is really no man at all: the Jesus is God, or at least essentially divine, throughout. He wears only a transparent garment of flesh. Mark historizes only. Matthew also historizes and faintly humanizes. Luke more strongly humanizes; while John not only humanizes but begins to sentimentalize.[9]
Contemporary German scholars, such as Wellhausen, working on the synoptics, begin uneasily to note the lack of reality and verisimilitude in the presentment there given, avowing a deficit of biographical quality where English amateurs still heedlessly affirm a veridical naïveté. Wellhausen, tacitly clinging to the biographical assumption, gives up section after section of Mark, where our amateurs primitively acclaim as genuine biographic detail such an item as “asleep on the cushion” ([Mk. iv, 38]). Following another will-o’-the-wisp, Wellhausen is moved to claim the episode of the widow’s mite ([Lk. xxi, 1–4]) as having biographical flavour, as if the admitted inventor of other Lucan episodes could not have doctrinally framed this. There is no science in such tentatives. They do but tell of a search for a subjective basis of belief when criticism has dissolved the objective bases of the old assumption.
When it is pretended, as by Dr. Conybeare, that the mythical theory rests on and grows solely out of the supernaturalist details in the gospel story, the case is simply falsified. This writer never seems to master his subject matter. Before Strauss, as by Strauss, the myth-theory was widely applied to non-supernatural matter; and to surmise a historical Jesus behind those details has been the first step in all modern inquiry. The assertion that the rejection of the historicity of Jesus “is not really the final conclusion of their [myth-theorists’] researches, but an initial unproved assumption”[10] is categorically false. Professor Smith’s biographical statement negates it.[11] As I have repeatedly stated, I began without misgivings by assuming a historical Jesus, and sought historically to trace him, regarding the birth myth and the others as mere accretions. But the very first step in the strictly historical inquiry revealed difficulties which the biographical school and the traditionalists alike had simply never faced. The questions whether Jesus was “of Nazareth,” “Nazarene” in that sense, or “the Nazarite”; and why, if he was either of these, he was never so named in the epistles, stood in the very front of the problem, wholly unregarded by those who profess to trace a historical Jesus by historical method. The problem of “the twelve” is to this day passed with equal heedlessness by critics professing to work on historico-critical lines; and the question of the authenticity of the teachings is no more scientifically met. It was because at every step the effort to find historical foundation failed utterly that after years of investigation I sought and found in a thorough application of the myth-theory the solution of the enigma. Invariably that gives light where the historical assumption yields darkness.
It is thoroughly characteristic of the spirit in which some champions of the biographical view work that, in sequel to the falsification of the problem just noted, we have from them the plea that if we give up the historicity of Jesus, we must give up that of Solon and Pythagoras; and that “obviously Jesus has a far larger chance to have really existed than Solon.”[12] Such a use of the conception of “chance” reveals the kind of dialectic we are dealing with. One recalls Newman’s derision of the Paleyan position that the “chances” were in favour of there being a God. “If we deny all authenticity to Jesus’s teaching,” we are asked, “what of Solon’s traditional lore?” Well, what of it? Is it to be authenticated by the threat that it must go if we deny that the Sermon on the Mount is a sermon at all? The fragments of Solon’s verse purport to have been written by him: have we anything purporting to have been written by Jesus? The very fact that we have only fragments of Solon is in itself an argument in favour of their genuineness: to Jesus any evangelist could ascribe any sayings at will.[13]
As usual, the critic falsifies the debate, affirming that “the stories of Plutarch about him [Solon] are, as Grote says, ‘contradictory as well as apocryphal.’” What Grote really says[14] is that Plutarch’s stories “as to the way in which Salamis was recovered are contradictory as well as apocryphal.” He makes no such assertion as to the stories of Solon’s life in general, though, like every critical historian, he recognizes that many things were ultimately ascribed to Solon which belong to later times.[15] But the genuine fragments of Solon’s verse and laws are sound historical material. As Meyer claims,[16] the Archon list is as valid as the Roman Fasti. It is precisely because of the solid elements in the record that Solon stands as a historic figure, while Lycurgus is given up as a deity Evemerized.[17] On the principles of Dr. Conybeare, we must give up Solon because we give up Lycurgus, or accept Lykurgos if we accept Solon. Historical criticism does no such thing. It decides the cases on their merits by critical tests, and finds the fact of a Solonian legislation historically as certain as the Lycurgean is fabulous. The item that Solon’s family claimed to be descended from Poseidon is no ground for doubting the historicity of Solon, because such claims were normal in early Greece. Is it pretended that claims to be the Son of God were normal in later Jewry?
The device of saying that we must accept the historicity of Jesus if we accept that of Solon is merely a new dressing of the old claim that we must believe in the resurrection if we believe in the assassination of Cæsar. Both theses rest on spurious analogies; and both alike defeat themselves, the older by carrying the implication that the prodigies at Cæsar’s death are as historical as the assassination; the newer by involving the consequence that Solon accredits not only Lycurgus but Herakles and Dionysos, Ulysses and Achilles.
The argument from Pythagoras is a still more fatal device. Of him “it is no easy task to give an account that can claim to be regarded as history.”[18] And “of the opinions of Pythagoras we know even less than of his life.”[19] It is held to be certain that he taught the doctrine of transmigration and originated certain propositions in mathematics; but while the mathematical element has no analogue in the gospels, the residual view of Pythagoras as vending in religion only a “thoroughly primitive” set of taboos[20] would sanction, by analogy, the view that the real Jesus was the Talmudic Ben Pandira, who dates about 100 B.C., and was reputed a worker of wonders by sorcery. This is a sufficiently lame and impotent conclusion from a polemic in favour of the gospel Jesus, whom it leaves, in effect, a myth, as the myth-theory maintains. As for Apollonius of Tyana, one holds him historical[21] just because his myth-laden story is finally intelligible as history, which is precisely what the Jesus story is not.
This said, The Historical Jesus may be left, as it is, open to critical refutation. The present volume is theoretically constructive, and does not unnecessarily return upon the other. It is open in its turn to refutative criticism.
That description, it may be remarked, would not be accorded by me to a mere asseveration that there “must” be a historical basis for the gospels in a person answering broadly to the Gospel Jesus. Any one who confidently holds such a view need hardly trouble himself with the present thesis at all: and for me any one who affects to dispose of the issue by merely fulminating the “must” is simply begging the question. Those who, on the other hand, do but lean instinctively to such a belief may be respectfully invited to reconsider it in the light of all hierology. That there “must” be a historic process of causation behind every cult is a truism: it does not in the least follow that the historic basis must be the historicity of the God or Demigod round whose name the cult centres.
Many Saviour names have been the centres of cults, in the ancient world as in the modern. There were extensive and long-lived worships of Herakles, Dionysos, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, in addition to the age-long cults of the “Supreme” Gods. Is it claimed that there “must” have been a historical Herakles, or Dionysos, or Adonis? If so, is it further contended that there must have been a historical Jehovah, a Jove, a Cybelê, a Juno, a Venus? If the Father-Gods and Mother-Gods could be evolved by protracted mythopœia, why not the Son-Gods?
It is perfectly true, as was urged by the late Sir Alfred Lyall, that in India and elsewhere distinguished men may to this day be deified; that ancestor-worship played a great part in God-making; and that tribal Gods are in many cases probably evolved from distinguished chiefs. But such cases really defeat the inference drawn from them. Such God-making can in no instance be shown ever to have set up what can reasonably be termed a world-religion. The world-religions are the product of a far more protracted and complex causation. They grow from far further-reaching roots. Above all, they have never grown up without the services either of a numerous priesthood or of Sacred Books, or of both.
Is it then contended that a Sacred Book must represent the originative teaching of a real person and his disciples? It may or may not; but what does not at all follow is that the personality deified or extolled in the Sacred Book was real. Mohammed was a real person: he made no claim to deity: he acclaimed an established God. The names of Zoroaster and Buddha were probably not those of real persons: the first figures as a cult-building priest; the second as a Teacher, enshrined from the first in a luxuriant myth, whence his practical deification. In both cases the specific centre of the religion is the Book or Books; and it is beyond question that in both cases many hands wrought on these. To say that only a primary personality of abnormal greatness could have inspired the writing of the books is really equivalent to saying that there must have been a historical Jehovah to account for the Old Testament, and a historical Allah to account for the Koran. Let it be freely granted that the writers of Sacred Books were in many cases remarkable personalities. That is a totally different proposition from the one we are considering.
The claim that the gospels could only have originated round the memory of an inspiring and love-creating personality is in effect an evasion of the multitudinous facts of hierology. The European who sees nothing in the fact that the mythic Krishna is loved by millions of Hindoos; that in ages of antiquity millions of worshippers were absorbed in the love of Dionysos, mutilated themselves for Attis, and wept for Adonis, is not really ready for a verdict on what “must” have been as regards the building up of any cult. Are the Psalms, once more, a testimony to the historicity of Jehovah, or is the hymn of Hippolytos to Artemis, in Euripides, a proof of anything but that men can love an imagination?
The special claim for a historical Jesus arises out of the very fact that Jesus alone among the Saviour Gods of antiquity (Buddha being excluded from that category) is celebrated in a set of Sacred Books in which he figures as at once a Sacrificed God and a Teaching God.[22] But the worships of the Saviours Dionysos and Herakles and Adonis, without Sacred Books (apart from temple liturgies), were as confident as the worship of Jesus. Is the production of Sacred Books in itself any more of a testimony to a Saviour God’s human actuality than the worship with which they are associated?
Historically speaking, the emergence of Sacred Books as accompaniments of a popular cultus is a result of special culture conditions. In the case of Judaism these have never been scientifically traced, by reason of the presuppositions of the past.[23] But we can trace later cases. Early Christism founded primarily on the Sacred Books of Judaism; and it needed to produce books of its own if it was to survive as against the overshadowing parent cult. Save for these books, Christism would have disappeared as did Mithraism, of which the scanty hieratic literature remained occult, liturgical, unpopular, where Christism was committed to publicity by the Jewish lead. To make of Sacred Books produced under those special conditions a special argument for the historicity of their contents, or of their narrative groundwork, is to embrace the fallacy of the single instance. And when the contents utterly fail to sustain the tests of rational documentary criticism, to fall back on a “must” for certification of the actuality of the figure they deify is merely to renounce critical reason.
The rational problem is to account historically for the projection as a whole, to explain the main features and as many minor details as may be, as we explain the “personality” and the myth of Herakles or Samson or Adonis, the doctrines and fictions of the Books of Ruth and Esther, the religions of Krishna and Mithra and Quetzalcoatl. We are now compendiously to make the attempt.
M. Loisy has declared[24] that “One can explain to oneself Jesus: one cannot explain to oneself those who invented him.” In the previous volume it has been contended that M. Loisy has decisively failed to “explain Jesus” as a possible person: in this we essay to explain “those who invented him.” M. Loisy is an illustrious New-Testament scholar: he is not a mythologist or a comparative hierologist. It is very likely that he would find it difficult to explain to himself those who invented Tezcatlipoca; but it would hardly follow that Tezcatlipoca was not invented. In point of fact, a large portion of M. Loisy’s own important critical performance consists precisely in explaining away as inventions a multitude of items in the gospel narrative. He can understand invention of many parts, and admits that unless removed they make an incongruous whole. There is really no more difficulty in explaining the other parts as similar inventions than in explaining these. Thus the alleged difficulty is illusory.
The occupation of “explaining to oneself” imaginary beings has been the occupation of theologians through whole millenniums. There can still be found even a hierologist or two who believe in the historicity of Krishna; as the judicious Mosheim in the eighteenth century confidently believed in the historicity of Mercury and Mithra. Those—and they are many—who are now content to see myth in the figures of Mithra and Krishna, with or without the nimbus of Sacred Books, may on that score consent to consider the thesis of this volume.
It will be no adequate answer to that to say, as will doubtless be said, that the outline of the evolution of the myth is unsatisfying. In the very nature of the case, the connections of the data must be speculative. It may well be that those here attempted—some of them modifications of previous theories—will have to be at various points reshaped; and I invite the reader to weigh carefully the views of Professors Drews and Smith where I diverge from them. The complete establishment of a historical construction will be a long and difficult task. But in its least satisfying aspect the myth-theory is a scientific substitution for what is wholly dissatisfying—the entirely unhistorical construction furnished by the gospels.
That has been under revision for a hundred and fifty years, with an outlay of labour that is appalling to think of, in view of the utter futility of the search—or, let us say, the labour in proportion to the result, for toil even upon false clues has yielded some knowledge that avails for rectification. But the labour has meant a steadily dwindling confidence in a dwindling residuum of supposed fact; though every shortening of the line of defence has evoked furious outcry from the unthinking faithful. The first pious framers of “harmonies” of the gospels were indignantly told by the more stupid pious that there was no strife to harmonize: the Schmiedels and Loisys of to-day, striving their hardest to save something by rational methods from the rational advance, are execrated by those who believe more than they. The more instructed believers are as warm in their resentment of the latest and coolest negative criticism as were their fathers towards the contemptuous exposure of the contradictions of “inspiration.” Anger, it would seem, always leaps to the help of shaken confidence. Let the believer perpend.
It is not orthodoxy that is to-day fighting the case of the historicity of Jesus. Orthodoxy is committed to the miraculous, to Revelation, to the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and, if it would be consistent, to the Ascension, which is on the same plane of belief. Upon such assumptions, there can be no critical defence worthy of the name. The defence is being conducted mainly by the avowed or non-avowed Neo-Unitarians of the various churches and countries; and these are simply standing either at the position taken up fifty years ago by Renan, whose “biography” of Jesus was received with a far more widespread and no less violent storm of censure than that now being turned upon the myth-theory; or at the more nearly negative position of Strauss, which was still more fiercely censured. Renan’s position, or Strauss’s, is now the position of the mass of “moderate” scholars and students. Those who have thus seen a denounced heresy become the standpoint of ordinary scholarly belief should be slow to conclude that a newer heresy will not in time find similar acceptance.
[1] The charge of haste is posited as a preliminary to criticism by the Rev. Dr. Thorburn in his work on The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels. Some examples of Dr. Thorburn’s own haste will be found in the following pages. [↑]
[2] Twenty years ago a French scholar gently included me in this reproach. [↑]
[4] Art. by H. G. Wood in The Cambridge Magazine, Jan. 1917. [↑]
[6] In the course of a second attack, the critic avows that he knows of “no theory of gospel-origins, living or dead,” which concedes that the tragedy-story was added to the gospels as a separate block. Reminded that the school of B. Weiss make their “Primitive Gospel” end before the tragedy, he replies in a third attack that that school is “obsolete”—i. e. neither living nor dead? [↑]
[7] It seems to have been the view of Mr. Cassels. [↑]
[8] Art. Gospels in Encyc. Bibl., ii, col. 1869. [↑]
[10] Historical Christ, p. 182. [↑]
[11] Ecce Deus, pref. p. ix. [↑]
[12] Dr. Conybeare, The Historical Christ, p. 5. [↑]
[13] H.J. 112, 113, 128, 157 sq., 177 sq. [↑]
[14] Hist. of Greece, 10 vol. ed. 1888, ii, 462. [↑]
[16] Gesch. des Alterthums, ii (1893), 649. See the context for the historic basis in general. [↑]
[18] Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd ed. p. 91. Cp. 93 sq. [↑]
[19] Id. p. 100. Cp. 106–7, 123. [↑]
[21] P.C. 274 sq. A proselytizing Catholic Professor in Glasgow has represented me as denying the historicity of Apollonius, having reached that opinion by intuition. [↑]
[22] The Bhagavat Gîta, which glorifies Krishna, is late relatively to the cult. [↑]
[23] Cp. Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des N.T., 1903, p. 5 sq. [↑]
[24] Apropos d’histoire des religions, p. 290. [↑]
Chapter II
THE CENTRAL MYTH
§ 1. The Ground of Conflict
For the purposes of this inquiry, all miracles, strictly so-called, are out of discussion. This does not mean that the myth-theory of Jesus is an outcome of atheistic philosophy. One of the most brilliant of modern books on Jesus is the work of an avowed atheist,[1] who accepted substantially the whole of the non-supernatural presentment of Jesus in the gospels, taking it to be a bad biography, and subjecting the doctrine to keen but sympathetic criticism. This writer, dismissing miracles as outside debate, had a conviction of the historicity of Jesus which was in no way affected by a knowledge of modern documentary criticism. On the other hand, Professor Arthur Drews, author of The Christ Myth, expressly claims to urge the myth-theory in the interest of theistic religion. Of course he too dismisses miracles as outside discussion.
Those who are still concerned to discuss them, and to affirm such beliefs as those of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, should turn their attention to the well-known work of the late W. R. Cassels, Supernatural Religion,[2] in which the whole supernaturalist case, in its double aspect of “revelation” and miracles, is examined with an abundance of learning, patience, and candour. Disparaged in its day by professional orthodox scholars, that treatise has so completely done its special work in the general criticism of supernaturalist faith that, however common orthodoxy may still be, the matter is now little debated among instructed men. Those who still hold the orthodox position, therefore, are not here addressed. Our inquiry invites the attention only of those who, abandoning the supernaturalist basis of the Christian creed, seek to retain (it may be as the ground for a transformed “Christianity”) (1) the human personality which they believe to have underlain the admitted myths of the record, and (2) the teachings—or some of them—ascribed to the God-Man of the Gospels. The problem is one of historical criticism, and does not turn upon theism or atheism. The historicity of Jesus is maintained not only by “Christians” of various degrees of heterodoxy but by some professed rationalists; by critics eminent for judicial temper, as by Professor Schmiedel of Zürich; and on the other hand by Dr. F. C. Conybeare.
These critics agree in regarding Jesus as a natural man, naturally born, and it is to them that we must reply. When an orthodox Christian like the Rev. Dr. T. J. Thorburn, holding by the Annunciation and the Virgin Birth, sets himself to rebut the myth-theory[3] by scouting myth analogies, it would be idle to argue with him. A writer who can believe he has evidence for a story of human parthenogenesis has no conception of evidence in common with us. It is accordingly needless to point out that he constantly and absurdly misunderstands the myth argument;[4] that he discusses Evemerism without knowing what it means;[5] and that he merely juggles with such cruces as the stories of the Transfiguration and the Ascension. From one at his standpoint we can expect nothing else; and to those whom his exposition satisfies no myth-theory can appeal. When he resorts to the device of denying “spiritual insight” to those who accept scientific tests, he merely exemplifies the normal procedure of orthodox incompetence. The religious reasoner who flouts reason usually certificates and betrays himself in that inexpensive fashion. Our argument is addressed to those who profess to apply to Biblical matters the principles of historical criticism.
The biographical school, as one may inoffensively term the variously minded champions of the historicity of the record, abandon the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection as impossibilities. That is to say, they accept the myth-theory as regards those two cardinal items of the Christian legend. They also in general recognize that the fourth gospel, in so far as it differs vitally from the synoptics, is in the main a process of myth-making. But, clinging to the alleged substratum, most members of the school adhere to the fundamental historicity of the Crucifixion. Here they stand with Strauss, who found in the execution of Jesus by Pontius Pilate a solid historical fact. Strauss is generally explicit as to his reasons for accepting and rejecting; and while he resolves into myth at least nine-tenths of the gospel narratives, finding them mere inventions to “fulfil” supposed Old Testament predictions, he finds the testimony of Tacitus unquestionable as to the execution.[6]
Now, the Annals of Tacitus is itself a questioned document; but even if we take it as unquestionable it is admittedly only a late statement of a narrative already made current by the Christists, the Annals being commonly dated about 120 C.E. Either Tacitus was founding on a Roman record of the Crucifixion or he was merely saying what Christists said as to the origin of their sect. If the latter, he supplies no historical basis. On the other hand, the unlikelihood of there being a Roman record of executions in Palestine ninety years before is so great that no Christian advocate now appears to affirm it. Tacitus in fact gives no sign of consulting official records,[7] his only traceable sources being previous historians, notably Suetonius. Thus Strauss’s express ground for accepting the execution of a “Christ” by Pontius Pilate is really illusory; and when we further find him pronouncing that the Barabbas episode must be held fundamentally historical because it is “so firmly rooted in the early Christian tradition,”[8] we are again compelled to reject his test. As we shall see, the Barabbas episode is unintelligible as history, but highly intelligible as myth. At the very outset, then, unverified assumptions are seen to be made by the biographical school as to what may confidently be taken as historical, even when, as in the case of Strauss, they affirm an abundance of myth.
Where Strauss was rash, later rationalistic writers have been more so. My old friend, the English translator of Jules Soury’s early work on Jesus, took for granted that behind legendary heroes in general there is always a nucleus of fact; but Soury, after postulating a large part of the gospel story as veridical, gave up a number of his own items.[9] As soon as he began to apply criticism, they were seen to be arbitrary assumptions. Equally arbitrary is the assumption of “some basis,” made upon no scientific principle.
The biographical school in general adhere at least to the trial and condemnation before Pilate, though many abandon as fiction the trial before the Sanhedrim, which indeed was abandoned as long ago as the third gospel, in favour of an equally fictitious trial before Herod. As is seen by M. Loisy, the trial before Pilate is for the historical critic the keystone of the tragedy story. If that goes, there remains only a highly composite body of teaching, with no identifiable historical personality to which to attach it.
But even as regards the trials there is wide divergence among the biographical school. For instance, Mr. Charles Stanley Lester, an ex-clergyman of Milwaukee, in his interesting work The Historic Jesus,[10] entirely rejects the Sanhedrim trial, and likewise the gospel account of the Pilate trial, but finds “probable history” in the view that the priests privately persuaded Pilate to condemn Jesus on their accusation without any trial.[11] Again, the anonymous author of The Four Gospels as Historical Records,[12] an eminently keen, searching, and candid critic, rejects alike the Judas story, the trial before the Sanhedrim, and the trial before Pilate,[13] as he does most of the other items of the gospel history, yet throughout seems to take for granted the historicity of the “Great Teacher,” the “Master,” never even raising that issue save in protesting that he has absolutely nothing to say against him.[14] So completely does he destroy the whole narrative, indeed, that he can hardly be said to maintain the thesis of historicity, but he never calls it in question: he merely destroys the biography. Mr. Lester, on the other hand, confidently rejects a hundred details as myth, claiming that he presents the gospels “relieved of the drapery of mythology and set free from all dogmatic fictions”;[15] and yet no less confidently affirms a hundred “undoubted” things, in a manner that almost outgoes M. Loisy.
If, faced by such procedures, the critical reader asks upon what grounds the historical personality is accepted, he gets from the able anonymous writer no answer, and from Mr. Lester, in effect, only the answer that the teachings which appeal to him in the gospels are self-certified as coming from the “Jesus” in whom he believes, while the others are dismissed by him as inconsistent with his conception. As a rule, the negative criticism is soundly reasoned; the constructive is purely arbitrary. Yet Mr. Lester is an amiable and—apart from his quaint animosity towards “the Semitic mind”[16]—a temperate critic, warmly concerned for historic truth and loyally opposed to all kinds of priestcraft, ancient and modern. What we must ask from such critics is that they should bring to bear on their biographical assumption the same critical method that they bring to bear on the multitude of details which strike them as obviously unhistorical. Rejecting miracles and self-contradictory narrative, they affirm a miraculous and self-contradictory Person. That conception too must be analysed.
The Jesus of the Gospels is at once a Messiah (with no definite mission as such), a Saviour God with whom the indefinite Messiah coalesces, and a Teaching God who coalesces with both. The biographical school, in the mass, posit a human Teacher, round whose teaching a Messianic conception combined with a doctrine of salvation by blood sacrifice has nucleated. If in this tissue there cannot be inserted the historical detail of the trial before Pilate, there is nothing left but the quasi-mythical detail of the crucifixion as an ostensible historical basis for the Messianic and other teaching, so much of which is alien to the early cult, so much of which is critically to be assigned to previous and contemporary Jewish sources, and so much to later Jesuist editors and compilers. Those laymen who are content to pick out of the gospels certain teachings, such as the Sermon on the Mount, and call these “Christianity,” have not realized how completely documentary analysis has disintegrated the teachings into pre-Jesuine Jewish and post-Jesuine Gentile matter. The latest professional analysis, as we have seen, leaves no Jesuine “Teaching” save an eschatology, a doctrine of “last things,” coming from a visionary Messiah with no political or social message.[17] The bulk of the biographical school, on the other hand, cling diversely to “something” in the Teaching which shall be somehow commensurate with the “impression” made by the life and death of the Teacher, which, from Renan onwards, they regard as the real genesis of the myth of the Resurrection and the consequent cult.
Having shown, then, the cogent critical reasons for dismissing the entire record of the triple episode of the Supper, the Agony, and the Trials, as unhistorical,[18] it concerns us to show (1) that the whole is intelligible only as myth, and (2) how the myth probably arose. The sequence culminates in the Crucifixion, which, with the Sacrament, is for the rational hierologist as for the orthodox theologian the centre of Christianity. Equally the biographical school are committed to maintaining the historicity of the event, without which they cannot explain the rise of the cult. If then the myth-theory is to stand, it must show that the central narrative belongs to the realm of myth.
§ 2. The Sacrificial Rite
In the Christian record, the Crucifixion is essentially a sacrifice. “The essence of the Sacrament is not merely partaking of a common cup or a common meal, but feasting upon a sacrifice ... and this was found everywhere among Jews and Gentiles.”[19] Thus the term “Eucharist,” which means “thanksgiving” or “thank-offering,” applied in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles to the kind of sacrament there indicated, and thence taken by Justin and other Fathers, is clearly a misnomer for the thing specified in the gospels. Of the gospel sacrifice, the sacrament is the liturgical and symbolic application.[20] Or, otherwise, the crucifixion is the fulfilment of the theory of the sacrament. On the view of the historicity of the former, or of both, it would be necessary to show why the procedure set forth in the gospels so closely simulated a human sacrifice; and this is incidentally attempted in passing by M. Loisy. The scene of derision by the soldiers, he says, “was perhaps connected with some pagan festival usage.”[21] But this at once admits the entrance of the myth-theory, which affirms that an immemorial “festival” usage is indicated. If Jesus was executed to please the Jewish multitude, as is the view even of the most destructive of the later German exegetes[22]—why should the execution take a pagan form? M. Loisy, who had previously accepted as history the narrative of the Entry into Jerusalem, with the public acclamation of Jesus as “the Son of David,” is unprepared to believe with the German critic that within a week the multitude cried “Crucify him!”; and he therefore wholly eliminates that item from his biographical sketch. He implies, however, that the doom of Jesus was passed by Pilate to please the priests, which is equally fatal to the thesis of a pagan festival usage. He accepts, further, the scene of the Mocking, with no ostensible critical reason, but presumably in order to establish a history which would explain the subsequent growth of the cult. In this process the salient episode of Barabbas is dismissed by him as unhistorical.[23]
Thus the most distinguished critic of the biographical school has no account to give of a second salient item in the record which, being entirely non-supernatural, must be held to have been inserted for some strong reason. It in fact closely involves the whole myth-theory. Barabbas was in all probability a regular figure in Semitic popular religion; and the name connects documentarily with that of Jesus. The reading “Jesus Barabbas,” in [Mt. xxvii, 16], as we have noted,[24] was long the accepted one in the ancient Church; and its entrance and its disappearance are alike significant. It is obviously probable that such a name as “Jesus the Son of the Father” (= Bar-Abbas[25]), applied to a murderer, would give an amount of offence to early Christian readers which would naturally lead in time to its elimination from the current text.[26] But on that view there is no explanation of its entrance. Such a stumbling-block could not have been set up without a compulsive reason.
The anthropological and hierological data go to show that an annual sacrifice of a “Son of the Father” was a long-standing feature in the Semitic world. A story in Philo Judæus about a mummery in Alexandria in ridicule of the Jewish King Agrippa, the grandson of Herod, points pretty clearly to a local Jewish survival from that usage. A lunatic named Karabas is said to have been paraded as a mock-king, with mock-crown, sceptre and robe.[27] In all likelihood the K is a mistranscription for B. In any case, “the custom of sacrificing the son for the father was common, if not universal, among Semitic peoples,”[28] as among others; and the Passover[29] was originally a sacrifice of firstlings, human and animal,[30] the former being probably most prevalent in times of disaster. “Devotion” was the principle: surrogate sacrifices would normally be substituted. Sacrifice of a king’s son, in particular, was held to be of overwhelming efficacy by early Hebrews and other Semites, as among other races in the savage and barbaric stages.[31]
There is nothing peculiar to the Semites either in the general or in the particular usage, both being once nearly universal; but it is with the Semites that we are here specially concerned. The story of Abraham and Isaac, to say nothing of that of Jephthah’s daughter, is a finger-post in the evolution of religion, being inferribly a humane myth to promote the substitution of animal for human sacrifice. And the Phœnician myth of “Ieoud,” the “only-begotten” son of King Kronos, “whom the Phœnicians call Israel,” sacrificed by his father at a time of national danger, after being dressed in the trappings of royalty,[32] points towards the historic roots of Christianity. Again and again we meet the conception of the “only-begotten” “Son of the Father”—Father Abraham, Father Kronos, Father Israel, the Father-King—as a special sacrifice in Hebrew and other Semitic history. Kronos is a Semitic God; and in connection with the Roman Saturnalia we have the record of a Greek oracle commanding to “send a man to the Father”—that is, to Kronos.[33]
What is certain is that sacrifices of kings, which were at one stage of social evolution normal,[34] inevitably tended to take other tribal or communal forms; and a multitude of rites preserved plain marks of the regal origin. Kings would inevitably pass off their original tragic burden; the community, bent on the safeguard of sacrifice, shifted it in turn.[35] Sacrifice of some kind, it was felt, there must be, to avert divine wrath:[36] that conviction lies at the base of the Christian as of the Jewish religion: it is fundamental to all primitive religion; and it is happily beyond our power to realize save symbolically the immeasurable human slaughter that the religious conviction has involved.
Primarily, voluntary victims were desired; and in Roman and Japanese history there are special or general records of their being forthcoming, annually or in times of emergency.[37] Even in the case of animal sacrifice, the Romans had a trick of putting barley in the victim’s ear to make him bow his head as if in submission.[38] But as regards human sacrifices, which were felt to be specially efficacious, the progression was inevitable from willing to compelled victims; and out of the multitude of the forms of human sacrifice, for which war captives and slaves at some stages supplied a large proportion of the victims, we single that of the evolution from the voluntary scape-goat or the sacrificed king or messenger, through the victim “bought with a price,” to the released criminal or other desperate or resigned person bribed with a period of licence and abundance to die for the community at the end of it.
In many if not in most of these cases, deification of the victim was involved in the theory, the victim being customarily identified with the God.[39] It was so in certain special sacrifices in pre-Christian Mexico.[40] It was so in the human sacrifices of the Khonds of Orissa, which subsisted till about the middle of last century.[41] In the latter instance, of which we have precise record, the annual victims were taken from families devoted by purchase to the function, or were bought as children and brought up for the purpose. They were “bought with a price.” When definitely allotted, the males were permitted absolute sexual liberty, being regarded as already virtually deified. The victim was finally slain “for the sins of the world,” and was liturgically declared a God in the process.
Such rites gradually dwindled in progressive communities from ritual murders into ritual mysteries or masquerades; even as human sacrifices in general, in most parts of the world, dwindled from bodies to parts of bodies, fingers, hair, foreskins; from human to animal victims;[42] from larger to smaller animals; from these to fowls; from real animals to baked or clay models, fruits, grains, sheafs of rushes, figures, paper or other symbols. It seems usually to have been humane kings or chiefs who imposed the improvement on priesthoods. And as with the victim, so with the sacramental meal which accompanied so many sacrifices. Cannibal sacraments were once, probably, universal: they have survived down till recent times in certain regions; but with advance in civilization they early and inevitably tend to become merely symbolic. In Mexico at the advent of Cortes, both the cannibal and the symbolic forms subsisted—the former under conventional limitations; the latter in the practice of eating a baked image which had been raised on a cross and there pierced, for sanctification.[43] This “Eating of the God” was very definitely a sacrament; but so were the cannibalistic sacraments which preceded it.
Surveying the general evolution, we reach the inference that somewhere in Asia Minor there subsisted before “our era” a cult or cults in which a “Son of the Father” was annually sacrificed under one or other of the categories of human sacrifice—Scapegoat, representative Firstling, Vegetation God, or Messenger; possibly in some cases under all four aspects in one. The usage may or may not have subsisted in post-exilic Jerusalem: quite possibly it did, for not only do the Sacred Books avow constant popular and legal resort to “heathen” practices of human sacrifice,[44] but Jewish religious lore preserves in a variety of forms clear evidence of institutions of human sacrifice which are not recognized in the Sacred Books.[45] In any case, in connection with the particular cult or rite in question there subsisted also a Eucharist or Sacrament or Holy Supper, analogous to the sacraments of the cults of Mithra, Dionysos, Attis, and many other Gods.[46] At a remote period it had been strictly cannibalistic: in course of time, it became symbolical. In other words, originally the sacrificed victim was sacramentally eaten; in course of time the thing eaten was something else, with at most a ritual formula of “body and blood.” At a certain stage, whether by regal or other compulsion or by choice of the devotees, the annual rite of sacrifice became a mere ritual or Mystery Drama—as in other cases it became a public masquerade. The former evolution underlay the religions of Dionysos, Osiris, Adonis, and Attis: the latter may or may not have gone on alongside of the former.
What does emerge from the gospel narrative concerning Barabbas and Jesus is, not that such an episode happened: here the myth-theory is at one with M. Loisy, who in effect pronounces the narrative to be myth: but that in the first age of Christianity the name “Jesus Barabbas” was well known, and stood for something well known. It was certainly known to the Jews, for we have Talmudical mention, dating from a period just after the fall of the Temple, that there was a Jewish ritual “Week of the Son, or, as some call it, Jesus the Son,” in connection with the circumcision and redemption of the first-born child.[47] From the inference of the currency of the name there is no escape: attached to a robber and murderer it could never have got into the gospels otherwise. And the myth-theory can supply the explanation which neither the orthodox nor the biographical theory can yield. We have outside evidence that a sacrifice of a “Son of the Father” was customary in parts of the Semitic world. What the gospel story proves is that it was known to have been a practice, either at Jerusalem or elsewhere, to release a prisoner to the multitude in connection with a popular festival, which might or might not have been the Passover. The release may have been for the purpose either of a religious masquerade or of a sacrifice. Either way, the religious rite involved was a rite of “Jesus Barabbas”—Jesus the Son of the Father—and it involved either a real or a mock sacrifice, in which the “Son” figured as a mock king, with robe and crown.
The more the problem is considered, then, the more clear becomes the solution. As soon as the Jesuist cult reached the stage of propaganda in which it described its Son-God as having died, in circumstances of ignominy, as an atoning sacrifice, it would be met by the memory of the actual Barabbas rite. Given that the Barabbas victim was ritually scourged and “crucified” (a term which has yet to be investigated), it follows that wherever the early propaganda[48] went in areas in which the memory of the rite subsisted, the Christists would be told that their Jesus the Son was simply the Jesus Barabbas of that popular rite; and the only possible—or at least the best—way to override the impeachment was to insert a narrative which reduced the regular ritual Jesus Barabbas to a single person, a criminal whom the wicked Jewish multitude had chosen to save instead of the sinless Jesus of the cult. In the circumstances given it was an absolutely necessary invention; and no other circumstances could conceivably have made it necessary. The story, by the unwilling admission of M. Loisy, who conserves whatever he thinks he critically can of the record, is a myth; and it is a myth which on the biographical theory cannot be explained. The myth-theory has explained it. As for the disappearance of the “Jesus” from the name of Barabbas in the records, it hardly needs explanation. When the memory of the old annual rite died away from general knowledge, the elision of the “Jesus” would be desirable alike for the learned who still knew and the unlearned who did not.[49]
§ 3. Contingent Elements
It is needless for the defender of the biographical theory to interject a protest that the Barabbas story is only one item in the case. The other items will all be dealt with in turn: that has been put in the front because of its crucial significance. Incidentally it may be further noted that the myth-theory explains the plainly unhistorical item of “the thirty pieces of silver,” confusedly explained from “the prophet Jeremy” as “the price of him that was priced, whom [certain] of the children of Israel did price” ([Mt. xxvii, 9]). The reference is really to Zechariah ([xi, 12, 13]).
The story of the Betrayal is fiction on the very face of the narrative, Judas being employed to point out a personage of declared notoriety, about whose movements there had been no secrecy.[50] Judas is demonstrably a somewhat late figure in the gospel legend, coming from the later Mystery Drama, not from the rite on which it was built. But, whatever may be the solution of the cryptogram about the potter’s field and the thirty pieces of silver in Zechariah, or the historic fact about Aceldama, one thing is clear: “the price of him that was priced,” in Matthew, tells of the usage of paying a price for sacrificial victims.
It does not follow that a price was regularly paid in the case of the Jesus Barabbas rite, though the record actually insists on the item by way of the Judas story: what is clear is that a memory of bought victims subsisted after the fall of Jerusalem. It is not unlikely that “Aceldama” was a field where sacrificial victims were either slain or buried, or both. A passage in the Kalika Purana suggests the procedure, and the probable significance of Golgotha, the “place of skulls.” In the Hindu rite, the human victim was immolated “at a cemetery or holy place,” upon which the sacrificer was not to look; and the head was presented in “the place of skulls, sacred to Bhoiruvu” (God of Fear). This could be in a special temple, or in a part of the cemetery, “or on a mountain.”[51]
At this point a warning must be given against the confusion set up by the habitual assumption that “something of the kind” occurred under Pontius Pilate. It is only on the biographical theory that that date is valid. Pontius Pilate is simply a figure in the later Mystery Drama, originally chosen, probably, because of his notoriety as a shedder of Jewish blood.[52] We are not bound to prove that at his date the usage of ritual human sacrifice, real or pretended, survived at Jerusalem, though it may have done, as it survived at Rhodes in the time of Porphyry in the form, perhaps, of a Semitic mystery drama.[53]
It is the assumption of the historicity of the Crucifixion that partly disarms the theorem of Sir J. G. Frazer as to a coincidence of Jewish sacrificial rites.[54] Noting that the details of the Crucifixion closely conform to those of a human sacrifice sometimes practised in the Christian era in connection with the Roman Saturnalia, and also to those of a real or mock rite connected with the Babylonian feast of the Sacæa, he resorts to the alternative hypotheses (a) that the analogous Jewish feast of Purim, imported from Babylon after the Return, and also involving either a real or a mock crucifixion, chanced to coincide with the actual crucifixion of the gospel Jesus; or that (b) Christian tradition “shifted the date of the crucifixion by a month or so” to connect it with the Passover. As the official Purim rite, though cognate with that of the Passover, cannot well have been allowed to coincide with it, the theory of coincidence is barred; and the theorist is assured by an expert colleague that “all that we hear of the Passion is only explicable by the Passover festival,” and that “without the background of the festival all that we know of the Crucifixion and of what led up to it is totally unintelligible.”[55]
When, however, the unhistorical character of the gospel narrative is realized, such difficulties disappear. The intention was certainly to connect the Crucifixion with the Passover (in which the paschal lamb—symbolizing Isaac—was customarily dressed in the form of a cross[56]); and in the fourth gospel Jesus becomes an actual Passover sacrifice. But the narrative is simply a reduction to historic form of the procedure of a customary ritual sacrifice, habitual usages of human sacrifice being represented as expedients of a single Roman execution. With the exact seasonal date of the Jesus Barabbas rite which here motived the gospel legend, the myth-theory is not primarily concerned, though it has secondary interest. It was probably a Spring Festival, and at the same time a New Year Festival, the period of the vernal equinox having been both in east and west the time of the New Year before that was placed after the winter solstice. It is thus highly likely that there were analogous sacrificial festivals at Yule and at Easter, one celebrating the new-birth of the sun and the other the revival of vegetation. The Sacæa festival may or may not have been identical with that known from the monuments to have been called the Zakmuk[57] (New Year): either way, the features may have been the same. There was in Judea, further, a hieratic year as well as a civil, a Lesser Passover as well as the greater.[58] The myth-theory does not depend on an agreed date, though the myth fixes on an astronomical date, itself constantly varying in the calendar.
What leaps to the eyes is that the gospel legend preserves two separated features of the festival of a Sacrificed Mock-King, which as incidents in the life of the Teacher are wholly incompatible, and which the biographical theory cannot reasonably explain—the acclaimed and welcomed Entry into Jerusalem and within a week the demand of the city multitude for the crucifixion. The Entry is an elaboration of several myth elements, but it contains the item of the acclaimed ride of the quasi-king, mounted on an ass (or two asses). If the biographical school would but consider historical probabilities, they would realize that the story as told cannot be historical, with or without the strange antithesis of the multitude’s speedy demand for the prophet’s death. Such a triumphal entry, for such a person as the gospel Jesus, could not spontaneously have taken place: it must have been planned; and, if arranged with such an effect as the record describes, it would have given Pilate very sufficient ground for intervention without waiting for a complaint from the priests. Taken as history, it is wholly irreconcilable with the “Crucify him” ascribed to a multitude whose support of Jesus had been affirmed the day before; and accordingly M. Loisy, accepting the Entry, rejects the latter episode. Strauss, hesitating to go, “as has latterly often been done,” the length of rejecting the Entry on the ass as wholly mythical, finds it very much so;[59] and Brandt incidentally dismisses it as “under the strongest suspicion of being framed upon Old Testament motives from beginning to end.”[60]
Thus the biographical school itself proffers a myth-theory, without indicating an explanatory motive for the positing of a contradiction. But when we realize that an acclamation of a quasi-king riding on an ass was actually part of the ritual in a sacrificial rite in which he was to be crucified, the two clashing elements in the legend are at once explained in the full myth-theory. Their separate handling and development was, just as intelligibly, part of the process of gospel-making, the creation of an ideal Jesus. But seeing that in the Sacæa festival the mock-king had a five days’ reign between his start and his death,[61] the original ritual gave the interval which in the gospel story is filled with the acts of the Teaching God. Five days is the accepted traditional interval from Palm Sunday to Crucifixion Day.
[Even for the item of the two asses in Matthew there is a myth-explanation. Many writers of the biographical school, who compensate themselves for their difficulties by ascribing a peculiarly crass stupidity to the apostles and evangelists at every opportunity, decide that the narrator or interpolator posited the two asses, an ass and its colt, because he found in Zechariah a Messianic prediction so phrased,[62] and did not understand that the Hebraic idiom simply meant “an ass.” Yet one member of the school, Dr. Conybeare, fiercely denounces myth-theorists for claiming to understand Jewish symbolism better than the Jews did. Either principle serves the turn. When Tertullian says that Jesus is the Divine Fish because fishes were parthenogenetically born, and Jesus was born again in the waters of the Jordan, Dr. Conybeare is sure of the wisdom of Tertullian. This thesis, first found in Tertullian, is to decide the question, to the exclusion of any reflection on the fact that the Sun at Easter had before the Christian era passed from the sign Aries to the sign Pisces in the zodiac. But when Matthew reads Zechariah’s two asses as meaning two asses, Matthew is to be dismissed as a Jew who did not understand the commonest Hebrew idiom.
The simple fact that the Septuagint does not give the duplication, putting only “a young colt,” will serve to indicate to any careful reader that the evangelist or interpolator was following the Hebrew, and therefore is to be presumed to have known something of Hebrew idiom. And the just critical inference is that both passages had regard to the zodiacal figure of the Two Asses for the sign Cancer, from which we have the myth of Bacchus riding on two asses.[63] Further, it is probable that the similar passage in the Song of Jacob[64] has also a zodiacal basis. These details, which Dr. Conybeare absolutely withholds from his readers, indicate the mythological induction put by the present writer. In an unconstruable sentence, Dr. Conybeare appears to argue[65] that to secure any consideration for such a thesis we must “prove that the earliest Christians, who were Jews, must have been familiar with the rare legend of Bacchus crossing a marsh on two asses,” and “with the rare representation of the zodiacal sign Cancer as an ass and its foal.”
How the critic knows that the legend was rare at the beginning of the Christian era he does not reveal; any more than he gives his justification for calling the Asses sign rare in the face of the statement of Lactantius that the Greeks call the sign of Cancer “(the) Asses.” This reference was given by me, as also the item that the sign of the Ass and Foal is Babylonian. It was thus very likely to be known in the Semitic world. Yet Dr. Conybeare obliviously informs us that “it is next to impossible” that it should be known to “the earliest Christians,” when all the while he is arguing that Matthew was not the gospel of “the earliest Christians.” It is in perfect keeping with this chaotic procedure that he first oracularly refers me to Hyginus, whose version of the myth of Bacchus and the asses I had actually cited and quoted; and then, discovering that I had done so, yet leaving his written exhortation unaltered, he announces that “by Mr. Robertson’s own admission, Bacchus never rode on two asses at all.” It is difficult to be sure whether Dr. Conybeare does or does not believe in the historicity of Bacchus, as he does in that of Jesus; but seeing that Lactantius, as cited by me, expressly declares that the two asses (= Cancer) carried Bacchus over the marsh, and that Dr. Conybeare had already recognized that such a myth existed, his absurd conclusion can be set down only to his habitual incoherence.
I have dealt in detail with his futile criticism at this point by way of putting the reader on his guard against the method of bluster. Comparative mythology is a difficult and thorny field, but it has to be explored; and Dr. Conybeare, whose study of the subject seems to have begun in the year of the issue of his book,[66] does not even discern the nature of its problems. He avowedly supposes that totems are Gods; and he argues that the Jewish and Hellenistic world in the age of Augustus was at the mythopœic stage of the Australian aborigines of to-day. Of the phenomena of iconographic myth he is evidently quite ignorant; and his dithyramb on the sun myth tells of nothing but obsolete debate on the question. And it is in this connection that he informs his antagonists, in his now celebrated academic manner, that they are “a back number.”
It has only to be added that as regards the documentary problem, in this connection, Dr. Conybeare is equally distracted. It is far from certain that at this point Mark’s “colt” is not a “rectification” of an original which Matthew accepted. The assumption—negatived by themselves—that Mark and Matthew as we have them are both primary forms, Matthew always following and elaborating Mark, is one of the loose hypotheses which such critics when it suits them take for certainties. But the question of priority of form does not affect the fundamental issue. One of the suggestions put by me which Dr. Conybeare has carefully withheld from his readers—if, indeed, he ever really sees what is before him—is that the item of the single ass or colt is probably a myth with another basis. “An ass tied” appears to have been an Egyptian symbol pointing to a solar date or a zodiacal or other myth,[67] and this symbol, which is found in the Song of Jacob, is the form put upon the Mark story by Justin Martyr. That the other symbol had a long Christian vogue is indicated first by the fact that there actually exists a Gnostic gem showing an ass suckling its foal, with the figure of the crab (Cancer) above, and the inscription D.N. IHV. XPS., DEI FILIUS = Dominus Noster Jesu (?) Christus, Son of God;[68] and, secondly, by the mention of the ass and foal in the third Sermon of St. Proclus (5th c.).[69] These details also Dr. Conybeare withholds from his readers, for the purposes of his polemic.
That we are dealing with a conflict of symbolisms will probably be the inference of those who will face the facts. But Dr. Conybeare, who is here in good company, is quite satisfied that behind the Mark story of Jesus riding in a noisy procession on an unbroken colt we have unquestionable history. There must be no nonsense about two asses; but for him the story of the unbroken colt raises no difficulty. He further simplifies the problem by summarizing Mark as telling that “an insignificant triumphal demonstration is organized for him [Jesus] as he enters the sacred city on an ass”;[70] and by explaining that “there was no other way of entering Jerusalem unless you went on foot.”[71] The “insignificant” is held to be sufficient to dispose of the problem of the Roman Governor’s entire indifference to a Messianic movement. Thus functions the biographic method, in the hands of our academician.
All the while, the item of the foal is, on his own interpretation, a specified fulfilment of a prophecy, only in this case the prophecy is in his opinion rightly understood, whereas in the two-ass story it was misunderstood. By his own method, the critic is committed to the position that the phrase “whereon no man ever yet sat” is myth.[72] For serious critics in general, this is sufficient to put in doubt the whole story. For our critic, a story of a triumphal procession, with an unbroken colt, is simply resolved into one of an “insignificant procession,” with an ordinary donkey. Thus, under the pretence of extracting history from a given document, the document is simply manipulated at will to suit a presupposition. On this plan, the twelve labours of Herakles are simply history exaggerated, and any one can make any Life of Herakles out of it at his pleasure. We must not say that Una rode on a lion, but we may infer that she rode on a small yellow pony. It is the method of the early German deistic rationalists, according to which the story of Jesus walking on the water is saved by the explanation that he was walking on the shore.]
Part of the demonstration of the myth-theory, again, lies in the fact that the first act of Jesus after his entry is to “cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrow the tables of the money-changers, and the seats of them that sold the doves.” That this should have been accomplished without resistance seemed to Origen so astonishing that he pronounced it among the greatest miracles of Jesus,[73] adding the skeptical comment—“if it really happened.” The myth-theory may here claim the support of Origen.
Strauss could find no ground for rejecting the story as myth upon his method of finding myth-motives only in the Old Testament. If he had lived in our day he would probably have agreed that the episode is singled out of the kinds of exploit which were permitted to the victim in the Sacæa and the Saturnalia and such primitive sacrificial festivals in general, and turned to a doctrinal account. Such liberties as are described, all falling short of sacrilege, are among those which could normally take place. It is by way of anti-Judaism that the episode is utilized in the synoptics.
In the fourth gospel, where so many matters are turned to new account, and so much new doctrine introduced, the purification is put with symbolic purpose at the outset of the Messiah’s career, in a visit to Jerusalem of which the synoptics know nothing; and in this myth Jesus makes “a scourge of small cords” to effect his purpose. That later item was probably suggested by the effigy of the Egyptian Saviour God Osiris, who bears a scourge as the God of retribution. In the synoptics there is no symbol: the story is simply employed as part of the superadded didactic machinery which alternately exhibits the full development of the Messiah and the unfitness of the “Jewish dispensation” to continue. Inferribly, the story of the fig-tree is in the same case, signifying the condemnation of the Jewish cult, though here there may be a concrete motive of which we have lost the clue. But it is significant that while the gospel record could not possibly assign to the holy Messiah such a general course as was followed by the licensed sacrificial victim, it follows the story of his Entry with that of one markedly disorderly act; whereafter he goes to lodge in Bethany ([Mt. xxi, 17]) at a house which later is indicated as that of a leper ([xxvi, 6]). There his head is anointed by a woman; who in Luke, in a differently placed episode ([vii, 37]), becomes “a sinner.” Is not this another echo from the obscure tragedy of the sacrificial victim, who was anointed for his doom?
§ 4. The Mock-King Ritual
Separately considered, the Crucifixion in the gospel story is as impossible as the Entry. The cross, we are told, was headed with an inscription: “This is the King of the Jews.” Sir J. G. Frazer[74] and M. Salomon Reinach[75] concur in recognizing that if the victim had really been executed on the charge of making such a claim, no Roman governor would have dared so to endorse it.[76] The argument is that only by turning the execution into a celebration of a popular rite could the procedure have been made officially acceptable. But to extract such an explanation from the record is simply to stultify it as such. If there really occurred such a manipulation of the death-scene of an adored Teacher, how could the narrators possibly fail to say as much? We are asked by the biographical school to believe that the Crucifixion was made a farce-tragedy by treating the Teacher as the victim in a well-known rite of human sacrifice, and also to believe that the devotees who preserved the record, knowing this fact, chose to say nothing about it, preferring to represent the procedure as a unique incident.
It might perhaps be argued, on the biographical view, that the Roman soldiers, who are held to have been Asiatics, chose to improvise a version of a sacrificial rite which was unknown to the Jesuists, and that the latter simply reported the episode without understanding it, interpreting it from their prophets in their own way. But if the record be historical it is incredible that in a cult which is claimed to have made many adherents throughout the Roman Empire in east and west in a generation or two, it should not quickly have become known that the procedure of the Crucifixion was a copy of popular eastern and western rites of human sacrifice. If there had taken place what the hypothesis suggests, there was a purposive suppression. That is to say, the credibility of the narrative is at this point vitally impeached by a supporter of the biographical theory, which expressly rests on the narrative as regards non-miraculous data.
And while on the one hand it is in effect charged with the gravest suppressio veri, on the other it is charged, equally in the name of the biographical view, with something more than suggestio falsi, with absolute fiction. M. Loisy does not merely dismiss the Barabbas story as unhistorical, offering no explanation of its strange presence: he comes critically to the conclusion that Jesus on the cross uttered no word, whether of despair, entreaty, or resignation. We need not ask what kind of credit M. Loisy can ask for a record which he thus so gravely discredits. The scientific question is, Upon what grounds can he demur to the extension of a myth-theory to which he thus contributes? If the record admittedly invented utterances for the Teacher on the cross, why should not the whole be an invention? In particular, why should not the trial before Pilate and the inscription on the cross be inventions?
The inscription on the cross, we see, is for the great anthropologist of the school impossible save as part of a simulated ritual. M. Loisy, supporting the same general thesis, declares that “to say Jesus was not condemned to death as king of the Jews, that is to say, as Messiah, on his own avowal, amounts to saying [autant vaut soutenir] that he never existed.”[77] It is even so; and the supporter of the myth-theory is thus doubly justified. The loyal induction is, not that in any rite of human sacrifice exactly such a label was affixed to the gibbet, but that probably some label was, and that the gospel framers (or one of them) “invented” a label which stated their claim for Jesus as Messiah. It was a fairly skilful thing to do, representing the label as a Roman mockery, and thereby making it an appeal to every Jew.[78] It is indeed conceivable that Roman soldiers taking part, once in a way, in the rite of Jesus Barabbas, may have turned that to a purpose of contempt by labelling the poor mock-king as the king of the Jews. But such an episode would not be the enactment of the scene described in the record. It would merely be a hint for it, the acceptance of which was but an additional item of fiction.
That the Crucifixion, as described, is a normal act of ritual human sacrifice, is even more true than it is shown to be by the parallels of the Sacæa and the Saturnalia. The scourging, the royal robe, the mock crown, were all parts of those rituals, which thus conform in parody to the ritual of the mythic sacrifice of Ieoud, son of Kronos, probably parodied in the ritual for the victim sacrificed to Kronos at Rhodes. But so are the drink of wine and myrrh, the leg-breaking, and the piercing with the spear. The crown is a feature of all ancient sacrifice, in all parts of the world. Crowns of flowers were normal in the case of human victims, in India, in Mexico, in Greece, and among the North-American Indians, as in ordinary animal sacrifice among the Greeks, Romans, and Semites. But even the crown of thorns had a special religious vogue in Egypt, procured as such crowns were from thorn-trees near Abydos whose branches curled into garland-form. Prometheus the Saviour, too, receives from Zeus a crown of osiers; and his worshippers wore crowns in his honour.[79] Either some such special motive or the common practice in the popular rite will account for the record.
And these items of the mock-king ritual exclude the argument which might possibly be brought from the fact that in the ancient world, as among primitives in general, all executions, as such, tend to assume the sacrificial form. The condemned criminal is “devoted,” sacer, taboo, even as is the simply sacrificed victim, becoming the appanage of the God as is the God’s representative who is sacrificed to the God.[80] It might therefore be argued that a man condemned on purely political grounds could be treated as a sacrificial victim. But there is no instance of the criminal executed as such being treated as the mock-king. A criminal might be turned to that account, but that would be by special arrangement: executed simply as a criminal, he would not be crowned and royally robed. These details were features of specific sacrifices: executions were only generically sacrificial, and were of course in no way honorary. In the gospel story, the two thieves are neither mocked, robed, nor crowned. They are not “Sons of the Father,” or deputies of the King.
§ 5. Doctrinal Additions
The question here arises, however, whether the triple execution was a customary rite. All executions being, as aforesaid, quasi-sacrificial, an ordinary execution might conceivably be combined with a specific sacrifice. It is to be observed that no mention of the triple execution occurs outside of the gospels: the Acts and the Epistles have no allusion to it. It is thus conceivably, as was hinted by Strauss, a late addition to the myth, motived by the verse now omitted as spurious from Mark ([xv, 28]), but preserved in Luke ([xxii, 37]): “And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, And he was reckoned with transgressors.” But we are bound to consider the possibility that the triple execution was ritually primordial.
The story of such an execution in the “Acts of Saint Hitzibouzit,” martyred at some time in Persia, is evidently doubtful evidence for the practice, as Sir J. G. Frazer observes. The record runs that the saint was “offered up as a sacrifice between two malefactors on a hill top opposite the sun and before all the multitude,”[81] suggesting that the sacrifice was a solar one. This is possible; but martyrology is dubious testimony. On the other hand Mr. W. R. Paton has suggested that the triple execution was a Persian practice, and was made to a triple God.[82] There is the notable support of the statement in a fragment of Ctesias (36) that the Egyptian usurper Inarus was crucified by Artaxerxes the First between two thieves. In addition to the cases of Greek sacrifices of three victims may be noted one among the Dravidians of Jeypore;[83] and the practice among the Khonds of placing the victim between two shrubs. In the Jeypore case one victim was sacrificed at the east, one at the west, and one at the centre of a village; and in another case two victims were sacrificed every third year. A triple execution might be a special event, in which two victims were both actually and ritually criminals, in order to enhance the divinity of the third. And we know that triple sacrifices did occur. The throwing of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into the fiery furnace was ostensibly a triple sacrifice: it will hardly be claimed as a historical episode in its subsisting form.
On a careful balance, however, the presumption seems rather against a triple rite. What is quite clear is that for the early Jesuists the “prophecy” in 53rd Isaiah possessed the highest importance. For us, that lyric chapter is still somewhat enigmatic. Gunkel, who is here followed by Professor Drews,[84] takes the view that the suffering figure described is really that of the typical victim of the human sacrifice; and it certainly fits that conception at points where it does not easily compose with that of the figure of oppressed Israel.[85] The victim was “wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities”; and conceptually “with his stripes we are healed.” On the other hand, who were “we” for “Isaiah” if not Israel itself? The only interpretation seems to be that the past generations had suffered for the present; and this does not yield an intellectually satisfying figure. But still more improbable, on the whole, is the suggestion that the Hebrew prophet or quasi-prophetic lyrist—whatever date we may assign to the chapter—has really perceived and figured the tragic vision of the sacrificial victim as he is here supposed to have done. It would be a psychological feat extremely remarkable even for that highly gifted writer;[86] and moreover it would finally compose still less with the general idea of the context than does the supposed presentment of the suffering People. It is difficult to reach any satisfying notion of Isaiah’s general meaning on the view of Gunkel and Drews.
We are thus far held, then, to the inference that, as Isaiah’s chapter was certainly taken by the early Christists[87] who had adopted the Messianic idea to be a prophecy of their Messiah, the Christ myth was shaped in accordance with it. There are three main strands in the Christ myth, the Jesuist, the Christist or Messianic, and that of the Teaching God. The “suffering” motive serves to bind the three together; and the concrete item, “he was numbered with the transgressors,” bracketed as it is with “he poured out his soul unto death,” gives a very definite ground for the item of the forced companionship of the malefactors in the Crucifixion scene. It is, in short, apparently one of the specifically Judaic motives in the myth construction. Earlier in the narrative the Messiah is frequently grouped with “publicans and sinners”: he comes “eating and drinking,” in contrast with the ascetic figure of the Baptist. That feature is probably part of the atmosphere of the myth-motive of the sacrificial victim, with the leper-host and the anointing by the “sinner.” But the “two thieves” are inferribly supplied from another side.
In the first two gospels, the character of the unnamed anointress is tacitly suggested by the very reticence of the description, “a woman.” In Jewry and in the East generally, the woman who went freely into men’s houses was declassed; and the “sinner” of Luke was only a specification of the already hinted. But the story in Luke of the homage of the good thief is clearly new myth, coming of the widened ethic of the “gospel of the Gentiles.” Matthew and Mark have no thought of anything but the association of the Messiah with typical transgressors in death: for them the two thieves are hostile. The “Gentile” gospel improves the occasion by converting one of the transgressors. No critical inquirer, presumably, now fails to see doctrinal myth at the second stage. It is only the atmosphere of presupposition that can keep it imperceptible in the first. In the making of the gospels, ritual myth, doctrinal myth, and traditional myth are co-factors; and it may be that even where doctrinal myth is quite clearly at work, as in the staging of the Messianic death “with transgressors,” an actual ritual is also commemorated.
§ 6. Minor Ritual and Myth Elements
In the later myth the robbers, as it happens, are made to embody certain features of sacrificial ritual. We are told in the fourth gospel that the Jews “asked of Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away,”—“that the bodies should not remain on the cross upon the sabbath, for the day of that sabbath was a high day.” Accordingly the soldiers break the legs of the two thieves, “but when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs.” The implication is that the men’s legs were to be broken by way of killing them—a patently untrue suggestion.[88] The spear-thrust which “howbeit” was given to Jesus would have been the way of killing the others if they were alive: breaking the legs was a brutality which would not ensure death.
The explanation is that both leg-breaking and spearing were features of sacrificial rites. It may have been by way of purposive contrast to the former procedure that in the priestly ritual[89] of the passover it is enacted that no bone of the (unspecified) victim shall be broken. The breaking of the leg-bones in human sacrifice was one of the horrible expedients of the primitive world for securing the apparent willingness of the victim: it is to be found alike in Dravidian and in African sacrifice.[90] An alternative method, which tended to supersede the other, was that of drugging or intoxication, of which we find still more widespread evidence. In ancient Jerusalem, we find the practice transferred to ordinary execution on the cross, the humane women making a practice of giving a narcotic potion of wine and incense to the victim.[91] Thus associated with the deaths of ordinary criminals, it suggested to some of the Jesuist myth-makers a ground for specializing the record.
In the first two gospels, a drink is offered to Jesus on the cross—wine[92] mingled with gall, in Matthew; wine mingled with myrrh in Mark—“but he received it not”; this, in Matthew, after tasting. The Marcan form is probably the first, as it describes the customary narcotic: the idea is to indicate that in the case of the divine victim no artifice was needed to secure an apparent acquiescence: he was a voluntary sufferer. “Gall,” in Matthew, may have reference to pagan mysteries in which a drink of gall figured.[93] In Luke, vinegar is ostensibly offered as part of the derision. In John, no drink is mentioned till the end, when the dying victim says, “I thirst.” Having partaken of “a sponge full of the vinegar upon hyssop,” he says, “It is finished,” and dies. In Matthew, this act of compassion takes a simpler form, the sponge of vinegar being given on the utterance of the despairing cry, while other bystanders jeer: in Mark, the giver of the sponge also jeers.
It is needless to debate long over the priorities of such details: as regards the drink of vinegar, all alike have regard to [Psalm lxix, 21]: “They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” For that reason, the wine-and-myrrh item is probably primordial: it tells of the sacrificial rite; and the drink of vinegar is a doctrinal addition; even as the rejection of the narcotic is doctrinal. For the variations which distinguish each narrative from the others, there is no reasonable explanation on the biographical view: if devoted onlookers could not preserve the truth at such a point, where could they be trusted? The mythical interpretation alone makes all intelligible.
The fourth gospel, with its tale of the leg-breaking, supplies the strongest ground for surmising the occasional occurrence of a triple rite, in which the lesser victims were treated as sacrificed slaves normally have been in African and other human sacrifice, while the central victim was put on another footing. The express enactment in regard to the mysterious paschal sacrifice suggests that bone-breaking took place in others. In all likelihood, the original paschal sacrifice was that of a human victim of specially high grade: the substitution of the lamb was part of the process of civilization indicated in the myth of Abraham and Isaac. And if the knowledge of the death-rite of Jesus Barabbas could subsist in the first century or later, knowledge of an early triple rite could subsist also. But this remains open to doubt, though at several points the fourth gospel specially emphasizes the historical derivation of the cult from a sacrament of blood sacrifice.
Nowhere else is the literal basis of the symbol of “body and blood” so insisted upon. Its writers had present to their minds an actual ritual in which the eating of the body of a Sacrificed God, first actually, then symbolically, was of cardinal importance. The later myth puts new stress on the conception, as if it had been felt that the earlier was not sufficiently explicit; and it makes the Jewish high-priest lay down the doctrine of human sacrifice from the Judaic side.[94] It is in this atmosphere of sacrificial ideas that we get the item of the piercing of the divine victim with a spear. The detail is turned specially to the account of the Johannine doctrine of resurrection by putting what passed in popular physiology for a certain proof of death—the issuing of “blood and water.”[95] But here again we find both a Hebrew motive[96] and a pagan motive for the detail. In the sacrifice of the sacred slave of the Moon-Goddess among the primitive Albanians, the victim was allowed the customary year of luxury and licence, and was finally anointed and slain by being pierced to the heart with a sacred lance through the side. And there are other eastern analogues.[97]
It is the fourth gospel, finally, that introduces the “garment without seam,” combining a Hebraic with a pagan motive. In order to fulfil a “prophecy” held to be Messianic,[98] the synoptics make the soldiers cast lots for the garments of Jesus. The fourth gospel specifies a simple allotment of the garments in general, as if they could have been numerous enough to go round the soldiery, but limits the act of “casting lots” to the chiton, the under garment. Thus the soldiers both “divide the raiment” and cast lots for the “vesture.” The making of this “without seam” is at once an assimilation of Jesus to the high-priest and an assimilation of the Slain God to the Sun-God and other deities.[99] A special chiton was woven for Apollo in Sparta; as a peplos or shawl was woven for Hêrê at Elis. And this in turn had for the pre-Christian pagans mystic meanings as symbolizing the indivisible solar robe of universal light, ascribed to Osiris; the partless robe of Ahura Mazda; Pan’s coat of many colours, and yet other notions. Always the story is itemized in terms of myth, of ritual, of symbol, of doctrine, never in terms of real biography.
§ 7. The Cross
It is not at all certain, and it is not probable, that in the earlier stages of the myth the cross as such was prominent. Early crucifixion was not always a nailing of outstretched hands in the cross form, but often a hanging of the victim by the arms, tied together at the wrists, with or without a support to the body at the thighs.[100] The stauros was not necessarily a cross: it might be a simple pile or stake. In the Book of Acts ([v, 30]) Peter and the Apostles are made to speak of Jesus “whom ye slew, hanging him on a tree.” This was in itself a common sacrificial mode; and all sacrificial traditions are more or less represented in the New Testament compilation.
But there was an irresistible compulsion to a divinizing of the cross as of the victim. Ages before the Christian era the symbol had been mystic and sacrosanct for Semites, for Egyptians, for Greeks, for Hindus; and the Sacred Tree of the cults of Attis, Dionysos, and Osiris lent itself alike to many symbolic significances.[101] The cross had reference to the equinox, when the sacred tree was cut down; to the victim bound to it; to the four points of the compass; to the zodiacal sign Aries, thus connected with the sacrificial lamb;[102] and to the universe as symbolized in the “orb” of the emperor, with the cross-lines drawn on it. The final Christian significance of the cross is a composite of ideas associated with it everywhere, from Mexico to the Gold Coast, in both of which regions it was or is a symbol of the Rain-God.[103] The Dravidian victim, the deified sacrifice, was as-it-were crucified;[104] as was a victim in a Batak sacrifice, where, as on the Gold Coast, the St. Andrew’s-cross form is enacted.[105] The commonness of some such procedure in African sacrificial practice points to its general antiquity.
It would appear, too, that in the mysteries of the Saviour Gods not only a crucified aspect of the God but a simulation of that on the part of the devotees was customary. Osiris was actually represented in crucifix form;[106] and in the ritual the worshipper became “one with Osiris,” apparently by being “joined unto the sycamore tree.”[107] When, then, in the Epistle to the Galatians[108] we find “Paul” addressing the converts as “those before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly set forth (προεγράφη) crucified,” and declaring of himself:[109] “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus,” we are at once pointed to the Syrian practice of stigmata, which appears to connect with both Osirian and Christian usage. In his remarkable account of the life of the sacred city of Hierapolis—a microcosm of eastern paganism—Lucian, after telling how children are sacrificed with the votive pretence that they are oxen, records that it is the universal practice to make punctures in the neck or in the hands, and that “all” Syrians bear such stigmata.[110] One of the principal cults of the place was that of Attis, the castrated God of Vegetation, in whose mysteries the image of a youth was bound to a tree,[111] with a ritual of suffering, mourning, resurrection and rejoicing. As Dionysos was also “he of the tree,” it is not improbable that he, who also died to rise again, may have been similarly adored. On the other hand, the representation of the Saviour Prometheus suffering in a crucified posture tells of an immemorial concept.[112]
For the Jews, finally, the cross symbol was already mystically potent, being a mark of salvation in connection with the massacre-sacrifice of the Passover, and by consequence salvatory in times of similar danger.[113] When with this was combined the mystic significance of the sign in Platonic lore as pointing to the Logos,[114] the mythic foundation for Christism was of the broadest. The crucifix is late in Christian art; but the wayside cross is as old as the cult of Hermes, God of boundaries.[115]
§ 8. The Suffering Messiah
By way of accounting for the Jewish refusal to see in Jesus the promised Messiah, orthodox exegesis has spread widely the belief that it was no part of the Messianic idea that the Anointed One should die an ignominious death; and some of us began by accepting that account of the case. Clearly it was not the traditional or generally prevailing Jewish expectation. Yet in the Acts we find Peter and Paul alike ([iii, 18]; [xvii, 3]; [xxvi, 23]) made to affirm that the prophets in general predicted that Christ should suffer; and in Luke ([xxiv, 26–27], [44–46]) the same assertion is put in the mouth of Jesus. Either then the exegetes regard these assertions as unfounded or they admit that one school of interpretation in Jewry found a number of “prophetical” passages which foretold the Messiah’s exemplary death. And the A. V. margin refers us to [Ps. xxii]; [Isa. l, 6]; [liii, 5], etc.; [Dan. ix, 26].
Now, these are adequate though not numerous documentary grounds for the doctrine, on Jewish principles of interpretation. Jewish, indeed, the Messianic idea is not in origin: it is Perso-Babylonian;[116] and the idea of a suffering or re-arising Messiah may well have come in from that side. But equally that may have found some Jewish acceptance. We can see very well that in Daniel “the Anointed One”—that is, “the Messiah” and “the Christ”—refers to the Maccabean hero; but that as well as the other passages, on Jewish principles, could apply to the Messiah of any period; and the Septuagint reading of [Psalm xxii, 16]: “They pierced my hands and my feet,” was a specification of crucifixion. It is not impossible that that reading was the result of the actual crucifixion of Cyrus, who had been specified as a “Christ” in Isaiah. We have nothing to do here with rational interpretation: the whole conception of prophecy is irrational; but the construing of old texts as prophecies was a Jewish specialty.
When then a theistic rationalist of the last generation wrote of the gospel Jesus:—
His being a carpenter, occupying the field of barbaric Galilee, and suffering death as a culprit, are not features which the constructor of an imaginary tale would go out of his way to introduce wherewith to associate his hero, and therefore, probably, we have here real facts presented to us,[117]
he was far astray. Anything might be predicated of a Jewish Messiah. Not only had the Messianic Cyrus been crucified: the anointed and triumphant Judas Maccabæus, under whose auspices the Messianic belief had revived in Israel in the second century B.C., had finally fallen in battle; and his brother Simon, who was actually regarded as the Messiah, was murdered by his son-in-law.[118]
It is not here argued that the Messianic idea had been originally connected with the Jesus cult; on the contrary that cult is presented as a non-national one, surviving in parts of Palestine in connection with belief in an ancient deity and the practice of an ancient rite, in a different religious atmosphere from that of Messianism. The solution to which we shall find ourselves led is that at a certain stage the Messianic idea was grafted on the cultus; and this stage is likely to have begun after the fall of Jerusalem, when for most Jews the hope of a Maccabean recovery was buried. Then it was that the idea of a Messiah “from above,”[119] supernaturally empowered to make an end of the earthly scene, became the only plausible one; and here the conception of a Slain God who, like all slain Gods, rose again, invited the development. Jesuists could now make a new appeal to Jews in general upon recognizably Jewish lines. They were of course resisted, even as Sadducees were resisted by Pharisees, and vice versa. The statement in the Messiah article in the Encyclopædia Biblica that it is highly improbable that “the Jews” at the time of Christ believed in a suffering and atoning Messiah is nugatory. No one ever put such a proposition. But “the Jews” had in course of time added much to their creed, and might have added this, were it not that the Jesus cult became identified with Gentile and anti-Judaic propaganda.
In any case the idea arose among Jews, and quite intelligibly. The picture drawn by Isaiah was a standing incitement to the rise of a cult whose Hero-God had been slain. It was the one kind of Messianic cult which the Romans would leave unmolested. At the same time it committed the devotees to the position that the Messiah must come again, “in the clouds, in great glory”; and the Christian Church was actually established on that conception, which sufficed to sustain it till the earthly Providence of the State came to the rescue. Some of its modern adherents have not hesitated to boast that the common expectation of the speedy end of the world gave the infant Church a footing not otherwise obtainable. It was certainly a conditio sine qua non for Christianity in its infancy.
As for the item of “the carpenter,” we have seen[120] not only that that is mythic, but that the myth-theory alone can account for it.
§ 9. The Rock Tomb
In the first gospel ([xxvii, 57] sq.) we have a comparatively simple version of the story of Joseph of Arimathea, a rich disciple of Jesus, who gets the dead body of the crucified, wraps it in clean linen, and lays it “in his own new tomb, which he had hewed out in the rock.” In Mark and Luke we have visibly elaborated accounts, in which, however, while the rock tomb is specified, it is not described as Joseph’s “own,” though it is represented as hitherto unused. Such a narrative points very directly to the Mithraic rite in which the stone image of the dead God, after being ritually mourned over, is laid in a tomb, which, Mithra being “the God out of the rock,” would naturally be of stone—a simple matter in a cult whose chief rites were always enacted in a cave.[121] Details thus thrown into special prominence, while in themselves historically insignificant, can be understood only as mythically motived. So noticeable is the Mithraic parallel that the Christian Father who angrily records it exclaims, Habet ergo diabolus Christos suos—“the devil thus has his Christs.” In Mithraism the rock tomb, which is an item in a ritual of death and resurrection, is mythically motived throughout: in the gospel story, historically considered, the item is meaningless.
Obvious as is the mythological inference, it is met by the assertion that round Jerusalem “soil was so scarce that every one was buried in a rock tomb.”[122] Such a criticism at once defeats itself. If every one was buried in a rock tomb, what was the point of the emphasised detail in the gospels, which are so devoid of details of a really biographical character? Obviously, rock tombs were the specialty of the rich; and Joseph of Arimathea is described in all the synoptics as a man of social standing. Is the motive of the story nothing better than the desire to record that Jesus was richly buried?
“Scores of such tombs remain,” cries the critic: “were they all Mithraic?” The argument thus evaded is that there was no real tomb. If there was one thing which the early Jesuists, on the biographical theory, might be supposed to keep hold of, it was the place of their Lord’s sepulchre; yet nothing subsists but an admittedly false tradition. At Jerusalem, as one has put it, there are shown “two Zions, two Temple areas, two Bethanys, two Gethsemanes, two or more Calvarys, three Holy Sepulchres, several Bethesdas.”[123] It is all myth. “There is not a single existing site in the Holy City that is mentioned in connection with Christian history before the year 326 A.D., when Constantine’s mother adored the two footprints of Christ on Olivet.”[124] She was shown nothing else.[125] “The position of the traditional sites of Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre, in the middle of the north quarter of Jerusalem, seems to have given rise to suspicions very early.”[126] It well might. I have known a modern traveller who, on seeing the juxtaposed sites, at once realized that he was on the scene, if of anything, of an ancient ritual, not of events such as are narrated in the gospels. The traditional Golgotha is only fifty or sixty yards away from the Sepulchre;[127] and near by is “Mount Moriah,” upon which Abraham is recorded to have sought to sacrifice Isaac.
Colonel Conder, who accepts without misgiving all four gospel narratives, and attempts to combine them, avows that the “Garden Tomb” chosen by General Gordon, in the latterly selected Calvary, is impossible, being probably a work of the twelfth century;[128] and for his own part, while inclined to stand by the new Golgotha, avows that “we must still say of our Lord as was said of Moses, ‘No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’”[129] Placidly he concludes that “it is well that we should not know.”[130] But what does the biographical theory make of such a conclusion? Its fundamental assumption is that of Renan, that the personality of Jesus was so commanding as to make his disciples imagine his resurrection. In elaborate and contradictory detail we have the legends of that; and yet we find that all trace of knowledge alike of place of crucifixion and tomb had vanished from the Christian community which is alleged to have arisen immediately after his ascension. The theory collapses at a touch, here as at every other point. There is no more a real Sepulchre of Jesus than there is a real Sepulchre of Mithra; and the bluster which offers the solution that at Jerusalem every one was buried in a rock tomb is a mere closing of the eyes to the monumental fact of the myth.
The critic is all the while himself committed to the denial that there was any tomb. Professing to follow the suggestion[131] of M. Loisy that Jesus was thrown into “some common foss,” which in his hands becomes “the common pit reserved for crucified malefactors,” he affirms[132] that “the words ascribed in [Acts xiii, 29], to Paul certainly favour the Abbé’s view.” They certainly do not. The text in question runs:
And when they had fulfilled all things that were written of him they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a tomb.
The Greek word is μνημεῖον—that used in the gospel story. There is thus no support whatever either for the suggestion of “a common foss” or for the allegation about “the common pit reserved for crucified malefactors”—a wholly unwarranted figment. The second “they” of the sentence is indefinite: it may mean either the Jews of the previous sentence or another “they”: but either way it expressly posits a tomb. Yet after this deliberate perversion of the document, which of course he does not quote, the critic proceeds (p. 302) to aver that “the genuine tradition of Jesus having been cast by his enemies into the common pit reserved for malefactors ... survived among the Jews”; and that the tomb story was invented as “the most effective way of meeting” the imagined statement. Such an amateur inventor of myth is naturally resentful of mythological tests!
§ 10. The Resurrection
If a suffering Messiah was arguable for the Jews, his resurrection after death was a matter of course. The biographical theory, that the greatness of the Founder’s personality led his followers to believe that he must rise again, is historically as unwarrantable as any part of the biographical case. The death and resurrection of the Saviour-God was an outstanding feature of all the most popular cults of the near East; Osiris, Herakles, Dionysos, Attis, Adonis, Mithra, all died to rise again; and a ritual of burial, mourning, resurrection, and rejoicing was common to several. On any view such rituals were established in other contemporary cults; and it is this fact that makes it worth while in this inquiry to glance at a myth which is now abandoned by all save the traditionally orthodox.
On the uncritical assumption that nothing but pure Judaism could exist in Jewry in the age of the Herods, the notion of a dying and re-arising Hero-God was impossible among Jews save as a result of a stroke of new constructive faith. That simple negative position ignores not only the commonness of the belief in immortality among Jews (the Pharisees all held it) before the Christian era, but the special Jewish beliefs in the “translation” of Moses and Elijah, and the story of Saul, the witch of Endor, and the spirit of Samuel. The very belief that the risen Elias was to be the forerunner of the Messiah was a lead to the belief that the Messiah himself might come after a resurrection.
But it is practically certain that a liturgical resurrection was or had been practised in contemporary cults which had at one time enacted an annual sacrifice of the representative of the God, abstracted in myth as the death of the God himself. And in our own time the survival of an analogous practice has been noted in India. At the installation of the Rajahs of Keonjhur it was anciently the practice for the Rajah to slay a victim: latterly there is a mock-slaying, whereupon the mock-victim disappears. “He must not be seen for three days; then he presents himself to the Rajah as miraculously restored to life.”[133]
[1] Jesus, by William Renton. Pub. by author, Keswick, 1879. [↑]
[3] The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels, 1916. [↑]
[4] E. g. He takes as applying to Jesus (p. 377) a remark applied expressly and solely to the myth of Herakles. [↑]
[6] Second Leben Jesu, § 91 (3te Aufl. p. 569). [↑]
[7] See refs. in Drews, The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, Eng. trans. p. 23. [↑]
[9] Jesus and Israel, Eng. tr., pp. viii, ix, 29. [↑]
[10] Putnams, 1912. I had not met with this work when I chose my own title, The Historical Jesus, else I should have framed another. [↑]
[11] Work cited, pp. 335–353. [↑]
[12] Williams and Norgate, 1895. [↑]
[15] The Historic Jesus, p. vii. [↑]
[16] In this connection he puts the theory—derived from the celebrated Herr Chamberlain—that Jesus was not a Jew but an “Amorite.” [↑]
[17] H.J. chs. xvii and xix. [↑]
[18] H.J. 199. On this compare The Four Gospels as Historical Records, chs. vi–xiii. [↑]
[19] Canon Cheetham, Hulsean Lectures on The Mysteries, 1897, p. 115. [↑]
[20] “The primitive idea of the sacrificial meal, namely, that it is by participation in the blood of the god that the spirit of the god enters into his worshipper.”—Prof. Jevons, Introd. to the Hist. of Religion, 1896, p. 291. “Originally the death of the god was nothing else than the death of the theanthropic victim.”—Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 1889, p. 394. [↑]
[21] Jésus et la tradition évangélique, 1910, p. 106. [↑]
[24] See refs. in H.J. 171; others in G.B. ix. 420 n. An overwhelming case for the reading “Jesus (the) Barabbas” is established by E. B. Nicholson, The Gospel according to the Hebrews, 1879, pp. 141–2. [↑]
[25] Mr. Lester translates “Son of a Teacher,” but this (adopted by Brandt) is an evasive rendering. He thinks the story, even if true, had no connection with the condemnation of Jesus. [↑]
[26] Cp. Nicholson, as cited, p. 142. [↑]
[27] G.B. ix, 418; P.C. 146. [↑]
[29] Id. iv, ch. vi; P.C. 124. [↑]
[30] P.C. 152, 64; G.B. iv (Pt. III, The Dying God), 170 sq. [↑]
[31] P.C. 161. Cp. Turner, Samoa, 1884, 274–5; G.B. iv, ch. vi. [↑]
[32] P.C. 137, 161, 186; G.B. iv (Pt. III), 166. [↑]
[33] Macrobius, Saturnalia, i, 7. Cp. Varro, cit. by Lactantius, Div. Inst. i, 21. [↑]
[34] G.B. iv, 14 sq., 46 sq., x, 1 sq. [↑]
[35] Cp. Ward’s View of the Religion of the Hindoos, 5th ed. 1863, p. 92. [↑]
[36] See P.C. 105 sq. as to the various motives of human sacrifice. [↑]
[37] Livy, viii, 9, 10; Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, 166; P.C., 138. [↑]
[38] Cp. Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, 1867, i, 366; P.C. 121. [↑]
[39] Robertson Smith, Semites, 391; F. B. Jevons, Introd. to Hist. of Religion, pp. 274–93. [↑]
[42] Cp. G.B. Pt. III, The Dying God (vol. iv), 166 n., 214 sq.; P.C. 116–117, 140. [↑]
[44] Cp. Kalisch, as cited; G.B., as last cited; [Ps. 106], etc. [↑]
[45] P.C. 158 sq. [Hebrews, ix, 7], [25], suggests a cryptic meaning for the sacrifice of atonement. [↑]
[46] As to Hebrew private sacraments, see P.C. 168 sq. [↑]
[47] P.C. 166. I do not find that Mr. R. T. Herford deals with this matter in his valuable work on Christianity in Talmud and Midrash, 1903. [↑]
[48] See below, p. 104, as to the inferrible early forms of the propaganda of the crucifixion. [↑]
[49] Mr. Joseph McCabe (Sources of Gospel Morality, p. 21) argues against the myth-theory that the early Rabbis never question the historicity of Jesus. But it is extremely likely that early Rabbis did use the Barabbas argument before the gospel story was framed. In an age destitute of historical literature and of critical method or practice, it sufficed to turn their flank. [↑]
[50] C.M. 352, § 21, and refs. A fair “biographical” inference would be that the betrayed Jesus had been an obscure person, not publicly known. This inference, however, is never drawn. [↑]
[51] Ward’s View of the Religion of the Hindoos, 5th ed. 1863, p. 91. [↑]
[52] Cp. Prof. Drews, The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, Eng. tr. p. 54 sq., for Niemojewski’s theory that Pilate = the constellation Orion, pilatus, the javelin-bearer. This theory is not endorsed by Drews. [↑]
[56] Justin Martyr, Dial. with Trypho, c. 40. [↑]
[58] P.C. 146; G.B. ix, 359. [↑]
[59] Second Leben Jesu, § 83. [↑]
[60] Die evang. Geschichte, p. 156. [↑]
[61] G.B. Pt. III (vol. iv), 113–114. [↑]
[62] “Upon an ass and [even in R.V.] upon a colt, the foal of an ass,” [Zech. ix, 9]. I should explain that in denying that such “tautologies” were normal in the Old Testament I had in view narrative passages. [↑]
[65] The Historical Christ, p. 22. [↑]
[66] See p. 19, note, ref. to M. Durkheim. M. Durkheim is one of the greatest of anthropologists; he is not a mythologist at all. [↑]
[72] See his Myth, Magic, and Morals, 2nd ed. p. 302. [↑]
[73] Comm. in Joh. x, 16, cited by Strauss. See his first Life of Jesus, Pt. II, ch. vii, § 88, for the views of the commentators on the episode. [↑]
[75] Cultes, mythes, et religions, i, 338. [↑]
[76] In John, the high priest is actually made to remonstrate from a Jewish point of view, by way of enforcing the Christian conclusion. [↑]
[77] Jésus et la tradition, p. 76. [↑]
[78] There might be involved, again, a reminiscence of the crucifixion of the last independent king of the Jews, Antigonus, by Mark Antony. C.M. 364. [↑]
[80] P.C. 130 sq., 363. Cp. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 391; Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 55, citing Pliny, H.N. xviii, iii, 12. [↑]
[81] Apology and Acts of Apollonius, etc., ed. by F. C. Conybeare, 1894, p. 270. Here Dr. Conybeare momentarily appears as a myth-theorist. [↑]
[84] The Christ Myth, Eng. trans. pp. 65–68. [↑]
[85] Cp. Cheyne, Introd. to Isaiah, 1895, pp. 304–5, as to Ewald’s theory that Jeremiah may have been meant. [↑]
[86] So to be estimated whether he be “the” Deutero-Isaiah or a song-writer whose work has been incorporated. Cp. Cheyne, as cited, and his art. Isaiah in Encyc. Bib. [↑]
[87] The terms “Christists” and “Jesuists” are, it need hardly be said, used for the sake of exactitude. The term “early Christians” would often convey a different and misleading idea. There were Jesuists and Christists before the “Christian” movement arose. Dr. Conybeare pronounces such terms “jargon” (Histor. Christ, p. 94). In the next line he illustrates the delicacy of his own academic taste by the terms “tag-rag and bobtail.” Such slang abounds in his book, and this particular phrase recurs (p. 183). [↑]
[88] It is interesting to note that in the Gospel of Peter one of the malefactors is represented as speaking to the Jews in defence of Jesus, whereupon they break his legs in vengeance. [↑]