I
I
THE HISTORICAL CHRIST
I
THE HISTORICAL CHRIST;
OE,
AN INVESTIGATION OF THE VIEWS OF
Mr. J. M. KOBERTSON, Dr. A. DREWS,
AND Prof. W. B. SMITH
BY
FRED. C. CONYBEARE, M.A., F.B.A.,
HONORARY FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD ; HON. LL.D.
OP THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS ; HON. DOCTOR
OF THEOLOGY OF GIESSEN
[issued for THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]
LONDON :
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.G.
1914
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE -...-.. vii
CHAP.
. I. HISTORICAL METHOD .... 1
11. PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS - - - - 81
III. THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE - - - 06
IV. THE EPISTLES OF PAUL - - - - 125
V. EXTERNAL EVIDENCE .... 154
VI. THE ART OF CRITICISM - - - - 107
VII. DR. JENSEN 202
EPILOGUE 214
INDEX - - - 227
PREFACE
This little volume was written in the spring of the
year 1913, and is intended as a plea for moderation
and good sense in dealing with the writings of early
Christianity ; just as my earlier volumes entitled Mytli^
Magicj and Morals and A History of New Testament
Criticism were pleas for the free use, in regard to the
origins of that religion, of those methods of historical
research to which we have learned to suhject all
records of the past. It provides a middle way between
traditionalism on the one hand and absurdity on the
other, and as doing so will certainly be resented by
the partisans of each form of excess.
The comparative method achieved its first great
triumph in the field of Indo-European philology ; its
second in that of mythology and folk-lore. It is
desirable to allow to it its full rights in the matter of
Christian origins. But we must be doubly careful in
this new and almost un worked region to use it with
the same scrupulous care for evidence, with the same
absence of prejudice and economy of hypothesis, to
Ml
viii PEEFACE
which it owes its conquests in other fields. The
untrained explorers whom I here criticize discover on
almost every page connections in their subject-matter
where there are and can be none, and as regularly
miss connections where they exist. Parallelisms and
analogies of rite, conduct, and belief between religious
systems and cults are often due to other causes than
actual contact, inter-communication, and borrowing.
They may be no more than sporadic and independent
manifestations of a common humanity. It is not
enough, therefore, for one agent or institution or
belief merely to remind us of another. Before we
assert literary or traditional connection between
similar elements in story and myth, we must satisfy
ourselves that such communication was possible. The
tale of Sancho Panza and his visions of a happy isle,
over w^hich he shall hold sway when his romantic lord
and master, Don Quixote, has overcome with his good
sword the world and all its evil, reminds us of the naif
demand of the sons of Zebedee (Mark x, 87) to be
allowed to sit on the right hand and the left of their
Lord, so soon as he is glorified. With equal simplicity
(Matthew xix, 28) Jesus promises that in the day of
the regeneration of Israel, when the Son of Man takes
his seat on his throne of glory, Peter and his com-
panions shall also take their seats on twelve thrones
to judge the twelve tribes of Israel. The projected
PEEFACE ix
mise en scene is exactly that of a Per-sian great king
with his magnates on their several '' cushions " of
state around him. There is, again, a close analogy
psychologically between Dante's devout adoration of
Beatrice in heaven and Paul's of the risen Jesus.
These two parallels are closer than most that Mr.
Robertson discovers between Christian story and Pagan
myth, yet no one in his senses would ever suggest
that Cervantes drew his inspiration from the Gospels
or Dante from the Pauline Epistles. In criticizing
the Gospels it is all the more necessary to proceed
cautiously, because the obscurantists are incessantly
on the watch for solecisms — or '* howlers," as a
schoolboy would call them ; and only too anxious to
point to them as of the essence of all free criticism of
Christian literature and history.
Re-reading these pages after the lapse of many
months since they were written, I have found little to
alter, though Prof. A. C. Clark, who has been so good
as to peruse them, has made a few suggestions which,
where the sheets were not already printed, I have
embodied. I append a list of errata calling for
correction.
Fred. C. Conybeare.
March 1, 1014.
ERRATA
P. 87, first line of footnote : for " des as Alten " read
" des alten. "
P. 110, line 28 : for " passages" read " episodes."
P. 116, line 6 : for " At Cyprus they stay with an early
disciple " read " They stay with an early disciple from
Cyprus."
P. 147, line 5: omit the word "twice."
P. 151, line 9 : after "verse 20" add: "But, since the
Bezan omission does not cover the whole of the
matter taken from Corinthians, we may suppose that
Luke borrowed the words from the Epistle in
question."
P. 167, in marginal lemma : for " of Jesus " read " of
Jesus of."
P. 185, lines 11, 12, read thus', "on it (the Didache)
the," etc.
XI
J
Chapter I
HISTORICAL METHOD
In Myth, Mafjic, and Morals (Chapter IX) I have Oithodox
remarked that the Church, by refusing to apply in the isnTt'he" '
field of so-called sacred history the canons by which pf^i'ent of
in other fields truth is discerned from falsehood, by
beatifying credulous ignorance and anathematizing
scholarship and common sense, has surrounded the
figure of Jesus with such a nimbus of improbability
that it seems not absurd to some critics of to-day to
deny that he ever lived. The circumstance that both
in England and in Germany the books of certain
of these critics — in particular, Dr. Arthur Drews,
Professor W. Benjamin Smith, and Mr. J. M.
Robertson — are widely read, and welcomed by many
as works of learning and authority, requires that
I should criticize them rather more in detail than
I deemed it necessary to do in that publication.
Benedetto Croce well remarks in his Lorjica (p. 195) ^- ^^'oce
that history in no way differs from the physical of History
sciences, insofar as it cannot be constructed by pure
reasoning, but rests upon sight or vision of the fact
that has happened, the fact so perceived being the
only source of history. In a methodical historical
treatise the sources are usually divided into monu-
ments and narratives ; by the former being understood
whatever is left to us as a trace of the accomplished
fact — €.[/., a contract, a letter, or a triumphal arch;
1 B
HISTORICAL METHOD
Eelative
paucity of
evangelic
tradition
and pre-
sence of
miracles
in it,
explains
and ex-
cuses the
while narratives consist of such accounts of it as have
been transmitted to us by those who were more or
less eye-witnesses thereof, or by those who have
repeated the notices or traditions furnished by eye-
witnesses.
Now it may be granted that we have not in the
New Testament the same full and direct information
about Jesus as we can derive from ancient Latin
literature about Julius Caesar or Cicero. We have
no monuments of him, such as are the commentaries
of the one or the letters and speeches of the other.
It is barely credible that a single one of the New
Testament writers, except perhaps St. Paul, ever set
eyes on him or heard his voice. It is more than
doubtful whether a single one of his utterances, as
recorded in the Gospels, retains either its original
form or the idiom in which it was clothed. A mass
of teaching, a number of aphorisms and precepts, are
attributed to him ; but we know little of how they
were transmitted to those who repeat them to us, and
it is unlikely that we possess any one of them as it
left his lips.
And that is not all. In the four Gospels all sorts
of incredible stories are told about him, such as that
he was born of a virgin mother, unassisted by a
human father ; that he walked on the surface of the
water ; that he could foresee the future ; that he
stilled a storm by upbraiding it ; that he raised the
dead ; that he himself rose in the flesh from the dead
and left his tomb empty ; that his apostles beheld
him so risen ; and that finally he disappeared behind
a cloud up into the heavens.
It is natural, therefore — and there is much excuse
for him — that an uneducated man or a child, bidden
HISTOKICAL METHOD 3
unceremoniously in the name of religion to accept extreme
these tales, should revolt, and hastily make up his school
mind that the figure of Jesus is through and through
fictitious, and that he never lived at all. One thing
only is certain — namely, that insofar as the orthodox
blindly accept these tales — nay, maintain with St.
Athanasius that the man Jesus was God incarnate,
a pre-existent aeon. Word of God, Creator of all
things, masked in human flesh, but retaining, so far
as he chose, all his exalted prerogatives and cosmic
attributes in this disguise — they put themselves out of
court, and deprive themselves of any faculty of reply
to the extreme negative school of critics. The latter
may be very absurd, and may betray an excess of
credulity in the solutions they offer of the problem of
Christian origins ; but they can hardly go further
along the path of absurdity and credulity than the
adherents of the creeds. If their arguments are to
be met, if any satisfactory proof is to be advanced of
the historicity of Jesus, it must come, not from those
who, as Mommsen remarked, " reason in chains,"
but from free thinkers.
Those, however, who have much acquaintance with Yet Jesus
antiquity must perceive at the outset that, if the attested^
thesis that Jesus never existed is to be admitted, than most
then quite a number of other celebrities, less well '"^"^^^"'^
evidenced than he, must disappear from the page of
history, and be ranged with Jesus in the realm of myth.
Many characteristically Christian documents, such Age of the
as the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, christ^hm
and the Teaching of the Apostles, are admitted by literature
Drews to have been written before a.d. 100.^ Not
^ Page 20 of The Christ Myth, from a note added in the third
edition.
HISTORICAL METHOD
If Jesus
never
lived,
neither
did Solon,
only the canonical Gospels, he tells us,^ were still
current in the first half of the second century, hut
several never accepted by the Church — e.r/., spurious
gospels ascribed to Matthew, Thomas, Bartholomew,
Peter, the Twelve Apostles. These have not reached
us, though we have recovered a large fragment of
the so-called Peter Gospel, and find that it at least
pre-supposes canonical Mark. The phrase, " Still
current in the first half of the second century,"
indicates that, in Dr. Drews's opinion, these derivative
gospels were at least as old as year 100 ; in that case
our canonical Gospels would fall well within the first.
I will not press this point ; but, anyhow, we note
the admission that within about seventy years of
the supposed date of Jesus's death Christians were
reading that mass of written tradition about him
which we call the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John. They were also reading a mass of less
accredited biographies — less trustworthy, no doubt,
but, nevertheless, the work of authors who enter-
tained no doubt that Jesus had really lived, and who
wished to embellish his story.
If, then, armed with such early records, w^e are yet
so exacting of evidence as to deny that Jesus, their
central figure, ever lived, what shall we sa}^ of other
ancient worthies — of Solon, for example, the ancient
Athenian legislator ? For his life our chief sources,
as Grote remarks {History of Greece, Pt. II, ch. 11),
are Plutarch and Diogenes, writers who lived seven
and eight hundred years after him. Moreover, the
stories of Plutarch about him are, as Grote says,
" contradictory as well as apocryphal." It is true
1 Op. cit. p. 214.
HISTORICAL METHOD 5
that Herodotus repeats to us the story of Solon's
travels, and of the conversations he held with Croesus,
King of Lydia ; but these conversations are obviously
mere romance. Herodotus, too, lived not seventy,
but nearly one hundred and fifty years later than
Solon, so that contemporary evidence of him we have
none. Plutarch preserves, no doubt, various laws
and metrical aphorisms which were in his day
attributed to Solon, just as the Christians attributed
an extensive body of teaching to Jesus. If we deny
all authenticity to Jesus's teaching, what of Solon's
traditional lore ? Obviously Jesus has a far larger
chance to have really existed than Solon.
And the same is true of Epimenides of Crete, who or E pi-
was said to be the son of the nymph Balte ; to have
been mysteriously fed by the nymphs, since he was
never seen to eat, and so forth. He was known as
the Purifier, and in that role healed the Athenians of
plagues physical and spiritual. A poet and prophet
he lived, according to some, for one hundred and
fift3'-four years ; according to his own countrymen,
for three hundred. If he lived to the latter age, then
Plato, who is the first to mention him in his Laws,
was his contemporary, not otherwise.
Pythagoras, again, can obviously never have lived ^J.^^^^ ^°'
at all, if we adopt the purist canons of Drews. For
he was reputed, as Grote (Pt. II, ch. 37) reminds us,
to have been inspired by the gods to reveal to men a
new way of life, and found an order or brotherhood.
He is barely mentioned by any writer before Plato,
who flourished one hundred and fifty years later than
he. In the matter of miracles, prophecy, pre-exist-
ence, mystic observances, and asceticism, Pythagoras
equalled, if he did not excel, Jesus.
HISTOEICAL METHOD
or Apol-
lonius of
Tyana
Miracles
do not
wholly in-
validate a
document
Apollonius of Tyana is another example. We
have practically no record of him till one hundred
and twenty years after his death, when the Sophist
Philostratus took in hand to write his life, hy his
own account, with the aid of memorials left by Damis,
a disciple of the sage. Apollonius, like Jesus and
Pythagoras, was an incarnation of an earlier being ;
he, too, worked miracles, and appeared after death to
an incredulous follower, and ascended into heaven
bodily. The stories of his miracles of healing, of his
expulsions of demons, and raising of the dead, read
exactly like chapters out of the Gospels. He, like
Jesus and Pythagoras, had a god Proteus for his father,
and was born of a virgin. His birth was marked in the
heavens by meteoric portents. His history bristles
with tales closely akin to those which were soon told
of Jesus ; yet all sound scholars are agreed that his
biographer did not imitate the Gospels, but wrote
independently of them. If, then, Jesus never lived,
much less can Apollonius have done so. Except for
a passing reference in Lucian, Philostratus is our
earliest authority for his reality ; the life written of
him by Moeragenes is lost, and we do not know when
it was written. On the whole, the historicity of Jesus
is much better attested and documented than that of
Apollonius, whose story is equally full of miracles
wath Christ's.
The above examples suffice. But, with the aid of a
good dictionary of antiquity, hundreds of others could
be adduced of individuals for whose reality we have
not a tithe of the evidence which we have for that of
Jesus ; yet no one in his senses disputes their ever
having lived. We take it for certain that hundreds —
nay, thousands — of people who figure on the pages
HISTOEICAL METHOD 7
of ancient and medieval history were real, and that,
roughly speaking, they performed the actions attributed
to them — this although the earliest notices of them are
only met with in Plutarch, or Suidas, or William of
Tyre, or other writers who wrote one hundred, two
hundred, perhaps six hundred years after them. Nor
are we deterred from believing that they really existed
by the fact that, along with some things credible,
other things wholly incredible are related of them.
Throughout ancient history we must learn to pick
and choose. The thesis, therefore, that Jesus never
lived, but was from first to last a myth, presents itself
at the outset as a paradox. Still, as it is seriously
advanced, it must be seriously considered (Jib,nd that
I now proceed to do.
It can obviously not pass muster, unless its authors Proof of
furnish us with a satisfactory explanation of every torj^it of
single notice, direct or indirect, simple or constructive, Jesus, how
which ancient writers have transmitted to us. Each ^^^'^^"^" ^
notice must be separately examined, and if an
evidential document be composite, every part of it.
Each statement in its prima facie sense must be
shown to be irreconcilable with what we know of the
age and circumstances to which it pretends to relate.
And in every case the new interpretation must be
more cogent and more probable than the old one.
Jesus, the real man, must be driven line by line,
verse by verse, out of the whole of the New Testament,
and after that out of other early sources which directly
or by implication attest his historicity. There is no
other way of proving so sweeping a negative as that
of the three authors I have named. How to
For every statement of fact in an ancient author is ^PP^'oach
a problem, and has to be accounted for. If it accords documents
\
8
HISTORICAL METHOD
Value of
several in-
dependent
witnesses
in ease of
Jesus
with the context, and the entire body of statement
agrees with the best scheme we can form in our
mind's eye of the epoch, we accept it, just as we
would the statement of a witness standing before us
in a law court. If, on the other hand, the statement
does not agree with our scheme, we ask why the
author made it. If he obviously believed it, then
how did his error arise ? If he should seem to have
made it without himself believing it, then we ask.
Why did he wish to deceive his reader ? Sometimes
the only solution we can give of the matter is, that
our author himself never penned the statement, ))ut
that someone covertly inserted it in his text, so that
it might appear to have contained it. In such cases
we must explain why and in whose interest the text
was interpolated. In all history, of course, we never
get a direct observation, or intuition, or hearing of
what took place, for the photographic camera and
phonograph did not exist in antiquity. We must rest
content with the convictions and feelings of authors,
as they put them down in books. To one circum-
stance, however, amid so much dubiety, we shall
attach supreme importance ; and that is to an affirma-
tion of the same fact by two or more independent
witnesses. One man may well be in error, and report
to us what never occurred ; but it is in the last degree
improbable that two or more independent witnesses
will join forces in testifying to what never was. Let
us, then, apply this principle to the problem before us.
Jesus, our authors affirm, w^as not a real man, but an
astral myth. Now we can conceive of one ancient
writer mistaking such a myth for a real man ; but
what if another and another witness, what if half a
dozen or more come along, and, meeting us quite
HISTORICAL METHOD 9
apart from one another and by different routes, often
by pure accident, conspire in error. If we found
ourselves in such case, would we not think we were
bewitched, and take to our heels?
Well, I do not intend to take to my heels. I The oldest
mean to stand up to the chimeras of Messrs. Drews, ^bouT^
Robertson, and Benjamin Smith. And the best Jesus
courage is to take one by one the ancient sources
which bear witness to the man Jesus, examine and
compare them, and weigh their evidence. If they
are independent, if they agree, not too much — that
would excite a legitimate suspicion — but only more
or less and in a general way, then, I believe, any
rational inquirer would allow them weight, even if
none were strictly contemporaries of his and eye-
witnesses of his life. In the Gospel of Mark we
have the earliest narrative document of the New
Testament. This is evident from the circumstance
that the three other evangelists used it in the com-
position of their Gospels. Drews, indeed, admits it to
be one of the "safest" results of modern discussion
of the life of Jesus that this Gospel is the oldest of
the surviving four. He is aware, of course, that this
conclusion has been questioned ; but no one will
doubt it who has confronted ]\Iark in parallel columns The
with Luke and Matthew, and noted how these other Mark\ised
evangelists not only derive from it the order of the i'^ ^^^'^t-
events of the life of Jesus, but copy it out verse after L^ike'^"
verse, each with occasional modifications of his own.
Drews, however, while aware of this phenomenon,
has yet not grasped the fact that it and nothing else
has moved scholars to regard Mark as the most
ancient of the three Synoptics ; quite erroneously, as
if he had never read any work of modern textual
10
HISTOEICAL METHOD
Contents
of Mark
Drews's
account of
Messian-
ism
criticism, he imagines that they are led to their
conclusion, firstly by the superior freshness and
vividness of Mark, by a picturesqueness which argues
him to have been an eye-witness ; and, secondly, by
the evidence of Papias, who, it is said, declared Mark
to have been the interpreter of the Apostle Peter.
In point of fact, the modern critical theologians, for
whom Drews has so much contempt, attach no decisive
weight in this connection either to the tradition pre-
served by Papias or to the graphic qualities of Mark's
narratives. They rest their case mainl}^ on the internal
evidence of the texts before them.
What, then, do we find in Mark's narrative ?
Inasmuch as my readers can buy the book for a
penny and study it for themselves, I may content
myself with a very brief resume of its contents.
It begins with an account of one John who preached
round about Judaea, but especially on the Jordan, that
the Jews must repent of their sins in order to their
remission ; in token whereof he directed them to take
a ritual bath in the sacred waters of the Jordan, just
as a modern Hindoo w^ashes aw^ay his sins by means
of a ritual bath in the River Jumna. An old docu-
ment generally called Q. (Quelle), because Luke and
Matthew used it in common to supplement Mark's
rather meagre story, adds the reason w4iy the Jews
were to repent ; and it was this, that the Kingdom of
Heaven w-as at hand. Drews, in his first chapter of
The Christ Myth, traces out the idea of this Kingdom
of God, which he finds so prominent in the Jewish
Apocalyptics of the last century before and the first
century after Christ, and attributes it to Persian and
Mithraic influence. Mithras, he says, was to descend
upon the earth, and in a last fierce struggle over-
HISTOEICAL METHOD 11
whelm Angromainyu or Ahriman and his hosts, and
cast them down into the nether world. He would
then raise the dead in hodily shape, and after a
general judgment of the whole world, in which the
wicked should be condemned to the punishments of
hell and the good raised to heavenly glory, establish
the ''millennial kingdom." These ideas, he con-
tinues, penetrated Jewish thought, and brought about
a complete transformation of the former belief in a
messiah, a Hebrew term meaning the anointed — in
Greek Christos. For, to begin with, the Christ was
merely the Jewish king who represented Jahwe
before the people, and the people before Jahwe. He
was " Son of Jahwe," or " Son of God " par excellence ;
later on the name came to symbolize the ideal king
to come — this when the Israelites lost their indepen-
dence, and were humiliated by falling under a foreign
yoke. This ideal longed-for king was to win Jahwe's
favour ; and by his heroic deeds, transcending those
of Moses and Joshua of old, to re-establish the glory
of Israel, renovate the face of the earth, and even
make Israel Lord over all nations. But so far the
Messiah was only a human being, a new David or
descendant of David, a theocratic king, a divinely
favoured prince of peace, a just ruler over the people
he liberated ; and in this sense Cyrus, who delivered
the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, the rescuer
and overlord of Israel, had been acclaimed Messiah.
At last and gradually — still under Persian influence,
according to Drews — this figure assumed divine attri-
butes, yet without forfeiting human ones. Secret and
supernatural as was his nature, so should the birth
of the Messiah be ; though a divine child, he was to
be born in lowly state. Nay, the personality of the
12
HISTORICAL METHOD
John and
Jesus
began as
messen-
gers of the
divine
kingdom
on earth
Jesus's
anticipa-
tions of its
speedy
advent
Messiah eventually mingled with that of Jahwe
himself, whose son he was. Such, according to
Drews, were the alternations of the Messiah between
a human and a divine nature in Jewish apocalypses
of the period e.g. 100 to a.d. 100. They obviously do
not preclude the possibility of the Jews in that epoch
acclaiming a man as their Messiah — indeed, there is
no reason why they should not have attached the
dignity to several ; and from sources which Drews
does not dispute we learn that they actually
did so.
Let us return to Mark's narrative. Among the
Jews who came to John to confess and repent of
their sins, and wash them away in the Jordan, was
one named Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee ; and he,
as soon as John was imprisoned and murdered by
Herod, caught up the lamp, if I may use a metaphor,
which had fallen from the hands of the stricken saint,
and hurried on with it to the same goal. We read
that he went to Galilee, preaching the gospel of God,
and saying: ''The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom
of God is at hand ; repent ye, and believe in the
gospel or good tidings."
The rest of Mark is a narrative of what happened
to Jesus on this self-appointed errand. We learn
that he soon made many recruits, from among whom
he chose a dozen as his particular missionaries or
apostles. These, after no long time, he despatched
on peculiar beats of their own. He was certain that
the kingdom was not to be long delayed, and on
occasions assured his audience that it would come in
their time. When he was sending out his missionary
disciples, he even expressed to them his doubts as
to whether it would not come even before they had
HISTOEICAL METHOD 13
had time to go round the cities of Israel. It was He con-
not, however, this consideration, hut the instinct of pj-o^niij^es
exclusiveness, which he shared with most of his race, to Jews
that led him to warn them against carrying the
good tidings of the impending salvation of Israel to
Samaritans or Gentiles ; the promises were not for
schismatics and heathens, hut only for the lost sheep
of the house of Israel. Some of these details are
derived not from Mark, but from the document out
of which, as I remarked above, the first and second
evangelists supplemented Mark.
Like Luther, Loyola, Dunstan, St. Anthony, and ^^'1^]^^
many other famous saints and sinners, Jesus, on the his own
threshold of his career, encountered Satan, and over- ^^"^^^^'^^
threw him. A characteristically oriental fast of forty
days in the wilderness equipped him for this feat.
Thenceforth he displayed, like Apollonius of Tyana
and not a few contemporary rabbis, considerable
familiarity with the demons of disease and madness.
The sick flocked to him to be healed, and it was only
in districts where people disbelieved in him and his
message that his therapeutic energy met with a check.
Among those who particularly flouted his pretensions
were his mother and brethren, who on one occasion
at least followed him in order to arrest him and put
him under restraint as being beside himself or exaltr.
A good many parables are attributed to him in this His Para-
Gospel, and yet more in Matthew and Luke, of which turn on
the burden usually is the near approach of the dis- the coming
solution of this world and of the last Judgment, which ^ ^
are to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. We
learn that the parable was his favourite mode of
instruction, as it always has been and still is the th^earhes"
chosen vehicle of Semitic moral teaching. Of the sources of
14
HISTORICAL METHOD
the mirac-
ulous birth
of Jesus
Late re-
cognition
of Jesus
as himself
the Mes-
siah
His hopes
shattered
at ap-
proach of
death
later legend of his supernatural birth, and of the
visits before his birth of angels to Mary, his mother,
and to Joseph, his putative father, of the portents
subsequently related in connection with his birth at
Bethlehem, there is not a word either in Mark or in
the other early document out of which Matthew and
Luke supplemented Mark. In these earliest docu-
ments Jesus is presented quite naturally as the son
of Joseph and his wife Mary, and we learn quite
incidentally the names of his brothers and sisters.
Towards the middle of his career Jesus seems to
have been recognized by Peter as the Son of God or
Messiah. Whether he put himself forward for that
role we cannot be sure ; but so certain were his
Apostles of the matter that two of them are repre-
sented as having asked him in the naivest way to
grant them seats of honour on his left and right
hand, when he should come in glory to judge the
world. The Twelve expected to sit on thrones and
judge the twelve tribes of Israel, and this idea meets
us afresh in the Apocalypse, a document which in the
form we have it belongs to the years 92-93.
But the simple faith of the Apostles in their
teacher and leader was to receive a rude shock.
They accompany him for the Passover to Jerusalem.
An insignificant triumphal demonstration is organized
for him as he enters the sacred city on an ass ; he
beards the priests in the temple, and scatters the
money-changers who sat there to change strange
coins for pilgrims. The priests, who, like many
others of their kind, were much too comfortable to
sigh for the end of the world, and regarded enthusiasts
as nuisances, took offence, denounced him to Pilate as
a rebel and a danger to the Roman government of
HISTOKICAL METHOD 15
Jud?ea. He is arrested, condemned to be crucified,
and as he hangs on the cross in a last moment of
disiUusionment utters that most pathetic of cries :
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
He had expected to witness the descent of the
kingdom on earth, but instead thereof he is him-
self handed over helpless into the hands of the
Gentiles.
Such in outline is the story Mark has to tell. The
rival and supplementary document of which I have
spoken, and which admits of some reconstruction
from the text of Matthew and Luke, consisted mainly
of parables and precepts which Jesus was supposed to
have delivered. It need not engage our attention
here.
Now the three writers I have named — Messrs. The myth-
Drews, Eobertson, and W. B. Smith — enjoy the oTjesu?^^
singular good fortune to be the first to have dis-
covered w^hat the above narratives really mean, and
of how they originated ; and they are urgent that we
should sell all we have, and purchase their pearl of -^
wisdom. They assure us that in the Gospels we
have not got any " tradition of a x^ersonality." Jesus,
the central figure, never existed at all, ^but was a
purely mythical pers onage. The mythical character
of the Gospels, so Drews assures us, has, in the hands
of Mr. J. M. Robertson, led the way, and made a
considerable advance in England ; he regrets that so
far official learning in Germany has not taken up
a serious position regarding the mythic symbolical
interpretation of the latter.^ Let us then ask. What
^ The Chriat Mytli, p. 9. (Zu Robertson hat sie meines Wissens
noch keiner Weise ernsthaft JStellung genommen, p. vii of German
edition.)
16 HISTORICAL METHOD
is the gist of the new system of interpretation. It is
as follows : —
Joshua Jesus, or Joshua, was the name under which the
a Sun-god, expected Messiah was honoured in a certain Jewish
secret culf ^^^^'^^ society which had its headquarters in Jerusalem
ahout the beginning of our era. In view of its secret
character Drews warns us not to be too curious, nor
to question either his information or that of Messrs.
Smith and Robertson. This recalls to me an incident
in my own experience. I was once, together with a little
girl, being taken for a sail by an old sailor who had
many yarns. One of the most circumstantial of them
w^as about a ship which went down in mid ocean with
all hands aboard ; and it wound up with the remark :
"And nobody never knew nothing about it." Little
girl : " Then how did you come to hear all about it ? "
Like our brave old sailor. Dr. Drews warns us (p. 22)
not to be too inquisitive. We must not '* forget that
we are deali ng with a secret cu lt, the existence of
which we can decide upon only by indirect means."
His hypothesis, he tells us, " can only be rejected
without more ado by such as geek the traces of the
pre-Christian cult of Jesus in well-worn places, and
will only allow that to be ' proved ' which they have
established by direct original documentary evidence
before their eyes." In other words, we are to set
aside our copious and almost (in Paul's case) con-
temporary evidence that Jesus was a real person in
favour of a hypothesis which from the first and as
such lacks all direct and documentary evidence, and
is not amenable to any of the methods of proof recog-
nized by sober historians. We must take Dr. Drews's
word for it, and forego all evidence.
But let our authors continue with their new revela-
HISTORICAL METHOD 17
tion. By Joshua, or Jesus^ we are not to understand
the personage concerning ^Yhose exploits the Book of
Joshua was composed, but a_ Sun-god. The Gospels
are a veiled account of the sufferings and exploits
of this Sun-god. ''Joshua is apparently [why this
qualification ?] an ancient Ephraimitic god of the Sun
and Fruitfulness, who stood in close relation to the
Feast of the Pasch and to the custom of circum-
cision."^
Now no one nowadays accepts the Book of Joshua Emptiness
offhand as sound history. It is a compilation of older godJoshua
sources, which have already been sifted a good deal, liypothesis.
and will undergo yet more sifting in the future. The
question before us does not concern its historicity,
but is this : Does the Book of Joshua, whether history
or not, support the hypothesis that Joshua was ever
regarded as God of the Sun and of Fruitfulness ? Was
ever such a god known of or worshipped in the tribe
of Ephraim or in Israel at large ? In this old Hebrew
epic or saga Joshua is a man of flesh and blood.
How did these gentlemen get it into their heads that
he was a Sun-god ? For this statement there is not
a shadow of evidence. They have invented it. As
he took the Israelites dryshod over the Jordan, why
have they not made a Biver-god of him ? And as,
according to Drews, he was so interested in fruitful-
ness and foreskins, why not suppose he was a Priapic
god ? They are much too modest. We should at
least expect ** the composite myth " to include this
element, inasmuch as his mystic votaries at Jeru-
1 Christ Myth, p. 57. In the German text (first ed. 1909, p. 21)
Mr. Robertson is the authority for this statement (so hat Kobertson
es sehr wahrscheinlich gemacht).
C
18
HISTOEICAL METHOD
The Sun-
myth stage
of com-
parative
mythology
salem were far from seeing eye to eye with Paul in
the matter of circumcision.
There was years ago a stage in the Comparative
History of Religions when the Sun-myth hypothesis
was invoked to explain almost everything. The shirt
of Nessus, for example, in which Heracles perished,
was a parable of the sun setting amidst a wrack of
scattered clouds. The Sun-my_th was the key which
fitted every lock, and was employed unsparingly by
pioneers of comparative mythology like F. Max MuUer
and Sir George Cox. It was taken for granted that
early man must have begun by deifying the great
cosmic powers, by venerating Sun and Moon, the
Heavens, the Mountains, the Sea, as holy and divine
beings, because they, rather than humble and homelier
objects, impress us moderns by their sublimity and
overwhelming force. Man was supposed from the
first to have felt his transitoriness, his frailty and
weakness, and to have contrasted therewith the
infinities of space and time, the majesty of the
starry hosts of heaven, the majestic and uniform
march of sun and moon, the mighty rumble of the
thunder. Max Miiller thought that religion began
when the cowering savage was crushed by awe of
nature and of her stupendous forces, by the infinite
lapses of time, by the yawning abysses of space. As
a matter of fact, savages do not entertain these
sentiments of the dignity and majesty of nature.
On the contrary, a primitiva^-man thinks that he can
impose his paltry will on the elements ; that he knows
how to unchain the wind, to oblige the rain to fall ;
that he can, like the ancient witches of Thessaly,
control sun and moon and stars by all sorts of petty
magical rites, incantations, and gestures, as Joshua
HISTOEICAL METHOD 19
made the sun stand still till his band of brigands had
"won the battle. It is to the imagination of us moderns
alone that the grandeur of the universe appeals, and
it was relatively late in the history of religion —
so far as it can be reconstructed from the scanty
data in our possession — that the higher nature cults
were developed. The gods and sacred beings of an
Australian or North American native are the humble
vegetables and animals which surround him, objects
with which he is on a footing of equality. His totems
are a duck, a hare, a kangaroo, an emu, a lizard, a
grub, or a frog. In the same way, the sacred being
of an early Semite's devotion was just as likely to be
a pig or a hare as the sun in heaven ; the cult of an
early Egyptian was centred upon a crocodile, or a
cat, or a dog.-^ In view of these considerations, our
suspicion is aroused at the outset by finding Messrs.
Drews and Robertson to be in this discarded and
obsolete Sun-myth stage of speculation. They are a
back number. Let us, however, examine their mythic
symbolic theory a little further, and see what sort of
arguments they invoke in favour of it, and what their
" indirect" proofs amount to.
Why was Jesus buried in a rock-tomb ? asks Mr. Examples
_^ ,— --:i , rr 1 n-'iT. iT_ of the Sun-
Robertson. Answer : B ecause ne was Mitnras, _ tne god theory
rock-born Sun-god. We would like to know what ^^j^^^^^',
other sort of burial was possible round Jerusalem, xomb
where soil was so scarce that everyone was buried in
a rock-tomb. Scores of such tombs remain. Are
they all Mithraic ? Surely a score of other con-
siderations would equally well explain the choice of
a rock-tomb for him in Christian tradition.
1 Cp. Emile Durkheim, La Vie Religieuse, Paris, 1912, p. 121, to
whom I owe much in the text.
20 HISTOEICAL METHOD
Th At Why was Jesus born at the winter-solstice? Answer:
of birthday Because he was a Sun-god.
Our author forgets that the choice of December 25
for the feast of the phj^sical birth of Jesus was made
by the Church as late as 354 a.d. What could the
cryptic Messianists of the first half of the first century
know about a festival which was never heard of in
Kome until the year 354, nor accepted in Jerusalem
before the year 440 ? Time is evidently no element
in the calculations of these authors ; and they commit
themselves to the most amazing anachronisms with
the utmost insouciance, or, shall we not rather say,
ignorance ; unless, indeed, they imagine that the
mystic worshippers of the God Joshua knew all about
the date, but kept it dark in order to mystify all
succeeding generations.
^^® Why did Jesus .gurnnind himself with twelve dis-
disciples ciples ? Answer : Because they were the twelve sign^
of the Zodiac and he a Sun-god. We naturally ask,
Were the twelve tribes of Israel equally representative
of the Zodiac ? In any case, may not Christian story
have fixed the number of Apostles at twelve in view
of the tribes being twelve ? It is superfluous to go as
far as the Zodiac for an explanation.
^6 Wliy did Jesus preach his sermon on the Mount?
the Mount Answer : Because as Sun-god he hatl_to take his stand
on the *' pillar of the world." In the same way, Moses,
another Sun-god, gave his law from the Mount.
I always have heard that Moses got his tables of
the law up top of a mountain, and brought them down
to a people that were forbidden to approach it. He
did not stand up top, and shout out his laws to them,
as Mr. Kobertson suggests. In any case, we merely
read in Matthew v that Jesus went up into a
HISTOKICAL METHOD 21
mountain or upland region, and when he had sat
down his disciples came to him, and he then opened
his mouth and taught them. In a country like
Galilee, where you can barely walk a mile in any
direction without climbing a hill, what could be more
natural than for a narrator to frame such a setting
for the teacher's discourse ? It is the first rule of
criticism to practise some economy of hypothesis,
and not go roaming after fanciful and extravagant
interpretations of quite commonplace and every-day
occurrences.
, Why was it believed that Jesus was to judge men The last
after death ? Answer : Becau se he was a Sun-god, °
and 7)r() tcnito identical with Osiris.
Surely the more natural interpretation is that, so
soon as Jesus was identified in the minds of his
followers with the Messiah or Christ, the task of
judging Israel was passed on to him as part of the
role. Thus in the Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish
apocryph of about e.g. 50, we read that the Messiah
will "in the assemblies judge the peoples, the tribes
of the sanctified" (xvii, 48). Such references could
be multiplied ; are they all Osirian ? If Mr. Robertson
had paid a little more attention to the later apocrypha
of Judaism, and made himself a little better acquainted ' -
with the social and religious medium which gave birth
to Christianity, he would have realized how unneces-
sary are these Sun-mythic hypotheses, and we should
have been spared his books.
Why is Jesus represented in art and lore by the The Lamb
Lamb and the Fishesl* Answer : As a Sun-g od symbol-
passing through the Zodiac. ism
"This is amazing. We"Enow the reason why Jesus
was figured as a Lamb by the early Christians. It_
22 HISTOEICAL METHOD
was because they regarded the paschal lamb as a
type of him. Does Mr. Robertson claim to know the
reasons of their symbolism better than they did
themselves ?
And where did he discover that Jesus was repre-
sented as Fishes in Art and Lore ? He was symbolized
as one fish, not as several ; and Tertullian has told
us why. It was because, according to the popular
zoology of the day, fishes were supposed to be born
and to originate in the water, without carnal con-
nection between their parents. For this reason the
fish was taken as a symbol of Jesus, who was born
again in the waters of the Jordan. A later generation
explained the appellation of Ix^vg {ichtlius), or Fish,
as an acrostic. The letters of the Greek word are the
initials of the words : Icsoiis Christos TJieoii uios soter
— i.e., Jesus Christ of God Son, Saviour ; but this
later explanation came into vogue in an age when it
was already heretical to say that Jesus was reborn
in baptism ; nor does it explain why the multitude
of the baptized were symbolized as little fishes in
contrast with the Big Fish, Christ.
?1^L*^° "Why did Jesus ride into Jerusalem before his death
on two asses ? Answer : Because Dionysus also rides.
on an ass and a foal in one of the Greek signs of
Cancer (the turning point in the sun's course).
" Bacchus (p. 287) crossed a marsh on two asses."
Mr. Robertson does not attempt to prove that the
earliest Christians, who were Jews, must have been
familiar with the rare legend of Bacchus crossing a
marsh on two asses ; still less with the rare repre-
sentation of the zodiacal sign Cancer as an ass and
its foal. It is next to impossible ; and, even if they
were, what induced them to transform the myth into
asses
HTSTOEICAL METHOD 23
the legend of Jesns riding into Jerusalem on two
donkeys at once ? If they had so excellent a legend
of Bacchus on his asses crossing a marsh, why not
be content with it? And the same question maybe
asked in regard to all the other transformations by
which these "mystic sectaries," who formed the early
Church, changed myths culled from all times and all
religions and races into a connected story of Jesus, as
it lies before us in the Synoptic Gospels.
Mr. Robertson disdains any critical and comparative
study of the Gospels, and insists on regarding them
as coeval and independent documents. Everything
inside the covers of the New Testament is for him,
as for the Sunday-school teacher, on one dead level
of importance. All textual criticism has passed over
his head. He has never learned to look in Mark for
the original form of a statement which Luke or
Matthew copied out, and in transferring them to
their Gospels scrupled not to alter or modify.
Accordingly, to suit the exigencies of his theory
that the Gospels are an allegory of a Sun-god's
exploits, he here claims to find the original text not
in Mark, but in Matthew ; as if a transcript and
paraphrase could possibly be prior to, and more
authoritative than, the text transcribed and hrode.
Accordingly, he writes (p. 339) as follows : "In
Mark xi and Luke xix, 30, the two asses become
one In the Fourth Gospel, again, we have simply
the colt." And yet by all rules of textual criticism
and of common sense the underlying and original text
is Mark xi, 1-7. In it the disciples merely bring a
colt which they had found tied at a door. The author
of the Gospel called of Matthew, eager to discern in
every incident, no matter how commonplace, which
24 HISTORICAL METHOD
he found in Mark, a fulfilment of some prophecy, or
another, drags in a tag of Zechariah : ''Behold, the
King cometh to thee, meek, and riding on an ass and
upon a colt, the foal of an ass." Then, to make the
story told of Jesus run on all fours with the prophecy,
he writes that the disciples " brought the ass and the
colt, and put on them their garments, and he (Jesus)
sat on them." He was unacquainted w^ith Hebrew
idiom, and so not aware that the words, " a colt the
foal of an ass," are no more than a rhetorical
reduplication^ of an ass. There was, then, but one
animal in the original form of the story, and, as the
French say, it saute aux yeux that the importation of
two is due to the influence of the prophecy on the
mind of the transcriber. Why, therefore, go out of the
way to attribute the tale to the influence of a legend
of Bacchus, so multiplying empty hypotheses ? Mr.
Robertson, with hopeless perversity, takes Dr. Percy
Gardner to task for repeating what he calls " the
fallacious explanation, that 'an ass and the foal of
^ Such reduplications are common in Semitic languages, and in
John xix, 23, 24, we have an exact analogy with this passage of
Matthew. In Psalm xxii, 19, we read: "They parted my garments
among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots." Here one and
the same incident is contemplated in both halves of the verse, and it
is but a single garment that is divided. Now see what John makes
out of this verse, regarded as a prophecy of Jesus. He pretends that
the soldiers took Jesus's garments, and made four parts, to every
soldier a part, so fulfilling the words : " They parted my garments
among them." Next they took the coat without seam, and said to
one another : " Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall
be." The parallel with Matthew is exact. In each case what is mere
rhetorical reduplication is interpreted of two distinct objects, and on
this misinterpretation is based a fulfilment of prophecy, and out of
it generated a new form of a story or a fresh story altogether. In
defiance of the opinion of competent Hebraists, Mr. Kobercson writes
(p. 338) that " there is no other instance of such a peculiar tautology
in the Old Testament." On the contrary, the Old Testament teems
with them.
HISTORICAL METHOD 25
an ass ' represents a Greek misconception of the
Hebrew way of saying ' an ass,' as if Hebrews in
every-day life lay under a special spell of verbal
absurdity."^ But did Hebrews in every-day life Jewish ab-
mould their ideas of the promised Messiah on out- orPa^an
of-the-way legends of Bacchus ? Were they likely to myths
fashion a tale of a Messianic triumph out of Gentile
myths ? Do we not know from a hundred sources
that the Jews of that age, and the Christians who
were in this matter their pupils, abhorred everything
that savoured of Paganism. They were the last
people in the world to construct a life of the Messiah
out of the myths of Bacchus, and Hermes, and Osiris,
and Heracles, and the fifty other heathen gods and
heroes whom Mr. Robertson rolls up into w^hat he
calls the ''composite myth" of the Gospels. But let
us return to his criticism of Dr. Gardner. Why, it
may be asked, was it a priori more absurd of Matthew
to turn one ass into two in deference to Hebrew
prophecy, than for Hebrews to set their Messiah
riding into the holy city on two asses in deference
to a myth of Bacchus crossing a marsh on two
of them ? Is it not Mr. Robertson, rather than
Dr. Gardner, who here lies under a special spell of Kobertson
absurdity? *'A glance at the story of Bacchus," Gardner
writes Mr. Robertson, " crossing a marsh on two J^nd
asses would have shown him that he was dealing '^^^^" ^^
with a zodiacal myth." The boot is on the other
foot. Had Mr. Robertson chosen to glance at the
Pocticon Astronomicon of Hyginus, a late and some-
what worthless Latin author, who is the authority for
this particular tale of Bacchus, he would have read
^ Christianity and Mythology, p. 286.
26 HISTOEICAL METHOD
(ii, 23) how Liber {i.e., Dionj^sus) was on his way to
get an oracle at Doclona which might restore his lost
sanity: Sed aim venisset ad quandam paludem mafinam,
qiiam transirc non j^osset, de quihusdam duohus asellis
ohviis factis dicitur luium deprehcndissc corum, et ita
esse transvectus, lit omnino aquam non tetigerit.
In English : *' But when he came to a certain
spacious marsh, which he thought he could not get
across, he is said to have met on the way two young
asses, of which he caught one, and he was carried
across on it so nicely that he never touched the water
at all."
Here there is no hint of Bacchus riding on two
asses, and Mr. Robertson's entire hypothesis falls to
the ground like a house of cards. The astounding
thing is that, although he insists on pages 287
and 453^ that Bacchus rode on two asses, and that
here is the true Babylonian explanation of Jesus
also riding on two, he gets the Greek, or rather
Latin, myth right on p. 339, and recognizes that
Dionysus was only mounted on one of the asses
when he passed the morass or river on his way to
Dodona. Thus, by Mr. Robertson's own admission,
Bacchus never rode on two asses at all.
^h^^Pilate Why was Jesus crucified by Pilate? For an answer
to this~ let us Tor a little quit " the very stimulating
and iiTformlTfg works," as i)r. Drews calls them, of
Mr. Robertson, and turn to Dr. Drews' s own work on
T]ie Witnesses to the Historiv itijofJc&RS.'^ For there
we find the true " astral myth interpretation " in all
^ Dr. Carpenter had objected that " It has first to be proved that
Dionysos rode on two asses, as well as that Jesus is the San-God."
Mr. Robertson complacently answers (p. 453) : '* My references
perfectly prove the currency of the myth in question " !
2 The Witnesses, p. 55 (p. 75 of German edition).
myth
HISTOEICAL METHOD 27
its glory. The Pilate of Christian legend was, so we
learn, not originally an historical person at all; the
whole story of Christ is to be taken in an astral
sense ; and Pilate in particular represents the story
of Orion, the javelin-man (Pilatus), with the Arrow
or Lance constellation (Sagitta), which is supposed to
be very long in the Greek myth, and reappears in the
Christian legend under the name of Longinus In
the astral myth the Christ hanging on the cross or
world-tree {i.e., the Milky Way) is killed by the lance
of Pilatus The Christian population of Rome told
the legend of a javelin-man, a Pilatus, who was
supposed to have been responsible for the death of
the Saviour. Tacitus heard the myth repeated, and,
like the fool he was, took it that Pilate the javelin-
man was no other than Pilate the E,oman procurator
of Judaea under Tiberius, who must have been known
to him from the books of Josephus.^ Accordingly,
Tacitus sat down and penned his account of the
wholesale massacre and burning of Christians by
Nero in the fifteenth book of his Annals.
We shall turn to the evidence of Tacitus later on.
Meanwhile it is pertinent to ask where the myth of
Pilatus, of which Drews here makes use, came from.
The English text of Drews is somewhat confused ; but
presumedly Orion, with his girdle sword and lion's
skin, is no other than Pilatus ; and his long lance,
with which he kills Christ, further entitles him to
the name of Longinus. Or is it Pilatus who stabs
1 W^'hy necessarily from Jos-^phus ? Were not other sources of
recent Koman history avaihihle for Tacitus ? Here peeps out
Dr. Drews's conviction that the whole of ancient literature lies
before him, and that even Tacitus could have no other sources of
information than Dr. Drews.
28 HISTOEICAL METHOD
Orion ? It does not matter. Let us test this
hypothesis in its essential parts.
The Firstly, then, Longinus was the name coined by
myth Christian legend-mongers of the third or fourth
century for the centurion who stabbed Jesus with a
lance as he hung on the cross. How could so late a
myth influence or form part of a tradition three
centuries older than itself ? The incident of the
lance being plunged into the side of Jesus is related
only in the Fourth Gospel, and is not found in the
earlier ones. The author of that Gospel invented it
in order to prove to his generation that Jesus had
real blood in his body, and was not, as the Docetes
maintained, a phantasm mimicking reality to the ears
and eyes alone of those who saw and conversed with
him. This Gospel, even according to the Christian
tradition of its date, is barely earlier than a.d. 100,
and the name Longinus was not heard of before
A.D. 250 at the earliest. Yet Drews is ready to believe
that it was on the lips of Christians in the reign of
Nero, say in a.d. 64.
Secondly, what evidence is there that Pilatus could
mean the " javelin-man " for the earliest generations
of Roman Christians ? The language current among
them was Greek, not Latin, as the earliest Christian
inscriptions in the catacombs of Rome testify. The
language of Roman rites and popes remained Greek
for three centuries. Why, then, should they have had
their central myth of the crucifixion in a Latin form ?
Thirdl}', what evidence is there that Pilatus could
mean a javelin-man even to a Latin? Many lexico-
graphers interpret it in Virgil in the sense of packed
together or denscy and in most authors it bears the
sense of bald or despoiled.
HISTOEICAL METHOD 29
But, letting that pass, we ask what evidence is inade-
there that Orion ever had the epithet Pilatus in this the mythic
sense ? What evidence that such a myth ever existed theory
at all ? There is none, absolutely none. It is not
enough for these authors to ransack Lempriere and
other dictionaries of mythology in behalf of their
paradoxes ; but when these collections fail them,
they proceed to coin myths of their own, and pretend
that they are ancient, that the early Christians
believed in them, and that Tacitus fell into the trap;
as if these Christians, whom they acknowledge to
have been either Jews or the converts of Jews, had
not been constitutionally opposed to all pagan myths
and cults alike ; as if a good half of the earliest
Christian literature did not consist of polemics
against the pagan myths, which were regarded with
the bitterest scorn and abhorrence ; as if it were not
notorious that it was their repugnance to and ridicule
of pagan gods and heroes and religious myths that
earned for the Christians, as for the Jews, their
teachers, the hatred and loathing of the pagan popu-
lations in whose midst they lived. And yet we are
asked to believe that the Christian Church, almost
before it was separated from the Jewish matrix,
fashioned for itself in the form of the Gospels an
allegory of a Sun-god Joshua, who, though unknown
to serious Semitic scholars, is yet so well known to
Mr. Robertson and his friends that he identifies him
with Adonis, and Osiris, and Dionysus, and Mithras,
and Krishna, and Asclepius, and with any other
god or demi-god that comes to hand in Lempriere's
dictionary. After hundreds of pages of such fanciful
writing, Dre^vs warns us in solemn language against
the attempts *'of historical theologians to reach the
30
HISTOKICAL METHOD
Joshua the
Sun-god
a pure
invention
of the
mythic
school
nucleus of the Gospels by purely philological means."
The attempt, he declares, is " hopeless, and must
remain hopeless, because the Gospel tradition floats
in the airy One would like to know in what medium
his own hypotheses float. Like Dr. Drews, Mr.
Robertson adopts the Joshua myth as if it were
beyond question. His faith in " the ancient Pales-
tinian Saviour-Sun-God " is absolute. This otherwise
unknown deity was the core of what is gracefully
styled " the Jesuist myth." On examination, how-
ever, the Joshua Sun-god turns out to be the most
rickety of hypotheses. Because the chieftain who, in
old tradition, led the Jews across the Jordan into the
land of promise was named Joshua, certain critics,
who are still in the sun-myth phase of comparative
mythology — in particular, Stade and Winckler — have
conjectured that the name Joshua conceals a solar
hero worshipped locally by the tribe of Ephraim.
Even if there ever existed such a cult, it had long
vanished when the book of Joshua was compiled ; for
in this he is no longer represented as a solar hero,
but has become in the popular tradition a human
figure, a hero judge, and leader of the armies of
Israel. Of a Joshua cult the book does not preserve
any trace or memory ; that it ever existed is an
improbable and unverifiable hypothesis. We might
just as well conjecture that Romulus, and Remus,
and other half or wholly legendary figures of ancient
history, were sun-gods and divine saviours. But it is
particularly in Jewish history that this school is apt
to revel. Moses, and Joseph, and David were all
mythical beings brought down to earth ; and the god
David and the god Joshua, the god Moses, the god
Joseph, form in the imagination of these gentlemen
HISTORICAL METHOD 31
a regular Hebrew prehistoric Pantheon. I say in
their imagination, for it is certain that when the
Pentateuch was compiled — at the latest in the fifth
century b.c. — the Jews no longer revered David, and
Joshua, and Joseph as sun-gods ; while of what they
worshipped even locally before that date we have little
knowledge, and can form only conjectures. In any
case, that they continued to worship a sun-god under
the name of Joshua as late as the first century of our
era must strike anyone who has the least knowledge
of Hebrew religious development, who has ever read
Philo or Josephus, or studied Jewish sapiential and
apocalyptic literature of the period b.c. 200-a.d. 100, Supposed
as a wildly improbable supposition. Sensible that secrecy of
their hypothesis conflicts with all we know about the christian
Jews of these three centuries, these three authors cuitahter-
' . ary trick
— Messrs. Drews, Robertson, and W. B. Smith —
insist on the esoterism and secrecy of the cryptic
society which in Jerusalem harboured the cult. This
commonest of literary tricks enables them to evade
any awkward questions, and whenever they are
challenged to produce some evidence of the existence
of such a cult they can answer that, being secret and
esoteric, it could leave little or no evidence of itself,
and that we must take their ipse dixit and renounce
all hope of direct and documentary evidence. They
ask of us a greater credulity than any Pope of Rome
ever demanded.
The divine stage of Joshua, then, if it ever existed, Joshuaben
was past and forgotten as early as 500 b.c. It has also a Sun-
left no traces. Of the other Joshuas, who meet us in o*^"^^
the pages of the Jewish scriptures, the most important
one is Jeshua or Joshua ben Jehozadak, a high priest
who, together with Zerubbabel, is often mentioned
32 HISTOEICAL METHOD
(according to the EncydopcEclia Bihlica) in contcm-
})orarij writings. Not only, then, have we contemporary
evidence of this Joshua as of a mere man and a priest,
but we know from it that he stooped to such mundane
occupations as the rebuilding of the Temple. He
also had human descendants, who are traced in
Nehemiah xii, 10 fol. down to Jaddua. Of this epoch
of Jewish history, in which the Temple was being
rebuilt, we have among the Jewish and Aramaic
papyri lately recovered at Elephantine documents
that are autographs of personages with w^hom this
Joshua may well have been in contact. His contem-
poraries are mentioned and even addressed in these
documents, so that he and his circle are virtuall}^ as
well evidenced for us as Frederick the Great and
Voltaire. Is it credible in the face of such facts that
the authors we are criticizing should turn this Joshua,
too, into a solar god ? Yet Drews turns with zest
to the notice of this Joshua, the high priest in
Zechariah iii, as '' one of the many signs " which
attest that " Joshua or Jesus was the name under
which the expected Messiah was honoured in certain
Jewish sects." Unless he regards this later Joshua
also as a divine figure, and no mere man of flesh and
blood, why does he thus drag him into his argument ?
The sus- But, after all, Messrs. Drews and Robertson are
the com-^ uneasy about the book of Joshua, and not altogether
P^^e^^o^ capable of the breezy optimism of their instructor,
Testament Mr. W. B. Smith, who, in Ecce Deiis (p. 74), commits
burked himself to the naive declaration that, " even if we
evicience
favourable had no evidence whatever of a pre-Christian Jesus
to the Sun- g^j|-^ ^^g should be compelled to affirm its existence
hypothesis with undiminished decision." Accordingly, they both
go out of their way to hint that the ancient Jews
HISTORICAL METHOD 33
suppressed the facts of the Joshua or Jesus Sun-God-
Saviour cult. Thus Mr. Robertson {Christianity and
Mijthologii, p. 99, note 1), after urging us to accept a
late and worthless tradition about Joshua, the Son
of Nave, remarks that " the Jewish books would
naturally drop the subject." How ill-natured, to be
sure, of the authors of the old Hebrew scriptures to
suppress evidence that would have come in so handy
for Mr. Robertson's speculations. Dr. Drews takes
another line, and in a note draws our attention to
the fact that the Samaritans possessed an apocryphal
book of the same name as the canonical book of
Joshua. This book, he informs us, is based upon an
old work composed in the third century b.c, con-
taining stories which in part do not appear in our
Book of Joshua.
He here suggests that something was omitted in
canonical Joshua by its authors which would have
helped out his hypothesis of a Joshua Sun-god cult.
He will not, however, find the Samaritan book
encouraging, for it gives no hint of such a cult ;
of that anyone who does not mind being bored by a
perusal of it can satisfy himself. Drews's statement
that it is based on an old work composed in the third
century b.c. is founded on pure ignorance, and the
Encyclopcedia Biblica declares it to be a medieval
production of no value to anyone except the student
of the Samaritan sect under Moslem rule.
Mr. Robertson thinks he has got on a better trail The evid-
in the shape of a tradition as to Joshua which he is i51*^xabari
quite sure the old Jewish scripture writers suppressed, about
Let us examine it, for it affords a capital example
of his ideas of what constitutes historical evidence.
*' Eastern tradition," he writes, "preserves a variety
D
34 HISTOEICAL METHOD
of myths that the Bible-makers for obvious reasons
suppressed or transformed." In one of those tradi-
tions *' Joshua is the son of the mythical Miriam ;
that is to say, there was probably an ancient Pales-
tinian Saviour-Sun-God, Jesus, the son of Mary."
So on p. 285 we learn that the cult of Jesus of
Nazareth was " the Survival of an ancient solar or
other w^orship of a Babe Joshua, son of Miriam."
And he continually alludes to this ancient form of
devotion, not as a mere hypothesis, but as a well-
ascertained and demonstrable fact.-^
Let us then explore this remarkable tradition by
which " we are led to surmise that the elucidation of
the Christ myth is not yet complete." For such is
the grandiose language in which he heralds his dis-
covery. And what does it amount to ? An Arab,
El Tabari, who died in Bagdad about the year 925,
compiled a Chronicle, of w^hich some centuries later
an unknown native of Persia made an abridgement
in his own tongue, and inserted in it as a gloss " the
remarkable Arab tradition," as it is called in the
Pagan Chrlsts (p. 157) of Mr. Eobertson, albeit he
acknowledges in a footnote that it is " not in the
Arabic original." He asks us accordingly, on the
faith of an unknown Persian glossator of the late
Middle Ages, to believe that the canonical Book of
Joshua originally contained this absurd tradition, and
why ? Because it would help out his hypothesis that
1 On p. 299, Mary, mother of Joshua, does duty for Mary Magdalen.
We there read as follows : " The friendship (of Jesus) with a ' Mary '
points towards some old myth in which a Palestinian God, perhaps
named Yeschu or Joshua, figures in the changing relations of lover
and son towards a mythic Mary, a natural fluctuation in early
theosophy." Very " natural" indeed among the Jews, who punished
even adultery with death !
HISTORICAL METHOD
35
Jesus was an ancient Palestinian Saviour -Sun-God,
worshipped by a cryptic society of Hebrews in Jeru-
salem, both before and after the beginning of the
Christian era; and this is the man who writes about
"the psychological resistance to evidence " of learned
men, and sets it down to " malice and impercipience "
that anyone should challenge his conclusions. As
usual, Dr. Drews, who sets Mr. Robertson on a level
with the author of the Golden Bough^ as a "leading
exponent of his new mythico-symbolical method,"
plunges into the pit which Mr. Robertson has dug
for him, and writes that, " according to an ancient
Arabian tradition, the mother of Joshua was called
Mirzam (Mariam, Maria, as the mother of Jesus
was)."
The source from which Messrs. Drews and Robertson W. B.
have drawn this particular inspiration is Dr. W. B. hypothesis
Smith's work. The Pre-Christian Jesus {Der Vor- of a God
christliclie Jesus). This book, we are told, " first
systematically set forth the case for the thesis of its
title." Let us, therefore, consider its main argument.
We have the following passages in Acts xviii, 24 : —
Now a certain Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrian
by race, a learned man, came to Ephesus ; and he
was mighty in the Scriptures. This man had been
instructed in the way of the Lord ; and, being fervent
in spirit, he spake and taught carefully the things
concerning Jesus, knowing only the baptism of John :
and he began to speak boldly in the synagogue. But
Joshua
^ Needless to say, Dr. Frazer, as any scholar must, rejects the
thesis of the unhistoricity of Jesus with derision. Mr. llobertson, in
turn, imputes his rejection of it to timidity. "He (Frazer) has had
some experience in arousing conservative resistance," he writes in
Christianity and Mijtltology, p. 111. He cannot realize that any
learned man should differ from himself, except to curry favour with
the orthodox, or from fear of them.
36 HISTOEICAL METHOD
when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him
unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God
more carefully. And when he was minded to pass
over into Achaia, the brethren encouraged him, and
wrote to the disciples to receive him : and when he
was come, he helped them much which had believed
through grace : for he powerfully confuted the Jews,
publicly, showing by the Scriptures that Jesus was
the Christ.
Availing ourselves of the canons of interpretation
laid down by Drews and Robertson, we may para-
phrase the above somewhat as follows by way of
getting at its true meaning : —
" A certain sun-myth hero, as his name Apollos
signifies, came to Ephesus, which, being the centre
of Astarte or Aphrodite worship, was obviously the
right place for such a hero to pilgrimage unto. He
was mighty in the Jewish Scriptures, and had been
instructed in the way of the Lord Joshua, the Sun-
God- Saviour of ancient Ephraim. He spake and
taught carefully the things concerning this Joshua
(or Adonis, or Osiris, or Dionysus, or Yegetation-god,
or Horus — for you can take your choice among these
and many more). But he knew only of the pre-
historic ritual of baptism of Cadmus or of Oannes-Ea,
the ancient culture-god of the Babylonians, who
appeared in the form of a Fish-man, teaching men
by day and at night going down into the sea — in his
capacity of Sun-god." This Cadmus or Cannes was
worshipped at Jerusalem in the cryptic sect of the
Christists or Jcsuists under the name of John. His
friend Apollos, the solar demi-god, began to speak
boldly in the synagogue. Priscilla (presumably Cybele,
mother of the gods), and Aquila, the Eagle-God, or
Jupiter, heard him ; she took him forthwith and
HISTORICAL METHOD 37
expounded to him the way of Jahve, who also was
identical wdth Joshua, the Sun-god, with Osiris, etc.
Professor W. B. Smith is a little more modest and His forced
less thorough-going in his application of mythico- fetched"
symbolic methods. He only asks us to believe that ii^terpreta-
the trite and hackneyed phrase, "the things con- common
cerning Jesus," refers not, as the context requires, to P^ii'ases
the history and passion of Jesus of Galilee, but to
the mysteries of a prehistoric Saviour-God of the
same name. We advisedly ssij j^rehistoric, for he was
never mentioned by anyone before Professor Smith
discovered him. The name Jesus, according to him,
means what the word Essene also meant, a Healer.^
Note, in passing, that this etymology is wholly false,
and rests on the authority of a writer so late, ignorant,
and superstitious as Epiphanius. Now, why cannot
the words, " the things about Jesus," in this context
mean the tradition of the ministry of Jesus as it had
shaped itself at that time, beginning with the Baptism
and ending with the Ascension, as we read in Acts i, 22?
It cannot, argues Professor Smith, because Apollos Apollos
only knew the baptism of John. The reference to Baptism of
John's baptism may be obscure, as much in early John
Christianity is bound to be obscure, except to Professor
Smith and his imitators. Yet this much is clear, that
it here means, what it means in the sequel, the baptism
of mere repentance as opposed to the baptism of the
Spirit, which was by laying on of hands, and cou-
1 I could have given Professor Smith a better tip. Philo composed
a glossary of Biblical and other names with their meanings, which,
though lost in Greek, survives in an old Armenian version. In this
Essene is equated with " silence." What a magnificent aid to
Professor Smith's faith ! For if Essene meant •' a silent one," then
the pre-Christian Nazarenes must surely have been an esoteric and
secret sect.
38 HISTOEICAL METHOD
ferred the charismatic gifts of the Holy Ghost. The
Marcionites, and after thera the Manichean and
Cathar sects, retained the latter rite, and termed it
Spiritual or Pneumatic Baptism ; while the}^ dropped
as superfluous the Johannine baptism with water.
It would appear, then, that ApoUos was perfectly
acquainted with the personal history of Jesus, and
understood the purport of the baptism of repent-
ance as a sacrament preparing followers of Jesus for
the kingdom of Heaven, soon to be inaugurated on
earth. Perhaps we get a glimpse in this passage of
an age when the mission of Jesus in his primitive
role as herald of the Messianic kingdom and a mere
continuer of John's mission was familiar to many
who yet did not recognize him as the Messiah. For,
after instruction by Priscilla and Aquila, Apollos set
himself to confute the Jews who denied Jesus to
have been Messiah, which, as a mere herald of the
approaching kingdom of God, he was not. We know
that Paul regarded him as having attained that
dignity only through, and by, the fact of the Spirit
having raised him from the dead ; and did not regard
him as having received it through the descent of the
Spirit on him in the Jordan, as the oriental Christians
presently believed. Still less did Paul know of the
later teaching of the orthodox churches — viz., that
the Annunciation was the critical moment in which
Christ became Jesus. In any case, we must not
interpret the words, " the things about Jesus," in
this passage in a forced and unnatural sense wholly
alien to the writer of Acts. This writer again and
again recapitulates the leading facts of the life and
ministry of Jesus, and the phrase, '' the things con-
cerning Jesus," cannot in any work of his bear any
HISTOEICAL METHOD 39
other sense. Moreover, the same author uses the
very same phrase elsewhere (Luke xxiv, 19) in the
same sense. Here Cleopas asks Jesus (whom he had
failed to recognize), and says: —
Dost thou alone sojourn in Jerusalem, and not
know the things which are come to pass there in
these days ? And he said unto him, What things ?
And they said unto him, the thint/s concerning Jesus
of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed
and w^ord before God and all the people : and how
the chief priests and our rulers delivered him up to
be condemned to death, and crucified him.
Such, then, were "the things about Jesus," and
to find in them, as Professor W. B. Smith does, an
allusion to a pre-Christian myth of a God Joshua
is to find a gigantic mare's-nest, and fly in the face
of all the evidence. He verges on actual absurdity
when he sees the same allusion in Mark v, 26, where
a sick woman, having heard " the things concerning
Jesus," went behind him, touched his garment, and
was healed. Her disease w^as of a hysterical descrip-
tion, and in the annals of faith-healing such cures are
common. What she had heard of was obviously not
his fame as a Sun-god, but his power to heal sick
persons like herself. Professor Smith tries to find
support for his hardy conjecture in a chance phrase Magical
in a magical papyrus of Paris, No. 3,009, edited first Wessely°^
by W'essely, and later by Dieterich in his Abraxas^
p. 138. It is a form of exorcism to be inscribed on a
tin plate and hung round the neck of a person
possessed by a devil, or repeated over him by an
exorcist. In this rigmarole the giants, of course, are
dragged in, and the Tower of Babel and King
Solomon ; and the name of Jesus, the God of the
Hebrews, is also invoked in the following terms: "I
40
HISTOEICAL METHOD
Jesus a
Nazorsean
in what
sense
adjure thee by Jesus the God of the Hebrews, labaiae
Abraoth aia thoth ele, elo," etc. The age of this
l^apyrus is unknown ; but Wessely puts it in the
third century after Christ, while Dieterich shows that
it can in no case be older than the second century
B.C. It is clearly the composition of some exorcist
who clung on to the skirts of late Judaism, for he is
at pains to inform us in its last line that it is a
Hebrew composition and preserved among pure men.
In that age, as in after ones, not a few exorcists,
trading on the fears and sufferings of superstitious
people, affected to be pure and holy ; and the mention
of Jesus indicates some such charlatan, who was
more or less cognisant of Christianity and of the
practice of Christian exorcists. He was also aware
of the Jewish antecedents of Christianity, and did not
distinguish clearly between the mother religion and
its daughter. That is why he describes Jesus as a
Hebrew God. We know from other sources that
even in the earliest Christian age Gentiles used the
name of Jesus in exorcisms. The author of the
document styles Jesus God, just as Pliny informs us
that the Christians sang hymns " to Christ as to
God" — Christo quasi deo. How Professor Smith can
imagine that this papyrus lends any colour to his
thesis of a pre-Christian Jesus it is difficult to
imagine.
Still less does his thesis really profit by the text
of Matthew ii, 23, in which a prophecy is adduced
to the effect that the Messiah should be called a
Nazorsean, and this prophecy is declared to have been
fulfilled in so far as Jesus was taken by his parents
to live at Nazareth in Galilee.
What prophecy the evangelist had in mind is not
HISTORICAL METHOD 41
known. But Professor W. B. Smith jumps to the
conckision that the Christians were identical with the
sect of Nazor[Tei mentioned in Epiphanius as going back
to an age before Christ ; and he appeals in confirma-
tion of this quite gratuitous hypothesis^ to Acts
xxiv, 5, where the following of Jesus is described as
that of the Nazor?ei. It in no way helps the thesis
of the non-historicity of Jesus, even if he and his
followers were members of this obscure sect ; it would
rather prove the opposite. Drews, following W. B.
Smith, pretends in the teeth of the texts that the
name is applied to Jesus only as Guardian of the
World, Protector and Deliverer of men from the
power of sins and daemons, and that it has no refer-
ence to an obscure and entirely unknown village
named Nazareth. He also opines that Jesus was
called a Nazarene, because he was the promised
Netzer or Zemah who makes all things new, and so
forth. Such talk is all in the air. Why these
writers boggle so much at the name Nazorcean is not
^ Of course, it is possible that Jesus, before he comes on the scene,
at about the age of thirty, as a follower of John the Baptist, had been
a member of the Essene sect, as the learned writer of the article on
Jesus in the Jewish Encyclopcedia supposes. If such a sect of
Nazor£ei,as Epiphanius describes, ever really existed — and Epiphanius
is an unreliable author — then Jesus may have been a member of it.
But it is a long way from a may to a must. Even if it could be
proved that Matthew had such a tradition when he wrote, the proof
would not diminish one whit the absurdity of Professor Smith's
contention that he was a myth and a mere symbol of a God Joshua
worshipped by pre-Christian Nazoroei. The Nazoraei of Epiphanius
were a Christian sect, akin to, if not identical with, the Ebionites ;
and the hypothesis that they kept up among themselves a secret cult
of a God Joshua is as senseless as it is baseless, and opposed to all we
know of them. In what sense Matthew, that is to say the anonymous
compiler of the first Gospel, understood nazorceus is clear to anyone
who will take the trouble to read Matthew ii, 23. He understood by
it "a man who lived in the village called Nazareth," and that is the
sense which Nazarene (used interchangeably with it) also bears in the
Gospel. Mr. Smith scents enigmas everywhere.
42 HISTOEICAL METHOD
easy to divine ; still less to understand what Pro-
fessor Smith is driving at when he writes of those
whom he calls " historicists," that "They have
rightly felt that the fall of Nazareth is the fall of
historicism itself." Professor Burkitt has suggested
that Nazareth is Chorazin spelt backwards. Well-
hausen explains Nazorceaii from Nesar in the name
Gennessaret. In any case, as we have no first-
century gazetteer or ordnance survey of Galilee, it is
rash to suppose that there could have been no town
there of the name. True the Talmuds and the Old
Testament do not name it ; but they do not profess
to give a catalogue of all the places in Galilee, so
their silence counts for little.-^ All we know for
certain is that for the evangelist Nazortean meant
a dweller in Nazareth, and that he gave the word
that sense when he met with it in an anonymous
prophecy.
^^' I feel that I ought almost to apologize to my
on myths readers for investigating at such length the hypo-
thesis of a pre-Christian Jesus, son of a mythical
Mary, and for exhibiting over so many pages its
fantastic, baseless, and absurd character. But Mr.
Kobertson himself warns us of the necessity of show-
ing no mercy to myths when they assume the garb
of fact. For he adduces (p. 126) the William Tell
myth by way of illustrating once for all " the
fashion in which a fiction can even in a historical
^ How treacherous the arfiumentum a f^ilcntio may be I can
exemplify. My name and address were recently omitted for two years
running from the Oxford directory, yet my house is not one of the
smallest in the city. If any future publicist should pry into my life
with the aid of this publication, he will certainly infer that I was not
living in Oxford during those two years. And yet the Argument
from Silence is only valid where we have a directory or gazetteer or
carefully compiled list of names and addresses.
HISTORICAL METHOD 43
period find general acceptance." Even so it is with
his own lictions. We see them making their way
with such startUng rapidity over England and
Germany as almost to make one despair of this age
of popular enlightenment. It is not his fault, and I
exonerate him from blame. For centuries orthodox His
theologians have been trying to get out of the Gospels Jhose^o/
supernaturalist conclusions which were never in them, old-
nor could with any colour be derived from them orthodoxy
except by deliberately ignoring the canons of evidence
and the historical methods freely employed in the
study of all other ancient monuments and narratives.
They have set the example of treating the early
writings of Christianity as no other ancient books
would be treated. Mr. Robertson is humbly following
in their steps, but a rehours, or in an inverse sense.
They insist on getting more out of the New Testament
than any historical testimony could ever furnish ; he
on getting less. In other respects also he imitates
their methods. Thus they insist on regarding the
New Testament, and in particular the four Gospels,
as a homogeneous block, and will not hear of the
criticism which discerns in them literary development,
which detects earlier and later couches of tradition and
narrative. This is what I call the Sunday-school
attitude, and it lacks all perspective and orientation.
Mr. Robertson imbibed it in childhood, and has never
been able to throw it off. For him there is no before
and after in the formation of these books, no earlier
and later in the emergence of beliefs about Jesus, no
stratification of documents or of ideas. If he some-
times admits it, he withdraws the admission on the
next page, as militating against his cardinal hypo-
thesis. He seems never to have submitted himself
44
HISTORICAL METHOD
Thus he
insists on
the
priority in
Christian
tradition
of the
Virgin
Birth
legend
to systematic training in the methods of historical
research — never, as we say, to have gone through the
mill ; and accordingly in the handling of documents
he shows himself a mere wilful child.
His treatment of the legend of the Virgin Birth is
an example of this mental attitude, which might he
described as orthodoxy turned upside down and
inside out. The Gospel of Mark is demonstrably
older than those of the other two synoptists who
merely copied it out with such variations, additions,
omissions, and modifications as a growing reverence
for Jesus the Messiah imposed. It contains, no more
than the Pauline Epistles and the Johannine Gospel,
any hint of the supernatural birth of Jesus. It
regards him quite simply and naturally as the son of
Joseph and Mary. In it the neighbours of Jesus
enumerate by way of contumely the names of his
brothers and sisters. I have shown also in m}^ Myth,
Magic, and Morals that this naturalist tradition of
his birth dominates no less the whole of the Gospels
of Matthew and Luke apart from the first two
chapters of each, and that even in the first chapter
of Matthew the pedigree in early texts ended with
the words " Joseph begat Jesus." I have shown
furthermore that the belief in the paternity of Joseph
was the characteristic belief of the Palestinian Chris-
tians for over two centuries, that it prevailed in Syria
to the extent of regarding Jesus and Thomas as twin
brothers. I have pointed out that the Jewish inter-
locutor Trypho in Justin Martyr's dialogue (c. 150)
maintains that Jesus was born a man of men and
rejects the Virgin Birth legend as a novelty unworthy
of monotheists, and that he extorts from his Christian
antagonist the admission that the great majority
HISTORICAL METHOD 45
of Christians still believed in the paternity of
Joseph.
Now Mr. Robertson evidently reads a good deal, Hisexcep-
and must at one time or another have come across tieatment
all these facts. Why, then, does he go out of his way of Chris-
to ignore them, and, in common with Professors Drews tion
and W. B. Smith, insist that the miraculous tradition
of Jesus's birth was coeval with the earliest Chris-
tianity and prior to the tradition of a natural birth ?
Yet the texts stare him in the face and confute him.
Why does he shut his eyes to them, and gibe per-
petually at the critical students who attach weight to
them '? The works of all the three writers are tirades
against the critical method which tries to disengage
in the traditions of Jesus the true from the false, fact
from myth, and to show how, in the pagan society
which, as it were, lifted Jesus up out of his Jewish
cradle, these myths inevitably gathered round his
figure, as mists at midday thicken around a mountain
crest.
Their insistence that in the case of Christian in secular
origins the miraculous and the non-miraculous form uses^other
a solid block of impenetrable myth is all the more canons
remarkable, because in secular history they are methods,
prepared, nay anxious, for the separation of truth
from falsehood, of history from myth, and continually
urge not only its possibility, but its necessity. Mr.
Robertson in particular prides himself on meting out
to ApoUonius of Tyana a measure which he refuses c.p., in
to Jesus the Messiah. " The simple purport," he theTtory^
writes in the Literary Guide, May 1, 1913, "of my of Apol-
chapter on xVpollonius was to acknowledge his
historicity, despite the accretions of myth and more
or less palpable fiction to his biography." And yet
46 HISTOEICAL METHOD
there are ten testiraonies to the historicity of Jesus
where there is one to that of Apollonius ; yet Apol-
lonius was reputed to have been born miraculously,
and his birth accompanied by the portent of a meteor
from heaven, as that of Jesus by a star from the east.
Like Jesus, he controlled the devils of madness and
disease, and by the power of his exorcisms dismissed
them to be tortured in hell. Like Peter, he miracu-
lously freed himself from his bonds ; like Jesus, he
revealed himself after death to a sceptical disciple
and viva voce convinced him of his ascent to heaven ;
like him, he ascended in his body up to heaven amid
the hymns of maiden worshippers. In life he spent
seven days in the bowels of the earth, and gathered
a band of disciples around him who acclaimed him
as a divine being ; long after his death temples were
raised to him as to a demigod, miracles wrought by
his relics, and prayer and sacrifice offered to his
genius. So considerable was the parallelism between
his story and that of Jesus that the pagan enemies
of the Christians began about the year 300 to run
his cult against theirs, and it was only yesterday that
the orthodox began to give up the old view that the
Life of Apollonius was a blasphemous rechauffe of
the Gospels. " There is no great reason to doubt that
India was visited by Apollonius of Tyana," writes
Mr. Robertson {Christianity and Mythology, p. 273) ;
and yet his visit in the only relation we have of it
is a tissue of marvels and prodigies, his Indian
itinerary is impossible, and full of contradictions not
only of what we know of Indian geography to-day,
but of what was already known in that day. Yet
about his pilgrimage thither, declares Mr. Robertson,
there is no more uncertainty than about the embassies
HISTORICAL METHOD 47
sent by Porus to Augustus, and by the king of
" Taprobane " to Claudius. " There is much myth,"
he writes again, p. 280, *' in the life of Apollonius of
Tyana, who appears to be at the bottom a real
historical personage." In the Gospels we have the
story of Jairus's daughter being raised to life from
apparent death. " A closely similar story is found
in Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the
girl in each case being spoken of in such a way as
to leave open the question of her having been dead
or a cataleptic." So writes Mr. Robertson, p. 334,
who thinks that "the simple form preserved in
Matthew suggests the derivation from the story in
Philostratus," overlooking here, as elsewhere, the
chronological difficulties. We can forgive him for
that ; but why, we must ask, does the presence of
such stories in the Gospel irrevocably condemn Jesus
to non-historicity, while their presence in the Life of
Apollonius leaves his historical reality intact and
unchallenged ? Is it not that the application of his
canons of interpretation to Apollonius would have
deprived him of one of the sources from which the
mythicity of Jesus by his anachronistic methods could
be deduced ?
Mr. Robertson endeavours in a halting manner to The early
justify his partiality for Apollonius. " We have," he ^;''y'of\he
writes {Pagan ChristSt p. 283, § 16), " no reason for Sun -god
doubting that there was an Apollonius of Tyana. °^
The reasons for not doubting are (1) that there
was no cause to be served by a sheer fabrication ;
and (2) that it was a much easier matter to take a
known name as a nucleus for a mass of marvels and
theosophic teachings than to build it up, as the
phrase goes about the canon, ' round a hole.' The
--t
48 HISTOEICAL METHOD
difference between such a case and those of Jesuism
and Buddhism is obvious. In those cases there was
a cultus and an organization to be accounted for, and
a biography of the founder had to be forthcoming.
In the case of Apollonius, despite the string of
marvels attached to his name, there was no cultus."
Let us examine the above argument. In the case
of " Jesuism " (Mr. Robertson's argot for early
Christianity) there had to be fabricated a biography
of Jesus, because there existed an organized sect that
worshipped Jesus.
The organized sect consisted, according to Mr.
Robertson, of " Christists " or " Jesuists," and the
chief incident for which they were organized was an
annual play in which the God Jesus was betrayed,
arrested, condemned, was crucified, died, was buried,
and rose again. Ober Ammergau has supplied him
w^ith his main conception, and his annually recurring
" Gospel mystery play," as he imagines it to have
been acted by the " Jesuists," who were immediate
ancestors of the Christians, is a faithful copy of the
modern Passion Play. He supposes it to have been
acted annually because the hypothetical Sun-God-
Saviour Joshua, whose mythical sufferings and death
it commemorated, was an analogue of Osiris, whose
sufferings and death were similarly re^^resented in
Egypt each recurring spring ; also of Adonis, of
Dionysus, of Mithras, and of sundry vegetation gods,
annually slain to revive vegetation and secure the
life of the initiate in the next world. Be it remarked
also that the annuall}^ slain God of the Jesuists was
not only an analogue of these other gods, but a
"composite myth" made up of their myths. As we
have seen, Mr. Robertson is ready to exhibit to us in
HISTOEICAL METHOD 49
one or another of their m3^thologies the origmal of
every smgle incident and actor in the Jesuist play.
Such was the cultus and organization which,
according to Mr. Robertson and his imitator Dr.
Drews, lies behind the Christian religion. The latter
began to be when the " Jesuist " cult, having broken
away from Judaism, was also concerned to break
away from the paganism in contact with which the
play would first arise.
A biography of the Founder of the cult was now The Gos-
called for, by the Founder oddly enough being meant transcript
the God himself, and not the hierophant who insti- of this play
tuted the play. The Christian Gospels are the
biography in question. They are a transcript of the
annually performed ritual drama, just as Lamb's
Tales from Shakespeare are transcripts of Shake-
speare's plays.
The first performances of the play, we learn,
probably took place in Egypt. It ceased to be acted
when " it was reduced to writing as part of the
gospel." How far away from Jerusalem it was that
the momentous decision was taken by the sect to
give up play acting and be content with the transcript
Mr. Robertson " can hardly divine." He hints, how-
ever, that some of the latest representations took
place in the temples built by Herod at Damascus and
Jericho and in the theatres of the Greek town of
Gadara. *' The reduction of the play to narrative
form put all the Churches on a level, and would
remove a stumbling block from the way of the
ascetic Christists who objected to all dramatic shows
as such."
But where did the play come from ? What inspired
it ? Mr. Robertson makes a tour round the Mediter-
E
50
HISTOEICAL METHOD
Joshua or
Jesus slain
once a year
Hypo-
thesis of
human
sacrifice
among
Jews
ranean, and collects in Part II, Ch. I, of his Parjan
Christs a lot of scrappy information about mock
sacrifices and mystery dramas, all of them "cases
and modes of modification " of actual human sacri-
fices that were " once normal in the Semitic world."
He assumes without a tittle of proof, and against all
probability, that the annual sacrifice of a king or of
a king's son, whether in real or mimic, held its ground
among Jews as a religious ceremony right down into
our era, and was " reduced among them to ritual
form, like the leading worships of the surrounding
Gentile world." He fashions a new hypothesis in
accordance with these earlier ones as follows : —
''If in any Jewish community, or in the Jewish
quarter of any Eastern city, the central figure in this
rite {i.e., of a mock sacrifice annually recurring of a
man got up to represent a god) were customarily
called Jesus Barabbas, ' Jesus the Son of the Father *
— whether or not in virtue of an old cultus of a God
Jesus who had died annually like Attis and Tammuz
— we should have a basis for the tradition so long
preserved in many MSS. of the first gospel, and at
the same time a basis for the whole gospel myth of
the crucifixion."
Here we have a whole string of hypotheses piled
one on the other. Let us see which have an}^ ground
in fact, or cohere with what we know of the past, which
are improbable and unproven.
That human sacrifice was once in vogue among
the Jews is probable enough, and the story of the
frustrated sacrifice of Isaac was no doubt both a
memory and a condemnation of the old rite of
sacrificing first-born children with which we are
familiar in [ancient Phoenicia and her colony of
HISTOEICAL METHOD 61
Carthage. That such rites in JucUea and in Israel
did not survive the Assyrian conquest of Jerusalem
is certain. The latest allusion to them is in Isaiah
XXX, 27-33. This passage is post-exilic indeed ; but,
as Dr. Cheyne remarks (Encycl. Biblica, art. Molech,
col. 3,187) : " The tone of the allusion is rather that
of a ^Yriter remote from these atrocities than of a
prophet in the midst of the struggle against them."
AVe may then assume (1) that the custom of human
sacrifice disappeared among Jews centuries before
our era ; (2) that in the epoch 100 b.c. to 100 a.d.
every Jew, no matter where he lived, would view
such rites and reminiscences w^ith horror. As a
matter of fact, Philo dwells in eloquent language on
the horror and abomination of them as they were
still in his day sporadically celebrated, not among
Jews, but among pagans.
This being so, is it likely that any Jewish com-
munity would keep up even the simulacrum of such
rites ? In Josephus and Philo, who are our most
important witnesses to the Judaism that just preceded
or was contemporary with early Christianity, there
is no hint of such rites as might constitute a memory
and mimicry of human victims, whether identified
with a god or not. No serious pagan writer of that
age ever accused the Jews of keeping up such rites
openly or in secret among themselves. Apion alone Evidence
had a cock-and-bull story of how Antiochus Epiphanes, ^^ ^P'o"
ficceptecl
when he took Jerusalem (c. 170 b.c), found a Greek by Mr.
being fattened up by the Jews in the adytum of the I'^o^ertson
temple about to be slain and eaten in honour of their
god. Of course Mr. Robertson catches at this, and
writes {Parian Clirists, p. 161) that, ''in view of all
the clues, we cannot pronounce that story incredible."
52 HISTOKICAL METHOD
What clues has he ? The undoubted survival of
ritual murder among the pagans of Phoenicia in that
age is no clue, though it explains the genesis of
Apion's tale. And Mr. Robertson has one other
treasure trove — to wit, the obscure reading *' Jesus
Barabbas " in certain MSS. of Matthew xxvii, 17:
"Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye that I release
unto you? (Jesus) Barabbas, or Jesus which is
called Christ?"
The sacri- j^ }^g^g })een plausiblv suggested that the addition
ficing of . *• .,,,,..
the mock Jesus IS due to a scribe s reduplication, such as is
^^"S common in Greek manuscripts, of the last syllable
of the word hiimin = unto you. The in in uncials
is a regular compendium for lesun Jesus. In this
way the name Jesus may have crept in before
Barabbas. The entire story of Barabbas being
released has an apocryphal air, for Pilate would not
have let off a rebel against the Roman rule to please
the Jewish mob ; and the episode presupposes that
it was the Sanhedrin which had condemned Jesus to
death, which is equally improbable. What is pro-
bable, however, is that the Syrian soldiery to whom
Pilate committed Jesus for crucifixion were accus-
tomed to the Sacaea festival of Babylonian origin, and
perhaps to the analogous Roman feast of the Satur-
nalia. In such celebrations a mock king was chosen,
and vested with the costume, pomp, and privileges of
kingship perhaps for as long as three days. Then
the mimicry of slaying him was gone through, and
sometimes the mock king was really put to death.
Among Syrians the name Barabbas may — it is a mere
hypothesis — have been the conventional appellation
of the victim slain actually or in mock show on such
occasions ; and the soldiers of Pilate may have treated
HISTOEICAL METHOD 53
him en Barabbas. Loisy suggests in his Commentary
on the Synoptics that this was the genesis of the
Barabbas story. That a pagan soldiery treated Jesus
as a mock king, when they dressed him in purple
and set a crown of thorns on his head, and, kneeling
before him, cried " Hail King of the Jews," is quite
possible ; and serious scholars like Paul Wendland
{Ilennes, Vol. XXXHI (1898), foil. 175) and Mr.
W. R. Baton long ago discerned the probability.
But it was one thing for Syrians and pagans to
envisage the crucifixion of Jesus under the aspect of
a sacrifice to Molech, quite another thing for Jews —
whether as his enemies or as his partisans — to do
so ; nor does the Gospel narrative suggest that any
Jews took part in the ceremony. Perhaps it was out
of respect for Jewish susceptibilities — and they were
not likely to favour any mockery of their Messianic
aspirations — that Pilate caused Jesus to be divested
of the purple insignia of royalty and clad in his usual
garb before he was led out of the guardroom and
through the streets of Jerusalem on his way to
Golgotha.
We read in Philo {In Flacciim, vi) of a very Evidence
similar scene enacted in the streets of Alexandria °^ ^^^^^
within ten years of the crucifixion. The young
Agrippa, elevated by Caligula to the throne of Judaea,
had landed in that city, where feeling ran high
between Jews and pagans. The latter, by way of
ridiculing the pretensions of the Jews to have a king
of their own, seized on a poor lunatic named Carabas
who loitered night and day naked about the streets,
ran him as far as the Gymnasium, and there stood
him on a stool, so that all could see him, having first
set a mock diadem of byblus on his head and thrown
54
HISTORICAL METHOD
Evidence
of the
Khonds
a rug over his shoulders as a cloak of honour. In
his hand they set a papyrus stem by way of sceptre.
Having thus arrayed him, as in a mime of the
theatre, with the insignia of mock royalty, the young
men shouldering sticks, as if they were a bodyguard,
encircled him, while others advanced, saluted his
mock majest}^, and pretended that he was their judge
and king sitting on his throne to direct the common-
wealth. Meanwhile a shout went un from the crowd
around of Marin, which in the Syrian language
signified Lord.
This passage of Philo goes far to prove that the
mockery of Jesus in the Gospels was no more than
a public ridiculing of the Jewdsh expectations of a
national leader or Messiah who should revive the
splendours of the old Davidic kingdom. In any case,
the mockery is conducted at Jerusalem by Pilate's
soldiers (who w^ere not Jews, but a pagan garrison
put there to overawe the Jews), at Alexandria by
such Greeks as Apion penned his calumnies to
gratify. Mr. Robertson's suggestion that the mock
ceremony of the crucifixion was performed by Jews or
Christians is thus as absurd as it is gratuitous. It
was held in bitter despite of Jews and Christians, it
was a mockery and reviling of their most cherished
hopes and ideals ; and yet he does not scruple to
argue that it is " a basis for the whole gospel myth of
the crucifixion."
Thus he is left with the single calumny of Apion,
which deserves about as much credence as the similar
tales circulated to-day against the Jews of Bessarabia.
That is the single item of evidence he has to prove
what is the very hinge of his theory — the supposition,
namely, that the Jews of Alexandria first, and after-
HISTOEICAL METHOD 55
wards the Jews of Jerusalem, celebrated in secret
once a year ritual dramas representing the ceremonial
slaying of a Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, Son of the
Father and of the Virgin Miriam. It is a far cry to
the horrible rites of the Khonds of modern India ;
but Mr. Robertson, for whom wide differences of age
and place matter nothing when he is explaining
Christian origins, has discovered in them a key to
the narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus. He runs
all round the world and collects rites of ritual murder
and cannibal sacraments of all ages, mixes them up,
lumps them down before us, and exclaims trium-
phantly. There is my "psychological clue" to
Christianity. The most superficial resemblances
satisfy him that an incident in Jerusalem early in
our era is an essential reproduction of a Khond
ritual murder in honour of the goddess Tari. Was
there ever an author so hopelessly uncritical in his
methods ?
The Gospels, then, are a transcript of a mock Origin of
murder of the Sun-god Joshua annually performed pe^g^°^'
in secret by the Jews of Jerusalem, for it had got
there before it was written down and discontinued.
One asks oneself why, if the Jews had tolerated so
long a pagan survival among themselves, they could
not keep it up a little longer ; and why the " Christists "
should be so anxious " to break away from paganism "
at exactly the same hour. Moreover, their breach
with paganism did not amount to much, since they
kept the transcript of a ritual drama framed on
pagan lines and inspired throughout by pagan ideas
and myths ; not only kept it, but elevated it into
Holy Scripture. At the same time they retained the
Old Testament, which as Jews they had immemorially
66
HISTOEICAL METHOD
How could
a Sun-god
slain an-
nually be
slain by
Pontius
Pilate ?
venerated as Holy Scripture ; and for generations
they went on worshipping in the Jewish temple, kept
the Jewish feasts and fasts, and were zealous for
circumcision. What a hotchpotch of a sect !
It occurs to me to ask Mr. Robertson a few ques-
tions about this transcript. It was the annual mystery
play reduced to writing. The central event of the
play was the annual death and resurrection of a solai*
or vegetation god, whose attributes and career were
borrowed from the cults of Osiris, Adonis, Dionysus,
and Co. All these gods died once a year ; and, I
suppose, had you asked one of the votaries when his
god died, he would have answered. Every spring.
Now all the Gospels (in common with all Christian
tradition) are unanimous that Jesus only died once,
about the time of the Passover, when Pilate was
Roman Governor of Judsea, when Annas and Caiaphas
were high-priests and King Herod about. This surely
is an extraordinary record for a Sun-god who died
once a year. And it was not in the transcript only
that all these fixities of date crept in, for Mr. Robertson
insists most vehemently that Pilate was an actor in
the play. "Even the episode," he writes {Pagan
Christs, p. 193), "of the appeal of the priests and
Pharisees to Pilate to keep a guard on the tomb,
though it might be a later interpolation, could quite
well have been a dramatic scene." In Mark and
Matthew, as containing "the earlier version " of the
drama, he detects everywhere a "concrete theatri-
cality." Thus he commits himself to the astonish-
ing paralogism that Pilate and Herod, Annas and
Caiaphas, and all the other personages of the closing
chapters of the Gospels, were features in an annually
recurring passion play of the Sun-god Joshua ; and
HISTOEICAL T^IETHOD 67
this play ^yas not a novelty introduced after the
crucifixion, for there never was a real crucifixion.
On the contrar}^ it ^Yas a secret survival among
paganized Jews, a bit of Jewish pagan mummery
that had been going on long ages before the actors
represented in it ever lived or were heard of. Such
is the reductlo ad ahsurdum of the thesis which peeps
out everywhere in Mr. Robertson's pages. And now
we have found what we were in search of — namely,
the cultus and organization to account for which a
biography of Jesus had to be fabricated. The Life
of Apollonius, argues Mr. Robertson, cannot have
been built up round a hole, and as there was no
organized cult of him (this is utterly false), there
must have been a real figure to fit the biography. In
the other case the organized and pre-existing cult was
the nucleus around which the Gospels grew up like
fairy rings around a primal fungus. It is not obvious
why a cult should exclude a real founder, or, rather,
a real person, in honour of whom the cult was kept
up. In the worship of the Augustus or of the ancient
Pharaoh, who impersonated and was Osiris, we have
both. Why not have both in the case of Jesus, to
whose real life and subsequent deification the Augusti
and the Pharaohs ofter a remarkal)le parallel ? But
there never was any pre-Christian cult and organiza-
tion in Mr. Robertson's sense. It is a monstrous
outgrowth of his own imagination.
And as in the case of Apollonius, so in the case of Historicity
other ancients, he is careful not to apply those falls by the
methods of interpretation which he yet cannot pardon canons of
scholars for not applying to Jesus. Let us take icists
another example. Of the life of Plato we know next
to nothing. In the dialogues attributed to him his
58 HISTORICAL METHOD
name is only mentioned twice ; and in both cases its
mention could, if we adopt Mi'. Robertson's canons
of interpretation, be with the utmost ease explained
away as an interpolation. The only life we have of
him was penned by Diogenes Laertius 600 years
after he lived. The details of his life supplied b}^
Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, are obviously false.
The only notices preserved of him that can be claimed
to be contemporary are the few derived from his
nephew Speusippus. Now what had Speusippus to
tell ? Why, a story of the birth of Plato which, as
Mr. Robertson (p. 293) writes, scarcely differs from
the story of Matthew i, 18-25 :
" In the special machinery of the Joseph and Mary
myth — the warning in a dream and the abstention
of the husband — we have a simple duplication of the
relations of the father and mother of Plato, the former
being warned in a dream by Apollo, so that the child
was virgin-born."
Again, just as the Christians chose a " solar date "
for the birthday of Jesus, so the Platonists, according
to Mr. Robertson, p. 308, " placed the master's birth-
day on that of Apollo — that is, either at Christmas or
at the vernal equinox."
Now in the case of Jesus such legends and events
as the above suffice to convince Mr. Robertson that
the history of Jesus as told in the Gospels is a mere
survival of " ancient solar or other worship of a babe
Joshua, son of Miriam," of which ancient worship
nothing is known except that it looms large in the
imagination of himself, of Dr. Drews, and of Professor
W. B. Smith. On the other hand, we do know that
a cult of Apollo existed, and that it is no fiction of
these modern writers. Surely, then, it is time we
HISTOKICAL METHOD 69
changed our opinion about the historicity of Plato.
Is it not as clear as daylight that he was the survival
of a pre-Platonic Apollo myth ? We know the role
assigned to Apollo of revealer of philosophic truth.
Well, here were the dialogues and letters of Plato,
calling for an explanation of their origin ; a sect of
Platonists who cherished these writings and kept the
feast of their master on a solar date. On all the
principles of the new mythico-symbolic system Plato,
as a man, had no right to exist. " W^ithout Jesus,"
writes Drews, " the rise of Christianity can be quite
well understood." Yes, and, by the same logic, no
less the rise of Platonism without Plato, or of the
cult of Apollonius without ApoUonius. W^hat is
sauce for the goose is surely sauce for the gander.
With a mere change of names we could write of Plato
what on p. 282 Mr. Robertson writes of Jesus. Let
us do it : *' The gospel Jesus {read dialogist Plato)
is as enigmatic from a humanist as from a super-
naturalist point of view. Miraculously born, to the
knowledge of many {read of his nephew Speusippus,
of Clearchus whose testimony ' belongs to Plato's
generation,' of Anaxilides the historian and others),
he reappears as a natural man even in the opinion
of his parents {read of nephew Speusippus and the
rest) ; the myth will not cohere. Rationally con-
sidered, he (Plato) is an unintelligible portent ; a
Galilean {read Athenian) of the common people,
critically untraceable till his full manhood, when he
suddenly appears as a cult-founder."
Why does Mr. Robertson so incessantly labour the 'J^j^e Virgin
point that the belief in the supernatural birth of part of the
Jesus came first in time, and was anterior to the ^arhest
belief that he was born a man of men ? This he tradition
60 HISTOEICAL METHOD
implies in the words just cited : " Miraculously born,
to the knowledge of many, he reappears as a natural
man." A story almost identical with that of the
Massacre of the Innocents by Herod was, Mr. Robert-
son tells us (p. 184), told of the Emperor Augustus
in his lifetime, and appears in Suetonius " as accepted
history." And elsewhere (p. 395) he writes: "It
was after these precedents {i.e., of Antiochus and
Ptolemy) that Augustus, besides having himself given
out, like Alexander, as begotten of a God, caused
himself to be proclaimed in the East as being
born under Providence a Saviour and a God and the
beginning of an Evangel of peace to mankind."
Like Plato's story, then, so the official and contem-
porary legends of Augustus closely resembled the later
ones of Jesus. Yet Mr. Robertson complacently accepts
the historicity of Plato and Augustus, merely brush-
ing aside the miraculous stories and supernatural role.
Nowhere in his works does he manifest the faintest
desire to apply in the domain of profane history the
canons which he so rigidly enforces in ecclesiastical.
Yet there are passages in Mr. Robertson's works
where he seems, to use his own phrase, to ''glimpse"
the truth. Thus, on p. 124 of Christianity and Mytho-
logy he writes : " Jesus is said to be born of a Virgin ;
but not in the original version of the first gospel ;
and not in the second ; and not in the fourth ; and
not in any writing or by any mouth known to or
credited by the writers of the Pauline Epistles. Here
we see how a myth may be superimposed on a cult."
Does not this mean that a cult of Jesus already
existed before this myth was added, and that the
myth is absent in the earliest documents of the cult ?
Again, on p. 274, he writes that " the Christian
HISTOEICAL METHOD 61
Virgin-m3^th and Yirgin-and-child worship are cer-
tainly of pre-Christian origin, and of comparatively
late Christian acceptance y Yet, when I drew attention
in the Literary Guide of December 1, 1912, to the
inconsistency with this passage of the later one above
cited, which asserts that, " Miraculously born, to
the knowledge of many, he reappears as a natural
man," he replied (January 1, 1913) that '* a reader
of ordinary candour would understand that ' accept-
ance ' applied to the official action of the Church."
It appears, therefore, that in the cryptic secret society
of the Joshua Sun-God- Saviour, which held its
seances at Jerusalem at the beginning of our era,
there was an official circle which lagged behind the
unofficial multitude. The latter knew from the first
that their solar myth was miraculously born ; but the
official and controUing inner circle ignored the miracle
until late in the development of the cult, and then at
last issued a number of documents from which it was
excluded. One wonders why. Why trouble to utter
these documents in which Jesus " reappears as a
natural man," long after the sect as a whole were
committed to the miraculous birth? What is the
meaning of these wheels within wheels, that hardly
hunt together? We await an explanation. Mean-
while let us probe the new mythico-symbolism a
little further.
Why did the solar God Joshua-Jesus scourge the The
money-changers out of the temple ? Answer : of^he'"^
Because it is told of ApoUonius of Tyana, '' that he temple
expelled from the cities of the left bank of the
Hellespont some sorcerers who were extorting money
for a great propitiatory sacrifice to prevent earth-
quakes."
62
HISTOEICAL METHOD
Janus-
Peter the
hifrons
The connection is beautifully obvious like the rest
of our author's rapproeliemcnts ; but we must accept
it, or we shall lay ourselves open to the reproach of
''psychological resistance to evidence." Nor must
we ask how the memoirs of Damis, that lay in a
corner till Philostratus got hold of them in the year
215, enjoyed so much vogue among the " Christists "
of Jerusalem long years before they can conceivably
have been written.
Why on the occasion in question did Jesus make
a scourge of cords with which to drive the sheep and
oxen out of the Temple ? Answer : "■ Because in the
Assyrian and Egyptian systems a scourge-bearing
god is a very common figure on the monuments
it is specially associated with Osiris, the Saviour,
Judge, and Avenger. A figure of Osiris, reverenced
as 'Chrestos' the benign God, would suffice to set up
among Christists as erewhile among pagans the
demand for an explanation."
Here we get a precious insight into the why and
wherefore of the Gospels. They were intended by
the "Christists" to explain the meaning of Osiris
statues. Why could they not have asked one of the
priests of Osiris, who as a rule might be found in
the neighbourhood of his statues, what the emblem
meant ? And, after all, were statues of Osiris so
plentiful in Jerusalem, where the sight even of a
Koman eagle aroused a riot ?
Who was Peter ? Answer : An understudy of
Mithras, who in the monuments bears two keys ; or
of Janus, who bears the keys and the rod, and as
opener of the year (hence the name January) stands
at the head of the twelve months.
Why did Peter deny Jesus ? Answer : Because
HISTOEICAL METHOD G3
Janus was called hij'rous. The epithet puzzled the
" Christists " or " Jesuists " of Jerusalem, who,
instead of asking the first Roman soldier they met
what it meant, proceeded to render the word hifwns
in the sense of " douhle-faced," quite a proper epithet
they thought for Peter, who thenceforth had to be
held guilty of an act of double-dealing. For we must
not forget that it was the epithet which suggested to
the Christists the invention of the storv, and not the
story that of the epithet. But even Mr. Robertson
is not quite sure of this ; and it does not matter, where
there is such a wealth of alternatives. For Peter is
also an understudy of " the fickle Proteus." Janus's
double head was anyhow common on coins, and with
that highly relevant observation he essays to protect
his theories of Janus-Peter from any possible
criticisms. Indeed, we are forbidden to call in
question the above conclusions. They are quite
certain, because the " Christists " were intellectually
" about the business of forming myths in explanation
of old ritual and old statuary" (p. 350). Wonderful
people these early " Christists," who, although they
were, as Mr. Robertson informs us (p. 348), ''apostles
of a Judaic cult preaching circumcision," and there-
fore by instinct inimical to all plastic art, nevertheless
rivalled the modern archaeologist in their desire to
explain old statuary. They seem to have been the
prototypes of the Jews of Wardour Street. No less
wonderful were they as philologists, in that, being
Hebrews and presumably speaking Aramaic, they
took such a healthy interest in the meaning of Latin
words, and discovered in hifrons a sense which
it never bore in any Latin author who ever used
it!
64 HISTOEICAL METHOD
^f^p ^^"^^ ^^ appears to have escaped the notice of Professor
Franz Cumont that Mithras carries in his monuments
two keys. The two kej^s were an attribute of the
Mithraic Kronos, in old Persian Zervan, whom rela-
tively late the Latins confused with Janus, who also
had two heads and carried keys. That late Christian
images of Peter were imitated from statues of these
gods no one need doubt, and Fr. Cumont {Monuments
de Mithras, i, 85) does not reject such an idea. It is
quite another thing to assume dogmatically that the
text Matthew xvi, 19 was suggested by a statue of
Janus or of Zervan. To explain it you need not
leave Jewish ground, but merely glance at Isaiah
xxii, 22, where the Lord is made to say of Eliakim:
''And the key of the house of David will I lay upon
his shoulder ; and he shall open and none shall shut ;
and he shall shut and none shall open." The same
imagery meets us in Revelation iii, 7 (copied from
Isaiah), Luke xi, 52, and elsewhere. A. Sulzbach
(in Ztsclir. f.d. Neutest. JVissenschaft, 1903, p. 190)
points out that every Jew, up to a.d. 70, would under-
stand such imagery, for he saw every evening the
temple keys ceremoniously taken from a hole under
the temple floor, where they were kept under a slab
of stone. The Levite watcher locked up the temple
and replaced the keys under the slab, upon which
he then laid his bed for the night. In connection
with the magic power of binding and loosing the keys
had, of course, a further and magical significance, not
in Judpea alone, but all over the world, and the Evan-
gelists did not need to examine statues of Janus or
Zervan in order lo come by this bit of everj'day
symbolism.
N.B. — No connection of Janus-Peter of the Gospels
HISTORICAL METHOD 65
with Peter of the Pauline Epistles ! The one was a
mythical companion of the Sun-god, the other a man
of flesh and hlood, according to Mr. Pohertson.
Who was Joseph? Answer: Forasmuch as ''the Joseph
Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred sugges- '^ss
tions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage " (p. B05),
and " Christism was only neo-Paganism grafted on
Judaism" (p. 338), Joseph must be regarded as '* a
partial revival of the ancient adoration of the God
Joseph as well as of that of the God Daoud " (p. 303).
He was also, seeing that he took Mary and her child
on an ass into Egypt, a reminiscence ; or, shall we
not say, an explanation of " the feeble old man leading
an ass in the sacred procession of Isis, as described
byApuleius in his Metamorphoses''
There is no mention of Joseph's ass in the Gospels,
but that does not matter. Dr. Drews is better
informed, and would have us recognize in Joseph an
understudy of Kinyras, the father of Adonis, who '' is
said to have been some kind of artisan, a smith, or
carpenter. That is to say, he is supposed to have
invented the hammer," etc. Might I suggest the
addition of the god Thor to the collection of gospel
aliases? The gods Joseph and Daoud are purely
modern fictions ; no ancient Jew ever heard of either.
Why was Jesus crucified ?
**The story of the Crucifixion maii rest on the The Cruci-
. f, . T^ nxion
remote datum of an actual crucifixion of Jesus Ben
Pandira, the possible Jesus of Paul, dead long before,
and represented by no preserved biography or teach-
ings whatever."
The Christists were clearly pastmasters in the art
of explaining ignotum per ignotius. For on the next
page we learn that it is not known whether this
F
66 HISTOEICAL METHOD
worthy "ever lived or was crucified." In Pagan
CJirists he is acknowledged to be a " mere name."
However this be, *' it was the mythic significance of
crucifixion that made the early fortune of the cult,
with the aid of the mythic significance of the name
Jeschu = Joshua, the ancient Sun-god."
The meaning of this oracular pronouncement is
too profound for me to attempt to fathom it. Let us
pass on to another point in the new elucidation of the
Gospels.
W. B. What were the exorcisms of evil spirits ascribed to
Smith on ^^ ancient Sun-god Joshua, under his alias of Jesus
exorcisms ^ '
of devils of Nazareth ?
In his Pagan Christs, as in his Christianity and
Mythology, Mr. Kobertson unkindly leaves us in the
lurch about this matter, although we would dearly
like to know what were the particular archaeological
researches of the " Christists " and " Jesuists " that
led them to coin these myths of exorcisms performed,
and of devils cast out of the mad or sick by their
solar myth. Nor does Dr. Drews help us much.
Never mind. Professor W. B. Smith nobly stands
in the breach, so we will let him take up the parable ;
the more so because, in handling this problem, he
may be said to have excelled himself. On p. 57, then,
of Ecce Deus, he premises, in approaching this delicate
topic, that "in the activity of the Jesus and the
apostles, as delineated in the Gospels, the one all-
important moment is the casting-out of demons.''
With this all will agree ; but what follows is barely
consonant with the thesis of his friends. He cites in
effect Mark iii, 14, 15, and the parallel passages in
which Jesus is related to have sent forth the twelve
disciples to preach and to have authority to cast
HISTOKICAL METHOD 67
out the demons. Now, according to the mythico-
symbolical theory, the career of Jesus and his disciples
lay not on earth, but in that happy region where
mythological personages live and move and have
their being. As Dr. Drews says {The Christ Myth,
p. 117) : " In reality the whole of the family and
home life of the Messiah, Jesus, took place in heaven
among the gods."
Accordingly, Dr. W. B. Smith finds it '' amazing
that anyone should hesitate an instant over the sense "
of the demonological episodes in the Gospels, and he
continues: " When w^e recall the fact that the early
Christians uniformly understood the heathen gods to
be demons, and uniformly represented the mission of
Jesus to be the overthrow of these demon gods, it
seems as clear as the sun at noon that this fall of
Satan from heaven^ can be nothing less (and how
could it possibly be anything more?) than the
headlong ruin of polytheism — the complete triumph
of the One Eternal God. It seems superfluous to
insist on anything so palpable Can any rational
man for a moment believe that the Saviour sent forth
his apostles and disciples with such awful solemnity
to heal the few lunatics that languished in Galilee?
Is that the way the sublimist of teachers would found
the new and true religion ? "
In the last sentence our author nods and lapses into
the historical mood ; for how can one talk of a
mythical Joshua being a teacher and founding a new
religion — of his sending forth the apostles and
disciples ? These things are done on earth, and not
up in heaven '' among the gods," as Drews says. It
1 See Luke x, 17-20.
68 HISTORICAL METHOD
is, perhaps, impertinent, for the rest, to criticize so
exalted an argument as Professor Smith's; yet the
question suggests itself, why, if the real object of the
mystic sectaries who worshipped in secret the " Proto-
Christian God, the Jesus," was to acquaint the faithful
with the triumph of the heavenly Jesus over the
demon-gods of paganism — why, in that case, did they
wrap it up in purely demonological language ? All
around them exorcists, Jewish and pagan, were driving
out demons of madness and disease at every street
corner — dumb devils, rheumatic devils, blind devils,
devils of every sort and kind. Was it entirely
appropriate for these mystic devotees to encourage
the use of demonological terminology, when they
meant something quite else? "These early propa-
gandists," he tells us, p. 143, " were great men, were
very great men ; they conceived noble and beautiful
and attractive ideas, which they defended with curious
learning and logic, and recommended with captivating
rhetoric and persuasive oratory and consuming zeal."
Surely it was within the competence of such
egregious teachers to say without disguise what they
really meant, instead of beating about the bush
and penning stories which so nearly reproduced the
grovelling superstitions of the common herd around
them? They might at least have issued a Delphin
edition of their gospels, with a paraphrase in the
margin to explain the text and to save the faithful
from taking these stories literally — for so they took
them as far back as we can trace the documents ; and,
what is more, in all those derivative churches all over
the world which continued the inner life of Professor
Smith's mystic sectaries, we hear from the earliest
age of the appointing of vulgar exorcists, w^hose duty
HISTORICAL METHOD 69
was to expel from the faithful the demons of madness
and of all forms of sickness.
But worse than this. We know from Mr. Robertson
and Dr. Drews that the same Proto-Christian Joshua-
God, who was waging war in heaven on the pagan
gods and goddesses, was himself a composite myth
made up of memories of Krishna, ^Esculapius, Osiris,
Apollo, Dionysus, Apollonius, and a hundred other
fiends. Mr. Robertson attests this, p. 305, in these
words: *' As we have seen and shall see throughout
this investigation, the Christian system is a patchwork
of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and
ritual usage."
Is it quite ajDpropriate that the pre-Christian Jesus
or Joshua should turn and rend his pagan congeners
in the manner described by Professor W. B. Smith ?
His mythical antecedents, as ascertained by Mr.
Robertson and Dr. Drews, are grotesquely incom-
patible with the role of monotheistic founder
assigned him by Professor W. B. Smith. Are we to
suppose that the learned and eloquent propagandists
of his cult were aware of this incompatibility, and for
that reason chose to veil their monotheistic propa-
ganda in the decent obscurity of everyday demono-
logical language ?
Who was Mary, the mother of Jesus ? Mary
Let Dr. Drews speak first :— ^"^ ^^^
^ homonyms
Now if Joseph, as we have already seen, was origi-
nally a god, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a goddess.
Under the name of Maya, she is the mother of Agni —
i.e., the principle of motherhood and creation simply,
as which she is in the Rigveda at one time represented
by the fire-producing wood, the soft pith, in which the
fire-stick was whirled ; at another as the earth, with
which the sky has mated. She appears under the
70 HISTOEICAL METHOD
same name as the mother of Buddha as well as of the
Greek Hermes. She is identical with Maira (Maera)
as, according to Pausanias, viii, 12, 48, the pleiad
Maia, wife of Hephaistos was called. She appears
among the Persians as the ''virgin" mother of
Mithras. As M^-rrha she is the mother of the Syrian
Adonis ; as Semiramis, mother of the Babylonian
Ninus (Marduk). In the Arabic legend she appears
under the name of Mirzam as mother of the mythical
saviour Joshua ; while the Old Testament gives this
name to the virgin sister of that Joshua who was so
closely related to Moses ; and, according to Eusebius,
Merris was the name of the Egyptian princess who
found Moses in a basket and became his foster mother.
The above purpureus panims is borrowed by Dr.
Drews in the second edition of his work from Mr.
Eobertson's book, p. 297. Here is the original : —
It is not possible from the existing data to connect
historically such a cult with its congeners ; but the
mere analogy of names and epithets goes far. The
mother of Adonis, the slain *' Lord " of the great
Syrian cult, is Myrrha ; and Myrrha in one of her
myths is the weeping tree from which the babe Adonis
is born. Again, Hermes, the Greek Lof/o!^, has for
mother Maia, whose name has further connections
with Mary. In one myth Maia is the daughter of
Atlas, thus doubling with Maira, who has the same
father, and who, having " died a virgin," was seen by
Odysseus in Hades. Mythologically, Maira is identi-
fied with the Dog-Star, which is the star of Isis. Yet
again, the name appears in the East as Maya, the
virgin-mother of Buddha ; and it is remarkable that,
according to a Jewish legend, the name of the Egyptian
princess who found the babe Moses was Merris. The
plot is still further thickened by the fact that, as we
learn from the monuments, one of the daughters of
Ramses II was named Meri. And as Meri meant
" beloved," and the name was at times given to men,
besides being used in the phrase '' beloved of the gods,"
the field of mythic speculation is wide.
HTSTOEICAL METHOD 71
And we feel that it is, indeed, wide, when, on p. 301,
the three Marias mentioned by Mark are equated
with the three Moiral or Fates !
In another passage we meet afresh with one of these
equations, p. 306. It runs thus : " On the hypothesis
that the mythical Joshua, son of Miriam, was an
early Hebrew deity, it may be that one form of the
Tammuz cult in pre-Christian times was a worship of
a mother and child — Mary and Adonis ; that, in short,
Maria = Myrrha, and that Jesus was a name of
Adonis."
From such deliverances we gather that in Mr. Pre-phiio-
Robertson and his disciples we have survivals of arguments
a stage of culture which may be called prephilological.
A hundred 3^ears ago or more the most superficial
resemblance of sound was held to be enough of a
ground for connecting words and names together, and
Oxford divines were busy deriving all other tongues
from the Hebrew spoken in the Garden of Eden by
Adam and Eve. Mr. Robertson sets himself (p. 139)
to ridicule these old-fashioned writers, and regales us
with not a few examples of that over-facile identifica-
tion of cult names that have no real mutual affinity
which was then in vogue. Thus Krishna was held to
be a corruption of Christ by certain oriental mis-
sionaries, just as, inversely, within my memory,
certain English Rationalists argued the name Christ
to be a disguise of Krishna. So Brahma was identified
with Abraham, and Napoleon with the Apollyon of
Revelation. One had hoped that this phase of
culture was past and done with ; but Messrs. Robertson
and Drews revive it in their books, and seem anxious
to perpetuate it. As with names, so with myths. On
their every page we encounter — to use the apt phrase
method
72 HISTORICAL METHOD
of M. Emile Darkheim^ — ces rapprochements tumuU
tueux et sommaires qui out discredite la methode compara-
tive anpr}s d'nn certain nomhre de hons esprits.
of conim- "^^^ ^"® condition of advancing knowledge and
ratiye ^ clearing men's minds of superstition and cant by
application of the comparative method in religion, is
that we should apply it, as did Robertson Smith and
his great predecessor. Dr. John Spencer,^ cautiously,
and in a spirit of scientific scholarship. It does not do
to argue from superficial resemblances of sound that
Maria is the same name as the Greek Moira, or
that the name Maia has "connections with Mary";
or, again, that " the name {Maria) appears in the East
as Maya." The least acquaintance with Hebrew
would have satisfied Mr. Robertson that the original
form of the name he thus conjures with is not Maria,
but Miriam, which does not lend itself to his hardy
equations. I suspect he is carried away by the parti
pris which leaks out in the following passage of his
henchman and imitator. Dr. Drews^ : " The romantic
cult of Jesus must be combated at all costs This
cannot be done more effectually than by taking its
basis in the theory of the historical Jesus from
beneath its feet."
If " at all costs " means at the cost of common sense
and scholarship, I cannot agree. I am not disj^osed,
at the invitation of any self-constituted high priest of
Rationalism, to derive old Hebrew names from
Egyptian, Greek, and Buddhist appellations that
1 La Vie Religieusc, p. 134.
2 In his De lefjibus Hehraeornm ritualibus et earum rationibus
libri tres, printed at the Hague in 108G, but largely written twenty
years earlier.
'■^ The Christ Myth, 2nd ed., p. 18.
HISTORICAL METHOD 73
happen to show an initial and one or two other letters
in common. I will not believe that a " Christist " of
Alexandria or Jerusalem, in the streets of which the
Latin language ^Yas seldom or never heard, took the
epithet hifrons in a wrong sense, and straightway
invented the story of a Peter who had denied Jesus.
I cannot admit that the cults of Osiris, Dionysus,
Apollo, or any other ancient Sun-god, are echoed in
a single incident narrated in the primitive evangelical
tradition that lies before us in Mark and the non-
Marcan document used by the authors of the first
and third Gospels ; I do not believe that any really
educated man or woman would for a moment entertain
any of the equations propounded by Mr. Robertson,
and of which I have given a few select examples.
Mr. Marett, in his essay entitled llic Birth of Marett on
Humility, by way of criticizing certain modern abuses ^^^^^^
of the comparative method in the field of the investiga-
tion of the origin of moral ideas and religious beliefs,
has justly remarked that "No isolated fragment of
custom or belief can be worth much for the purposes
of comparative science. In order to be understood, it
must first be viewed in the light of the whole culture,
the whole corporate soul-life, of the particular ethnic
group concerned. Hence the new way is to emphasize
concrete difierences, whereas the old way was to amass
resemblances heedlessly abstracted from their social
context. Which way is the better is a question that
well-nigh answers itself."
Apply the above rule to nascent Christianity. In
the Synoptic Gospels Jesus ever speaks as a Jew to
Jews. Jewish monotheism is presupposed by the
authors of them to have been no less the heritage of
Jesus than of his audiences. The rare exceptions are
74 HISTOEICAL METHOD
carefully noticed by them. This consideration has so
impressed Professor W. B. Smith that he urges the
thesis that the Christian religion originated as a
monotheist propaganda. That is no doubt an
exaggeration, for it was at first a Messianic move-
ment or impulse among Jews, and therefore did not
need to set the claims of monotheism in the fore-
ground, and, accordingly, in the Synoptic Gospels
they are nowhere urged. In spite of this exaggera-
tion, however, Mr. Smith's book occupies a higher
plane than the works of Dr. Drews and Mr. Kobertson,
insofar as he shows some slight insight into the
original nature of the religion, whereas they show
none at all. They merely, in Mr. Marett's phrase,
" amass resemblances [would they were even such !]
heedlessl}^ abstracted from their context," and resolve
a cult which, as it appears on the stage of history, is
Jewish to its core, of which the Holy Scripture was
no other than the Law and the Prophets, and of which
the earliest documents, as Mr. Selwyn has shown, are
saturated with the Jewish Septuagint — they try to
resolve this cult into a tagrag and bobtail of Greek
and Roman paganism, of Buddhism, of Brahmanism,
of Mithraism (hardly yet born), of Egyptian, African,
Assyrian, old Persian,^ and any other religions with
which these writers have a second-hand and superficial
acquaintance. Never once do they pause and ask
themselves the simple questions : firstly, how the
early Christians came to be imbued with so intimate
^ It is possible, of course, that Jewish Messianic and apocalyptic
lore in the first century b.c. had been more or less evolved through
contact with the religion of Zoroaster ; but this lore, as we meet with
it in the Gospels, derivesexclusively from Jewish sources, and was part
of the common stock of popular Jewish aspirations.
HISTORICAL METHOD 75
a Imowledge of idolatrous cults far and near, new and
old ; secondly, why they set so much store hy them
as the mythico-symbolic hypothesis presupposes that
they did ; and, thirdly, why, if they valued them so
much, they were at pains to translate them into the
utterly different and antagonistic form which they
wear in the Gospels. In a word, why should such
connoisseurs of paganism have disguised themselves
as monotheistic and messianic Jews ? Mr. Robertson
tries to save his hypothesis by injecting a little dose
of Judaism into his '* Christists " and " Jesuists "; but
anyone who has read Philo or Josephus or the Bible,
not to mention the Apostolic Fathers and Justin
Martyr, will see at a glance that there is no room in
history for such a hybrid.
That Mr. Robertson should put his name to such Methods of
works as Dr. Drews imitates and singles out for ?i\^5^^'^°°
special praise is the more remarkable, because, in Lorinser
urging the independence of certain Hindoo cults
against Christian missionaries who want to see in
them mere reflections of Christianity, he shows
himself both critical and wide-minded. These charac-
teristics he displays in his refutation of the opinion
of a certain Dr. Lorinser that the dialogue between
Krishna and the warrior Arjuna, known as the
Bhagavat Gita and embodied in the old Hindoo Epic
of the Mahabharata, "is a patchwork of Christian
teaching." Dr. Lorinser had adduced a chain of
passages from this document which to his mind are
echoes of the New Testament. Though many of
these exhibit a striking conformity with aphorisms of
the Gospels, we are nevertheless constrained to agree
W'ith Mr. Robertson's criticism, which is as follows
(p. 262) :—
76 HISTOEICAL METHOD
The first comment that must occur to every
instructed reader on perusing these and the other
'* parallels " advanced by Dr. Lorinser is, that on the
one hand the parallels are very frequently such as
could be made by the dozen between bodies of
literature which have unquestionably never been
brought in contact, so strained and far-fetched are
they ; and that, on the other hand, they are discounted
by quite as striking parallels betw^een New Testament
texts and pre-Christian pagan writings.
Mr. Robertson then adduces a number of striking
parallelisms between the New Testament and old
Greek and Roman writers, and continues thus : " Such
parallels as these, I repeat, could be multiplied
to any extent from the Greek and Latin classics
alone But is it worthwhile to heajD up the disproof
of a thesis so manifestly idle ? "
Dionysus It occurs to ask w^hether it was not worth the w^hile
of Mr. Robertson to inquire whether the Evangelist
could " unquestionably have been brought in contact "
wdth the Dionysiac group of myths before he assumed
so dogmatically, against students of such weight as
Professor Percy Gardner and Dr. Estliu Carpenter,
that the myth of Bacchus meeting with a couple of
asses on his way to Dodona w^as the *' Christist's "
model for the story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on
an ass? Might he not have reflected that then, as
now, there was no other w^ay of entering Jerusalem
unless you w^ent on foot ? And what has Jerusalem
to do with Dodona? What has Bacchus's choice of
one ass to ride on in common wdth Matthew's literary
deformation, according to which Jesus rode on two
asses at once ? Lastly, what had Bacchus to do with
Jesus ? Has the Latin wine-god a single trait in
common with the Christian founder ? Is it not
and Jesus
HISTOEICAL METHOD 77
rather the case that any conscious or even uncon-
scious assimilation of Bacchus myths conflicts with
what Mr. Marett would call '* the whole culture, the
w^hole corporate soul-life " of the early Christian
community, as the surviving documents picture it,
and other evidence we have not? Yet Mr. Robertson
deduces from such paltry " parallels " as the above
the conclusion that Jesus, on whose real personality
a score of early and independent literary sources
converge, never existed at all, and that he was a
"composite myth." There is no other example of
an eclectic myth arbitrarily composed by connoisseurs
out of a religious art and story not their own ; still less
of such a myth being humanized and accepted by the
next generation as a Jewish Messiah.
In the same context (p. 264) Mr. Robertson remarks
sensibly enough that "No great research or reflec-
tion is needed to make it clear that certain common-
places of ethics as well as of theology are equally
inevitable conclusions in all religious systems that
rise above savagery. Four hundred years before
Jesus, Plato declared that it was very difflcult for the
rich to be good ; does anyone believe that any
thoughtful Jew needed Plato's help to reach the
same notion ? "
I would ask, does anyone believe that a thoughtful
Jew needed the stimulus of a statuette of Osiris in
order that he should record, or, maybe, invent, the
story of Jesus clearing the money-changers out of
the temple with a scourge? Even admitting — what
I am as little as anyone inclined to admit — that the
Peter of the early Gospels is, as regards his personality
and his actions, a fable, a mere invention of a Jewish
storyteller, need we suppose that the storyteller in
78 HISTORICAL METHOD
question depended for his inspiration on Janus ?
You might as well suppose that the authors of the
Arahian Nights founded their stories on the myths of
Greek and Roman gods. Again, the Jews were tradi-
tionally distributed into twelve tribes or clans. Let
us grant only for argument's sake that the life of
Jesus the Messiah as narrated in the first three
Gosj)els is a romance, we yet must ask, "Which is more
probable, that the author of the romance assigned
twelve apostles to Jesus because there were twelve
tribes to whom the message of the impending Kingdom
of God had to be carried, or because there are twelve
signs in the Zodiac? He agrees (p. 347) that Luke's
story of the choice of the seventy disciples " visibly
connects with the Jewish idea that there were seventy
nations in the world." Why, then, reject the view
that Jesus chose twelve apostles because there were
twelve tribes? Not at all. Having decided that
Jesus was the Sun- God- Saviour Joshua, a pure
figment of his brain, Mr. Robertson is ready to
violate the canons of evidence he appeals to on p. 347,
and will have it that in the Gospels the apostles are
Zodiacal signs, and that their leader is Janus, the
opener of the year. " The Zodiacal sign gives the
clue " (p. 339), in his opinion, to this as to much else.
P'*. Let us return to the case of Dr. Lorinser. '' We
Lormser i , -r. i -i-
are asked to believe that iiranmans expounding a
highly-developed Pantheism went assiduously to the
(unattainable) New Testament for the wording of a
number of their propositions, pantheistic and other,
while assimilating absolutely nothing of distinctively
Christian doctrine Such a position is possible only
to a mesmerized believer." Surely one may exclaim
of Mr. Robertson, De te fahiila narratur, and rewrite
J
HISTORICAL METHOD 79
the above as follows : '' We are asked to believe that
' Christists,' who were so far Jewish as to practise
circumcision, to use the Hebrew Scriptures, to live
in Jerusalem under the presidency and patronage of
the Jewish High-priest, to foster and propagate
Jewish monotheism, went assiduously to the (unattain-
able) rites, statuary, art, and beliefs of pagan India,
Egypt, Ancient Babylon, Persia, etc., for all ' the
narrative myths ' (p. 263) of the story in which they
narrated the history of their putative founder Jesus,
the Jewish Messiah, while assimilating absolutely
nothing of distinctively pagan doctrine."
Dr. Lorinser, for urging a thesis infinitely less
absurd, is denounced as "a mesmerized believer";
and on the next page Dr. Weber, who agrees with
him, is rebuked for his " judicial blindness." Yet in
the same context we are told that " a crude and nrnj-
system, like the Christism of the second gospel and
the earlier form of the first, borrows inevitably from
the more highly evolved systems with which it comes
socially in contact, absorbing myth and mystery and
dogma till it becomes as sophisticated as they."
It is quite true, as Gibbon observed, that the iiaij
figure of Jesus, as presented in the Synoptic Gospels,
was soon overlaid with that of the logos, and all sorts
of Christological cobwebs were within a few^ genera-
tions spun around his head to the efi'acement both of
the teacher and of what he taught. But in the
earliest body of the evangelical tradition, as we can
construct it from the first three Gospels, there is little
or nothing that is not essentially Jewish and racy of
the soil of Judtnea. The borrowings of Christianity
from pagan neighbours began with the flocking into
the new Messianic society of Gentile converts. The
80 HISTOEICAL METHOD
earlier bo^ro^Yings with which Messrs. Robertson
and Drews fill their volumes are one and all " resem-
blances heedlessly abstracted from their context,"
and are as far-fetched and as fanciful as the dreams
of the adherents of the Banner of Israel, or as the
cj^Dher of the Bacon- Shaksperians, over which Mr.
Robertson is prone to make merry. " Is it," to use
his own words, *' worth while to heap up the disproof
of a thesis so manifestly idle ?"
Chapter II
PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS
I CAN imagine some people arguing that Mark's Gospel ^^ Mark's
might be a religious novel, of which the scene is laid religious
in Jerusalem and Galilee among Jews; that it was ^^o^^ance?
by a literary artifice impregnated with Jewish ideas ;
that the references to Sadducees and Pharisees were
introduced as appropriate to the age and clime ; that
the old Jewish Scriptures are for the same reason
acknowledged by all the actors and interlocutors as
holy writ ; that demonological beliefs were thrown in
as being characteristic of Palestinian society of the time
the writer purported to write about ; that it is of the
nature of a literary trick that the peculiar Messianic
and Apocalyptic beliefs and aspirations rife among Jews
of the period b.c. 50-a.d. 160 and later, are made to
colour the narrative from beginning to end. All these
elements of verisimilitude, I say, taken singly or
together, do not of necessity exchide the hypothesis
that it may be one of the most skilfully constructed
historical novels ever written. Have we not, it may
be urged, in the Recognitions or Itinerary of Saint
Clement, in the Acts of Thomas, in the story of Paul
and Thecla, similar compositions ?
In view of what we know of the dates and diffusion Certainly
p , ^ . . ., not in the
of the Gospels, of their literary connections with one way as-
another, and of the reappearance of their chief smncd by
. ^ \ Drews and
pcrsonce dramatis in the Pauline letters, such a hypo- iiobertson,
81 G
82
PAGAN MYSTEKY PLAYS
whose
hypothesis
is ^self-des-
tructive,
thesis is of course wildly improbable, yet not utterly
absurd. We have to assume in the writer a know-
ledge of the Messianic movement among the Jews, a
familiarity with their demonological beliefs and
practices, with their sects, and so forth ; and it is all
readily assumable. In the Greek novel of Chariton
we have an example of such an historical romance,
the scene being laid in Syracuse and Asia Minor
shortly after the close of the Peloponnesian war. But
such romances are not cult documents of a parabolic
or allegorical kind, as the Gospels are supposed by
these writers to be. They do not bring a divine being
down from Olympus, and pretend all through that he
was a man who was born, lived, and died on the cross
in a particular place and at a particular date. We
have no other example of documents whose authors,
by way of honouring a God up in heaven who never
made any epiphany on earth nor ever underwent
incarnation, made a man of him, and concocted an
elaborate earthly record of him. Why did they do
it? What was the object of the " Jesuists " and
*' Christists " in hoaxing their own and all subsequent
generations and in building up a lasting cult and
Church on what they knew were fables ?
In the Homeric hymns and other religious docu-
ments not only of the Greeks, but of the Hindoos, we
have no doubt histories of the gods written by their
votaries ; but in these hymns they put down what
they believed, they did not of set design falsify the
legend of the god, and describe his birth and
parentage, when they knew he never had any ; his
ministrations and teaching career, when he never
ministered or taught; his persecution by enemies
and his death, when he was never persecuted and
PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS 83
never died. Or are we to suppose that all these
things were related in the Sun-god Joshua legend?
No, reply Messrs. Drews and Robertson. For the
stories told in the Gospels are all modelled on pagan
or astral myths ; the persons who move in their pages
are the gods and demigods of Egyptian, Greek, Latin,
Hindoo legends. Clearly the Saviour-God Joshua
had no legend or story of his own, or it would not
be necessary to pad him out with the furniture
and appurtenances of Osiris, Dionysus, Serapis,
jEsculapius, and who knows what other gods besides.
And — strangest feature of all — it is Jews, men cir-
cumcised, propagandists of Jewish monotheism, who,
in the interests of "a Judaic cult" (p. 348), go
rummaging in all the dustbins of paganism, in order
to construct a legend or allegory of their god. Why
could they not rest content with him as they found
him in their ancient tradition ?
The Gospels, like any other ancient document, and irre-
have to be accounted for. They did not engender ^vith as-
themselves, like a mushroom, nor drop out of heaven certained
ready written. I have admitted as possible, though Judaism
wild and extravagant, the hypothesis of their being a
Messianic romance, which subsequently came to be
mistaken for sober history ; and there are of course
plenty of legendary incidents in their pages. But
such a hypothesis need not be discussed. It is not
that of these three authors, and would not suit them.
They insist on seeing in them so many manifestoes of
the secret sect of Jews who worshipped a god Joshua.
For Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson the Gospels describe
a " Jesuine " mystery play evolved "from a Pales-
tinian rite of human sacrifice in which the annual
victim was ' Jesus the Son of the Father.' " There is
84 PAGAN MYSTEEY PLAYS
no trace in Jewish antiquity of any such rite in
epochs which even remotely preceded Christianity,
nor is the survival of such a rite of human sacrifice
even thinkable in Jerusalem, where the " Christists "
laid their plot. And why should they eke out their
plot with a thousand scraps of pagan mythology ?
J^^A , I was taught in my childhood to venerate the
Smith s
hypothesis Gospels ; but I never knew before what really
ofamythi- wonderful documents they are. Let us, however,
cal Jesus * .
mythically turn to Professor W. B. Smith, w-ho does not pile on
?"d^?n paganism so profusely as his friends, nor exactly
monothe- insist on a pagan basis for the Gospels. His hj^po-
gan(fa°^^" thesis in brief is identical with theirs, for he insists
that Jesus the man never existed at all. Jesus is, in
Professor Smith's phrase, " a humanized God "; in the
diction of Messrs. Drews and Kobertson, a myth.
Professor Smith allows {Ecce Dens, p. 78) that the
mere ''fact that a myth, or several myths, may be
found associated with the name of an individual by
no means relegates that individual into the class of
the unhistorical." That is good sense, and so is
the admission which follows, that " we may often
explain the legends from the presence of the historical
personality, independently known to he historic,'' But
in regard to Jesus alone among the figures of the past
he, like his friends, rules out both considerations.
The common starting-point of all three writers is that
the earliest Gospel narratives do not " describe ani/
human charade)' at all ; on the contrary, the indivi-
duality in question is distinctly divine and not human,
in the earliest portrayal. As time goes on it is true
that certain human elements do creep in, particularly
in Luke and John In Mark there is really no man
at all ; the Jesus is God, or at least essentially divine,
PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS 85
throughout. He wears only a transparent garment
of flesh. Mark historizes only."
How is it, we ask, that humanity has pored over ^^^J^l^.^^^^.^^,
the Synoptic Gospels for nearly two thousand years, tion, defies
and discerned in them the portraiture at least of a *^^® *®^^^'
man of flesh and blood, who can be imaged as such
in statuary and painting? Even if it were conceded,
as I said above, that the Gospel representation of
Jesus is an imaginary portrait, like that of William
Tell or John Inglesant, still, who, that is not mad,
will deny that there exist in it multiple human
traits, fictions may be of a novelist, yet indisputably
there? Mr. Smith's hardy denial of them can only
lead his readers to suspect him of paradox. More-
over, the champions of traditional orthodoxy have had
in the past every reason to side with Professor Smith
in his attempted elimination of all human traits and
characteristics. Yet in recent years they have been
constrained to admit that in Luke and John the
human elements, far from creeping in, show signs of
creeping out. " The received notion," adds Professor
Smith, " 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." Once more we rub our eyes. In
Mark Jesus is little more than that most familiar of
old Jewish figures, an earthly herald of the imminent
kingdom of heaven ; late and little by little he is
recognized by his followers as himself the Messiah
whose advent he formerly heralded. x\s yet he is
neither divine nor the incarnation of a pre-existent
quasi-divine Logos or angel. In John, on the other
hand, Jesus has emerged from the purely Jewish
phase of being Messiah, or servant of God (which is
86
PAGAN MYSTEEY PLAYS
and rests
on an
obsolete
and
absurd
all that Lord or Son of God'^ iraplies in Mark's
opening verses). He has become the eternal Logos
or Eeason, essentially divine and from the beginning
with God. Here obviously we are well on our way
to a deification of Jesus and an elimination of human
traits ; and the writer is so conscious of this that he
allegoriza- S^GS out of his Way to Call our attention to the fact
tion of that Jesus was after all a man of flesh and blood,
with human parents and real brethren who disbelieved
in him. He was evidently conscious that the super-
imposition on the man Jesus of the Logos scheme,
and the reflection back into the human life of Jesus
of the heavenly ivle which Paul ascribed to him qua
raised by the Spirit from the dead, was already
influencing certain believers (called Docetes) to
believe that his human life and actions were illusions,
seen and heard indeed, as we see and hear a man
speak and act in a dream, but not objective and real.
To guard against this John proclaims that he was
made flesh. Nevertheless, he goes half way with the
Docetes in that he rewrites all the conversations of
Jesus, abolishes the homely parable, and substitutes
his own theosophic lucubrations. He also emphasizes
the miraculous aspect of Jesus, inventing new miracles
more grandiose than any in previous gospels, but of
a kind, as he imagines, to symbolize his conceptions
of sin and death. He is careful to eliminate the
demonological stories. They were as much of a
stumbling-block to John as we have seen them to be
1 In Mark xv, 39, the utterance of the heathen centurion, " truly
this man was a Son of God," can obviously not have been inspired
by messianic conceptions; it can have meant no more than that he
was more than human, as Damis realized his master Apollonius to
be on more than one occasion. Nor can Mark have intended to
attribute Jewish conceptions to a pagan soldier.
PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS 87
to Mr. W. B. Smith. We must, therefore, perforce
accuse the latter of putting a hypothesis that from the
outset is a paradox. The documents contradict him
on every page.
A thesis that begins by flying in the face of the '^^^J
documents demands paradoxical arguments for its robber
support ; and the pages of all three writers teem with ^^^^^
them. Of a Jesus that is God from the first it is have been
perhaps natural to ask — anyhow our authors have selected as
asked it of themselves — which God was he? And of Jesus?
the accident of his bearing the name Jesus — he might
just as well have been called Jacob or Sadoc or
Manasseh, or what not — suggests Joshua to them,
for Joshua is the Hebrew name which in the LXX
was Grecized as lesoue, and later as lesoiis. That in
the Old Testament Joshua is depicted as a cut-throat
and leader of brigands, very remote in his principles
and practice from the Jesus of the Gospels, counts for
nothing. The late Dr. Winckler, who saw sun and
moon myths rising like exhalations all around him
wherever he looked in ancienthistory and mythology,-^
has suggested that Joseph was originally a solar hero.
Ergo, Joshua was one too. Ergo, there was a Hebrew
secret society in Jerusalem in the period b.c. 150-
1 For example, he gi'avely asserts (7)t<3 Weltajiscliauuug des^m^Alten
Orients^, Leipzig, 1904, p. 41) that Saul's melancholy is explicable as
a myth of the monthly eclipsing of the moon's light! Perhaps
Hamlet's melancholy was of the same mythic origin. A map of the
stars is Winckler's, no less than Jensen's, guide to all mythologies.
But, to do him justice, Winckler never fell into the last absurdity of
supposing that Jews at the beginning of our era were engaged in a
secret cult of a Sun-god named Joshua ; on the contrary, he declares
[op. cit.y p. 9G), that, just in proportion as we descend the course of
time, we approach an age in which the heroes of earlier myth are
brought down to the level of earth. This humanization of the Joshua
myth was, he held, complete when the book of Joshua was com-
piled.
88 PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS
A.D. 50 who worshipped the Sun- God- Saviour Joshua.
Ergo, the Gospels are a sustained parable of this Sun-
god. Thus are empty, wild, and unsubstantiated
hypotheses piled one on top of the other, like Pelion
on Ossa. Not a scintilla of evidence is adduced for
any one of them. First one is advanced, and its
truth assumed. The next is propped on it, ct sic ad
infinitum.
Whymake What, asks Professor Smith {Ecce Bens, p. 67),
central was the active principle of Christianity ? What its
figure of a germ? ''The monotheistic impulse," he answers,
monothe- ... „ ., ,.
isticcuit? "the mstmct for unity that lies at the heart of all
grand philosophy and all noble religion." Again,
p. 45 : " What was the essence of this originally
secret Jesus cult, that was expressed in such guarded
parabolic terms as made it unintelligible to the
multitude? It was a protest against idolatry; it
was a Crusade for monotheism."
The This is, no doubt, true of Christianity when we
earliest .
Christian- pass outside the Gospels. It is only not true of them,
ity was no j^ecause on their every page Jewish monotheism is
monothe- J i o _ • . ,
istic presupposed. Why are no warnings against poly-
propa- theism put into the mouth of Jesus ? Why is not a
ganda ■*■ ^
single precept of the Sermon on the Mount directed
against idolatry ? Surely because we are moving in
a Jewish atmosphere in which such warnings were
unnecessary. The horizon is purely Jewish, either
of Jerusalem as we know it in the pages of Josephus
or of certain Galilean circles in which even a know-
ledge of Greek seems not to have existed before the
third century. The very proximity of Greek cities
there seems to have confirmed the Jewish peasant of
that region in his preference of Aramaic idiom, just
as the native of Bohemia to-day turns his back on
PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS 89
you if you address him in the detested German
tongue.
Messrs. Robertson and Drews concede that the Robertson
and Drews
original stock of Christianity was Jewish. Thus we allow the
read in Christianity and Mijtholocjy (p. 415) that the i^^^'^^j^'e^^
Lord's Prayer derives " from pre-Christian Jewish lore, mainly
and, like parts of the Sermon (on the Mount), from an ^^Xlnd'
actually current Jewish document." The same writer feeling
admits (p. 338) the existence of "Judaic sections of
the early Church." When he talks (p. 337) of the
tale of the anointing of Jesus in Matthew xxvi, G-13,
and parallel passages, being " in all probability a
late addendum" to the "primitive gospel" of Bern-
hard Weiss's theory, " made after the movement had
become pronouncedly Gentile," he presupposes that,
to start with anj^how, the movement was mainly
Jewish. He admits that in the first six paragraphs
of the early Christian document entitled the Didache
we have a purely Jewish teaching document, " which
the Jesuist sect adopted in the first or second century."
He cannot furthermore contest the fact that the
Jesuists " took over the Jewish Scriptures as their
sacred book ; that they inherited the Jewish passover
and the Paschal lamb, which is still slain in Eastern
churches ; that the leaders of the secret sect in
Jerusalem upheld the Jewish rite of circumcision
against Paul."^ All this is inconceivable if the
society was not in the main and originally one of
Hebrews. When he goes on to argue that the
Gospels are the manifesto of a cult of an old Sun-
1 Cp. p. 342 : " In all his allusions to the movement of his day he
(Paul) is dealinrrwith Judaizing apostles who preached circumcision."
And p. 348 : " Paul's Cephas is simply one of the apostles of a Judaic
cult that preaches circumcision."
90
PAGAN MYSTEEY PLAYS
If so, how
could they
devote
them-
selves to
pagan
mystery
plays ?
Bobertson
admits
that Jews
could
never
borrow
from
pagan
rituals in
that age
god Joshua, son of a mythic Miriam, he at least
admits that the early '' Christists " selected from
ancient Jewish superstition, and not from pagan
myth, the central figure of their cult, and that they
chose for their deity a successor and satellite of
Moses with a Hebrew lady for his mother. We may
take it for granted, then, that the parent society out
of which the Christian Church arose was profoundly
and radically Jewish ; and Mr. Robertson frankly
admits as much when he affirms that " it was a
Judaic cult that preached circumcision,'' and that " its
apostles with whom Paul was in contact were of a
Judaizing description." Here is common ground
between myself and him.
What I want to know is how it came about that
a society of which Jerusalem was the focus, and
of w^hich the nucleus and propagandists were Jews and
Judaizers, could have been given over to the cult of a
solar god, and how they could celebrate mystery plays
and dramas in honour of that god ; how they can
have manufactured that god into " a composite myth "
(p. 336), and constructed in his honour a religious
system that was " a patchwork of a hundred suggestions
drawn from pagan art and ritual usage." For such,
we are told (p. 305), was " the Christian system."
We are far better acquainted with Jewish belief and
ritual during the period B.C. 400-a.d. 100 than w^e are
with that of the pagans. The content of the Greek
mysteries is an enigma to our best Hellenists ; we
know next to nothing of the inside of Mithraism ; for
the oriental cults of the late Roman republic and early
empire we are lamentably deficient in writings that
might exhibit to us the arcana of their worship and
the texture of their beliefs. Not so with Judaism.
PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS 91
Here we have the prophets, old and late ; for the two
centuries e.g. we have the apocrypha, including the
Maccabean books ; we have the so-called Books of
Enoch, of Jubilees, of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Fourth
Ezra, Baruch, Sirach, and many others. We have
the voluminous works of Philo and Josephus for the
first century of our era ; we have the Babylonian and
other Talmuds preserving to us a wealth of Jewish
tradition and teaching of the first and second cen-
turies. Here let Mr. Robertson speak. As regards
the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount, he
insists (p. 415 foil.) that they were inspired by parallel
passages in the Talmud and the Apocrypha, and he
argues with perfect good sense for the priority of the
Talmud in these words: "It is hardly necessary to
remark here that the Talmudic parallels to any part
of the Sermon on the Mount cannot conceivably have
been borrowed from the Christian gospels ; they would
as soon have bar voiced from the vituals of the pagans''
And yet he asks us to believe that a nucleus of Yetaffirms
Jews, hidden in Jerusalem, the heart of Judaism, a Christists,
sect whose apostles were Judaizers and vehement ^"- u'U,"
... . guisnable
defenders of circumcision — all this he admits — were, from Jews,
as late as the last half of the first century, maintain- borrow-
ing among themselves in secret a highly eclectic pagan wholesale
cult ; that they evolved '* a gospel myth from scenes in
pagan art " (p. 327) ; that they took a sort of modern
archaeological interest in pagan art and sculpture,
and derived thence most of their literary motifs ; that
the figure of Jesus is an alloy of Dionysus, Osiris,
Adonis, Krishna, ^Esculapius, and fifty other ancient
gods and demigods, with the all-important " Sun-God-
Saviour Joshua, son of Miriam "; that the story of
Peter rests on " a pagan basis of myth " (p. 340) ;
92
PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS
The cen-
tral idea
of a God
Joshua a
figment of
Eobeit-
son's
fancy
It does not
even ex-
plain the
birth
legends
of the
Christians
that Maria is the true and original form of the Hebrew
Miriam, and is the same name as Myrrha and Moira
ijioipa), etc., etc.
Such are the mutually destructive arguments on
the strength of which we are to adopt his thesis of the
unhistoricity of Jesus. His books, like those of Dr.
Drews, are a welter of contradictory statements, un-
reconciled and irreconcilable. Nevertheless, they
reiterate them in volume after volume, like orthodox
Christians reiterating articles of faith and dogmas too
sacred to be discussed. Who ever heard before them
of a Jewish cult of a Sun-God-Saviour Joshua? Such
a cult must have been long extinct when the book of
Joshua was written. Who ever heard of this Sun-god
having for his mother a Miriam, until Mr. Robertson
discovered a late Persian gloss to the effect that Joshua,
son of Nun, had a mother of the name ? Even if this
tradition were not so utterly worthless as it is, it
would prove nothing about the Sun-god. On the
basis of such gratuitous fancies we are asked to
dismiss Jesus as a myth. It does not even help
us to understand how the myths of the Virgin Birth
arose. Since when, I would like to know, did we need
such evidence against that legend ? If I thought that
the rebuttal of it depended on such evidence, I should
be inclined to become a good Papist and embrace it.
It is enough for me to have ascertained, by a com-
parison of texts and by a study of early Christian
documents, that it is a late accretion on the traditions
of Jesus of Nazareth. That is the real evidence, if any
be wanted, against it. Mr. Robertson admits that the
first two chapters of Luke which are supposed —
perhaps wrongly — to embody this legend are "a late
fabulous introduction." Again he writes (p. 189) :
PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS 93
"Only the late Third Gospel tells the story (of
Luke i and ii) ; the narrative (of the Birth) in
Matthew, added late as it was to the original com-
position, which obviously began at what is now the
third chapter, has no hint of the taxing."
This is good sense, and I am indebted to him for Evidence
pointing out that so loosely was the myth compacted tevange-
that in the Protevangelion (c. 17) the statement is ^^^^
that it was decreed " that all should be enrolled who
were in Bethlehem of Judiea," not all Jews over the
entire w^orld.
Surely all this implies that the legend of the Hobei-tson
miraculous birth was no part of the earliest tradition the anti-
about Jesus. Nevertheless, it is so important for q^ityof
Mr. Robertson's thesis (that Jesus was a mythical merely to
personaf]:e) that he should from the first have had s|^itliis
r , , . . . 11- theory
a mythical mother, that he insists on treating the
whole of Christian tradition, early or late, as a solid
block, and argues steadily that the Virgin Birth
legend was an integral part of it from the beginning.
Jesus was a myth ; as such he must have had a
myth for a mother. Now a virgin mother is half-way
to being a mythical one. Therefore Mary was a virgin,
and must from the beginning have been regarded as
such by the " Christists." Such are the steps of his
reasoning.
I have adduced in the preceding pages a selection The .
of the mythological equations of Mr. Robertson and ists " at
Dr. Drews in order that my readers may realize how °"^^°^^'^"
faint a resemblance between stories justifies, in their pagan and
minds, a derivation or borrowing of one from the extrava-
. gantly
other. Nor do they ever ask themselves how Jewish mono-
" Christists " were likely to come in contact with out- j^^^-g^f"^
of-the-way legends of Bacchus or Dionysus, of Hermes,
94 PAGAN MYSTEEY PLAYS
of old Pelasgic deities, of Cybele and Attis and Isis,
Osiris and Horus, of Helena Dendrites, of Krishna, of
Janus, of sundry ancient vegetation-gods (for they are
up to the newest lights), of Apollonius of Tyana, of
iEsculapius, of Herakles and Oceanus, of Saoshyant
and other old Persian gods and heroes, of Buddha
and his kith and kin, of the Eleusinian and other
ancient mysteries. Prick them with a pin, and out
gushes this lore in a copious flood ; and every item of
it is supposed to have filled the heads of the polymath
authors of the Christian Gospels. Every syllable of
these Gospels, every character in them, is symbolic
of one or another of these gods and heroes. Hear,
Israel : " Christians borrowed myths of all kinds from
Paganism " {Christiamtij and Mijthologij, p. xii). And
w^e are pompously assured (p. xxii, op. cit.) that this
new '' mythic " system is, " in general, more ' positive,'
more inductive, less a priori^ more obedient to scien-
tific canons, than that of the previous critics known to
me [i.e., to Mr. Robertson] who have reached similar
anti-traditional results. It substitutes an anthropo-
logical basis, in terms of the concrete phenomena
of mythology, for a pseudo-philosophical presup-
position." Heaven help the new science of anthro-
pology !
^rlifi^* And what end, we may ask, had the "Jesuists"
concoction and '' Christists " (to use Mr. Robertson's jargon) in
°os^el ^^®^^'' ^^^^ ^^^^ dressed up all this tagrag and bobtail
of pagan myth, art, and ritual, and disguised it under
the form of a tale of Messianic Judaism ? For that and
nothing else is, on this theory, the basis and essence of
the Gospels. Was it their aim to honour paganism or
to honour Jewish monotheism, when they concocted a
** Christ cult " which is " a synthesis of the two most
PAGAN MYSTEKY PLAYS 95
popular pagan myth-motives,^ with some Judaic
elements as nucleus and some explicit ethical teach-
ing superadded" (p. Q4:). We must perforce suppose
that the Gospels were a covert tribute to the worth
and value of Pagan mythology and religious dramas,
to pagan art and statuary. If we adopt the mythico-
symbolical method, they can have been nothing else.
Its sponsors might surely condescend to explain the
alchemy by which the ascertained rites and beliefs of
early Christians were distilled from these antecedents.
The effect and the cause are so entirely disparate, so
devoid of any organic connection, that we would fain
see the evolution worked out a little more clearly. At
one end of it we have a hurly-burly of pagan myths,
at the other an army of Christian apologists inveighing
against everything pagan and martyred for doing so,
all within a space of sixty or seventy years. I only
hope the orthodox will be gratified to learn that their
Scriptures are a thousandfold more wonderful and
unique than they appeared to be when they were
merely inspired by the Holy Spirit. For verbal
inspiration is not, as regards its miraculous quality,
in the same field with mythico-symbolism. Verily we
have discovered a new literary genus, unexampled in
the history of mankind, l^ou rake together a thousand
irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked up at random
from every age, race, and clime ; you get a " Christist "
to throw them into a sack and shake them up ; you open
it, and out come the Gospels. In all the annals of the
Bacon- Shakespeareans we have seen nothing like it.
^ To wit, of a Sun-god, who is also Mithras and Osiris, and of
a Vegetation-god annually slain on the sacred tree. We are gravely
informed that "not till Dr. Frazer had done his work was the
psychology of the process ascertained." Dr. Frazer must be blushing
at this tribute to his psychological insight.
Chapter III
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
Multiplic- I HAVE remarked above that if the Gospel of Mark
documents were an isolated writing, if we knew nothing of its
converging fortunes, nothing of any society that accepted it as
involving histor}^ ; if, above all, we were without any independent
an histori- documents that fitted in with it and mentioned the
persons and events that crowd its pages, then it
would be a possible hypothesis that it was like the
Recognitions of Clement, a skilfully contrived romance.
Such a hypothesis, I said, would indeed be improbable,
yet not unthinkable or self-destructive. But as a
matter of fact we have an extensive series of docu-
ments, independent of Mark, yet attesting by their
undesigned coincidences its historicity — not, of course,
in the sense that we must accept everything in it,
but anyhow in the sense that it is largely founded on
fact and is a record of real incident. Were it a mere
romance of events that never happened, and of people
who never lived, would it not be a first-class miracle
that in another romance, concocted apart from it and
in ignorance of its contents, the same outline of
events met our gaze, the same personages, the same
atmosphere, moral, intellectual, and religious, the same
interests ? If in a third and fourth writing the same
phenomenon recurred, the marvel would be multiplied.
Would any sane person doubt that there was a sub-
stratum of fact and real history underlying them all ?
96
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 97
It would be as if several tables in the gambling
saloon of Monte Carlo threw up the same series of
numbers — sa}^ 8, 3, 11, 7, 33, 21 — simultaneously
and independently of one another. A few of the
habitues — for Monte Carlo is a great centre of super-
stition — might take refuge in the opinion that the
tables were bewitched ; but most men would infer
that there was human collusion and conspiracy to
produce such a result, and that the croupiers of the
several tables were in the plot.
Now Mark's Gospel does not stand alone. As I Mark and
have pointed out in Myth, Magic, and Morals, Luke earliest^ °
and Matthew hold in solution as it were a second documents
document, called Q (Quelle), or the non-Marcan,
w4iich yields us a few incidents and a great many
sayings and parables of Jesus. Now this second
document, so utterly separate from and independent
of Mark that it does not even allude to the cruci-
fixion and death episodes, nevertheless has Jesus all
through for -its central figure. No doubt it ultimately
came out of the same general medium as Mark ; but
that consideration does not much diminish the weight
of its testimony. If I met two people a hundred
yards apart both coming from St. Paul's Cathedral,
and if they both assured me that they had just been
listening to a sermon of Dr. Inge's, I should not
credit them the less because they had been together
in church.
That both these documents — I mean Mark and the
non-Marcan — were in circulation at a fairly early
date is certain on many grounds. So great a scholar
as Wellhausen, a scholar untrammelled by ties of
orthodoxy, shows in his commentary that Mark, as
it lies before us, must have been redacted before the
H
98 THE AEGUMENT FROM SILENCE
fall of Jerusalem iu a.d. 70 ; so vague are its forecasts
of disasters that were to befall the holy city. In
Luke, on the other hand, these forecasts are accom-
modated to the facts, as we should expect to be the
case in an author who wrote after the blow had
fallen.
The first ^j-jj another consideration arises here. Matthew
and third t t i • • -i
Gospels and Luke wrote quite independently of one another —
constitute fQj^. ^-^^y practically never ioin hands across Mark —
two more i •
such and yet they both assume in their compilations that
documents these two basal documents, Mark and the non-
Marcan, are genuine narratives of real events. They
allow themselves, indeed, according to the literary
fashion of the age, to re-arrange, modify, and omit
episodes in them ; but their manner of handling and
combining the two documents is in general inexplic-
able on the hypothesis that they considered them to
be mere romances. They are too plainly in earnest,
too eager to find in them material for the life of a
master whom they revered. Luke in particular
prefixes a personal letter to one Theophilus, explain-
ing the purpose of his compilation. In it we find not
a word about the transcribing of Osiris dramas. On
the contrary, it will set in order for Theophilus a
story in which he had already been instructed. It
is clear that Theophilus had already been made
acquainted with " the facts about Jesus," perhaps
insufficiently, perhaps along lines which Luke depre-
Luke's cated. However this be, Luke desires to improve
argues an upon the information which Theophilus had so far
indefinite acquired about Jesus. It is clear that written and
more of unwritten traditions of Jesus were already dissemi-
such nated among believers. The prologue is inexplicable
documents . ° ^ , . .. ^ ^ • n-
otherwise, and it implies a whole series of witnesses
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 99
to the historicity of Jesus prior to Luke himself, of
whom, as I have said, we still have Mark and can
reconstruct Q. Both Matthew (whoever he was) and
Luke, then, are convinced of the historicity of Jesus,
and regarded Mark and Q as historical sources. They
exploit them, and they also try to fill up lacunas left
in these basal documents, and in particular to supply
their readers with some account of his birth and
upbringing. Both supplements, of course, are largely
fictitious, that of Matthew in particular ; but they
both testify to a fixed consciousness and belief among
early Christians that the Messiah was a real historical
person. Such an interest in the birth and up-bring-
ing of Jesus as Matthew and Luke reveal could never
have been felt by sectaries who were well aware that
he was not a real person, but a solar myth and first
cousin of Osiris. Had he been known, even by a few
believers and no more, to have been not a man but
a composite myth, people would not have craved for
details, even miraculous, about his birth and parentage
and upbringing. "Was it necessary to concoct human
pedigrees for a solar myth, and to pretend that Jacob
begat Joseph, and Joseph begat Jesus? The very
idea is absurd. They wanted such details, and got
them, just as did the worshippers of Plato, Alexander,
Augustus, Apollonius, and other famous men. In
connection with Osiris and Dionysus such details
were never asked for and never supplied.
In the covering letter which forms a sort of exordium l^^plica-
to his Gospel the following are the words in which Luke's
Luke assures us that others before himself had exordium
planned histories of the life of Jesus : —
Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw
up a narrative concerning those matters which have
100 THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
been fully established (or fulfilled) among us, even as
they delivered them unto us which from the beginning
were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed
good to me also, having traced out the course of all
things accurately from the first, to write them unto thee
in order, most excellent Theophilns ; that thou mightest
know the certainty concerning the things wherein thou
wast instructed.
This is not the tone of a man who trades in sun-
myths. The passage has a thoroughly honafide ring,
and declares (1) that Theophilus had already been
instructed in the Gospel narrative, but not so
accurately as the writer could wish ; (2) that several
accounts of Jesus's life and teaching w^ere in circula-
tion ; (3) that these accounts were based on the
traditions of those who had seen Jesus and assisted in
the diffusion of his Messianic and other teachings.
The passage cannot be later than a.d. 100, and is
probably as early as a.d. 80; many scholars put it
earlier. In any case, it reveals a consciousness,
stretching far back among believers, that Jesus had
really lived and died. Moreover, it is from the pen
of one who either had himself visited, with Paul,
James the brother (or, according to the orthodox, the
half-brother) of Jesus at Jerusalem (Acts xxi, 17), or
— if not that — anyhow had in his possession and
made copious use of a travel document written by the
companion of Paul.
ably^uS^a ^ study of Luke also suggests that he had a third
document narrative document of his own. Thus, without going
dent^of" outside the Synoptic Gospels, we have two, if not
Mark and three, wholly independent accounts of the doings and
^ sayings of Jesus, and an inferential certainty that
they were not the only ones which then existed. In
the earliest Christian writers, moreover, citations
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 101
occur that cannot well be referred to the canonical
Gospels, but which may very well have been taken
from the other narratives which Luke assures us
were in the possession of the earliest Church. These
narratives, like all other wholly or partly independent
documents, must have differed widely from one
another in detail ; for their authors probably handled
the tradition as freely as Matthew and Luke handle Messianic
Mark. But the inspiring motive of them all was the caiyptic
belief that a human Messiah had founded, or rather character
1 • (.11- • -r^ 1 . °^ these
begun, the community of believers in Palestine, early
That any of them were contemporary is improbable, tlocument^
for the simple reason that the eyes of believers were
turned, not backward on the life of the herald, but
forward to the Kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven
on earth which he heralded. They all felt themselves
to be living in the last days, and that the Kingdom
was to surprise many of them during their lifetime.
Nor among the earliest believers was this expectation
confined to Jews alone ; it extended equally to
Gentile converts. Thus Paul, in his epistles to the
Corinthians, labours to answer the pathetic query his
converts had addressed to him — namely, why the
kingdom to come so long delayed ; why many of
them had fallen sick and some had died, while yet it
tarried. Men and women who breathed such an
atmosphere of tense expectation, as a passage like this
and as the Gospel parables reveal, could not be
solicitous for annals of the past. Still less is the
attitude revealed that of people nurtured on ritual
dramas of an annuall}^ slain and annually resuscitated
god ; for in that case they only needed to wait for the
manifestation they yearned for, until the following
spring, when the god would rise afresh to secure
102 THE AEGUMENT FEOM SILENCE
Character
of the
Fourth
Gospel
salvation for his votaries. The tone of this passage
of Paul, as of all the earliest Christian documents,
shows that the mind's eye of the common believer, as
had been the founder's, was dazzled with the apoca-
lyptic splendours soon to be revealed, with the
beatitudes shortly to be fulfilled in the faithful.
They were as w^ayfarers walking in a dark night
towards a light which is far off, yet, because of its
brightness and of the lack of an interposed landscape
to fix the perspective, seems close at hand. Many a
Socialist workman, especially on the continent,
cherishes a similar dream of a good time coming ere
long for himself and his fellows. He has no sense of
the difficulties which for many a weary year — perhaps
for ever — will hinder the realization of his passion-
ately desired ideal. It is better so, for we live by our
enthusiasms, and are the better for having indulged
in them ; if the labourer had none, he would be a
chilly, useless being. Happily the Socialist seldom
reflects how commonplace he would probably find his
ideal if it were suddenly realized around him. Such
were the eschatological hopes and dreams rife in the
circles among which the Synoptic Gospels and their
constituent documents first saw the light ; they are
revealed on their every page, and, needless to say, are
inexplicable on Mr. Kobertson's hypothesis. Devoid
of sympathy with his subject, incapable of seeing it
against its true background, without tact or perspec-
tive, he has never felt or understood the difficulties
which beset his central hypothesis. He therefore
attempts no explanation of them.
Of the Fourth Gospel I have already said whatever
is strictly necessary in this connection. It hangs
together with the Johannine epistles ; and its writer
THE AEGUMENT FEOM SILENCE 103
certainly had the Gospel of Mark before him, for he
derives many incidents from it, and often covertly
controverts it. It seems to belong to the end of the
first century, and was in the hands of Gnostic sects
fairly early in the second — say about 128. When it
was written, the Gnosis of the Hellenized Jew^s, and
in especial of Philo, was invading the primitive
community. The Messianic and human traits of
Jesus, still so salient in Mark and Matthew, though
less so in Luke, are receding into the background
before the opinion that he had been the representa-
tion in flesh of the eternal Logos. All his conversa-
tions are re-written to suit the newer standpoint ; the
homely scenes and surroundings of Galilee are for-
gotten as much as can be, and Samaria and Jerusalem
— a more resounding theatre — are substituted. The
teaching in parables is dropped, and we hear no more
of the exorcisms of devils. Such things were unedi-
fying, and unworthy of so sublime a figure, as much
in the mind of this evangelist as of the fastidious
Professor W. B. Smith. Hence it may be said that
the Fourth Gospel has made the fortune of the
Catholic Church ; without it Athanasius could never
have triumphed, nor the Nicene Creed have been
penned, nor Professor Smith's diatribes have attracted
readers. For in it Jesus is becoming unreal, a divine it is half-
pedant masquerading in a vesture of flesh. When it ^^^^ ^^
was written, the Docetes, as they were called, were
already beginning to dot the ''i's" and cross the
"t's" of the teachers who sublimated Jesus into the
Philonian Logos ; and, as I said above, it is against
them, no doubt, that the caveat — so necessary in the
context — is entered that in Jesus the Word ivas made
flesh. Similarly, in the Johannine epistles certain
104 THE AEGUMENT FEOM SILENCE
Ignatius's
account of
Docetism
Drews
misunder-
stands
Gnosti-
cism
teachers are denounced who declared that Jesus
Christ had not come in the flesh, and taught that
his flesh was only a hlind. We have a fairly full
account of these docetic teachers in the Epistles
of Ignatius, which cannot be much later than a.d. 120.
From these we gather that they adopted the ordinary
tradition about Jesus, and believed that he had been
born, and eaten and drunk, had walked about with his
disciples, had delivered his teaching by word of mouth,
had been crucified by Pontius Pilate, had died, and
been buried. But all these operations had been
unreal and subjective in the minds of those who
were present at them, as are things we see in a
dream. They had taken place to the eye and ear
of bystanders, but not in reality. The partizans,
therefore, of the view that Jesus never lived deceive
themselves when they appeal to the Docetes as wit-
nesses on their side. The Docetes lend no colour to
their thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus, but just
the opposite. Drews writes (p. 57) that
the Gnostics of the second century really questioned
the historical existence of Jesus by their docetic
conception ; in other words, they believed only in
a metaphysical and ideal, not an historical and real,
Christ. The whole polemic of the Christians against
the Gnostics was based essentially on the fact that the
Gnostics denied the historicity of Jesus, or at least put
it in a subordinate position.
This is nonsense. The Docetes admitted to the full
that the Messiah had appeared on earth ; but, partly
to meet the Jewish objections to a crucified Messiah,
and partly inspired by that contempt for matter which
was and is common in the East, and has been the
inspiring motive of much vain asceticism, they shrank
from believing that he shared with ordinary men
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 105
their flesh and hlood, their secretions and evacua-
tions. Matter was too evil for a Messiah, much more
for the heavenly Lof/os, to have been encased in it, and
so subjected to its dominion ; to ascribe real flesh to
him was to humble him before the evil Demiurge, who
created matter. The Docetes accordingly took refuge Docetes
in the idea that his body was a phantom, and that in current
phantom form he had undergone all that was related Christian
of him in Christian tradition ; to which their views
bear testimony, instead of contradicting it, as
Dr. Drews and his friends pretend. " If these
things," writes Ignatius, " were done by our Lord
in Semblance, then am I also a prisoner in sem-
blance." This means that — mutatis mutandis — the
arguments of the Docetes would turn Ignatius too,
chains and all, into a phantom. Again and again
this writer affirms that the Docetes believed quite
correctly that Jesus was born of a virgin and
baptized by John, w^as nailed up for our sakes
under Pontius Pilate and Herod the Tetrarch, that
he suffered, died, and raised himself up out of the
grave. They only would not believe that he under-
went and performed all this truly — that is, objectively.
They insisted that the Saviour had only been among
men as a phantom, in the same manner as Helen had
gone through the siege of Troy as a mere phantom.
She was not really there, though Greeks and Trojans
saw and met her daily. She was all the time enjoying
herself amid the asphodel meadows of the Nile. Even
so the disciples, according to the Docetes, had heard
and seen Jesus all through his ministry' ; yet the body
they saw was phantasmal only. The Docetes also
argued — so we can infer from Ignatius's Epistle to
the Church of Smyrna — that, as Jesus ate and drank
106
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
Docetism
in Philo,
and in
Tobit
Professor
Smith and
Hippo-
lytus
after the resurrection in phantom guise, so he had
eaten and drunk hefore his death in no other than
phantom guise. The answer of Ignatius to this is :
" I know and believe that he was in the flesh even
after the resurrection "; and he forthwith relates how
the risen Jesus approached Peter and his company,
who thought they were in the presence of a phantom
or ghost, and said to them : '^ Lay hold and handle me,
and see that I am not a demon u-itliout a body.'' Every-
thing, then, that we read about the Docetes shows that
on all points, in respect of the miraculous incidents of
Jesus's life no less than of the natural, they blindly
accepted the record of evangelical tradition. Their
heresy was not to deny what the tradition related, but
to interpret it wrongly. Philo had long before set the
example of such an interpretation, when in his com-
mentaries, which were wddel}^ read by Christians in
the second century, he asserted that the angels who
appeared to Abraham at the oak of Mambre, and ate
and drank with him, only ate and drank in semblance,
and not in reality. They laid a spell on the eyes of
Abraham, and of the other guests at the banquet. So
in the Book of Tobit xii, 20, 21, the angel says : "All
these days did I appear unto you ; and I did neither
eat nor drink, but it was a vision ye yourselves
saw."
In the same way, Jesus laid a spell on the eyes of
his followers, in the belief of this very early sect of
Christian believers. Professor W. B. Smith, like his
two companions, writes as if Docetism were an asset
in favour of his thesis that Christianity began as the
cult of a slain God, and that " the humanization of this
divinity proceeds apace as we descend the stream of
tradition." Yet the Docetic doctrine, as given in the
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 107
report of Hippolytus, and adduced by Mr. Smith him-
self (p. 88), exactly bears out the estimate of its import
with which one rises from a study of the Ignatian
Epistles. It is from Hippolytus's Refutation of
Heresies, viii, 10, and runs thus : —
Having come from above, he (Jesus) put on the
begotten (body), and did all thiuf/s Just as has been
written in the Gospels; he washed himself in Jordan,
etc.
Hippolytus was in contact with Docetes, and familiar
with their writings and arguments. What better
proof could we have than this citation of the fact
that they servilely adopted the traditions of Jesus
recorded in the Gospels? They were not supplying
an answer to imaginar}^ Jews who had objected to
Christianity on the score that Jesus had never lived.
Their speciality was to interpret the Gospel record,
which they did not dream of disputing, along phantas-
magoric lines. There was still left in the Church
enough common sense and historic insight to brush
their interpretation on one side as nonsensical.
Drews once more has conjured up out of Justin Drews
Martyr a Jew of the second century who denied the "tTnds^^^
human existence of Jesus. The relevant passage is Justin
at p. 16 of his Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, ' ^^ ^'^
and runs as follows : —
It is not true, however, as has recently been stated,
that no Jew ever questioned the historical reality of
Jesus, so that we may see in this some evidence for
his existence. The Jew Trypho, whom Justin intro-
duces in his Dialoi/iie with Trijpho, expresses himself
very sceptically about it. "■ Ye follow an empty
rumour," he says, "and make a Christ for your-
selves." ''If he was born and lived somewhere, he
is entirely unknown " (viii, 3). This work appeared
in the second half of the second century ; it is there-
108 THE AEGUMENT FEOM SILENCE
fore the first indication of a denial of the human
existence of Jesus, and shows that such opinions were
current at the time.
Professor Drews has, I regret to say, failed to
read his text intelligently. So I will transcribe
the passage of Justin in full, premising that it was
more probably written in the first than in the second
half of the second century. The dialogue is between
a Jew and an ex-Platonist who has turned Christian,
and the Jew says with an ironical smile to the
Christian : —
The rest of your arguments I admit, and I admire
your religious enthusiasm. Nevertheless, you would
have done better to stick to Plato's or any other sage's
philosophy, practising the virtues of endurance and
continence and temperance, rather than let yourself
be ensnared by false arguments and follow utterly
worthless men. For if you had remained loyal to
that form of philosophy and lived a blameless life,
there was left a hope of your rising to something
better. But as it is you have abandoned God and
put your trust in man, so what further hope is left
to you of salvation? If, then, you are willing to
take advice from myself — for I already have come to
regard you as a friend — begin first by circumcising
yourself, and next keep in the legal fashion the
sabbath and the festivals and the new moons of God,
and in a word fulfil all the commandments written in
the Law, and then perhaps you will attain unto God's
mercy. But Messiah (or Christ), even supposing he
has come into being and exists somewhere or other,
is unrecof/nhed, and can neither Jx-now himself as such
nor possess any mii/ht, until Elias having come shall
anoint him and make him manifest unto all. But
j^ou (Christians), having lent ear to a vain report,
feign a sort of Messiah unto yourselves, and for his
sake are now rashly going to perdition.
There is a parallel passage in the Dialogue, c. ex,
THE AKGUMENT FKOM SILENCE 109
where the Christian interlocutor, after reciting the
prophecy of Micah, iv, 1-7, adds these words : —
I am quite aware, gentlemen, that j'our rabbis
admit all the words of the above passage to have
been uttered about, and to refer to the Messiah ; and
I also know that they deny him so far to have come,
or, if they say he has come, then that it is not yet
known who he is. However, when he is manifested
and in gloiy, then, they say, it will be known who he
is. And then, so they say, the things foreshadowed
in the above passage will come to pass.
The sense, then, of the passage adduced by Drews The Jews
is perfectly clear, and exactly the opposite of that testify to
which he puts upon it. The Christ or Messiah ^^^ns's
referred to by the Jew is not that man of Nazareth
in whom the Christians had falsely recognized the
signs of Messiahship. No, he is, on the contrary,
the Messiah expected by the Jews ; but the latter
has not so far come ; or, if he has come, still lurks
in some corner unrecognized until such time as Elias,
to whom the role appertains, shall appear again and
proclaim him. There is not a word of Jesus of
Nazareth not having come, or of his being still
unrecognized. The gravamen of the Jew is that the
ex-Platonist had been chicaned by Christians into
believing that the Messiah Jiad alreadij come in the
person of Jesus, and had been recognized in him.
The passage, therefore, has exactly the opposite
bearing to what Drews imagines.
There is, too, another very significant point to be Second
made in this connection. It is this, that the Jews of ^ewl^dfd
that age would not have borne the bitter grudge they not detest
did against the Christians if the latter had merely "hadows
devoted themselves to the cult of a mythical personage,
a Sun-God-Saviour, who never existed at all. They
110 THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
Chwolson
on early
Kabbis
were quite well capable of ridiculing myths of such
a kind, as the story of Bel and the Dragon shows.
Jesus, however, was a real memory to them, and one
which they detested. Their hatred for him was that
which you bear for a man who has upset your
religion and trampled on your prejudices — the sort
of hatred that Catholics have for the memory of
Luther and Calvin ; it was not in any way akin to
their mockery of idols, their disgust for the demons
that inhabited them, their abhorrence of their votaries.
It was hatred of a religious antagonist, odium theolo-
gicum of the purest kind, and hatred like that with
which the Ebionites for generations hated the memory
of Paul. Jesus had violated and set at naught the
law of Moses. A solar myth could not do that.
To this hatred of the Jews for the memory of Jesus,
and to the early date at which it showed itself, Dr.
Drews himself bears witness when, on p. 12 of the
work cited, he writes as follows : —
There is no room for doubt that after the destruc-
tion of Jerusalem, and especially during tlie jirst
quarter of the second century, the hostility of the Jews
and Christians increased ; indeed, by the year 130 the
hatred of the Jews for the Christians became so fierce
that a rabbi whose niece had been bitten by a serpent
preferred to let her die rather than see her healed " in
the name of Jesus."
Chwolson argues from this and similar passages
that the Rabbis of the second half of the first century,
or the beginning of the second, were well acquainted
with the person of Christ. **Here," says Drews, " he
clearly deceives himself and his readers if the impres-
sion is given that they had any personal knowledge
of him." The self-deception is surely on the part of
Dr. Drews. Chwolson does not imply that any
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 111
Rabbis of the years 50-100 had a personal know-
ledge of Jesus, in the sense of having seen him or
conversed with him ; for he is not given to writing
nonsense. He does, however, imply that they knew
of him as a real man who had lived and done them
a power of evil. If they had only known him as a
solar myth, their hostility to his followers, admitted
by Drews, w^ould be inexplicable ; equally inexplicable
if, as Dr. W. B. Smith contends, he had been a
merely heavenly power, a divine Logos or God,
incidentally the object of a monotheist cult. In that
case the Jews would rather have been inclined to
fall on the neck of the Christians and welcome them ;
and their cult would have been no more offensive to
them than the theosophy of Philo the Jew, from
which it would have been hardly distinguishable. In t^e
Justin Martyr furthermore makes statements on this gyna-
point which perfectly agree with the story of the gogues
hostile Rabbi adduced by Drews. Not in one, but in regularly
half-a-dozen, passages he testifies that in his day the execrated
Jews in all their synagogues, at the conclusion of
their prayers, cursed the memory of Jesus, execrated
his name and personality (for name meaned personalitii
in that age), and poured ridicule on the soi-cUsaut
Messiah that had been crucified by the Romans.
"Even to this day," Justin exclaims (ch. xciii), *' you
persevere in your wickedness, imprecating curses on
us because we can prove that he whom 3'ou crucified
is Messiah." He records (ch. cviii) *' that the Jews
chose and appointed emissaries whom they sent forth
all over the world to proclaim that a godless heresy
and unlawful had been vamped up by a certain
Jesus, a charlatan of Galilee. They were to warn
their compatriots that the disciples had stolen him
112 THE AKGUMENT FROM SILENCE
out of the tomb in which, after being unnailed from
the cross, he had been laid, and then pretended that
he had been raised from the dead and ascended into
heaven."
Eusebius's At first sight the above is a mere rechauffe of
on th^r Matt, xxviii, 13 ; but Eusebius, who had in his hands
point much first- and second- century literature of the Chris-
tians and Hellenized Jews that we have not, attests
a similar tradition, and declares that he found it in
the publications of the ancients.-^
The priests and elders of the Jewish race who lived
in Jerusalem wrote epistles and sent them broadcast
to the Jews everywhere among the Gentiles, calum-
niating the teaching of Christ as a brand-new heresy
and alien to God ; and they warned them by letters
not to receive it. And their apostles took their
epistles, written on papyrus and ran up and
down the earth, maligning our account of the Saviour.
It is still the custom of the Jews to give the
name of Apostles to those who carry encyclical letters
from their rulers.
Note that Eusebius does not weave in the story of
the disciples stealing their Master's body from out of
the tomb. From his omission of it, and from the
dissimilarity of his language, we can infer that the
" publications of the ancients " from which he derived
his information were not the works of Justin, but an
independent source, which may also have been in
Justin's hands. In any case, the Jews were not given
to tilting at windmills ; their secular and bitter hatred
of the very name of Jesus, the relentless war waged
with pen and sword from the first between the Chris-
^ Euseb., in Esai, xviii, 1 foil., p. 424, foil. The words might
mean Justin ; but when he quotes Justin he always gives his name.
The Gospels cannot be intended.
THE AKGUMENT FROM SILENCE 113
tians and themselves — all this is attested by the
earliest writings of the Church. It already colours
Luke's Gospel, and is a leading inspiration of the
Johannine. It alone is all-sufficient to dissipate the
hypotheses of these twentieth-century fabulists.
Let us turn to the Acts of the Apostles, the only Ev^ence
book of the New Testament which contains a history
of the Apostolic age. In the last half of this book is
embedded, as even Van Manen admitted, a travel
document or narrative of voyage undertaken by its
author in common with Paul. Whether or no the
fellow-traveller was the compiler of the Third Gospel
and of Acts is not certain ; but he was assuredly
a man named Luke. It does not matter. "It is
not," writes Dr. Drews {Christ Myth, p. 19),
the imaghied historical Jesus, but, if anj'one, Paul,
who is that " great personality " that called Chris-
tianity into life as a new religion ; and the depth of
his moral experience gave it the strength for its
journey, the strength which bestowed upon it victory
over the other competing religions. Without Jesus
the rise of Christianity can be quite well understood ;
without Paul, not so.
We infer from the above that, on the whole, Drews
accepts the narrative of Paul's sayings and doings as
given in Acts, and does not consider it a mere record
of the feats a solar hero performed, not on earth, but
in heaven. We gather also that Mr. Robertson takes
the same indulgent view of Acts, for he frequently
impugns the age of the Pauline epistles and the
evidence they contain on the strength of " Van Van
Manen's thesis of the non-genuineness" of them, ^^'^a!"
" ^ on Acts
*' In point of fact," he writes (p. 453), '' Van Manen's and Paul
whole case is an argument ; Dr. Carpenter's is a
simple declaration."
I
114 THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
But Van Manen never for a moment questioned the
historical reality of Jesus. What he insisted upon is^
that
there is no word, nor any trace, of any essential
difference as regards faith and life between Paul
and other disciples He is a "disciple" among the
"disciples." What he preaches is substantially
nothing else than what their mind and heart are
full of — the things concerning Jesus.
Van Manen, however, allows
that Paul's journeyings, his protracted sojourn outside
of Palestine, his intercourse in foreign parts with
converted Jews and former heathen, may have eman-
cipated him (as it did so many other Jews of the
Dispersion) without his knowing it, more or less —
perhaps in essence completely — from circumcision
and other Jewish religious duties, customs, and rites.
Concerning Paul the same writer says (oj). cit., art,
*' Paul ") that Acts gives us
a variety of narratives concerning him, differing in
their dates, and also in respect of the influences under
which they were written With regard to Paul's
journeys, we can in strictness speak with reasonable
certainty and with some detail only of one great
journey, which he undertook towards the end of his
life. (Acts xvi, 10-17 ; xx, 5-15 ; xxi, 1-18 ; xxvii, 1-
xxviii, 16.)
Evidence It is upon Acts, then, that Van Manen bases his
sectionrof estimate, which we just now cited, of Paul's relations
Acts with the other disciples. He refuses, and rightly,
** to assume that Acts must take a subordinate place
in comparison with the principal epistles of Paul."
In effect, his assault on the Pauline Epistles rests on
the assumption that the record of Paul's activity
presented in Acts is the more trustworthy wherever
1 Encycl. Bihl, art, "Paul."
THE AKGUMENT FROM SILENCE 115
it appears to conflict with the Pauline Epistles, and
in particular with Galatians. In accepting Van
IManen's conclusion, Mr. Robertson implicitl}^ accepts
his premises, one of which is the superior reliability
of Acts in general, and in particular of the four
sections enumerated above, and characterized by the
use of the word " we." For the moment, therefore,
let us confine ourselves to the ninety-seven verses of
these "we" sections, which are obviously from the
pen of a fellow-traveller of Paul. We find it recorded
in them that Paul was moved by a vision to go and
preach the Gospel^ in Macedonia ; that at Philippi
a certain woman named Lydia, who already ivor-
shipped God — i.e., was a heathen converted to Jewish
monotheism — had opened her heart in consequence to
give heed to the things spoken by Paul. We infer
that Paul's Gospel supplemented in some way her
monotheism. She and her household became some-
thing more than mere worshippers of God, and were
baptized. We learn that Paul and his companion
reckoned time by the Jewish feasts and fasts — e.g.,
by the days of unleavened bread — but at the same
time were in the habit of meeting together with the
rest of the faithful on the first day of the week, in
order to break bread and discourse about the faith.
At Tyre, as at Troas, they found " disciples " who,
like Paul, arranged future events, or were warned of
them through the Spirit. At Caesarea, of Palestine,
they stayed with Philip the evangelist, who was one
of tlie seven, and had four daughters — virgins ivho did
prophesy. They also met there a certain prophet
Agahus, who was a mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost,
* Words italicized in the sequel are citations of the text of Acts.
116 THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
and as such foretold that the Jews at Jerusalem, of
whose plots against Paul we elsewhere hear in these
sections, would deliver him into the hands of the
Gentiles. Paul, in his turn, declares his readiness
to be bound and die at Jerusalem for the name of
the Lord Jesus. At Cyprus they stay with an early
disciple f Mnason, and, on reaching Jerusalem, the
brethren received them gladl}^ And the day following
Paul 2vent in with us unto James ; and all the elders
(of the Church) ivere present. Paul relates to them
the facts of his ministry among the Gentiles. In the
course of the final voyage to Rome, when all the crew
have despaired of their lives, because of the violence
of the storm and of the ship leaking, Paul comes to
the rescue, and informs them that the angel of the
God whom he served, and whose he was, had stood by
him in the night, saying: ''Fear not, Paul; thou must
stand before Ccesar.'" He therefore could not perish by
shipwreck, nor they either. In Melita the trivial cir-
cumstance that the bite of a viper, promptly shaken
of! by him into the fire, did not cause Paul to swell up
{i.e., his hand to be inflamed), or die, caused the bar-
barians to acclaim him as a god ; and in the sequel
the sick in the island flock to him, and are healed.
At Puteoli Paul and his companion find brethren, as
they had found them at Jerusalem and elsewhere ;
and presently they enter Rome.
In these sections, then, we have glimpses of a
brotherhood disseminated all about the Mediterranean
whose members were Monotheists of the Jewish type,
but something besides, in so far as they accepted a
gospel which Paul also preached, about a Lord Jesus
Christ ; these brethren solemnly broke bread on the
first day of the week. In these sections we breathe
THE AEGUMENT EEOM SILENCE 117
the same atmosphere of personal visions, of angels,
of prophec}^ of direct inspiration of individuals by
the Holy Ghost, of the cult of virginity, which we
breathe in the rest of Acts and throughout the
Pauline Epistles. We meet also with a Philip, an ^^^^^ ^"^
evauf/eUstfa>nd one of the seven. Who were the seven? seven
We turn to an earlier chapter of Acts,^ and read that
in the earliest days of the religion at Jerusalem, in
order to satisfy the claims of the widows of Greek
Jews who were neglected in the daily ministration,
the twelve apostles had called together the multitude
of the faithful, and chosen seven men of good report,
full of the Spirit and of wisdom to serve the tahleSf
because they, the Twelve, were too busy preaching
the word to attend to the catering of the new
Messianic society. The first on the list of these
seven deacons was Stephen, the second Philip. When,
therefore, in the later passage the fellow-traveller of
Paul refers to Philip as one of the seven, he assumes
that w^e know who tlie seven were ; and he can only
expect us to know it because we have read the earlier
chapter which narrates their appointment. The
fellow-traveller of Paul, therefore, was aware of the
appointment of the seven deacons, and testifies
thereto. Here we have irrefragable evidence of the
historicity of verses 1-6 of chapter vi of Acts, and at
the same time a strong presumption that the fellow-
traveller of Paul was himself the redactor, if not the
author, of the earlier chapters (i-xv) of Acts, as he
is obviously of the last half (ch. xvi to end) ; for that
1 I expect Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson, in their next editions, to
broach the view that the earlier chapter was forged to explain the
later one, and that in the later one " The Seven " are a cryptic
reference to the Pleiades.
118 THE ARGUMENT FEOM SILENCE
last half coheres inseparably with the contiguous we
sections.
unlr^oT Have we, then, any way of testing this presump-
Acts tion that the fellow-traveller who penned these we
sections also penned the rest of Acts ? We have,
though it is one which can only appeal to trained
philologists, and I doubt if Messrs. Drews and Robert-
son are likely to give to such an argument its due
weight. The linguistic evidence of the ice sections
has been sifted and tested by Sir John Hawkins in
his Horce Synopticce. The statistic of words and
phrases cannot lie. It proves that the writer of Acts,
and consequently of the Third Gospel, " was from time
to time a companion of Paul in his travels, and that
he simply and naturally wrote in the first person
when narrating events at which he had been present."
This is the best hypothesis which a study of the
language of Acts and of the Third Gospel permits us
to accept. I do not say it is the only possible one,
and I expect Mr. Robertson and his pupil. Dr. Drews,
to reject it with scorn, for their philology is of the
sort which recognizes in Maria the same name as
Moira and Myrrha. The only other explanations of
the presence of we in these sections are, either that
a compiler who used the diary of the fellow-traveller
left it standing in the document when he embodied it
in his narrative, through carelessness and by accident,
or else that he left it of set design, and because
he wished his readers to identify him with the older
reporter, and so to pass for a companion of Paul.
The first of these explanations is very improbable ;
the second not only much too subtle, but out of
keeping with the babbling, but credulous, honesty
which everywhere shows itself in Acts.
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 119
It is true that Van Manen assumes a prion, and Van
without a shadow of proof, that Luke and Acts were g^gJ^g^jJ^Qf
written as late as the period 125-150. His only dating
argument is that Marcion already had the former in ^^tg^^o^^^j
his hands as early as 140 ; and he is prone to make postpone
the childish assumption that the date of composition J^temtur"^
of any book in the New Testament is exactly that of to the
its earliest ascertainable use by a later author. Such ^^j^g ^®
a mode of reasoning is utterly false and uncritical,
and would, if applied in other fields, prove that the
great mass of ancient literature was not ancient at
all, but composed in the tenth or later centuries to
which our earliest MSS. belong ; for we have no cita-
tions either in contemporary or in nearly contemporary
writers of nine-tenths of the whole volume of the
old Greek and Latin literatures. Most of it, if we
applied Van Manen's canons of evidence (which, of
course, are accepted and improved upon by the three
writers I am criticizing), would turn out to have been
written as late as the renaissance of European learn-
ing. It is a fallacious test, and Van Manen would
have shrunk from the paradox of enforcing it in
regard to any other literature than the New Testa-
ment. It would appear as if the orthodox tradition-
alists, by insisting that the Bible must not be judged
and criticized like other books, have prejudiced not
merely their own cause — that would not matter — but
the cause of sober history. They have invested it
with such an atmosphere of mystery and falsetto, with
what I may call a Sunday-school atmosphere, that a
certain class of inquirers rush to an opposite extreme,
and insist on canons of evidence and authenticity which
would, if consistently used, eliminate all ancient litera-
ture and history. One form of error provokes the other.
120 THE AKGUMENT FEOM SILENCE
Ephrem's
commen-
tary on
Acts
Evidence
of those
parts of
Acts which
cohere
with the
we sections
We have examined for their evidence as regards
the Early Church those sections which directly
evidence the hand of a companion of Paul, who was
probably Luke the physician, seeing that tradition
was unanimous in ascribing the Third Gospel and
Acts to him. Some scholars have observed that the
old Syriac version cited by Ephrem the Syrian in his
commentary^ on Acts read in Acts xx, 13, as follows :
'* But I, Lucas, and those ivith me, going before to the
ship, set sail for Assos," where the conventional text
reads: " But ?i;e, going before." The pronoun ?^'e in
this passage cannot include, as it usually does, Paul,
who had taken another route and had left directions
that they should call for him ; this may have led
Ephrem to substitute the paraphrase I, Lucas, and
those ivith me. Anyhow, without further evidence, we
can hardly use Ephrem's citation as a proof of the
Lucan authorship of Acts. But we must anyhow
consider the evidence as to Paul's beliefs which is to
be gathered from the sections of Acts which imme-
diately cohere with the travel document, and which
clearly depended for their information on a source
closely allied to them and of the same age and
provenance. Firstly, then, it is noticeable that all
this last part of Acts is relatively free from the
fabulous details which mar the earlier part descriptive
of the exploits of Peter. Next we note that Paul, on
entering a city, goes straight to the Jewish Synagogue,
and that the gospel with which he undertakes to
supplement their monotheism consisted not of tidings
about an ancient Palestinian Sun-god named Joshua,
or Dionysus or Krishna, or Osiris, or iEsculapius, or
^ The relevant part of this commentary is preserved in an old
Armenian version of which we have ancient MSS.
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE 121
Mithras, nor about a vegetation or harvest demon of
any kind, nor about any of the other members of the
Christian pandemonium invented by Mr. Robertson
and adopted by Dr. Drews. No ; on the contrary, at
Thessalonica Paul spent three sabbaths trying to
convince the Jews in their synagogue that Jesus
must have been the Jewish Messiah promised in the
Jewish scriptures, because in accordance with prophecy
he had suffered and risen from the dead. That he
taught them, further, that Jesus, qua Christ or
Messiah, was also the Jewish king whose advent they
looked for, is obvious from the fact that he was
accused on this occasion, as on others, of teaching,
'* contrary to the decrees of CiEsar, that there was
another king, one Jesus." At Corinth Paul found he
was wasting time in trying to persuade the Jews that
Jesus was the Messiah whose advent they expected ;
and he declared to them that thenceforth he would
devote himself to spreading his good news among the
Gentiles. None the less he persisted, wherever he
afterwards went, in going first to the synagogue, so
as to give his compatriots a prior chance of accepting
his spiritual wares, according to the principle enun-
ciated in his epistles, that the promises were for the
Jews first and only after them for the Gentiles. In
Acts XXV, 19, Festus lays before King Agrippa the
case against Paul as he had learned it from the
Jewish priests and elders at Jerusalem. It amounted
to this, that Paul affirmed that "one Jesus, who was
dead, was really alive." We learn in an earlier
passage that Paul was a Jew of Tarsus, an adherent
of the Pharisaic sect which believed in a general
resurrection of good Jews, that nevertheless he had
persecuted the adherents of Jesus of Nazareth and
122 THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
connived at the murder of Stephen. He has some
difficulty in convincing the Roman governor of Judaea
that he is not a leader of the Jewish sicarii, or sect of
assassins, who were ever anxious to range themselves
on the side of any Messiah ready to show jQght against
the Roman Legions. The impression made on Festus,
the Roman Governor, by Paul's prophetic arguments
about a Messiah who had suffered and then risen from
the dead was (Acts xxvi, 24) that " much learning had
made him mad." We can discern all through this
last half of Acts that attitude of Paul to Jesus which
confronts us in his epistles. Nothing interests him
except his death on the cross and his resurrection.
Of the rest of his career we learn nothing. In one
passage, ch. xiii, 26 foil., we have a slightly more
detailed account of the staple of Paul's teaching, as
delivered to the Jews when he encountered them in
their synagogues. He informed them of how " they
that dwell in Jerusalem and their rulers " had con-
demned Jesus; "though they found no cause of
death in him, yet asked they of Pilate that he should
be slain." They afterwards ''took him down from
the tree and laid him in a tomb. But God raised
him from the dead : and he was seen for many days
of them that came up with him from Galilee to
Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses unto the
people."
There is not much of a vegetation-god story about
the above concise narrative, which, however, is
strikingly independent of the Gospel legends concern-
ing the burial and resurrection of Jesus ; for, accord-
ing to them, it was the friends and adherents of Jesus,
and not the rulers, who condemned him, that w^ere
careful to bury him ; and his post-resurrectional
THE ARGUMENT FEOM SILENCE 123
appearances are here confined to his Galilean
followers, who, by virtue of their longer association
and intimacy with him, would be more likely than
others to see him after death in dreams and visions.
I have now reviewed the historical books of the Six inde-
New Testament. We have in them at least six a^a early
monuments — to wit, ^lark, the non-Marcan document, documents
the parts of the First and Third Gospels peculiar to i-eai jesus
their authors, the Fourth Gospel, and the history of
Paul and his mission given in chapters xiii to xxviii
of Acts. Perhaps I ought to add the first twelve
chapters of Acts, of which the information, according
to Van Manen, was derived from an early and lost
document, the Acts of Peter. That would make
seven monuments. Unless all philological analysis
is false, the Third Gospel and Acts are from the pen
of a companion of Paul, and cannot be set later than
about 90 A.D. Mark, which he used, must be inde-
finitely earlier, and I have pointed out that there are
good reasons for setting its date before the year 70.
The non-Marcan document, which critics have agreed
to call Q (Quelle), cannot be later than Mark, and is
probably much earlier, judging from the fact that it
as yet reported no miracles of Jesus, nor hints of his
death and resurrection. Now all these documents
are independent of one another in style and contents,
yet they all have a common interest — namely, the
memory of a historical man Jesus ; and such data as
they isolatedly afford about Jesus agree on the whole
as closely as any profane documents ever agreed
which, being written independently and from very
different standpoints, yet refer to one and the same
person. If we see a number of convergent rays of
light streaming down under clouds across a widely
124 THE AEGUMENT FEOM SILENCE
extended landscape, we infer a central sun behind the
clouds by which they are all emitted. Similarly, we
have here several traditions and documents which
converge on a single man, and are all and severally
meaningless, and their genesis impossible of explana-
tion unless we assume that he lived. It is sufficiently
incredible that one tradition should (to take the
hypothesis of non-historicity in its most rational
form — that, namely, of Professor W. B. Smith)
allegorize the myth of a Saviour God as the career
of a man, and that man a Galilean teacher, in whose
humanity the Church believed from the first. That
six or seven parallel traditions should all have hit on
the same form of deception and allegory is, as I said
before, as incredible as that several roulette tables at
Monte Carlo should independently and at one and
the same time throw up an identical series of numbers.
Credat Judceus Apella. These writers who develop
the thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus because
miracles came to be attributed to him — how could
they not in that age and social medium ? — ask us to
believe in a miracle which far outweighs any which
any religionists ever reported of their founder ; they
themselves have fallen into fathomless depths of
credulity.
Chapter IV
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
Now let us turn to the Epistles of Paul, a person ^^^^^
whom these writers, as we have seen above, admit to son's vital
have lived, and to have played no small part in the interpola-
establishment of Christianity.
In using these Epistles, they all three make a
reservation to the effect that any evidence which
they may supply in favour of the historicity of Jesus,
and which cannot be explained away, shall be regarded
as an interpolation ; and as it is something that slays
his hypothesis, Mr. Robertson has taught us to call
such evidence "vital interpolation." It must die in
order that his hypothesis may live. They also claim,
ah initio, to deny Pauline authorship to any epistles
that may turn out to be a stumbling-block in the way
of their theories, and lean to the view of Van Manen
and others, who held that the entire mass of the
Pauline letters are the " work of a whole school of
second-century theologians" — in other words, forgeries
of the period 130-140. They would, of course,
set them later than that, only it is overwhelmingly Defying
certain that Marcion made about that time a collection evidence
of ten of them, which he expurgated to suit his views, ^^^ reie-
and arranged in order, with Galatians first ; this Paulines
collection he called the ApostoUcon. It runs some- *° second
, . . , . century
what counter to this view that, twenty years earlier,
we already have a reference to these Epistles in
125
126
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
Professor
Smith's
kindred
thesis of-
fends the
facts
Ignatius, who, with an exaggeration hardly excused
by the fact that he is addressing members of the
Ephesian Church, informs us that the Ephesians
are mentioned "in every letter" by Paul. Those
who desire ample proof that Ignatius was well
acquainted with Paul's Epistles cannot do better
than refer to a work, drawn up and published in
1905 by members of the Oxford Society of Historical
Theology, entitled The New Testament in the Apostolic
Fathers. In this the New Testament originals and
the citations are arranged in parallel columns in the
order of their convincingness.
At a still earlier date — say a.d. 95 — Clement of
Piome cites the Paulines. As Professor "W. B. Smith
makes Herculean efforts to show that he did not, I
venture to set before my readers a passage — chap.
XXXV, 5, 6 of his Epistle face to face with Romans i,
29-32 — so that they may judge for themselves. I
print identical words in leaded type : —
1 Clement.
dwoppi-spavres dcj) eavrdv tt a a a v
d 8 I K i av Kat dvofxiav, ir\e o v €-
^ i a V, ^ p e IS, KaKOTjdeias re
Koi ddXovs \p id V pL<x ixov s re
Koi K ar a\a\ias, 6 e o ar v-
y lav, VTT € p-q (pav L av re Kal
d\a ^ove lay, Kevodo^iav re koX
d(pi\o^€viav.
T av T a yap oi Trpdaaovres
aTir/7]Tol Tu) deip virdpxovaLV' ov
ixdvov 5e oi IT pda a ov T es aiir d,
dXXd Kal ol avv€v5oKovvT€S
avTocs.
Bo mans.
TreTrXrjpoj/uievovs ir d a rj d 8 i k i a,
TT V 1] p La, TrXeove^ia, KaKiqi, [xea-
rovs <p66vov, cpdvov, ipiSos, 86-
\ov, KaKOTjdeias, •>{/ id v p La-
rds, K ar a \d\ovs, 6 e o a r v-
yeis, v^piards, V7rep7](pdvovs,
'\d\a^6vas, ecpei'perds KaKuv,
i yovevaiv aVet^eis, davveTovs, davv-
derovs, dcTTopyovs, dveXermdvas,
OLTLves rb diKaicojua rod deou eTri*/-
vdvres, 6tl rd t oiav t a ir p d c-
a OV T e s A^LOL davdrov eiaiv, o v
fxovov avrd iroLOvaiv, ctXXd
Kat (T vv e v8 OK ov a L toIs tt p d a-
(T ova I.
The dependence of Clement's Epistle on that of Paul's
Letter to the Romans is equally visible if the English
renderings of them be compared, as follows : —
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
127
[Translation.]
Clement xxxv, 5, 6.
Casting away from ourselves
all unrighteousness and
lawlessness, co vetou sness,
strife, malignity, and
deceit; whisperings and
backbiting s, hatred of
God, haughtiness and
boastfulness, vainglory and
inhospitableness.
For they that practise
these things are hateful to
God. And not only they
which practise them, but
also they who consent
with them.
Roman>i i, 29-32.
Being filled with all un-
righteousness, wickedness,
covetou sness, maliciousness ;
full of envy, murder, strife,
deceit, malignity; whis-
perers, backbiters, hate-
ful to God, insolent,
haughty, boastful, inven-
tors of evil thing.^, disobedient
to parents, without understand-
ing, covenant-breakers, without
natural affection, unmerciful :
who, knowing the ordinance of
God, that they which prac-
tise such things are worthy
of death, not only do the
same, but also consent
with them that practise them.
Some of the sources of Paul approximate in text
still more to Clement — (?.//., the reading Trom^pia
" wickedness " is not certain. In some, " malignity"
precedes ''deceit." In some, "and" is added before
the words " not only."
In the above parallel passages the agreement both
in kind and sequence of the lists of vices is too close
to be accidental ; and this is clinched by the identity
of sense and form of the clauses which follow the two
lists. Nor is this the only example of the influence of
the Paulines on Clement. We give one more, giving
the English only : —
Paid {1 Cor. i, 11-13).
For it hath been signified unto
me concerning you, my brethren,
by those of Chloe, that there are
contentions among you. Now
this I mean, that each one of
you saith, I am of Paul ; and I
of Apollos ; and I of Cephas ;
and 1 of Christ.
Clement xlvii, 1.
Take ye up the epistle of the
blessed Paul, the Apostle, what
did he write first to you in the
beginning of the good tidings.
In verity he spiritually indited
you a letter about himself and
I Cephas and Apollos.
128 THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
Here Clement only alludes to Paul's letter, not
citing it, and he betrays a knowledge of the order
and times in which Paul wrote his Epistles ; for he
declares that 1 Corinthians was written by Paul in
the beginning of the good tidings — i.e., of his preach-
ing to them of the Gospel. The Corinthians had been
first evangelized by him three years before. The
same phrase meets us in the same sense in Paul
(Philippians iv, 15) : —
And ye yourselves also know, ye Philippians, that
in the beginning of the Gospel, when I departed from
Macedonia, etc.
Altogether there are thirty passages in Clement's
Epistle to the Corinthians which indicate more or
less clearly a knowledge of the Pauline Epistles,
including that to Hebrews. If we were tracing the
relation of two profane authors, no scholar would
hesitate to acknowledge a direct influence of one on
the other. Merely because one of them happens to
belong to the New Testament, such writers as Van
Manen, W. B. Smith, et hoc genus omne, feel them-
selves in duty bound to run their heads against a
brick wall. The responsibility, it must be admitted,
lies at the door of orthodox theologians. For centuries
independent scholars have been warned off the domain
of so-called sacred literature. The Bible might not be
treated as any other book. I once heard the late Canon
Liddon forecast the most awful fate for Oxford if it
ever should be. The nemesis of orthodox superstition
is that such writers as those we are criticizing cannot
bring themselves to treat the book fairly, as they would
other literature ; nor is any h^^pothesis too crazy for
them when they approach Church history. The laity,
in turn, who too often do not know their right hand
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 129
from their left, are so justly suspicious of the evasions
and arriere-pensee of orthodox apologists that they are
ready to accept any wild and unscholarly theory that
labels itself Rationalist.
The Epistles of Paul, then, must obviously have Presuppo-
been widely known before Marcion issued an expur- fjj^^°"/^^
gated edition of them in the year 140. We have ment from
. "1
shown that many of them were familiar to Clement ^^^^°^®
of Rome in the last decade of the first century. But
even if we had no traces of the Pauline Epistles
before the year 140, as Yan Manen and these writers
in the teeth of the evidence maintain, it would not
follow that they were as late as the first irrefragable
use of them by a later author. Professor W. B.
Smith's argument is based on the supposed silence of
earlier authors, and he entitles his chapter on this
subject " Silentium SaecuUy A magnificent petitio
principii ! He has never thought over the aptitudes
of the " argument from silence." This argument, as
MM. Langlois and Seignobos remark in their Intro-
duction to the Study of History (translation by Berry ;
London, Duckworth, 1898),
is based on the absence of indications with regard to
a fact. From the circumstance of the fact [e.g., of
Paul's writing certain epistles] not being mentioned
in any document it is inferred that there was no such
fact It rests on a feeling which in ordinary life is
expressed by saying : " If it were true, we should
have heard of it." In order that such reasoning
should be justified it would be necessary that every
fact should have been observed and recorded in
writing, and that all the records should have been
preserved. Now the greater part of the documents
which have been written have been lost, and the
greater part of the events which happen are not
recorded in writing. In the majority of cases the
K
130
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
Date of
Paulines
to be deter-
mined by
contents
argument would be invalid. It must, therefore, be
restricted to the cases where the conditions implied
in it have been fulfilled. It is necessary not only
that there should be now no documents in existence
which mention the fact in question, but that there
should never have been any.
Now it is notorious that in the case of the earliest
Christian literature there was a special cause at work
of a kind to lead to its disappearance ; this was the
perpetual alteration of standards of belief, and the
anxiety of rival schools of thought to destroy one
another's books. The philosophic authors above
cited further point out that " every manuscript is
at the mercy of the least accident ; its preservation
or destruction is a matter of pure chance." In the
case of Christian books malice prepense and odium
theologicum were added to accident and mere chance.
How, then, can Mr. W. B. Smith be sure that
there were not fifty writings before the year 140
which by citation or otherwise attested the earlier
existence of all or some of the Pauline Epistles? We
have the merest debris of the earliest Christian
literature. What right has he to argue as if he had
the whole of it in the hollow of his hand? In such
a context the argument from silence is absolute
rubbish, and he ought to know it. But, alas, the
orthodox apologist has trained him in this sphere to
be content with "demonstrations" which in any
other would be at once extinguished by ridicule.
Obviously the genuineness and date of the Pauline
Epistles can only be determined by their contents,
and not by a supposed deficiency of allusions to them
in a literature that is well-nigh completely lost to us.
Judged by these considerations, and by the hundreds
of undesigned coincidences with the Book of Acts, we
THE EPISTLES OE PAUL
131
must conclude in regard to most of them that they
are from the hand of the Paul who is so familiar a
figure in that book. The author of the Paulines has
just the same supreme and exclusive interest in the
crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus the
Messiah as the Paul of Acts ; he manifests every-
where the same aloofness from the earthly life and
teaching of Jesus. They yield the same story as does
Acts of his birth and upbringing, of his persecution
of the Messianist followers of Jesus and of his con-
version ; much the same record of his missionary
travels can be reconstructed from the Letters as we
have in Acts. Yet there is no sign of borrowing on
either side. By way of casting doubt on -the Pauline
Letters the deniers of the historicity insist on the fact
that in Acts there is no hint of Paul ever having
written Epistles to the Churches he created or visited.
Why should there be ? To a companion Paul must Unde-
have been much more than a mere writer of letters. a<?reement
To Luke the letter writing must have seemed the between
A f J
least important part of Paul's activity, although for p^uiines
us the accident of their survival makes the Epistles
seem of prime importance. In the Epistles, on the
other hand, it is objected that there is no indication
of any use of Acts. How could there be, seeing that
the book was not penned (except on Van Manen's
hypothesis) until long after the Epistles had been
written and sent? I admit that Paul's account in
Galatians of his personal history is difficult to recon-
cile with Acts, and has provided a regular crux for
critics of every school.^ The numerous coincidences,
^ The difficulties largely vanish on the assumption that Galatians
is the earliest of the Epistles, and that in Gal. ii, 1, dia d " after four "
was misread in an early copy as dia id " after fourteen." This is
132
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
however, of the two writings are all the more worthy
of attention. If we found them agreeing pat with
each other we should reasonably suspect some form
of common authorship, if not of collusion. As it is
they attest one another very much in the way in
which the letters of Cicero attest and are attested by
Sallust, Julius Caesar, and other contemporary or
later writers of Roman history. There is neither
that complete accord nor complete discord between
Acts and Paulines, which would lead a competent
historian to distrust either as fairly contemporary
and trustworthy witnesses to the same epoch and
province of history.
Paul wit- The testimony of Paul to a real and historical
real Jesus Jesus is to be gathered from those passages in which
he directly refers to him or in w'hich he refers to his
brethren and disciples, for obviously a solar myth
cannot have had brethren nor have personally com-
missioned disciples and apostles. I have pointed out
in the first chapter of Myth, Magic, and Morals that
the interest of Paul in the historical Jesus was slender,
and have explained why it was so. But that is no
excuse for ignoring it, or pretending it is not there.
What does it amount to? This, that Jesus the
was born of the seed of David according
to the flesh" (Rom. i, 2); that "he was born of a
woman, born under the law" — that is to say, he was
born like any other man, and not, as a later genera-
tion believed, of a virgin mother. It means also that
he was born into Jewish circles, and that he was
brought up as a Jew, obedient to the Mosaic law
Summary
elilrcf Messiah
Professor Lake's conjecture. Such misreadings of the Greek
numerals are common in ancient MSS.
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 133
(Gal. iv, 4). His gospel was intended "for the Jews
in the first instance, but also for the Greeks " (Rom.
i, IG, ii, 11). He was "made a minister of the
circumcision " (Rom. xv, 8) ; in other words, he had
no quarrel with circumcision, even if he did not go
out of his way to insist on it as part of the Law
which, in the first Gospel it is recorded, he came not
to destroy but to fulfil.
Accordinor to Tim. ii, 8, Jesus was "of the seed of ^71?®"^,?
o ' ' ... of Epistles
David according to my gospel." This implies that to Timo-
others than Paul did not admit the Davidic ancestry * ^
of Jesus, and it is implicitly rejected by Jesus himself
in Mark xii, 35, as I point out in Myth, Magic, and
Morals, ch. xii. That is good proof that the Epistle
preserves a tradition that was quite independent on
the later Gospels ; and that proves that even if the
Epistles to Timothy be not Paul's, they are anyhow
very early documents, and constitute another witness
to the historicity of Jesus. In the first of them,
ch. vi, 13, we learn that Christ Jesus witnessed the
good confession before Pontius Pilate.
The passages in which Paul insists that Jesus was Pauline
• ^ T ,. -, T . Ji i. evidence
crucined, died, and rose again are so numerous that astodeath
they almost defy collection. In 1 Cor. xv, 3, Paul of Jesus,
relates the story of the resurrection at length. He
says he had "received" it from those who believed
before himself. From them he had learned that
Christ had "died for our sins," had been "buried,"
and " raised on the third day," after which he appeared
first " to Cephas" or Peter, next " to the Twelve "—
i.e., the Twelve Apostles of whom we read in the
Gospels that Jesus chose them and sent them forth
to herald to the Jews the speedy approach of the
Kingdom of God. Next " he appeared to 500 brethren
134 THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
at once'" of whom most were still alive when Paul
wrote ; then ** to James," then " to all the apostles,"
and " last of all " to Paul himself,
and as to Q^^ ^]j^ strength of this last vision of the Lord, Paul
brew dis- claimed to be as good an apostle as any of those who
ciples ^gj.g apostles before him (Gal. i, 17). Accordingly,
in 1 Cor. ix, 1, he writes in answer to those who pooh-
poohed his mission : " Am I not an apostle? Have
I not seen Jesus our Lord ?" And again, 2 Cor. xi, 22,
in the same vein: ''x\re they Hebrews ? So am I.
Are they Israelites? So am 1. Are they the seed of
Abraham ? So am I. Are they ministers of Christ?
I speak as one beside myself. I am more ; in labours
more abundantly, in prisons," etc.
So 2 Cor. xii, 11 : "In nothing came I behind the
very chiefest apostles."
From such passages we can realize what a purely
Hebrew business the Church was to begin with. To
be an apostle you had to be at least a Hebrew, and it
is clear that the earlier apostles challenged the right
of Paul to call himself an apostle on the ground that
he had not, as they, been a personal follower of Jesus.
Their challenge led him to preface his Epistles with
an assertion of his apostleship : " Paul, an apostle of
Messiah Jesus."
^\e learn further (1 Cor. xi, 23 foil.) how on a
certain night " the Lord Jesus was betrayed " or
handed over to his enemies (N.B. — The occasion is
referred to as one well known) ; how he then took
bread, and when he had given thanks, brake it, etc.
All this ill agrees with the view that Paul believed the
Jesus of the Gospels to be an ancient Palestinian Sun-
God-Saviour Joshua. ^\e read also (1 Cor. ix, 5)
that " the brethren of the Lord," like " the rest of
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 135
the apostles and Cephas," led about wives (probably
spiritual ones), and Paul claims the same right for
himself. In Galatiaus, ch. ii, he recounts how he
went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and tarried with
him fifteen days, on which occasion he associated with
James, the brother of the solar myth. On another
occasion this brother of the Sun-god sent emissaries
to Antioch to warn Peter or Cephas against eating
with Gentiles, as Paul had taught him to do. Peter
had been " intrusted with the gospel of the circumci-
sion," as Paul with that of the uncircumcision. On this
occasion there was a stand-up quarrel between Paul and
the older apostle of the sun-myth, and Paul's Epistles
ring from beginning to end with echoes of his quarrel
over circumcision with the sun-myth's earlier followers.
How do Mr. Robertson and his friends get round all
this evidence ? Their way out of it is beautifully
simple. It consists in ruling out every passage as an
interpolation that stands in their way. So I have
seen an ill-tempered chess-player, when he lost his
queen, kick over the chess-table and begin to swear.
That is one device. The other is to pretend that the
apostles with whom Paul was in personal touch were
not apostles of the solar god, but of the Jewish high
priest, who was also president of that secret society in
whose bosom were acted the ritual and dramas or
mystery-plays^ of annually slain Joshuas, of vegeta-
tion-gods, of Osiris, Krishna, and the whole pack of
mythical beings out of whom the Jewish Messiah
Jesus was compacted.
Let us take first the '' myth," as Mr. Robertson The
styles it, of the Twelve Apostles. Needless to say, Mr. o/"he^ "
Twelve
1 Christianity and Mythology, p. 354.
136 THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
Robertson and his friends regard the Gospel story of
their choice and mission as a fable. But they have
the bad grace to turn up afresh in Paul's Epistles.
Away with them, therefore, exclaims Mr. Robertson ;
and his friends echo his cry.
" In the documents from which all scientific study
of Christian origins must proceed — the Epistles of
Paul — there is no evidence of such a body " {Christi-
anity and Mythologij, p. 341).
In the passage in which the Twelve are mentioned
(1 Cor. XV, 3 foil.) w^e are further instructed " there
is one interpolation on another." It does not in the
least matter that the passage stands in every manu-
script, and in every ancient version and commentator.
It offends Mr. Robertson and his friends ; so we must
cut it out. Bos locutiis est ; and he complacently
sums up his argument (p. 342) in the words : " Paul,
then, knew nothing of a ' twelve.' "
Difficulties And yet he notes (p. 354) that in the fragments of
Judas ^^^ Peter Gospel recently recovered from the sands of
Egypt, Jesus is still credited with twelve disciples
immediately after the crucifixion, and it is therein
related that they " wept and grieved" at the loss of
their master. No hint, Mr. Robertson justly remarks,
is here given of the defection of Judas from the group.
No more is any hint given of it in Paul's Epistle.
These two sources, therefore, support each other in a
most unexpected manner in ignoring the Judas story.
At the same time twelve discij^les or apostles (in the
context they are the same thing) are incredible as an
interpolation ; for an interpolator would have adjusted
his interpolation to the early diffused story of Judas's
treason, and have written not '* the Twelve," but " the
Eleven."
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 137
Mr. Robertson admits that " at the stage of the
composition of this (the Peter) Gospel, the Judas myth
was not current," and that therefore the " Judas
myth " is later than that of the Twelve. It must, by
parity of reasoning, be later than the text of Paul,
which, therefore, if interpolated, must have been
interpolated before the legend, if such it be, of Judas
the traitor got abroad. Now we already meet with
this legend in Mark, and it is taken over from him by
the other evangelists, Matthew embellishing it with
the tale of Judas hanging himself, and Luke in Acts
with that of his bursting asunder. Papias, before
A.D. 140, knew of further details of Judas's story of a
most macabre kind ; the story stood also in the lost
form of gospel used by Celsus, about 160-180, against
whom Origen wrote. The tale of Judas, then, was of
wide and early diffusion ; yet Mr. Robertson, as we
have seen, admits that at the time when the Peter
Gospel emerged the Judas myth was not yet abroad.
Neither, then, can it have been current at the stage
of the interpolating of Paul's Epistle, and this inter-
polation, therefore, is prior to all the Gospels, to Acts,
and to the sources used by Papias and by the authors
of the Peter Gospel and of Celsus's Gospel. Neverthe-
less, on p. 357, Mr. Robertson, as a last method of
avoiding Paul's testimony on another point, is inclined
to "decide with Van Manen that all the Pauline
Epistles are pseudepigraphic," and merely express the
views of *' second-century Christian champions." He
therefore commits himself to the supposition that
Epistles forged not earlier than a.d. 130, were yet
interpolated in the interests of a tradition in which
*' the Twelve are treated as holding together after the
resurrection (p. 354)," which tradition, however, must
138 THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
have long before that date been abrogated by the
growing popularity of the Judas myth. Could texts
be treated with greater levity? I may also note that
the inconsistency of Paul's statement that Jesus " was
seen " by the Twelve with the Judas story was so
patent to scribes of the third and fourth centuries that
they had already begun to alter it in the Greek texts
and versions to the statement that " he was seen by
the Eleven." Now^ is it likely that Paul's text at any
time would have been interpolated in such a way as to
make it contradict so early and popular a Christian
belief as that in the treason and hurried suicide of
Judas? The hypothesis is absurd, and not the less
absurd because it is framed merely to save the other
hj^pothesis that the twelve apostles of the Gospels were
for the authors of the Gospels and for their readers an
allegory of the twelve signs of the Zodiac revolving
round the solar myth Joshua. Such are the lengths
to which the exigencies of his " mythic " system drive
Mr. Robertson.
fi^"tb^f^^' Some texts which imply that Paul, if he did not
the older actually See Jesus walking about on this earth, yet
apostles imply that he miejht have done so, he seems to
conversed ^ •' ^ . ., ^
with Jesus despair of, and passes them over in silence. Such
is the text, 2 Cor. v, 16 : " Wherefore we henceforth
know no man after the flesh : even though we have
known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him
so no more."
The older apostles, as is implied in verse 12 of the
same chapter, prided themselves on their personal
intercourse with Jesus, and twitted Paul with never
having enjoyed it. Paul's answer is that henceforth —
i.e., now that he is converted — he has no interest in
any man, not even in Jesus, as a being of flesh and
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 139
blood, but only as a vessel filled with the spirit of
election, and so a new creature in Christ, the first
member of the heavenly kingdom on earth. He seems
to aver that he had actually seen his Eedeemer in
the flesh, but before he was converted. But such
knowledge with him counts nothing in his own
favour ; nor will he allow it to count in favour of
the older apostles. Their association with Jesus in
the flesh failed to render them apostles in any other
sense than his vision of the risen Jesus rendered him
one also.
But there are other texts in Paul most inconvenient
to the zodiacal theory of the apostles. Such are the
texts I have cited from Galatians. How does
Mr. Robertson get rid of their evidence ?
He begins (p. 342) with the usual caveat that the Epistle to
Epistle to the Galatians is probably not genuine, and, attests
even if it be, is nevertheless " frequently interpolated." reality of
And yet any reader, with eyes in his head and an john' and
intelligence behind them, must recognize in this James
Epistle a writing which, above all other ancient
writings, rings true, and is instinct with the per-
sonality of a missionary, who in it bares his inmost
heart to his converts. Against this impression, which
it must leave upon anyone but a pedant, and against the
fact that in the external tradition there is nothing to
suggest either that it is not genuine or that it is
a mass of interpolations, what has Mr. Robertson to
offer us in support of his thesis ? Nothing, except
his ijhse dixit. We are to accept on a purely philo-
logical question the verdict of one whose mythological
equations are on a par with those of the editors of the
Banner of Israel. However, he does condescend to
explain away the apostles with whom, at Jerusalem,
140
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
Paul held personal converse ; and, taking from
Professor W. B. Smith a cue, which is also caught
at by Professor Drews, he assures us that the Peter {or
Cephas), James, and John, whom Paul knew per-
sonally, were not men who had been " in direct
intercourse with Jesus," but were merely "leaders
of an existing sect" — i.e., of the secret sect of Jew^s
who, after celebrating endless ritual dramas of
annually slain Joshuas and vegetation-gods, had,
by dint of prolonged archaeological study of pagan
mythology, art, and statuary, elaborated the four
Gospels, adopted the Old Testament as their holy
scripture, and Messianic Judaism as their distinctive
creed ; for such in essence the Christianity of the last
half of the first century was, as even Mr. Robertson
will hardly deny.
But Paul (Gal. i, 18, 19) expressly ranks Peter, or
Cephas, together with James, among the apostles,
using that word in a wide sense of persons commis-
sioned by Jesus ; and he describes James and Cephas
and John (ii, 9) as men " who w-ere reputed to be
pillars," or leading men of the Church. He declares
that in the end they made friends with him, and
arranged that he should preach the Kingdom to the
uncircumcised Gentiles as they were doing to the
circumcised Jew's.
The Now who had commissioned these three apostles, if
"Twelve" -
were apos- ^^^^ Jesus ? Who had taught them about the Kingdom
ties oUhe and sent them forth to proclaim it? Mr. Robertson,
oddly enough, scents a difficulty in the idea of a Sun-
God- Saviour Joshua, albeit son of Miriam a virgin,
sending forth apostles ; so he decides that " apostles "
in Galatians means " the twelve apostles of the
Patriarch, of whom he must have had knowledge "
Jewish
High
Priest !
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 141
(p. 342). Of what Patriarch? Why, of course,
" of the Patriarch or High Priest," whose *' twelve
apostles " formed *' an institution which preceded and
survived the beginning of the Christian era" (p. 344).
And, to use Mr. Kobertson's own phrase in such
connections, " the plot thickens " when we find (ibid.)
that
the twelve Jewish Apostles aforesaid, who were
commissioned by the High Priest — and later by
the Patriarch at Tiberias — to collect tribute from
the scattered faithful,
were no others than the Twelve Apostles who wrote
the "teaching of the Twelve Apostles," recovered in And they
1873 by Bryennios ! These " Judaizing apostles J^j^^^^M/
preached circumcision,"^ and "were among the
leaders of the Jesuist community in its pre-Pauline
days."
This discovery of Mr. Kobertson's is of stupendous
interest. It amounts to nothing less than this : that
the pre-Pauline secret sect of " Jesuists " which kept
up in Jerusalem the cult of the Sun-God-Saviour
Joshua, with his late Persian appendage of a virgin
mother Miriam ; and, not content with doing that,
padded it out with ritual dramas of vegetation-gods,
cults of Osiris, of Dionysus, Proteus, Hermes, Janus,
and fifty other gods and heroes (whose legends
Mr. Robertson has studied in Smith's Dictionary of
Mijtholoffij) — this sect, I say, had for its president
the Jewish High Priest, and for its "pillars" the
apostles, or messengers, whom the said High Priest
was in the habit of sending out to the Jews of the
Dispersion for the collection of the Temple tribute !
1 Why did they not do so in their " teaching," if it was intended
(see p. 344) for the Jews of the Dispersion, instead of confining them-
selves to precepts "simply ethical, non-priestly, and non-llabbiuical " ?
142 THE EPISTLES OE PAUL
This High Priest, we further learn on p. 342. was
the " man " who sent out the apostles in the first verse
of Galatians, from which apostles Paul expressly dis-
sociates himself when he w^'ites : ''Paul, an apostle,
not from men, neither through a man, but through
Jesus Christ." Here we are to understand that Paul
is pitting his Sun-God- Saviour Joshua against the
Jewish Pligh Priest. The Sun-god has sent him
forth, though not the other apostles. That must
be Mr. Robertson's interpretation, and we must give
up the older and more obvious one which saw in the
words *' not from men, neither through man," no
reference to a Jewish high priest or priests, but
a mere enhancement of the claim, ever reiterated
by Paul, that he owed his apostleship direct to the
risen Jesus Christ and God the Father ; so that he
held a divine and spiritual, not an earthly and carnal,
commission.
My readers must by now feel very much like poor
little Alice when the Black Queen was dragging her
across Wonderland. If they find the sensation
delightful, they can, I daresay, enjoy plenty more
of it by a closer study of Mr. Robertson's books on the
subject. If they do not like it, then they must not
blame me for taking him seriously ; for is he not
acclaimed by Dr. Drews as our greatest exegete of the
New Testament, Dr. Frazer alone excepted? Is he
not the spiritual guide of learned German orientalists
like Winckler and Jensen ? Has not Professor W. B.
Smith assured us of how much he feels he can learn
from such a scholar and thinker, though "he has
preferred not to poach on his preserves."^ It is,
^ Ecce Deus, p. 8.
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 143
therefore, incumbent on me to probe his work a little
further. Let us return to the passage, 1 Cor. xv, 5,
where we are told that Jesus appeared first to Cephas.
We have already seen that the Peter of the Gospels is
in this new system alternately a sign of the Zodiac,
a Mithraic myth, an alias of Janus, of Proteus, a
member of any other Pantheon you like. Obviously
he has nothing to do with Paul's acquaintance. The
latter in turn is *' not one of the pupils and com-
panions of the crucified Jesus" (p. 348). How,
indeed, could he be, seeing that Jesus is a Sun-god
crucified upon the Milky Way ? No, he is something
much humbler — to wit, " simply one of the apostles
of a Judaic cult that preaches circumcision," and,
more definitely, as we have seen, one of the twelve
apostles of the Jewish High Priest. James and John
must equally have belonged to this interesting band
of apostles.
This being so, it is pertinent to ask why Paul so Jesus of
persistently indicates that these apostles and pillars ^^"^^ jesus
of the Church had seen Jesus and conversed with him Ben Pan-
in the flesh. To this question Mr. Robertson attempts
no answer. For he believes that the crucified Jesus,
to whom Paul refers on every page of his Epistles,
was not the Jesus of Christian tradition, but " Jesus
Ben Pandira, dead long before, and represented by no
preserved biography or teachings whatever " (p. 378).
This Jesus had " really been only hanged on a tree "
(ihicL) ; but " the factors of a crucifixion myth,"
among which we must not forget its " phallic signifi-
cance," for that "should connect with all its other
aspects" (p. 375),— these factors, says Mr. Robertson,
" were conceivably strong enough to turn the hanging
into a crucifixion."
144 THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
who had
died one
It follows that Paul was quite mistaken in indicating
hundred the apostles whom he conversed with at Jerusalem to
bXre ^^ apostles of the crucified one ; in order to be so,
they must all have been over -ripe centenarians, since
Pandira had died at least a hundred years before. It
matters nothing that on the next page (379) Mr,
Robertson entertains doubts as to whether this worthy
ever lived at all. Who else, he asks (p. 364), could
" the Pauline Jesus, who has taught nothing and done
nothing," be, save "a doctrinal evolution from the
Jesus of a hundred years before ? " We must, he adds
with delightful ignoratio elenchi, " perforce assume
such a long evolution." Otherwise it would not be
** intelligible that, even if he had been only hanged
after stoning, he should by that time have come to
figure mythically as crucified." He admits that Paul's
*' references to a crucified Jesus are constant, and offer
no sign of interpolation." And he is quite ready to
admit also that, " if the Jesus of Paul w^ere really
a personage put to death under Pontius Pilate, the
Epistles (of Paul) would give us the strongest ground
for accepting an actual crucifixion." But, alas, the
Jesus put to death under Pontius Pilate, the Javelin-
man, is no more than an allegory of Joshua the
ancient Palestinian Sun-god, rolled up with a vegeta-
tion-god and other mythical beings, and slain afresh
once a year. There is thus no alternative left but to
identify Paul's crucified Jesus with Jesus Ben Pandira ;
and Mr. Robertson, with a sigh of relief, embraces
the alternative, for he feels that Paul's evidence is
menacing his whole structure.
It was nasty of Paul not to indicate more clearly to
us that by his crucified Jesus he intended Jesus Ben
Pandira ; and, in view of the circumstance that we
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 145
have left to us no " biography or teachings whatever "
of this Jesus, Paul might surely have communicated
to us some details of his career. It would have saved
Mr. Robertson the trouble of inventing them.
At first sight, too, it was extremely inconsiderate of ^^^^J'^. ^^
Paul to "thicken the plot" by bringing on his stage Jesus,only
a brother of Jesus Ben Pandira or of the solar myth ^^j^^^^'
Joshua. I am not sure which. But Mr. Robertson, sense
like Alice, is out for strange adventures, and prepared
to face any emergency. " Brother," therefore, is here
to be taken in a Pickwickian sense only. And here
we will let Dr. W. B. Smith take up the parable, for
it is he who has, with the help of St. Jerome, found
his friends a way out of their difficulty. Moreover, he
is more in need of a way out than even Mr. Robertson ;
for he declines to admit behind Jesus of Nazareth even
—what Mr. Robertson styles, p. 364— " a Talmudic
trace of a Jesus (Ben Pandira), who was put to death
on the eve of the Passover about a century before the
time of Pontius Pilate," Professor Smith cannot
hesitate, therefore, to be of opinion that, when Paul
calls James a brother of the Lord, he does not " imply
any family kinship," but one of a " class of earnest
Messianists, zealots of obedience " to the Mosaic Law.
He appeals in confirmation of his conjecture to the
apostrophe of Jesus when his mother and brethren
came to arrest him as an ecstatic (Mark iii, 31-35) : —
Who is my mother and my brethren? whoso-
ever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother
and sister and mother.
He also appeals to 1 Cor. ix, 5, where Paul alludes
to " the brethren of the Lord " as claiming a right to
lead about a wife that is a sister. And he argues that
those who in Corinth, to the imperilling of Christian
L
146 THE EPISTLES OE PAUL
unity, said, some, '' I am of Cephas"; others, "I am
of Christ "; others, '* I am of Apollos," were known as
brethren of Christ, of Cephas, etc. Now it is true that
Paul and other early Christian writers regarded the
members of the Church as brethren or as sisters, just
as the members of monastic society have ever styled
themselves brothers and sisters of one another. But
there is no example of a believer being called a brother
of the Lord or of Jesus} The passage in Mark and its
parallels are, according to Professor Smith, purely
legendary and allegorical, since he denies that Jesus
ever lived ; and he has no right, therefore, to appeal
to them in order to decide what Paul intended by the
phrase when he used it, as before, not of a mythical,
but of a concrete, case. However, if Professor Smith
is intent on appealing to the Gospels, then he must
allow equal weight to such a text as Matthew xiii, 55 :
"Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother
called Mary ? and his brethren, James and Joseph
and Simon and Judas ? And his sisters, are they not
all with us ? "
Did all these people, W'e may ask, including his
mother, stand in a merely spiritual relationship to
Jesus? Impossible. If they w^ere not flesh and
blood relations, then the passage is meaningless even
as allegorical romance. Again, in the very passage
to which Professor Smith appeals (Mark iii, 31-35),
we read that his mother and brethren came and stood
without, and it was their interference with him that
provoked the famous apostrophe. Were they, too,
only spiritually related to him ? Were they, too,
1 Note in Matthew the phrase (xxiii, 8): "But be ye not called
Eabbi : for one is your teacher, and all ye are brethren. "
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 147
*' earnest Messianists, zealots of obedience " ? In
John's Gospel we hear afresh that his brethren
believed not in him. Were they, too, mere " earnest
Messianists, zealots of obedience "? When Josephus,
again, twice alludes to "James the Just who was
brother of Jesus," is he, an enemy of the Christian
faith, adopting Christian slang ? Does he, too, mean
merely to "denote religious relation without the
remotest hint of blood kinship"? In 1 Cor. ix, 5,
the most natural interpretation is that the brothers
of the Lord are his real brothers, whose names are
supplied in the Gospels.
Here, then, are four wholly independent groups of 5°^^^^"^
ancient documents, of which one gives us the names intheGos
of four of the brothers of Jesus, clearly indicating pels the
c Tir J "myth"
that they were real brothers, and sons oi Mary and has
the Carpenter ; while the other group (the Paulines) "^^^^"^^^
speak as ever of his " brothers," but give us the brothers
name of one only, James; the third — viz., the works ^^^^^^^
of Josephus — allude to one only — viz., James, but
without indicating that there were not several.
Lastly, the we document (Acts xxi, 18) testifies that
" Paul went in with us unto James." Is not this
enough ? Surely, if we were here treating of profane
history, no sane student would for a moment hesitate
to accept such data, furnished by wholly independent
and coincident documents, as historical. Professor
Smith's other guess, that in 1 Cor. ix, 5, brethren
means spiritual brethren, just begs the question, and,
like his spiritual interpretation of James's relation-
ship, offends Greek idiom, as I said above. Paul,
like the author of Acts xxi, 17, speaks of "the
brother " or of "the brethren ''—e.g., in 1 Cor. viii, 11 :
"^/ic 6rof/icr for whose sake Christ died"; but when
148
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
Jerome's
opinion
about
Jesus's
brothers
the person whose brother it is is named, a blood
relationship is always conveyed in the Paulines as in
the rest of the New Testament. If *' brethren of the
Lord " in 1 Cor. ix, 5, does not mean real brethren,
why are they distinguished from all the apostles, who
on Professor Smith's assumption, above all others,
merited to be called " brethren of the Lord"? The
appeal, moreover, to 1 Cor. i, 12 foil., is absurd ; for
Paul is alluding there to factions among the believers
of Corinth ; how is it possible to interpret these
factions as brotherhoods? There was only one
brotherhood of the faithful, according to Paul's ideal ;
and the relationship involved in such phrases as
"I of Cephas," " I of Paul," is that of a convert to
his teacher and evangelist, not that of spiritual
brethren to each other. As used by his Corinthian
converts, such phrases were a direct menace to
spiritual brotherhood and unity, and not an expres-
sion of it ; and that is why Paul wished to hear
no more of them. When he makes appeal to them
Professor Smith damages rather than benefits his
argument.
There remains the appeal to Jerome {Ecce Deus,
p. 237) :—
No less an authority than Jerome has expressed
the correct idea on this point. In commenting on
Gal. i, 19, he says (in sum) : " James was called the
Lord's brother on account of his high character, his
incomparable faith, and his extraordinary wisdom ; the
other apostles are also called brothers " (John xx, 17).
Here Professor Smith withholds from his readers
the fact that Jerome regarded James the brother of
Jesus as his first cousin. It is just as difficult for a
mythical personage to have a first cousin as to have
a brother. Moreover, the reasons which actuated
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 149
Jerome to deny that Jesus had real brethren was —
as the Encyclopcedia Bihlica (art. James) points out — ■
" a prepossession in favour of the perpetual virginity
of Mary the mother of Jesus." It is, indeed, a
hollow theory that, in order to its justification, must
take refuge in the Encratite rubbish of Jerome.
If the crucified Jesus of Paul was Jesus Ben Mutual in-
Pandira, stoned to death and hanged on a tree dence of
between the years b.c. 106-79, then how can Paul ^^^^^i^^^.
have written (1 Cor. xv, 6) that the greater part of pel stories
the 500 brethren to whom Jesus appeared were still °.^ *^®
risen
alive ? I neither assert nor deny the possibility of so Christ
many at once having fallen under the spell of a
common illusion, though I believe the annals of
religious ecstasy might afford parallels. But this I
do maintain, that the passage records a conviction in
Paul's mind that Jesus, after his death by crucifixion,
had appeared to many at once, and that not a
hundred years before, but at a comparatively recent
time. That is also Mr. Robertson's view ; for, rather
than face the passage, he whips out his knife and
cuts it out of the text. Yet there is not a single
reason for doing so, except that it upsets his hypo-
thesis ; for the circumstance that the incident cannot
be reconciled with the Gospel stories of the apparitions
of the risen Christ clearly shows that Paul's text is
independent on them. Mr. Robertson argues that, if
it were not a late interpolation, the evangelists would
have found it in Paul and incorporated it in their
Gospels. I ask in turn. Why did the interpolator
thrust into the Pauline letter not only this passage,
but at least two other incidents (the apparitions to
Peter and James) which figure in no canonical
Gospel? Why, if the Evangelists were bound to
the Eucha
rist
150 THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
consult the Paulines in giving an account of these
posthumous appearances, was not the hypothetical
interpolator of the Paulines equally bound to consult
them ? The most natural hypothesis is that the
Gospels on one side and the Pauline Epistles on the
other led independent lives, till their respective
traditions were so firmly fixed that no one could
tamper with either of them. The conflict, therefore,
such as it is, between this Pauline passage and the
Gospels is the strongest possible proof of its
genuineness.
5 ,. Mr. Robertson's treatment of the Pauline descrip-
Paulme ... .
account of tion of the origin of the Lord's Supper as described
in 1 Cor. xi, 23-27, is another example of his deter-
mination simply to rule out all evidence which he
cannot explain away. '' It is evident y'' he writes
(p. 347), that this w^hole passage, ''or at least the
first part of it, is an interpolation." We would expect
him to produce support for this view from some MS.
or ancient version for what is so evident. Not at all ;
for he takes no interest in, and has no turn for, the
scientific criticism of texts a posteriori^ but deals with
them by a priori intuitions of his own. '' The
passage in question (verses 23, 24, 25) has every
appearance of being an interpolation." He is the
first to discover such an appearance. It is well known
that the words " took bread " as far as " in my blood "
recur in Luke xxii, 19, 20 ; and this is how Mr.
Robertson deals w'ith the problem of their recurrence :
*' No one pretends that the Third Gospel was in exist-
ence in Paul's time ; and the only question is whether
Luke copied the Epistle or a late copyist supplemented
the Epistle from Luke."
Surely there is another alternative — viz., that a
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 151
copyist of Luke supplemented the Gospel from Paul.
This is as conceivable as that a copyist of Paul
supplemented the Epistle from Luke. It is also an
hypothesis that has textual evidence in favour of it ;
for the Bezan Codex and several old Latin MSS., as
well as the old Syriac version, omit the words, ivliich
is given on your behalf, as far as on your behalf is shed
— that is to say, the end of verse 19 and the whole of
verse 20. Here we have a palmary example of the
mingled temerity and ignorance with which Mr.
Kobertson applies his principle of " vital interpola-
tions " to remove anything from the New Testament
texts which stands in the way of his far-fetched hypo-
theses and artificial combinations.
But it is time to inquire whence Mr. Kobertson JesusBen
derived his certainty that Jesus Ben Pandira died in Talmud is
the reisn of Alexander Jannaeus, B.C. lOG-79. Dr. Jesus of
. . N3;Z3ir6til
Samuel Kraus, in his exhaustive study of Talmudic
notices of Jesus of Nazareth {Das Leben Jesu nacli
jiidischen Qnellen, Berlin, 1902, p. 242) assumes as a
fact beyond dispute that the Jeschu or Joshua Ben
Pandira (or Ben Stada or Ben Satda) mentioned in
the Toldoth Jeschu is Jesus of Nazareth. In the
Toldoth he is set in the reign of Tiberius. This
Toldoth is not earlier than a.d. 400, and took its
information from the pseudo-Hegesippus. The
Spanish historian Abraham b. Daud (about a.d. 1100)
already noticed that the Talmudic tradition alluded
to by Mr. Piobertson set the birth of Jesus of Nazareth
a hundred years too early ; but the same tradition
corrects itself in that it assigns Salome Alexandra to
Alexander Jannai as his wife, and then, confusing her
with Queen Helena the proselyte, brings the incident
down to the right date. '' The truth is," says Dr.
162 THE EPISTLES OF PAUL
Kraus (p. 183), " we have got to do here with a chrono-
logical error." Lightfoot, to whose Horae Hehraicae
Mr. Bobertson refers in his footnote (p. 363), also
assumed that by Jesus Ben Pandira, or son of Pan-
thera, the Talmudists intended Jesus of Nazareth.
Celsus (about a.d. 170) attested a Jewish tradition that
Jesus Christ was Mary's son by a Roman soldier named
Panthera, and later on even Christian writers w^orked
Panthera into Mary's pedigree. Such is the origin of
the Talmudic tradition exploited by Mr. Robertson.
It is almost worthless ; but, so far as it goes, it over-
throws Mr. Robertson's hypothesis.
The The Epistles to Colossians, Thessalonians, and the
Epistles of so-called Pastorals, if they are not genuine works of
Paul so Paul, form so many fresh witnesses against the
fresh wit- hypothesis of Mr. Robertson and his friends. Such
nesses a verse as Col. ii, 14, where in highly metaphorical
language Jesus is said to have nailed the bond of all
our trespasses to the cross, is an unmistakable
allusion to the historical crucifixion ; as also is the
phrase " blood of his cross " in the same epistle,
i, 20. In 1 Thess. iv, 14, is attested the belief that
Jesus died and rose again ; and again in v, 10. I
have already indicated the express reference to the
crucifixion under Pontius Pilate in 1 Tim. v, 13, and
the statement in 2 Tim. ii, 8, that Jesus Christ,
risen from the dead, was of the seed of David. These
epistles may not be from Paul's hand, but they are
unmistakably early; and their forgers, if they be
forged, undoubtedly held that Jesus had really lived.
So also did the author, whoever he was, of Hebrews,
who speaks, ch. ii, 9, of Jesus suflering death, in
ii, 18, of his *' having suffered, being tempted." In
vii, 14, we read this: ''For it is evident that our
THE EPISTLES OF PAUL 153
Lord hath sprung out of Judah." If Jesus was only
a myth, how could this writer have written, prohably
before a.d. 70, that he was of the tribe of Judah ? In
ch. xii, 2, we are told that Jesus " endured the cross."
That this epistle was penned before the destruction
of Jerusalem by Titus is made probable by the state-
ment in ix, 8, that *' the first tabernacle is yet stand-
ing." Indeed, most of the epistle is turned into
nonsense by any other hypothesis.
The first Epistle of Peter is very likely pseudepi- Catholic
graphic, but it cannot be later than the year 100. It
testifies, iv, 1, that Christ " suffered in the flesh."
The Johannine Epistles are probably from the
same hand as the Fourth Gospel, and belong to the
period 90-110 a.d. Their author insists (1 John iv, 2),
as against the Docetes, that " Jesus Christ is come in
the flesh."
The Epistle of Jude, about the same date, exhorts
those to whom it was addressed to " remember the
words which have been spoken before by the Apostles
of our Lord Jesus Christ."
Lastly, the Revelation of John can be definitely Book of
dated about a.d. 93. It testifies to the existence of l^evelation
several churches in Asia Minor in that age, and, in
spite of the fanciful and oriental character of its
imagery, it is from beginning to end irreconcilable
with the supposition that its autbor did not believe
in a Jesus who had lived, died, and was coming
again to establish the new Jerusalem on earth. In
ch. xxii, 16, Jesus is made to testify that he is the
root and oflspring of David. That does not look as
if its author regarded Jesus as a solar or any other
sort of myth.
Chapter V
EXTERNAL EVIDENCE
Evidence It remains to examine how this school of writers
Josephus handle the evidence with regard to the earliest church
supplied by Jewish or Pagan writers. I have said
enough incidentally of the evidence of the Talmud
and Toldoth Jeschu, but there remains that of
Josephus. In the work on the Antiquities of the JewSy
Bk. xviii, 5, 2 (116 foil.), there is an account of John
the Baptist, and it is narrated that Herod, fearing an
insurrection of John's followers, threw him in bonds
into the castle of Machaerus, and there murdered
him. x\fterwards, when Herod's army was destroyed,
the Jewish population attributed the disaster to the
wrath of God, and saw in it a retribution for slaying
so just a man.^ On the whole, Josephus's account
^ The passage in which Josephus mentions John the Baptist runs
as follows : " To some of the Jews it seemed that Herod had had his
army destroyed by God, and that it was a just retribution on him for
his severity towards John called the Baptist. For it was indeed
Herod who slew him, though a good man, and one who bade the Jews
in the practise of virtue and in the use of justice one to another and
of piety towards God to walk together in baptism. For this was the
condition under which baptism would present itself to God as accept-
able, if they availed themselves of it, not by way of winning pardon
for certain sins, but after attaining personal holiness, on account of
the soul having been cleansed beforehand by righteousness. Because
men flocked to him, for they took the greatest pleasure in listening to
his words, Herod took fright and apprehended that his vast influence
over people would lead to some outbreak of rebellion. For it looked
as if they would follow his advice in all they did, tind he came to the
conclusion that far the best course was, before any revolution was
154
EXTERNAL EVIDENCE 155
accords with the picture we have of John in the
Synoptic Gospels, except that in the Gospels the
place and circumstances of his murder are differently
given. This difference is good evidence that Jose-
phus's account is independent of the Christian
sources. Nevertheless, Dr. Drews airily pretends
that there is a strong suspicion of its being a forgery
by some Christian hand. As for John the Baptist
as we meet him in the Gospels, he is, says Drews, no
historical personage. One expects some reason to be
given for this negative conclusion, but gets none
whatever except a magnificent hint that " a complete
understanding of the baptism in the Jordan can only
be attained, if here, too, we take into consideration
the translation of the baptism into astrological terms "
{Christ Myth, p. 121).
And he proceeds to dilate on the thesis that the The astral
baptism of Jesus in the Jordan was "the reflection Baptist
upon earth of what originally took place among the
stars." This discovery rests on an equation — pre-
philological, of course, like that of ''Maria" with
" Myrrha " — of the name "John" or " Jehohanan "
with " Cannes " or " Ea," the Babylonian Water-god.
However, this writer is here not a little incoherent, for
only on the page before he has assured us, as of some-
thing unquestionable, that John was closely related
to the Essenes, and baptized the penitents in the
Jordan in the open air. Was Jordan, too, up in
started by him, to anticipate it by destroying him : otherwise the
upheaval would come, and plunge him into trouble and remorse. So
John fell a victim to Herod's suspicions, was bound and sent to the
fortress of Machaerus, of which I have above spoken, and there
murdered. But the Jews were convinced that the loss of his army
was by way of retribution for the treatment of John, and that it was
God who willed the undoing of Herod."
156 EXTEENAL EVIDENCE
heaven? Were the Essenes there also? Mr.
Robertson, of course, pursues the same simple
method of disposing of adverse evidence, and asserts
(p. 39G) that Josephus's account of John "is plainly
open to that suspicion of interpolation which, in the
case of the allusion to Jesus in the same book (Antiq.,
xviii, 3, 3), has become for most critics a certainty."
He does not condescend to inform his readers that the
latter passage^ is absent from important MSS., was
unknown to Origen, and is therefore rightly bracketed
by editors ; whereas the account of John is in all
MSS., and was known to Origen. But as we have
1 The suspect passage in which Josephus refers to Jesus runs thus,
Ant. xviii, 3, 3: ^^ Now about this time came Jesus, a wise man, if
indeed one may call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works,
a teacher of such men as receive what is true with pleasure, and he
attracted many Jews and many of the Greeks. T]iis icas the ' CJirist.^
And u-Jie}i on the accusation of the principal men amongst us Pilate had
condemned him to the cross, they did not desist who had formerly loved
him, for he appeared to them on the third day alive again ; the divine
Prophets having foretold both this and a myriad other wonderful
things about him ; and even noio the race of those called Cliristians
after him has not died out.''''
I have italicized such clauses as have a chance to be authentic, and
as may have led Origen to say of Josephus that he did not believe
Jesus to be the Christ, For the clause " This was the Christ " must
have run, "This was the so-called Christ." We have the same ex-
pression in Matt, i, 16, and in the passage, undoubtedly genuine, in
which Josephus refers to James, Ant., xx, 9, 1. Here Josephus relates
that the Sadducee High-priest Ananus (son of Annas of the New
Testament), in the interval of anarchy between the departure of one
Eoman Governor, Festus, and the arrival of another, Albinus, set up
a court of his own, "and bringing before it the brother of Jesus who
was called Christ — James was his name — and some others, he accused
them of being breakers of the Law, and had them stoned."
In the History of the Jeicish War, iv, 5, 2, Josephus records his
belief that the Destruction of Jerusalem was a divine nemesis for the
murder of this Ananus by the Idumeans.
There is not now, nor ever was, any passage in Josephus where the
fall of Jerusalem was explained as an act of divine nemesis for the
murder of James by Ananus. Origen, as Professor Burkitt has
remarked, "had mixed up in his commonplace book the account of
Ananus's murder of James and the remarks of Josephus on Ananus's
own murder."
EXTEENAL EVIDENCE 157
seen before, Mr. Robertson is one of those gifted
people who can discern by peculiar intuitions of their
own that everything is interpolated in an author
which offends their prejudices. He has a lofty con-
tempt for the careful sifting of the textual tradition,
the examination of MSS. and ancient versions to
which a scholar resorts, before he condemns a passage
of an ancient author as an interpolation. Moreover,
a scholar feels himself bound to show why a passage
was interpolated, in whose interests. For, regarded
as an interpolation, a passage is as much a problem
to him as it was before. Its genesis has still to be
explained. But Messrs. Robertson and Drews and
Smith do not condescend to explain anything or give
any reasons. A passage slays their theories; there-
fore it is a " vital interpolation." It is the work of an
ancient enemy sowing tares amid their wheat.
John the Baptist having been removed in this Jopephus's
^ ^ reference
cavalier fashion from the pages of Joseph us, we to James,
can hardly expect James the brother of Jesus to jeg^g^^ °^
be left, and he is accordingly kicked out without
ceremony. It does not matter a scrap that the
passage {Antiquities xx, 9, 1, 200) stands in the Greek
MSS. and in the Latin Version. As Professor W. B.
Smith's argument on the point is representative of
this class of critics, we must let him speak first
(p. 235) :—
Origen thrice quotes as from Josephiis the statement
that the Jewish sufferings at the hands of Titus were
a divine retribution for the slaying of James.
He then proceeds to quote the text of Origen,
Against Celsus, i, 47, giving the reference, but
mangling in the most extraordinary manner a text
that is clear and consecutive. For Origen begins
158 EXTEENAL EVIDENCE
(ch. xlvii) by saying that Celsus " somehow accepted
John as a Baptist who baptized Jesus," and then adds
the following : —
In the Eighteenth Book of his Antiquities of the
Jews Josephus bears witness to John as having been
a Baptist, and as promising purification to those who
underwent the rite. Now this writer, although not
believing in Jesus as the Christ, in seeking after the
cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of
the Temple, whereas he ought to have said that the
conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these
calamities befalling the people since they put to
death Christ, who was a prophet, says, nevertheless —
although against his will, not far from the truth — that
these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment
for the death of James the Just, who was a brother of
Jesus called Christ, the Jews having put him to
death, although he was a man most distinguished
for his righteousness (i.e., strict observance of the
law).
In a later passage of the same treatise (ii, 13), which
Mr. Smith cites correctly, Origen refers again to the
same passage of the Antiquities (xx, 200) thus : " Titus
demolished Jerusalem, as Josephus writes, on account
of James the Just, the brother of Jesus, the so-called
Christ." Also in Origen's commentary on Matthew
xiii, 55, we have a like statement that the sufferings
of the Jews were a punishment for the murder of
James the Just.
Origen therefore cites Josephus thrice about James,
and in each case he has in mind the same passage —
viz., XX, 200. But Mr. Smith, after citing the shorter
passage. Contra Celsum, ii, 13, goes on as follows : —
The passage is still found in some Josephus manu-
scripts ; but, as it is wanting in others, it is, and must
be, regarded as a Christian interpolation older than
Origen.
EXTEENAL EVIDENCE 159
Will Mr. Smith kindly tell us which are the MSS.
in which are found any passage or passages referring
the fall of Jerusalem to the death of James, and so
far contradicting Josephus's interpretation of Ananus's
death in the Ilistort/ of the Jewish War, iv, 5, 2.
Niese, the latest editor, knows of none, nor did any
previous editor know of any.
Mr. Smith then proceeds thus : —
Now, since this phrase is certainly interpolated in
the one place, the only reasonable conclusion is that
it is interpolated in the other.
But "this phrase" never stood in Josephus at all,
even as an interpolation, and on examination it turns
out that Professor Smith's prejudice against the
passage in which Josephus mentions James, is merely
based on the muddle committed by Origen. Such
are the arguments by which he seeks to prove that
Josephus's text was interpolated by a Christian, as if
a Christian interpolator, supposing there had been
one (and he has left no trace of himself), would not,
as the protest of Origen sufficiently indicates, have
represented the fall of Jerusalem as a divine punish-
ment, not for the slaying of James, but for the slaying
of Jesus. Having demolished the evidence of Josephus
in such a manner, Mr. Smith heads ten of his pages
with the words, " The Silence of Josephus," as if he
had settled all doubts for ever by mere force of his
erroneous ipse dixit.
The next section of Professor Smith's work {Ecce The testi-
Deus) is headed with the same effrontery of calm TaciLs
assertion : '' 21ie Silence of Tacitus.'' This historian
relates {Annals, xv, 44) that Nero accused the Chris-
tians of having burned down Rome. Nero
160 EXTEENAL EVIDENCE
subjected to most exquisite tortures those whom,
hated for their crimes, the populace called Chrestians.
The author of this name, Christus, had been executed
in the reign of Tiberius by the Procurator Pontius
Pilate ; and, though repressed for the moment, the
pernicious superstition was breaking forth again, not
only throughout Judaea, the fountain-head of this
mischief, but also throughout the capital, where all
things from anywhere that are horrible or disgraceful
pour in together and are made a religion of.
In the sequel Tacitus describes how an immense
multitude, less for the crime of incendiarism than in
punishment of their hatred of humanity, were con-
victed ; how some were clothed in skins of wild beasts
and thrown to dogs, while others were crucified or
burned alive. Nero's savagery was such that it
awoke the pity even of a Roman crowd for his
victims.
Such a passage as the above, written by Tacitus
soon after a.d. 100, is somewhat disconcerting to our
authors. Professor Smith, proceeding on his usual
innocent assumption that the whole of the ancient
literature, Christian and profane, of this epoch lies
before him, instead of a scanty debris of it, votes it
to be a forgery. Why? Because Melito, Bishop of
Sardis about 170 a.d., is the first writer who alludes
to it in a fragment of an apology addressed to a
Roman Emperor. As if there were not five hundred
striking episodes narrated by Tacitus, yet never
mentioned by any subsequent writer at all. Would
Mr. Smith on that account dispute their authenticity?
It is only because this episode concerns Christianity
and gets in the way of his theories, that he finds it
necessary to cut it out of the text. You can prove
anything if you cook your evidence, and the wanton
EXTERNAL EVIDENCE 161
mutilation of texts which no critical historian has
ever called in question is a flagrant form of such
cookery. In the hands of these writers facts are
made to fit theory, not theory to fit facts.
I hardly need add that the narrative of Tacitus is Testimony
, , . 1 « T 1-1 • •ji n of Clement
frank, straightforward, and in keeping with all we aj^rees
know or can infer in regard to Christianity in that Z^^^.^
^ , *' Tacitus
epoch. Mr. E. G. Hardy, in his valuable book
Christianity and the Roman Government (London,
1894, p. 70), has pointed out that " the mode of
punishment was that prescribed for those convicted
of magic," and that Suetonius uses the term malefica
of the new religion — a term which has this special
sense. Magicians, moreover, in the code of Justinian,
which here as often reflects a much earlier age, are
declared to be " enemies of the human race." Nor
is it true that Nero's persecution as recorded in
Tacitus is mentioned by no writer before Melito. It
is practically certain that Clement, writing about
A.D. 95, refers to it. He records that a ttoXv irXriOog,
or vast multitude of Christians, the ingens multitudo
of Tacitus, perished in connection with the martyrdom
of Peter and Paul. He speaks of the manifold insults
and torments of men, the terrible and unholy out-
rages upon women, in terms that answer exactly to
the two phrases of Tacitus : pereuntibiis addita ludihria
and quaesitissimae poenae. Women, he implies, were,
*' like Dirce, fastened on the horns of bulls, or, after
figuring as Danaides in the arena, were exposed to Drews on
the attacks of wild beasts " (Hardy, op. cit., p. 72). ^,',"1^^°',^^
However, Drews is not content with merely ousting tions of
the passage from Tacitus, but undertakes to explain ^^^^^^^
to his readers how it got there. It was, he conjec-
tures, made up out of a similar passage read in the
M
162 EXTEKNAL EVIDENCE
Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus (written about 407) by
some clever forger, probably Poggio, who smuggled
it into the text of Tacitus, ''a writer whose text is
full of interpolations." It is hardly necessary to
inform an educated reader, firstly, that the text of
Tacitus is recognized by all competent Latin scholars
to be remarkably free from interpolations ; secondly,
that Severus merely abridged his account of Nero's
persecution from the narrative he found in Tacitus,
an author whom he frequently copied and imitated ;
thirdly, that Poggio, the supposed interpolator, lived
in the fifteenth century, whereas our oldest MS. of
this part of Tacitus is of the eleventh century ; it is
now in the Laurentian Library. I should advise Dr.
Drews to stick to his javelin-man story, and not to
venture on incursions into the field of classical
philology.
Pliny's Having dispatched Josephus and Tacitus, and
Tv!?nn° pi'inted over their pages in capitals the titles The
Silence of Josephus and The Silence of Tacitus, these
authors, needless to say, have no difficulty with Pliny
and Suetonius. The former, in his letter (No. 96) to
Trajan, gives some particulars of the Christians of
Bithynia, probably obtained from renegades. They
asserted that the gist of their offence or error was
that they were accustomed on a regularly recurring
day to meet before dawn, and repeat in alternating
chant among themselves a hymn to Christ as to a
God ; they also bound themselves by a holy oath not
to commit any crime, neither theft, nor brigandage,
nor adultery, and not to betray their word or deny
a deposit when it was demanded. After this rite was
over they had had the custom to break up their
meeting, and to come together afresh later in the
Trajan
EXTEKNAL EVIDENCE 163
day to partake of a meal, which, however, was of an
ordinary and innocent kind.
In this repast we recognize the early eucharist at
which Christians were commonly accused of devour-
ing human flesh, as the Jews are accused by besotted
fanatics of doing in Russia to-day, and by Mr.
Robertson in ancient Jerusalem. Hence Pliny's
proviso that the food they partook of was ordinary
and innocent. The passage also shows that this
eucharistic meal was not the earliest rite of the day,
like the fasting communion of the modern Ritualist,
but was held later in the day. Lastly, the qualifica-
tion that they sang hymns to Christ as to a Gocl^
though to Pliny it conveyed no more than the phrase
" as if to Apollo," or "as if to Aesculapius," clearly
signifies that the person so honoured was or had
been a human being. Had he been a Sun-god
Saviour, the phrase would be hopelessly inept. This
letter and Trajan's answer to it w^ere penned about
110 A.D.
Of this letter Professor W. B. Smith writes (p. 252)
that in it "there is no implication, not even the
slightest, touching the purely human reality of the
Christ or Jesus." Let us suppose the letter had
referred to the cult of Augustus Caesar, and that we
read in it of people who, by way of honouring his
memory, met on certain days and sang a hymn to
Augustus quasi deo, " as to a God." We know that
the members of a college of Augustals did so meet in
most cities of the Roman Empire. Well, would Mr.
Smith contend in such a case that the letter carried
no implication, not even the slightest, touching the
purely human reality of the Augustus or Caesar ? Of
course he would not. If this letter were the sole
164
EXTEENAL EVIDENCE
Evidence
of
Suetonius
record in existence of early Christianity, we might
perhaps hesitate about its implications ; but it is in
the characteristic Latin which no one, so far as we
know, ever wrote, except the younger Pliny, and is
accompanied by Trajan's answer, couched in an
equally characteristic style. It is, moreover, but one
link in a long chain, which as a whole attests and
presupposes the reality of Jesus. Mr. Smith, how-
ever, does not seem quite sure of his ground, for in
the next sentence he hints that after all Pliny's letter
is not genuine. These writers are not the first to
whom this letter has proved a pons asinorum. Semler
began the attack on its genuineness in 1784 ; and
others, who desired to eliminate all references to
Christianity in early heathen writers, have, as J. B.
Lightfoot has remarked {Apostolic Fathers, Pt. II,
vol. i, p. 55), followed in his wake. Their objections
do not merit serious refutation.
There remains Suetonius, who in ch. xxv of his
life of Claudius speaks of Messianic disturbances at
Eome impulsore Chresto. Claudius reigned from
41-54, and the passage may possibly be an echo of
the conflict, clearly delineated in Acts and Paulines
between the Jews and the followers of the new
Messiah.^ Itacism or interchange of "e" and " i " being
the commonest of corruptions in Greek and Latin
MSS., we may fairly conjecture Christo in the source
used by Suetonius, who wrote about the year 120.
Christo, which means Messiah, is intelligible in rela-
tion to Jews, but not Chresto ; and the two words were
^ So in Acts xviii, 12, we read of faction fights in Corinth between the
Jews and the followers of Jesus the Messiah ; Gallio, the proconsul of
Achaia, who cared for none of the matters at issue between them, is
a well-known personage, and an inscription has lately been dis-
covered dating his tenure of Achaia in a.d. 52.
EXTERNAL EVIDENCE 165
identical in pronunciation. Drews of course upholds
Chrcsto, and in Tacitus would substitute for Christiani
Chrestiani ; for this there is indeed manuscript
support, but it is gratuitous to argue as he does that
the allusion is to Serapis or Osiris, who were called
Chrestos " the good " by their votaries. He does not
condescend to adduce any evidence to show that in
that age or any other Chrestos, used absolutely,
signified Osiris or Serapis ; and there is no reason to
suppose it ever had such a significance. He is on
still more precarious ground when he surmises that
Nero's victims at Rome were not followers of Christ,
but of Serapis, and were called Chrestiani by the mob
ironically, because of their vices. Here we begin to
suspect that he is joking. Why should worshippers
of Serapis have been regarded as specially vicious by
the Roman mob ? Jews and Christians were no
doubt detested, because they could not join in any
popular festivities or thanksgivings. But there was
nothing to prevent votaries of Serapis or Osiris from
doing so, nor is there any record of their being
unpopular as a class.
In his life of Nero, Suetonius, amid a number of
brief notices, apparently taken from some annalistic
work, includes the following : "The Christians were
visited with condign punishments — a race of men pro-
fessing a new and malefic superstition." On this
passage I have commented above (p. 161).
Characteristically enough. Dr. Drews assumes, with- Origin of
out a shadow of argument, that the famous text in uQ^rfs^^
Acts which says that the followers of Jesus were tian"
first called Christians in Antioch is an interpolation.
It stands in the way of his new thesis that the Roman
people called the followers of Serapis — who was
166 EXTEENAL EVIDENCE
Chrestos or "good" — Chrestiani, because they were
precisely the contrary.^ Tacitus does not say that
Nero's victims were so called because of their vices.
That is a gloss put on the text by Drews. We only
learn {a) that they were hated by the mob for their
vices, and (b) that the mob at that time called them
Chrestiani. His use of the imperfect tense appellabat
indicates that in his own day the same sect had come
to be known under their proper appellation as Chris-
tiani. In a.d. 64, he implies, a Roman mob knew no
better.
* Tacitus very likely wrote Chrestiani. He says the mob called
them such, but adds that the author of the name was Christ, so
implying that Christianus was the true form, and Chrestianua a popular
malformation thereof. The Roman mob would be likely to deform a
name they did not understand, just as a jack-tar turns Bellerophon
into Billy Ruffian. Chrestos was a common name among oriental
slaves, and a Roman mob would naturally assume that GhristoSy
which they could not understand, was a form of it.
Chapter VI
THE ART OF CRITICISM
Let us pause here and try to frame some ideas of Repudia-
the methods of this new school which denies that Jesus thT ^
ever lived : — partisans
Firstly, they are all agreed that the method they historicity
would apply to all other figures in ancient history — for o^ J^sus
example, to Apollonius — shall not be used in connec- historical
tion with Jesus. They carelessly deride *' the attempt n^ethod
of historical theologians to reach the historical
nucleus of the Gospels by purely philological means "
(The Witnesses, p. 129). '' The process," writes Mr.
Robertson, " of testing the Synoptic Gospels down to
an apparent nucleus of primitive narrative " " this
new position is one of retreat, and is not permanently
tenable" (Christianity and Mythology, p. 284).
If this be so, we had better abolish our chairs of
history at the universities, and give up teaching it in
the schools ; for, in the absence of the camera and
gramophone, this method is the only one we can use.
When a Mommsen sets Polybius's, Livy's, and
Plutarch's lives of Hannibal side by side and *' tests
them down to an apparent nucleus of primitive narra-
tive," does Mr. Robertson take him as a text for a
disquisition on " the psychological Resistance to
Evidence " ? If not, why does he forbid us to take
the score or so of independent memories and records
of the career of Jesus which we have in ancient litera-
167
New
Testament
168 THE ART OF CRITICISM
ture between the years a.d. 50 and 120, and to try to
sift them down ? Why, without any evidence, should
we rush to the conclusion that the figure on whom
they jointly converge was a Sun-god, solar myth, or
vegetation sprite ?
Secondly, we may note how this disinclination to
literature sift sources and test documents prompts them to
Moc^ ^" ^^^® ^^^ ^^^^ sources and documents which arose
separately and in succession. Yet it is not simple
laziness which dictates to them this short and easy
method of dealing with ancient documents. Rather
they have inherited it from the old-fashioned orthodox
teachers of a hundred years ago, w^ho, convinced of
the verbal inspiration of the Bible, forbade us to
estimate one passage as evidence more highly than
another. All the verses of the Bible were on a level,
as also all the incidents, and to argue that one event
might have happened, but not another, was rank
blasphemy. All were equally certain, for inspiration
is not given by measure. Their mantle has fallen on
Mr. Robertson and his friends. All or none is their
method ; but, whereas all was equally certain, now
all is equally myth. ''A document," says (p. 159)
the excellent work by MM. Langlois and Seignobos
which I cited above,
(still more a literary work) is not all of a piece ; it
is composed of a great number of independent state-
ments, any one of w^hich may be intentionally or un-
intentionally false, while the others are bond jide and
accurate It is not, therefore, enough to examine a
document as a whole ; each of the statements in it
must be examined separately ; criticism is impossible
without analysis.
We have beautiful examples of such mixed criticism
and analysis in the commentaries on the Synoptics of
THE AET OF CEITICISM 169
Wellhausen and Loisy, both of them Freethinkers in
the best sense of the word.
I have given several minor examples of the incapacity
obstinacy with w^hich the three writers I am criticizing school to
shut their eyes to the gradual evolution of Christian under-
ideas ; they exhibit the same perversity in respect of evolution
the great development of Christological thought already ^^ Chns-
traceable in the New Testament.
Paul conceived of Jesus as a Jewish teacher elevated
through his death and resurrection to the position of
Messiah and Son of God. On earth he is still a merely
human being, born naturally, and subject to the law
— a weak man of flesh. Raised from the dead by the
energy of the Spirit, he becomes future judge of man-
kind, and his gospel transcends all distinctions of Jew
and Gentile, bondsman or free. In Mark he is still
merely human ; he is the son of Joseph and Mary,
born and bred like their other sons and daughters.
As a man he comes to John the Baptist, like others, to
confess and repent of his sins, and wash them away in
Jordan's holy stream. Not till then does the descent
of the Spirit on him, as he goes up from the Jordan,
confer a Messiahship on him, which his followers only
recognize later on. Astounding miracles and prodigies,
however, are already credited to him in this our earliest
Gospel. In the non-Marcan document, or Q, so far as
we can reconstruct it, he has become Messiah through
baptism (supposing this section to have belonged to
Q, and not to some other document used by Luke and
Matthew) ; but few or no miracles^ are as yet credited
1 Mr. Robertson recognizes (p. 124), though without realizing how
much it damages his theory, that the miracles of the Gospels are
" visibly unknown to the Paulinists " — presumably the early churches
addressed by Paul in his Epistle. Do we not here get a glimpse of
an early stage of the story of Jesus before it was overlaid with
170 THE AKT OF CRITICISM
to him, and the document contained little except his
teaching. His death has none of the importance
assigned to it by Paul, and is not mentioned ; his
resurrection does not seem to have been heard of by
the author of this document. In Matthew and Luke
the figure before us is much the same as in Mark ;
but human traits, such as his mother's distrust of his
mission, are effaced. We hear no more of his inability
to heal those who did not believe in him, and we get
in their early chapters hints of his miraculous birth.
In John there is, indeed, no hint of such birth ; but,
on the other hand, the entire Gospel is here rewritten
to suit a new conception of him as the divine, eternal
Logos, Demonology tales are ruled out. His role as
a Jewish Messiah, faithful to the law, has finally
retired into the background, together with that tense
expectation of the end of the world, of the final judg-
ment and installation in Palestine of a renovated
kingdom of David, which inspires the teaching and
parables of the Synoptic Gospels, just as it inspired
Philo, and the Apocalypse of the Fourth Esdras and
other contemporary Jewish apocrypha,
especially Now, in Mr. W. B. Smith's works this development
tion with 0^ doctrine about Jesus, this succession of phases, is
*^l/.^^®"*^ not only reversed, but, with singular perversity, turned
Birth, upside down. Similarly, Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews,
in order to secure a favourable reception for their hypo-
thesis that Jesus was a Sun-god, insist in the teeth of
the evidence that the belief in the Virgin Birth was
part and parcel of the earliest tradition. As a matter
mii-acles ? Yet Mr, Eobertson, in defiance of logic, argues that the
absence of miraculous tales of Jesus in the Paulines confirms what he
calls " the mythological argument."
THE AKT OF CEITICISM 171
of fact, it was comparatively late, as the heortology or
history of the feasts of the Church shows. Of specially
Christian feasts, the first was the Sunday, which com-
memorated every week the Resurrection, and the hope
of the Parousia, or Second Coming. The next was the
Epiphany, on January 6, commemorative of the bap-
tism when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus and
conferred Messiahship.
This feast we cannot trace before the year 125 or
150, and then only among Basilidians ; among
Catholics hardly before 300. Just as the story of
the Virgin Birth was the latest addition to evangelical
tradition, so it was the latest of the dominical feasts ;
and not till 354 did it obtain separate recognition in
Rome on December 25. Of the feast of the Annuncia-
tion and of the other feasts of the Virgin we first hear
in the sixth and succeeding centuries. From this
outline we can realize at how late a period the legend
of the Virgin Birth influenced the mind of the Church
at large ; yet Mr. Robertson, to smooth the way for
his " mythic " theory, pretends that it was the earliest
of all Christian beliefs, and without a tittle of evidence
invents a pre-Christian Saviour-Sun-god Joshua, born
of a virgin, Miriam. The whole monstrous conception
is a preposterous coinage of his brain, a figment un-
known to anyone before himself and bristling with
impossibilities. Witness the following passage (p. 284
of Christianity and Mythology), containing nearly as
many baseless fancies as it contains words : —
The one tenable historic hypothesis left to us at
this stage is that of a preliminary Jesus " b.c," a
vague cult-founder such as the Jesus ben Pandira
of the Talmud, put to death for (perhaps anti-Judaic)
teachings now lost ; round whose movement there
172
THE AET OF CEITICISM
and in
connec-
tion with
Schmie-
del's
"Pillars"
might have gradually clustered the survivals of an
ancient solar or other worship of a Babe Joshua son of
Miriam.
Such is the gist of the speculations of Messrs. Drews
and Robertson, as far removed from truth and reality
as the Athanasian Creed and from sane criticism as the
truculent buffooneries of theFuturists from genuine art.
We have more than once criticized this tendency of
Mr. Robertson to insist on the primitiveness of the
Virgin Birth legend. He urges it throughout his
volume, although here and there he seems to see
the truth, as, e.g., on p. 189, where he remarks that
" only the late Third Gospel tells the story" of Mary
and Joseph going to Bethlehem to be taxed, and " that
the narrative in Matthew" was "added late to the
original composition, which obviously began at what
is now the third chapter." If the legend was part of
the earliest tradition, why does it figure for the first
time in the late Third Gospel and in a late addition
to the first ? In another passage he assures us that
chapters i and ii of Luke are " a late fabulous intro-
duction." Clearly, his view is that, just in proportion
as any part of the Gospels is late, the tradition it con-
tains must be early ; and he it is who talks about " the
methodless subjectivism " of Dr. Pfleiderer, who, he
says, "like Matthew Arnold, accepts what he likes"
(p. 450).
The same inability to distinguish what is early from
what is late is shown by Mr. Robertson in his criticism
of Dr. Schmiedel's " pillars " — i.e., the nine Gospel
texts (seven of them in Mark) — " which cannot have
been invented by believers in the godhood of Jesus,
since they implicitly negate that godhood." Of these,
one is Mark x, 11 ff.t where Jesus uses — to one who
THE AET OF CKITICTSM 173
had thrown himself at his feet with the words : " Good
teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" (i.e.,
life in the kingdom to come) — the answer : " Why
callest thou me good ? No one is good, save one — to
wit, God." Here many ancient sources intensify
Jesus's refusal of a predicate which is God's alone ;
for they run : " Call thou me not good." This
apart, the Second and Third Gospels may be said
to agree in reading, ''Good master," and, "Why
callest thou me good ? "
In Matthew, however (xix, 16), we read as follows:
" Behold, one came to him and said : Master, what
good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life ?
And he said unto him. Why askest thou me con-
cerning that which is good ? One there is who is
good," etc.
Now, it is a result of criticism universally accepted
to-day that Matthew and Luke compiled their Gospels
with Mark before them, and that any reading in which
either of them agrees with Mark must be more original
than the discrepant reading of a third. Here Matthew
is the discrepant witness, and he has remodelled the
text of Mark to suit the teaching which had estab-
lished itself in the Church about a..d. 100 that Jesus
was without sin. He accordingly makes Jesus reply
as a Greek sophist might reply, and not as a Jewish
rabbi ; and, by omitting the predicate " good " before
teacher, he turns the words, " One there is who is
good," into nonsense. By adding it before " thing"
he creates additional nonsense ; for how could any but
a good action merit eternal life ? The epithet is here
superfluous. Even then, if we were not sure on other
grounds that the Marcan story is the only source of
the Matthsean deformed text, we could be sure that it
174 THE AET OF CEITICISM
was, because in Mark we have simplicity and good
sense, whereas in Matthew we have neither. Mr.
Robertson, on an earlier page, has, indeed, done lip-
service to the truth that Mark presents us with the
earliest form of evangelical tradition ; but here he
betrays the fact that he has not really understood the
position, nor grasped the grounds (set forth by me in
Myth, Magic, and Morals) on which it rests. For he
is ready to sacrifice it the moment it makes havoc of
his *' mythological " argument, and writes (p. 443):
" On the score of simple likelihood, which has the
stronger claim ? Surely the original text in Matthew."
Even if Matthew, Mark, and Luke were rival and
independent texts, instead of the first and third being,
as they demonstrably are, copies and paraphrases of
Mark, the best — if not the only — criterion of originality
would be such an agreement of two of them as Mark
and Luke here present against Matthew. Mr.
Robertson, with entire ignoratio elenchi, urges in
favour of the originality of Matthew's variant the
circumstance that the oldest MS. sources of that
Gospel reproduce it. How could they fail to do so,
supposing it to be due to the redactor or editor of
Mark, who was traditionally, but falsely, identified
with the apostle Matthew ? If the reading of Mark
be not original, how came Luke to copy it from him ?
The most obvious critical considerations are wasted
on Mr. Robertson and his friends.
Schmiedel ^^'- Schmiedel again draws attention to the narra-
on the tive of how Jesus, at the beginning of his ministry,
I'll*/* ^ ^^v-/ •/'
ofVary in was declared by his own household to be out of his
her son senses, and of how, in consequence, his mother and
brethren followed him in order to put him under
restraint. The story offended the first and third
THE ART OF CRITICISM 175
evangelists, and they partly omit it, partly obscure
its drift. The fourth evangelist limits the disbelief
to the brethren of Jesus. The whole narrative is in
flagrant antagonism to the Birth stories in the early
chapters of Matthew and Luke, and to the whole
subsequent drift of Church tradition. Being gifted
with common sense, Schmiedel argues that it must be
true, because it could never have been invented. It,
anyhow, makes for the historicity of Jesus. What
has Mr. Robertson to say about it? He writes
(p. 443) : " Why should such a conception be more
alien to Christian consciousness than, say, the story
of the trial, scourging, and crucifixion ? " Here he
ignores the point at issue. In Christian tradition,
whether early or late, it was not the mother and
brethren of Jesus who tried and scourged and
crucified him, but inimical Jews and pagans. The
latter are at no time related to have received an
announcement of his birth from an angel, as his
mother was presently believed to have done. We
have, therefore, every reason for averring that the
conception or idea of his being flouted by his own
mother and brethren was a thousand times more
alien to Christian consciousness — at least, any time
after a.d. 100— than that of his being flouted by
a Sadducean priesthood and by Roman governors.
Once the legend of the Virgin Birth had grown up,
such a story could not have been either thought of or
committed to writing in a Gospel. It is read in
Mark, and must be what we call a bed-rock tradition.
If Mr. Robertson cannot see that, he is hopeless. Did
he not admit (p. 443) that it is "certainly an odd
text," so revealing his inmost misgivings about it,
we should think him so.
176
THE AET OF CEITICISM
Jesus is
not deified
in the
earliest
docu-
ments, nor
do they
reveal a
" cult " of
him
The same vice of mixing up different phases of the
Christian religion shows itself in the insistence of
this school of critic that it was from the first a cult
of a deified Jesus. Thus Mr. Smith writes {Ecce
Deus) as follows (p. 6) : —
We affirm that the worship of the one God under
the name, aspect, or jjerson of the Jesus, the Saviour,
was the primitive and indefectible essence of the
primitive teaching and propaganda.
On the contrary, in the two basal documents, Mark
and Q, no such worship is discernible. Jesus first
comes on the scene as the humble son of Joseph and
Mary to repent of his sins and purge them away in
Baptism ; he next takes up the preaching of the
imprisoned John, which was merely that Jew^s should
repent of their sins because the kingdom of God,
involving a dissolution of the existing social and
political order, was at hand. This was no divine
role, and he is represented not as God, but only as
the servant of God ; for such in the Aramaic dialect
of that age was the connotation of the title " Son of
God." In Mark there is no sign of his deification,
not even in the transfiguration scene ; for in that he
is merely the human Messiah attended by Elias and
Moses. From a hundred early indicia we know that
in the Semitic-speaking churches of the East he
remained a human figure for centuries ; and the
Syrian Father Aphraat, as late as 336 in Persia, is
careful to explain in his homilies that Jesus was only
divine as Moses was, or as human kings are. It was
not till the religion was diffused in a pagan medium
in which gods had children by mortal w^omen that
the gross deification of Jesus emerged. The purport
of these basal documents, moreover, is not to deify
THE AET OF CRITICISM 177
Jesus, but to establish as against the Jews that he
was their promised Messiah and the central figure of
the Messianic kingdom he j)reached. That figure,
however, was never identified with Jehovah, but was
only Jehovah's servant, anointed king and judge of
Israel, restorer of Israel's damaged fortunes, fulfiller
of her political ideals and hopes. Mr. Smith argues
that Jesus was deified from the first because his name
was so often invoked in exorcisms. He even makes
the suggestion (p. 17) that the initial letter J of
Jesus " must have powerfully suggested Jehovah to
the Jewish consciousness." There is no evidence,
and less likelihood, of any such thing. The name of
Jesus was during his lifetime invoked against demons
by exorcists who rejected his message; just as they
used the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, so
they were ready to exploit his powerful name ; but
neither Jews nor Christians ever confounded with
Jehovah the names or personalities they thus invoked ;
any Jew in virtue of his birth and breeding would
have regarded such a confusion of a man with his God
as flat blasphemy.
Messrs. Robertson and Drews similarly insist that Wo^si^ip
1 • /-I 1 of a slam
Jesus was from the first worshipped as a slain God. God no
In the Gospel documents there is no sign of anything p^irt of ti^e
of the sort. It was Paul who first diffused the idea Chris-
that the crucified Jesus was a victim slain for the ^^^^^^y
redemption of human sins. We already have Philo
proclaiming that the just man is the ransom of the
many, so that there is no need to go to pagan circles,
no need to go outside the pale of Greek Jews, of
whom Paul was one, for the origin of the idea. He
probably found it even in the teaching of Gamaliel,
in which he was brought up. Mark asks no more of
N
178
THE ART OF CRITICISM
his readers than to attribute the Messiahship — a
thoroughly human role — to his hero, Jesus of Nazareth.
Nor does Matthew, who seeks at every turn to prove
that the actions of Jesus reported by Mark were
those which, according to the old prophets, a Messiah
might be expected to perform. How can writers who
end their record of Jesus by telling us how in the
moment of death he cried, " My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?" realizing no doubt that all
his expectations of the advent of God's kingdom
were frustrated and set at naught ; how, I say, can
such writers have believed that Jesus was Jehovah ?
The idea is monstrous. The truth is these writers
transport back into the first age of Christianity the
ideas and beliefs of developed Catholicism, and are
resolved that the first shall be last and the last first.
They have no perspective, and no capacity for under-
standing the successive phases through which a
primitive Messianism, at first thoroughly mono-
theistic and exclusively Jewish in outlook and ideals,
gradually evolved itself, with the help of the Logos
teaching, into the Athanasian cult of an eternal and
consubstantial Son of God.
Thirdly, these writers abuse the comparative
method. Applied discreetly and rationally, this
thrs'scliooi niethod helps us to trace myths and beliefs back to
of writers their homes and earlier forms. Thus M.Emmanuel
Cosquin (in Romania; Paris, 1912) takes the story of
the cat and the candle, and traces out its ramifications
in the media3val literature and modern folklore of
Europe, and outside Europe, in the legends of the
Pendjab, of Cashmir, Bengal, Ceylon, Tibet, Tunisia,
Annam, and elsewhere. But the theme is always
sufiiciently like itself to be really recognizable in the
Abuse of
the com-
parative
method by
THE AKT OF CEITICISM 179
various folklore frames in which it is found encased.
The old philologists saw in the most superficial
resemblance of sound a reason for connecting words
in different languages. They never asked themselves
how a word got out of Hebrew, say, into Greek, or
out of Greek into Mexican. Volumes were filled with
these haphazard etymologies, and the idea of the
classification of languages into great connected
families only slowly made its way among us in the
last century. I have pointed out that in regard to
names Messrs. Drews and Robertson are still in this
prephilological stage of inquiry ; as regards myths or
stories of incident, they are wholly immersed in it.
They never trouble themselves to make sure that the
stories they connect bear any real resemblance to one anything
another. For example, what have the Zodiacal signs ontoany-
and the Apostles of Jesus in common except the matfer
number twelve ? As if number was not the most how
superficial of attributes, the least characteristic and
essential. The scene of the Gospel is laid in Judaea,
where from remote antiquity the Jews had classed
themselves in twelve tribes. Is it not more likely
that this suggested the twelve missionaries sent out
by Jesus to announce the coming kingdom than the
twelve signs of the Zodiac ? Even if the story of the
Twelve be legendary, need we go outside Judaism for
our explanation of its origin ?
What, again, have the three Maries in common with
the Greek Moirai except the number three and a delu-
sive community of sound ? Yet Mr. Robertson insists
that the three Maries at the tomb of Jesus were
suggested by the Moirai, because these, ** as goddesses
of birth and death, naturally figured in many artistic
presentations of religious death scenes." As a matter
180
THE AET OF CRITICISM
and for-
get the
innate
hostility
of Jews to
Paganism
of fact, the representation of the Parcae or Fates in
connection with death is rare except on Roman sarco-
phagi, mostly of later date than the Gospel story.
And when they are so found, they represent, not
women bringing spices for the corpse or mourning for
the dead, but the forces, often thought of as blind
and therefore represented as veiled, which govern the
events of the world, including birth, life and death.
There was, therefore, nothing in the Moirai to suggest
the three Maries at the tomb ; nor is it credible that
the Hebrew Christists, given as they must have been
to monotheism and detesting all statuary, pagan or
other, would have chosen their literary motives from
such a source. Where could they see such statuary
in or about Jerusalem ? It is notorious that the very
presence of a symbolic eagle used as a military
standard was enough to create an emeute in Jerusalem.
The scheme of the emperor Caligula or Caius to set up
his statue in Jerusalem in 39-40 a.d. provoked a
movement of revolt throughout Palestine, with which
the Jews of Egypt and elsewhere were in full sympathy.
A deputation headed by Philo of Alexandria went to
Rome to supplicate the emperor not to goad the entire
race to frenzy. In the magnificent statues which
surrounded him on the Parthenon hill, Paul could see
nothing but idols, monuments of an age of supersti-
tion and ignorance which God had mercifully over-
looked.^ The hostility of the Jews to all pagan art
1 It is true that this is from a speech put into Paul's mouth by the
author of Acts ; but Paul himself is no less emphatic in Romans i, 23,
where of the Greeks he writes that, " though they knew God, they
glorified him not as God Professing themselves wise, they were
turned into fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God for
the likeness of an image of a corruptible man." Such were the feel-
ings excited in Paul by a statue of Pheidias ; how different from those
it roused in his contemporary Dion, who wrote as follows of it :
THE ART OF CRITICISM 181
and sculpture was as great as that of Mohammedans
to-day. Yet Mr. Robertson asks us to believe (p. 327)
that the Gospel myths, as he assumes them to be, are
*' evolved from scenes in pagan art." On the top of
that we afterwards learn from him that it was the
Jewish high priest with legalistic leanings that
presided over the Christists or Jesuists. Imagine
such a high priest's feelings when he beheld his
"secret society" evolving their system under such
an inspiration as Mr. Robertson outlines in the
following canons of criticism : —
As we have seen and shall see throughout this in-
vestigation, the Christian system is a patchwork of a
hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual
usage (p. 305).
Christism borrowed myths of all kinds from
paganism (p. xii).
the whole Christian legend, in its present
terminology, is demonstrably an adaptation of a mass
of pre-Christian myths (p. 136).
What a budget of mutually destructive paradoxes ;
and to crown them all Mr. Robertson claims in his
introduction (p. xxii) that the method of his treatise is
in general more " positive," less a priori, more obedient
to scientitic canons than that of the previous critics
who have reached similar anti-traditionalist
results. It substitutes an anthropological basis, in
terms of the concrete phenomena of mythology, for a
pseudo-philosophical presupposition.
♦'Whoever among mortal men is most utterly toilworn in spirit,
having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands
before^this image must utterly forget all the terrors and woes of this
mortal life." So strong was the prejudice of the Church (due exclu-
sively to its Jewish origin) against phistic or pictorial art that Eusebius
and Epiphanius condemned pictures of Christ as late as the fourth
century, while the Eastern churches, even to-day, forbid statues of
Jesus and of the Saints. Of the great gulf which separated Jew from
Gentile on such points Mr. Kobertson seems not to have the faintest
notion.
182
THE AET OF CKITICISM
Credulity
attends
hyper-
criticism
Fourthly, it is essential to note the childish, all-
embracing, and overwhelraing credulity of these
writers. To them applies in its full force the
paragraph in which MM. Langlois and Seignobos
describe the perils which beset hypercriticism (p. 131,
op, cit.) : —
The excess of criticism, just as much as the crudest
ignorance, leads to error. It consists in the application
of critical canons to cases outside their jurisdiction. It
is related to criticism as logic-chopping is to logic.
There are persons who scent enigmas everywhere, even
where there are none. They take perfectly clear texts
and subtilize on them till they make them doubtful,
under the pretext of freeing them from imaginary
corruptions. They discover traces of forgery in
authentic documents. A strange state of mind ! By
constantly guarding against the instinct of credulity
they come to suspect everything.
For these writers, in their anxiety to be original
and new, see fit to discard every position that earlier
historians, like Mommsen, Gibbon, Bury, Montefiore
— not to mention Christian scholars — have accepted
as beyond doubt. Their temper is that of the Bacon-
Shakesperians ; and the plainest, simplest, most
straightforward texts figure in their imaginations
as a laborious series of charades, rebuses, and cryp-
tograms. That Jesus never existed is not really
the final conclusion of their researches, but an
initial unproved assumption. In order to get rid of
him, they feign, without any evidence of it, a Jewish
secret society under the patronage of the Jewish
High Priest, that existed in Jerusalem well down into
the Christian era. This society kept up the worship
of an old Palestinian and Ephraimitic Sun-god and
Saviour, named Joshua, son of a virgin, Miriam.
Where is the proof that such a god was ever heard of
THE AET OF CEITICISM 183
in ancient Palestine, either early or late, or that such
a cult ever existed ? There is none. It is the emptiest
and wildest of hypotheses ; yet we are asked to accept
it in place of the historicity of Jesus. What, again, do
we know of secret societies in Jerusalem ? Josephus
and Philo knew of none. For the Therapeutse, far
from affecting secrecy, were anxious to diffuse their
discipline and lore even among the Hellenes, while
the Essenes had nothing secret save the names of the
angels they invoked in spells. They were a well-
known sect, and so numerous that a gate of Jerusalem
was called the Essene Gate, because they so often
came in and went forth by it. Were the Pharisees
and Sadducees, the Scribes, or the Sicarii or zealots,
secret sects '? We know they were not. But is it
likely that a sect composed in the main of Jews, and
patronized, as Mr. Robertson argues, by the High
Priest, would have kept up in the very heart of
monotheistic Judaism a cult of Sun-gods and
Vegetation-spirits? Could they there have given
themselves up to the study of pagan statuary, art,
and ritual dramas ? What possible connection is
there between the naive picture of Hebrew Messian-
ism we have in the Synoptic Gospels and the hurly-
burly, the tagrag and bobtail of pagan mythologies
which Mr. Robertson and his henchman Drews rake
together pell-mell in their pretentious volumes ? How
did all this paganism abut in a Messianic society which
reverenced the Old Testament for its sacred scriptures,
which for long frequented the Jewish Temple, took
over the feasts and fasts of Judaism, modelled its
prayers on those of the Synagogue, cherished in its
eastern branches the practice of circumcision ?
After hundreds of pages devoted to the task of
184 THE AET OF CKITICISM
Mr. evaporating Jesus into a Solar or Yegetation-god, and
accepts the ^^^ the personagGS we meet in the Gospels into
historicity zodiacal signs or pagan demigods, Mr. Robertson, as
after all WG have noticed above, finds himself, after all, con-
fronted with the same personages in Paul's Epistles.
There they are too real even for Mr. Robertson to
dissipate them into cloud-forms, and too numerous to
be cut out wholesale. He feels that, if all Paul's
allusions to the crucified Jesus are to be got rid of
as interpolations, then no Pauline Epistles will
remain. He cuts out, indeed, all he can, but there
is a residuum of reality. To identify Paul's Jesus
with the Jesus of the Gospels is too humdrum and
obvious a course for him. So common-sense and
commonplace a scheme does not suit his subtle
intelligence ; moreover, such an identification would
upset the hundreds of pages in which he has proved
that Jesus of Nazareth and all his accessories are
literary symbols employed by the Jewish " Jesuists "
to disguise their pagan art and myths. Accordingly,
he asks us to believe that Paul's Jesus is a certain
Jesus Ben Pandira, stoned to death a hundred years
earlier. This Jesus is a vague figure fished up out of
the Talmud ; but, on examination, we found Mr.
Robertson's choice of him as an alias for Paul's
Jesus to be most unfortunate, for competent Talmudic
scholars are agreed that Jesus Ben Pandira in the
Talmud was no other than Jesus of Nazareth in the
Gospels. Jesus most unkindly insists on being in at
his own death,^ in spite of all Mr. Robertson can say
or do ; and his house of cards is crowned with the
discovery that the apostles whom Paul knew — not
^ I trust my readers will forgive my use of a fox-hunting phrase in
so serious a context, but I cannot think of any other so apt.
THE ART OF CRITICISM 185
being identical with the signs of the Zodiac, like those
of the Gospels — were no other than the twelve apostles
of the Jewish High Priest, and that they were the
authors of the lately-discovered " Teaching of the
Apostles." He is very contemptuous for other early
Christian books which affect apostolic authorship in
their titles, but falls a ready victim to the relatively
late and anonymous editor of this " teaching," who to
give it vogue entitled it " The Teaching of the Lord
by the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles." "The
Jesuist sect," he writes (p. 345), " founded on it the
Didache, the Christian myth of the Twelve Apostles
of Jesus." Everywhere else in his books he has
argued that the " myth" in question was founded on
the signs of the Zodiac. Why give up at the eleventh
hour the astral explanation for an utterly different
one ? I may add that in the body of the Didache the
Twelve are nowhere alluded to ; that it must be a
much later document than the Gospels and Paulines,
since it quotes them in scores of passages ; and that
the interpolation of the title, with a reference to the
Twelve Apostles, was a literary trick scarcely older
than the fourth century, long before which age
the Pauline account of the resurrection was cited by
a score of Christian writers. Lastly, we are fain
to inquire of Mr. Robertson with whom he identifies
" the Lord " of the above title — with the Jewish High
Priest, or with Jesus Ben Pandira,or with the Sun-God-
Saviour Joshua.
I have ^iven many examples of the tendency of all Theory of
^ . . interpola-
these authors to condemn as an interpolation any text tions
which contradicts their hypotheses. There is only
one error worse than that of treating seriously docu-
ments which are no documents at all. It is that of
186
THE AET OF CEITICISM
Professor
Smith's
monothe-
istic cult
the man who cannot recognize documents when he
has got them. It is well, of course, to weigh sources,
and the critical investigation of authorship lies at the
basis of all true history. But, as the authors above
cited justly remark (p. 99) : —
We must not abuse it. The extreme of distrust in
these matters is almost as mischievous as the extreme
of credulity. Pere Hardouin, who attributed the works
of Virgil and Horace to medieval monks, was every
whit as ridiculous as the victim of Vrain-Lucas. It is
an abuse of the methods of this species of criticism to
apply them, as has been done, indiscriminately, for the
mere pleasure of it. The bunglers who have used this
species of criticism to brand as spurious perfectly
genuine documents, such as the writings of Hroswitha,
the Lif/iirinus, and the bull unam sanctani, or to estab-
lish imaginary filiations between certain annals, on the
strength of superficial indications, would have dis-
credited criticism before now, if that had been possible.
It is unhappily easier to discredit criticism in the
realm of ecclesiastical than of secular history ; and
this school of writers are doing their best to harm the
cause of true Rationalism. They only afford amuse-
ment to the obscurantists of orthodox}^, and render
doubly difficult the task of those who seek to win
people over to a common-sense and historical
envisagement, unencumbered by tradition and super-
stition, of the problems of early Christianity.
Lastly, it is a fact deserving of notice that the
genesis of Christianity as these authors present it
is much more mysterious and obscure than before.
Their explanation needs explaining. What, we must
ask, was the motive and end in view of the adherents
of the pre-Christian Jesus or Joshua in writing the
Gospels and bringing down their God to earth, so
humanizing in a story their divine myth ? Let Pro-
THE ART OF CRITICISM 187
fessor W. B. Smith speak : " What was the essence,
the central idea and active principle, of the cult
itself? " Here he means the cult of the pre-Christian
Christ that invented the Gospels and diffused them on
the market place. " To this latter," he continues,
*' we answer directly and immediately : It was a
Protest against idolatry ; it was a Crusade for mono-
theism. ''
And yet he cannot adduce a single text from the
Gospels — not even from the Fourth — which betrays
on the part of Jesus, their central figure, any such
crusading spirit. Jesus everywhere assumes his
hearers to be monotheists like himself — he speaks
as a Jew to Jews — and perpetually reminds them of
their Father in heaven. Thus Matt, vi, 8: "Your
Father knoweth what things ye have need of ";
Matt. V, 48: "Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your
heavenly Father is perfect."
The monotheism of those who stood around the
teacher is ever taken for granted by the evangelists,
and in all the precepts of Jesus not one can be adduced
that is aimed at the sins of polytheism and idolatry.
His message lies in a far different region. It is the
immediate advent of the Messianic kingdom, and the
need of repentance ere it come. Only when Paul
undertakes to bear this message to pagans outside the
pale of Judaism do we get teaching directed against
idolatry ; and in his Epistles such precepts have a
second place, the first being reserved to the preaching
of the coming kingdom and of the redemption of the
world by the merits of the crucified and risen
Messiah, the man Jesus. Most of Paul's letters read
as if those for whom he wrote them were already
proselytes familiar with the Jewish scriptures.
188
THE ART OF CRITICISM
His great
Oriental
crypto-
gram
Such is Mr. Smith's fundamental assumption, and
it is baseless. On it he bases his next great hypo-
thesis of " the primitive secrecy of the Jesus cult,"
which " was maintained in some measure for many
years — for generations even" (p. 45). "Why," he
asks, " was this Jesus cult originally secret, and
expressed in such guarded parabolic terms as made it
unintelligible to the multitude ? " The reason lay in
the fact that " it was exactly to save the pagan multi-
tude from idolatry that Jesus came into the world "
(p. 38).
Here the phrase *' Jesus came into the world," like
all else he did or suffered, is, of course, to be under-
stood in a Pickwickian sense, for he never came into
the world at all. The Gospels are not only a romance
concocted by *' such students of religion as the first
Christians were " (p. 65), and inspired by their study
of Plato, ^ and of the best elements in ancient mytho-
logy ; they are a romance throughout — an allegory of
a secret pre-Christian Nazarene society and of its
secret cult (p. 84). Of this society, he tells us, we
know nothing ; esoterism and cult secrecy were its
chief interests ; the " silence of the Christians about
it was intentional,"^ and, except for the special revela-
tion vouchsafed the other day to Professor W. B.
1 p. 48. After citing the rather problematic allusion to Plato
(Rep. ii, 361 D) in the apology of ApoUonius (c. 172), the just man
shall be tortured, he shall be spat on, and, last of all, he shall be
crucified. Harnack has said that there is no other reference to this
passage of Plato in old-Christian literature. "Why " asks Mr. Smith.
"Because Christians were not familiar with it? Impossible. The silence
of the Christians was intentional, and the reason is obvious. The
passage was tell-tale. Similarly we are to understand their silence
about the pre-Christian Nazarenes and many other lions that were
safest when asleep." This is in the true vein of a Bacon-Shakespearian
armed with his cypher.
2 See note (1).
THE AET OF CRITICISM 189
Smith, it would have remained for ever unknown, and
Christianity for ever enigmatic.
In accordance with this postulate of esoterism and
cult secrecy among the pre-Christian Nazarenes, who
subsequently revealed themselves to the world as the
Christian Church, though even then they " maintained
for generations the secrecy^ of their Jesus cult," the
Gospels, as I said, are an allegory or a charade. Their
prima facie meaning is never the true one, never more
than symbolic of a moral and spiritual undersense
such as old allegorists like Philo and Origen loved to
discover in the Bible. Thus, as we saw above, when
Jesus is reported to have cast out of the Jews who
thronged around him devils of blindness, deafness,
lameness, leprosy, death, what is really intended is
that he argued pagans out of their polytheism. " It
was spiritual maladies, and only spiritual, that he was
healing " (p. 38). We ask of Mr. Smith, why was so
much mystification necessary ? We are only told that
*' it was in the main a prudential measure, well enough
justified, but intended to be only temporary" (p. 39).
What exact risks they were to shun which the sect kept
itself secret, and only spake in far-fetched allegory,
Mr. Smith does not inform us. Is he, too, afraid of
being regarded as a " tell-tale " (p. 48) ?
As with the exorcisms, so with all else told of Professor
Jesus. None of it really happened. As he never resolves all
lived, so he never died. His human life and death the New
••11 1 1. ' Testament
are an allegory of the spiritual cult and mysteries as sym-
which the pre-Christian Nazarenes and their bohc and
^ allegorical
' Elsewhere Mr. Smith qualifies this position, p. 35 : " Of course,
the cult was not intended to remain, and did not in fact remain,
secret ; it was at length brought into the open." But perhaps Mr.
Smith is here alluding to his own revelation.
190 THE AET OF CEITICISM
descendants, the Christians, so jealously and for so long
guarded in silence. If he never lived, then he never
taught, not even in parables. By consequence the
entire record of his parables, still more of his having
chosen the parable as his medium of instruction in
order to veil his real meaning from his audience, is
all moonshine. Here, as elsewhere, the Gospel text
does not mean what it says, but is itself only a
Nazarene parable conveying, or rather concealing, a
Nazarene secret — what sort of secret no one, save
Professor Smith, the self-appointed revealer of their
mysterious lore, can tell, and he is silent on the point.
On Mr. Smith's premisses, then, we cannot rely on
the Gospels to inform us of anything historical, and,
so far as we can follow him, we must, if we would
discern through them the mind of their Nazarene
authors, take them upside down. We must discern
a pagan medium and homilies against polytheism in
discourses addressed to monotheistic Jews who needed
no warnings against idolatry ; we must also read the
stories of Jesus healing paralytics and demoniacs as
secret and disguised polemics against idolatry.
Yetclaims, But here mark Professor Smith's inconsistency.
suitrhim ^^^^^ ^^ ^^ ^^^'® ^^^^ ^^® Nazarenes, and after them
to treat it the earliest Christians, w^ere a secret society wath a
toricai secret cult'? They must have been so, he argues,
narrative because Jesus taught in parables. " The primitive
esoterism," he tells us, " is admittedly present in
Mark iv, 11, 12, 33, 34." These verses begin thus:
" And he said unto them, unto you is given the
mystery of the kingdom of heaven : but unto them
that are without, all things are done in parables."
Now, Mr. Smith's postulate is that he — i.e., Jesus
of Nazareth — never lived, and so never said anything
THE ART OF CRITICISM 191
to anyone. How, then, can he appeal to what he
said to prove that there was a pre-Christian Jesus
or Joshua sect, itself secret with a cult and ritual which
its members were ever on their guard not to reveal ?
Surely he drops here into two assumptions which he
has discarded ah initio : first, that there is a core of
real history in the Gospels ; and, second, that the
Gospel can mean what it says, and that its Nazarene
author is here not allegorizing, as he usually did.
But even if we allow Mr. Smith to break with his ^^\J,^'°'y
premisses wherever he needs to do so in order to diets itself
substantiate them, do these verses of Mark support
his hj'pothesis of a sect which kept itself, its rites,
and its teaching secret ? I admit that it was pretty
successful -svhen it veiled its anti-idolatrous teaching
under the outward form of demonological anecdotes,
and wrote Jews when it meant Pagans and Poly-
theists. But in Mark iv, 34, we are told that " to
his own disciples Jesus privately expounded all
things" after he had with many parables spoken the
word to such as " were able to hear it." It appears,
then, that for all their love of secrecy, and in spite of
all their precautions against "tell-tale" writing, the
Nazarenes on occasions went out of their way, in
their allegorical romance of their God Joshua, to
inform all who may read it what their parables and
allegories meant ; for in it Jesus sits down and
expounds to the reader over some twenty-four verses
(verses 10- 34) the inner meaning of the parables
which he had just addressed to the multitude. What
on earth were the Nazarenes doing to pubhsh a
Gospel like this, and so let the cat out of the bag ?
Instead of keeping their secret they were proclaiming
it on the housetops. Again, if the Gospels are to
192 THE AKT OF CEITICISM
such an extent merely allegorical, that we must not
assume their authors to have believed that Jesus ever
lived, how can we possibly rely on them for informa-
tion about such an obscure matter as a secret and
esoteric pre-Christian Nazarene sect ? We can only
be sure that the evangelists never under any circum-
stances meant what they said ; yet Mr. Smith, in
defiance of all his postulates, writes, p. 40, as follows :
" On the basis, then, of this passage alone [i.e.,
Mark iv, 10-34] we may confidently affirm the
primitive secrecy of the Jesus cult." Even if the
passage rightly yielded the sense he tries to extort
from it, how can we be sure that that sense is not,
like the rest of the Gospel, an allegory of something
else?
The other passage of the Gospels, Matthew x, 26, 27,
to which, with like inconsistency, Mr. Smith appeals
by way of showing that the Nazarenes of set purpose
hid their light under a bushel, does not bear the
interpretation he puts on it. It runs thus: "Fear
them not therefore : for naught is covered that shall
not be revealed, and hidden that shall not be known.
"What I tell you in the darkness, speak ye on the
housetops ; and what ye hear in the ear, proclaim
upon the housetops."
Absence of The reasonable interpretation of the above is that
about^^"^ Jesus, being in possession, as he thought, of a special
Jesus's understanding, perhaps revelation, of the true nature
^ of the Messianic kingdom, and convinced of its near
approach, instructed his immediate disciples in privacy
concerning it in order that they might carry the
message up and down the land to the children of
Israel. He therefore exhorts them not to be silent
from fear of the Jews, who accused him of being
THE AET OF CEITICISM 193
possessed of a devil, somewhat as his own mother
and brethren accused him of being an exalte and
beside himself. No, they were to cast aside all
apprehensions ; they must go, not to the supercilious
Pharisees or to the comfortable priests who battened
on the people, still less to Gentiles and Samaritans,
who had no part in the promises made to Israel, but
to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and they
must preach as they went, saying. The kingdom
of heaven is at hand. They were to heal the sick,
raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils, and
in general give freely the good tidings which freely
they had received from their Master, and he from
John the Baptist. If they so acted, discarding all
timidity, then no human repression, no human time-
serving, could prevent the spread of the good news.
What was now hidden from the poor and ignorant
among his compatriots would henceforth, thanks to
the courage and devotedness of his emissaries, be
made known to them ; what was now covered, be
revealed.
Such is the context of " this remarkable deliver-
ance," as Mr. Smith terms it ; and nothing in all the
New Testament savours less than it does of a secret
cult of mysterious sectaries, waiting for Mr. Smith to
manifest their arcana to us twenty centuries later.
Here, as everywhere else in the New Testament, he has
discovered a monstrous mare's nest ; has banished
the only possible and obvious interpretation, in order
to substitute a chimera of his own.
Mr. Smith credits his hypothetical pre-Christian it was not
Nazarenes with an ambition and anxiety to purge acai^sT'
away the errors of mankind. The " essence, the paganisM
central idea, and active principle of the cult itself,"
o
194 THE AET OF CRITICISM
he tells us (p. 45), " was a ijrotest against Idolatry^ a
crusade for monotheism.'" " The fact of the primitive
worship of Jesus and the fact of the primitive mission
to all the Gentiles are the two cardinal facts of Proto-
Christianity " (p. xvii). Why on earth, then, in con-
cocting that pronunciamento of their cult which we
call the Gospels, did these Nazarenes represent the
Jesus or Joshua God, even in allegory, as warning
his disciples on no account to disseminate his cult
among Gentiles and Samaritans, but only among
Jews, who were notoriously monotheists and bitterly
hostile to every form of idolatry ? Why carry coals
to Newcastle on so huge a scale?
Why turn ^^idi granted that the Nazarenes, in their anxiety
Jeshua to be parabolical and misunderstood of their readers,
into a man ^^ote Jews when they meant Pagans, was it neces-
sary in the interests of their monotheistic crusade to
nickname their One God Jesus, to represent him as
a man and a carpenter, with brothers and sisters,
and a mother that did not believe in him ; as a man
who was a Jew with the prejudices of a Jew, a man
circumcised and insisting that he came not to destroy
the law of Moses, but to fulfil it ; as a man who was
born like other men of a human father and mother ;
was crucified, dead and buried ; whose disciples and
Galilean companions, when in the first flush of their
grief they heard from Mary Magdalene the strange
story of his first appearing to her after death, still
'Misbelieved "?i
The These Nazarenes were, in their quality of " students
the initial of religion" (p. 65), intent on converting the world
"J"
1 Mark xvi, 9. The circumstance that Mark xvi, 9-20, was added
to the Gospel by another hand in no way diminishes the significance
of the passage here adduced.
THE ART OF CRITICISM 195
from polytheism. Why, then, did they call their
sublime deity by the name of Jesus ? " The word
Jesus itself," writes Mr. Smith,
also made special appeal to the Jewish consciousness,
for it was practically identical with their own Jeshua,
DOW understood by most to mean strictly Jah-help,
but easily confounded with a similar J'shu'ah, mean-
ing Deliverance, Saviour, Witness, Matthew i, 21.
Moreover, the initial letter J, so often representing
Jah in Hebrew words, must have powerfully suggested
Jehovah to the Jewish consciousness.
But what Jew of the first century, however fond of
the tales about Joshua which he read in his scriptures,
was ever minded to substitute his name for that of
Jehovah merely because it began with a J and has
been explained by twentieth-century Hebraists as
meaning Jah-help ? The idea is exquisitely humorous.
While they were about it why did the Nazarenes not
adopt the name Immanuel, which in that allegorical
romance (which from Mr. Smith we know to be the
character of Matthew's Gospel) they fished up out of
the Hebrew prophet Isaiah ? If Jehovah was not
good enough for them, Immanuel was surely better
than the name Jeshua, with its associations of pillage
and murder. But apart from these considerations,
as the name Jeshua is Hebrew, it follows that the
secret sectaries who had this cult must have been of
a Jewish cast. But, if so, what Jew, we ask, ever
heard of a God called Jeshua or Joshua? As I have
already pointed out, the very memory of such a God,
if there ever was one, perished long before the Book
of Joshua could have been written. Like the gods
Daoud and Joseph, with whom writers of this class
seek to conjure our wits out of our heads, a god
Joshua is a mere preposterous superfetation of a
196
THE AKT OF CRITICISM
Supposed
confusion
of Jesus
with
iesomai
disordered imagination. '' There were abundant
reasons," writes Mr. Smith (p. 16),
why the name Jesus should be the Aaron's rod to
swallow up all other designations. Its meaning,
which was felt to be Saviour, was grand, comforting,
uplifting. The notion of the world-Saviour thrust
its roots into the loam of the remotest antiquity.
One regrets to have to criticize such dithyrambic
outpourings of Mr. Smith's heart. But, granted
there was a widespread expectation, such as Suetonius
records, of Messiahs who were to issue from Judaea
and conquer all the world, who ever heard of the
name Joshua being assigned in advance to one of
them ? Who ever in that age felt the name Jesus
to be grand, comforting, uplifting ? Is not Mr.
Smith attributing bis own feelings, as he sat in a
Sunday school, to Jews and Gentiles of the first
century ? I add Gentiles, for he pretends that the
name Jesus appealed to the Greek consciousness also
as a derivative of the Ionic future 'IZ/o-o/iat iesomai — 1
will heal. Now what Christian writer ever made this
rapinochement ? Not a single one. Surely, if we are
minded to argue the man Jesus out of existence, we
ought to have a vera causa to put in his place, a
belief, or, if we like it better, a myth which was really
believed, and is known to have entered deeply into
the lives and consciences of men ? It is true that
the idea of a Messiah did so enter, but not in the
form in which Mr. Smith loves to conceive it. The
Messiah was such a human figure as Suetonius had
heard of ; he was a man who should, as we read in
Acts, restore the kingdom of David. " Lord, dost
Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" is
the question the apostles are said (Acts i, 7) to have
THE AET OF CRITICISM 197
put to Jesus as soon as his apparitions before them
had revived the Messianic hopes which his death had
so woefully dashed. The incident is probably apocry-
phal, yet its presence in the narrative illustrates what
a Messiah was then expected by Christians to achieve.
Judas Maccabaeus, Cyrus, Bar Cochba, Judas of
Galilee — these and other heroes of Israel had the
quality of Messiahs. They were all men, and not
myths. The suggestion, then, that the name Jesus
was one to conjure with is idle and baseless ; and if
his name had been Obadiah or Nathaniel, Professor
Smith would have been equally ready to prove that
these were attractive names, bound to triumph and
" swallow up all other designations." He only pitches
on the name of Jesus for his pre-Christian Saviour-
god because he finds it in the Gospels ; but inasmuch
as he sees in them mere allegorical romances, entirely
unhistorical and having no root in facts, there is no
reason for adopting from them one name more than
another. How does he know that the appellation
Jesus is not as much of a Nazarene fiction as he holds
every other name and person and incident to be which
the Gospels contain ? Is it not more probable that
this highly secretive sect, with their horror of " tell-
tale," would keep secret the name of their Saviour-
god, as the Essenes kept secret the names of their
patron angels ? The truth is, even Mr. Smith cannot
quite divest himself of the idea that there is some
historical basis for the Gospels ; otherwise he would
not have turned to them for the name of his Saviour-
-, Mr. Smith
gOCl. denies all
More consistently, however, than Mr. Robertson, historicity
Professor Smith denies that there are any allusions ^nd^*'^
to the real Jesus in the rest of the New Testament. Epistles
198 THE AET OF CEITICISM
The Acts and Epistles do not, he says (p. 23),
" recognize at all the life of Jesus as a man,'' though
" their general tenour gives great value to the death of
Jesus as a God.'" This is a new reading of the docu-
ments in question, for the Pauline conviction was
that Jesus had been crucified and died as a man, and,
being raised up from death by the Spirit, had been
promoted to be, what he was antenatally, a super-
human or angelic figure^ — a Christ or Messiah, who
was to come again on earth and judge mankind. Of
his mere humanity while on this earth, and as long
as he was associating with human disciples, Paul
entertained no doubts. How could he, inasmuch as
he had stayed with them at Jerusalem '? Mr.
1 In the same manner, as we know from Origen {Com. in Evang.
loannis, tom. xiii, 27), the Samaritans had a Messiah named Dosi-
theos, who rose from the dead, and professed himself to be the Messiah
of prophecy. His sect survived in the third century, as also his books,
which, as Origen says, were full of " myth " about him to the effect
that he had not tasted of death, but was somewhere or other still
alive. By all the rules of criticism as used by Mr. Robertson and his
friends, we must deny that Dositheos ever lived. The idea of a
human hero being an angel or divine power made flesh was common
among Jews, and in their apocryph, " The Prayer of Jacob " (see
Origen, op. cit., tom. ii, 25), that worthy represented himself as such
in the very language of Pa,ul and of the Fourth Gospel : " I who
spoke to you, I, Jacob and Israel, am an angel of God and a primeval
spirit, as Abraham and Isaak were created in advance of all creatures.
But I, Jacob, called Israel by God, a man seeing God, because I
am first-born of all living beings made alive by God." We also learn
that Uriel was sent forth by God to herald Jacob's descent upon earth,
where he " tabernacled among men." Jacob declares himself to be
" archangel of the power of God, and arch-captain among the sons of
God, Israel the foremost minister of the Presence." Paul, we observe,
did not need to go outside Judaism for his conceptions of Jesus, nor
Justin Martyr either, who regularly speaks of Jesus as an archangel.
So also among the pagans. In Augustus Cassar his contemporaries
loved to detect one of the great gods of Olympus just descended to earth
in the semblance of a man. He was the god Mercury or some other
god incarnate. His birth was a god's descent to earth in order to
expiate the sins of the Romans. Thus Horace, Odes, I, 2, v. 29 : Cut
dabit partes scelus expiandi Juppiter, and cp. v. 45 : Serus in coelum
redeas — " Mayest thou be late in returning to heaven. "
THE AET OF CEITICISM 199
Robertson, as we saw, although he dissipates Jesus
in the Gospels into a Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, never-
theless is so impressed by the Pauline *' references
to a crucified Jesus" (p. 364) that he resuscitates
Jesus Ben Pandira out of the limbo of the Talmud.
Perhaps he strains at a gnat after swallowing a camel.
Anyhow, I will leave Mr. Smith to settle accounts with
him, and turn to a fresh point, which has not occurred
to either of them.
It is this. Adonis and Osiris were never regarded by of^chrif.
their votaries as having been human beings that had tian belief
recently lived and died on the face of this earth. The ^^^jt'Jf ^uU
Christians, in strong contrast with them and with all of Adonis
other pagans ever heard of, did so regard Jesus from
first to last. Why so, when they knew that from the
first he was a God and up in heaven ? Why has the
fact of his unreality, as these writers argue it, left no
trace of itself in Christian tradition and literature ?
According to this new school of critics, the Nazarenes,
when they wrote down the Gospels, knew perfectly
well that Jesus was a figment, and had never lived at
all. And yet we never get a hint that he was only
a myth, and that the New Testament is a gigantic
fumisterie. Why so ? Why from the very first did
the followers of Jesus entertain what Mr. Smith
denounces as " an a priori concept of the Jesus "
(p. 35) ? Why, in other words, were they convinced
from the beginning that he was a man of flesh and blood,
who had lived on earth among them? The "early
secrecy," the " esoterism of the primitive cult " (p. 39),
says Mr. Smith, " was intended to be only temporary."
If so, why could not the Nazarenes, primarily
interested as they were, not in lies and bogus, but in
disseminating their lofty monotheism, have thrown
200 THE ART OF CRITICISM
off the disguise some time or other, and explained
to their spiritual children that the intensely concrete
life of Jesus which they had published in our Gospel
of Mark meant nothing ; that it was all an allegory,
and no more, of a Saviour-god, who had never existed
as a human being, nor even as the docetic phantasma-
goria of the Gnostic? " Something sealed the lips of
that (Nazarene) evangelist," and the Nazarenes have
kept their secret so well through the ages that it has
been reserved for Mr. Smith first to pierce the veil and
unlock their mystery. He it is who has at last dis-
covered that " in proto-Mark we behold the manifest
God" (p. 24).
Now what possessed the Nazarenes so firmly to
impose on the world through the Gospels an erroneous
view of their God, that for 2,000 years not only their
spiritual offspring, the Christians, but Jews and
pagans as well, have believed him to have lived on
earth, a man of flesh and blood and of like passions
with themselves ? Was the deception necessary ? The
votaries of Osiris and Adonis were never so tricked.
The adherents of the Augustalian cult, the pious
Greeks and Syrians who thronged to be healed of
their diseases at the shrines of Apollonius, believed,
of course, that their patron saints and gods had lived,
prior to their apotheosis, upon earth; and so they
had. But a follower of Osiris or ^sculapius would
have opened his eyes wide with astonishment if you
asked him to believe that his Saviour had died only
the other day in Judaea. Not so a Christian ; for the
Nazarene monotheists had so thoroughly fooled him
with their Gospels that he was ready to supply you
with dates and pedigrees and all sorts of other details
about his Saviour's personal history. And yet all the
THE ART OF CRITICISM 201
time, had he only known it, his religion laboured
under the same initial disadvantage as the cult of
Osiris or ^sculapius — that, namely, of its founder
never having lived at all. What, then, did " such
students of religion, as the first Christians were"
{Ecce DeitSf p. 65), imagine was to be gained by hood-
winking their descendants for the long centuries
which have intervened between them and the advent
of Professor W. B. Smith ?
Chapter VII
Baby-
lonian
influence
on Greek
religion
slight ;
on Hebrew
religion
more im-
portant ;
DR. JENSEN
The three writers whose views I have so far considered
agree in denying that Jesus was a real historical per-
sonage ; but their agreement extends no further, for
the Jesus legend is the precipitate, according to
Professor W. B. Smith, of a monotheistic jDropaganda ;
according to Mr. Robertson, of a movement mainly
idolatrous, polytheistic, and pagan. There exists in
Germany, however, a third school of denial, which
sees in the Jesus story a duplicate of the ancient
Babylonian Gilgamesch legend. The more extreme
writers of this school have endeavoured to show that
not only the Hebrews, but the Greeks as well, derived
their religious myths and rites from ancient Babylon ;
and their general hypothesis has on that account been
nicknamed Pan- Bahylonismus. This is not the place
to criticize the use made of old Babylonian mythology
in explanation of old Greek religion, though I do well
to point out that the best students of the latter — for
example, Dr. Farnell — confine the indebtedness of the
Greeks to very narrow limits.
The case of the Hebrew scriptures and religion
stands on different ground ; for the Jews were
Semites, and their myths of creation and of the
origin and early history of man are, by the admission
even of orthodox divines of to-day, largely borrowed
from the more ancient civilization of Babylon. Thus
202
DR. JENSEN 203
Heinrich Zimmern (art. " Deluge," in Encyclopcedia
Bihlica) writes: "Of all the parallel traditions of a
deluge, the Babylonian is undeniably the most
important, because the points of contact between it
and the Hebrew story are so striking that the view of
the dependence of one of the two on the other is
directly suggested even to the most cautious of
students."
This undoubted occurrence of Babylonian myths in yet a Jew
the Book of Genesis has provided some less critical possessed
and cautious cuneiform scholars with a clue, as they ?ome
imagine, to the entire contents of the Bible from tion'^of his
beginning to end. It is as if the Jews, all through ^^^"
their literary history of a thousand years, could not
possibly have invented any myths of their own, still
less have picked a few up elsewhere than in Babylon.
Accordingly, in a volume of 1,030 enormous pages,
P. Jensen has undertaken to show^ that the New
Testament, no less than the Old, was derived from
this single well-spring. Moses and Aaron, Joshua,
Jeroboam, Rehoboam, Hadad, Jacob and Esau, Saul,
David and Jonathan, Joseph and his brethren,
Potiphar, Rachel and Leah, Laban, Zipporah, Miriam
sister of Moses, Dinah, Simeon and Levi, Jethro and
the Gibeonites and Sichemites, Sarah and Hagar,
Abraham and Isaac, Samson, Uriah and Nathan, mesch,
Naboth, Elijah and Elisha, Naaman, Benhadad and Eabuni,
Hazael, Gideon, Jerubbaal, Abimelech, Jephthah, holy
Tobit, Jehu, and pretty well any other personage in h'^'^Jo*'
the Old Testament, are duplicates, according to him, ists of
of Gilgamesch or his companion the shepherd Eabani ^e entire
(son of Ea), or of the Hierodule or sacred prostitute, Testament
^ Bas Gilgamesch Epos in der Weltliteratur, 1906.
204 DE. JENSEN
and of a few more leading figures in the Babylonian
epic. There is hardly a story in the whole of Jewish
literature which is not, according to Jensen, an echo
of the Gilgamesch legend ; and every personage, every
incident, is freely manipulated to make them fit this
Procrustean bed. No combinations of elements separ-
ated in the Biblical texts, no separations of elements
united therein, no recasting of the fabric of a narrative,
no modifications of any kind, are so violent as to deter
Dr. Jensen. At the top of every page is an abstract
of its argument, usually of this type: ^^ Der Hirte
Eahani, die Hierodule und Gilgamesch, Der Hirte
Moses, sein Weih und, Aai'on." In other words, as
Moses was one shepherd and Eahani another, Moses
is no other than Eabani. As there is a sacred
prostitute in the Gilgamesch story, and a wife in the
legend of Moses, therefore wife and prostitute are
one and the same. As Gilgamesch was companion of
Eabani, and Aaron of Moses, therefore Aaron was an
alias of Gilgamesch. Dr. Jensen is quite content with
points of contact between the stories so few and slight
as the above, and pursues this sort of loose argument
over a thousand pages. Here is another such rubric :
" Simson-Gilgamesch's Leiche und Saul-Gilgamesch's
Gebeine wieder ausgegraben, Elisa-Gilgamesch's Grab
geoffnet." In other words, Simson, or Samson, left a
corpse behind him (who does not ?) ; Saul's bones
were piously looked after by the Jabeshites ; Elisha's
bones raised a dead Moabite by mere contact to fresh
life. These three figures are, therefore, ultimatel}^
one, and that one is Gilgamesch ; and their three
stories, which have no discernible features in common,
are so many disguises of the Gilgamesch epos.
But Dr. Jensen transcends himself in the New
DR. JENSEN 205
Testament. ''The Jesus-saga," he informs us (p. 933), ^^ also of
"as it meets us in the Synoptic Gospels, and equally New
as it meets us in John's Gospel, stands out among all Testament
the other Gilgamesch Sagas which we have so far
{i.e., in the Old Testament) expounded, in that it not
merel}^ follows up the main body of the Saga with
sundry fragments of it, like so many stragglers, but
sets before us a long series of bits of it arranged in
the original order almost undisturbed."^
And he waxes eloquent about the delusions and
ignorance of Christians, who for 2,000 years have
been erecting churches and cathedrals in honour of
a Jesus of Nazareth, who all the time was a mere alias
of Gilgamesch.
T 1
Let us, then, test some of the arguments by which ]^g^^~^
this remarkable conclusion is reached. Let us begin
with John the Baptist (p. 811). John was a prophet,
who appeared east of the Jordan. So was Elias or
Elijah. Elijah was a hairy man, and John wore
a raiment of camel's-hair ; both of them wore leather
girdles.
Now, in the Gilgamesch story, Eabani is covered
with hair all over his body (p. 579 — " am ganzen
Leibe mit Haaren bedeckt ist"). Eabani (p. 818) is
a hairy man, and presumably was clad in skins (" ist
ein haariger Mann und vermutlich mit Fellen be-
kleidet"). Dr. Jensen concludes from this that John
and Elijah are both of them, equally and inde-
pendently, duplicates or understudies of Eabani. It
^ p. 933 : " Die Jesus-sage nach den Synoptikern — wie auch die
nach Johannes — unterscheidet sich nun abervon alien anderen bisher
erorterten Gilgamesch-sapen dadurch, dass sie hinter dem Gros der
Sage nicht nur einzelne Bruchstiicke von ihr als Nachziigler bringt,
sondern eine lai^ge Rcihe von Stiickeii der Saje in fast inigextijrter
urspriinglicher Reihenfolge," etc.
206 DE. JENSEN
never occurs to him that in the desert camel's-hair
was a handy material out of which to make a coat,
as also leather to make girdles of, and that desert
prophets in any story whatever would inevitably be
represented as clad in such a manner. He has,
indeed, heard of Jo. Weiss's suggestion that Luke
had read the LXX, and modelled his picture of John
the Baptist on Elijah ; but he rejects the suggestion, for
he feels — and rightly — that to make any such admis-
sions must compromise his main theory, which is that
the old Babylonian epic was the only source of the
evangelists. No (he writes), John's girdle, like Elijah's,
came straight out of the Saga (" wohl durch die Sage
bedingt ist"). Nor (he adds) can Luke's story of
Sarah and Zechariah be modelled on Old Testament
examples, as critics have argued. On the contrary, it
is a fresh reflex of Gilgamesch (" ein neuer Reflex "),
an independent sidelight cast by the central Baby-
lonian orb ("ein neues Seitenstiick "), and is copied
direct. We must not give in to the suggestion thrown
out by modern critics that it is a later addition to the
original evangelical tradition. Far from that being
so, it must be regarded as an integral and original
constituent in the Jesus-saga (" So wird man zuges-
tehen miissen, dass sie keine Zugabe, sondern ein
integrierender Urbestandteil der Jesus-sage ist").
Jesus— From this and many similar passages we realize
m'esdi ^^^^ ^^^ view that Jesus never lived, but was a mere
reflex of Gilgamesch, is not, in Jensen's mind, a con-
clusion to be proved, but a dogma assumed as the
basis of all argument, a dogma to which we must
adjust all our methods of inquiry. To admit any
other sources of the Gospel story, let alone historical
facts, would be to infringe the exclusive apriority, as
DK. JENSEN 207
a source, of the Babylonian epic ; and that is why we
are not allowed to argue up to the latter, but only
down from it. If for a moment he is ready to admit
that Old Testament narrative coloured Luke's birth-
story, and that (for example) the angel's visit in the
first chapter of Luke was suggested by the thirteenth
chapter of Judges, he speedily takes back the admis-
sion. Such an assumption is not necessary (" allein
notig ist ein solche Annahme nicht ").
" So much," he writes (p. 818),
of John's person alone. Let us now pursue the Jesus
Saga further.
In the Gilgamesch Epic it is related how the
Hunter marched out to Eabani with the holy prosti-
tute, how Eabani enjoyed her, and afterwards pro-
ceeded with her to Erech, where, directly or in his
honour, a festival was held ; how he there attached
himself to Gilgamesch, and how kingly honours were
by the latter awarded to him. We must by now in a
general way assume on the part of our readers a know-
ledge of how these events meet us over again in the
Sagas of the Old Testament. In the numerous
Gilgamesch Sagas, then [of the Old Testament], we
found again this rencounter with the holy prostitute.
And yet we seek it in vain in the three first Gospels
in the exact context where we should find it on the
supposition that they must embody a Gilgamesch
Saga — that is to say, immediately subsequent to
John's emergence in the desert. Equally little do
we find in this context any reflex of Eabani's entry
into the city of Erech, all agog at the moment with
a festival. On the other hand, we definitely find in
its original position an echo of Gilgamesch's meeting
with Eabani. 1
1 P. 818. So weit von Johannis Person allein. Verfolgen wir
nun die Jesus-Sage weiter.
Im GUnamcsch Epos wild erziihlt, wie zu Eabjmi in der Wiiste der
Jager m it der Hierodule hinauszieht, wie Eabani ihrer habe geniesst,
und dann mit ihr nach Erech kommt, wo grade oder ihm zu Ehre ein
208 DE. JENSEN
Evangel- j^q^ ^g p^^ge a moment and take stock of the
borrowed above. In the epic two heroes meet each other in a
from Gn^ ^®^^^'^- John and Jesus also meet in a desert ; there-
gamesch fore, SO argues Jensen, John and Jesus are reproduc-
epos alone ^j^j^g ^^ ^^iq heroes in question, and neither of them
ever lived. It matters nothing that neither John
nor Jesus was a Nimrod. This encounter of Gilga-
mesch and Eabani was, as Jensen reminds us, the
model of every Old Testament story in which two
males happen to meet in a desert ; therefore it must
have been the model of the evangelists also when
they concocted their story of John and Jesus meeting
in the wilderness. But how about the prostitute ;
and how about the entry into Erech ? How are
these lacunae of the Gospel story to be filled in ?
Jensen's solution is remarkable; he finds the encounter
with the prostitute to have been the model on which
the fourth evangelist contrived his story of Jesus's
visit to Martha and Mary. For that evangelist, like
the synoptical ones, had the Gilgamesch Saga stored
all ready in his escritoire, and finding that his prede-
cessors had omitted the prostitute he hastened to fill
up the lacuna, and doubled her into Martha and Mary.
In this and man}^ other respects, so we are assured
by Jensen, the fourth evangelist reproduces the
Fest gefeiert wird, wie er sich dort an Gilgamesch ansehliesst und ihn
durch Diesen konigliche Ehren zuteil werden. Welche Metaraor-
phosen diese Geschehnisse in den Sagen des alten Testaments erlebt
haben, darf jetzt in der Hauptsache als bekannt vorausgesetzt
werden. In zahlreichen GilgameschSAgen fanden wir nun die
Begegnung mit der Hierodule wiedei', Aber vergeblich suchen wir
sie dort in den drei ersten Evangelien, wo ihr Platz ware, falls diese
etwa eine GiUiameschS&ge enthalten soUten, niimlich unmittelbar
hinter Johannis Auftreten in der Wiiste. Ebenso wenig finden wir
an dieser Stelle etwa einen Eellex von Eabani's Einzug in das
festlieh erregte Erech. Wohl dagegen treffen wir an ursprtinglicher
Stelle eiu Wiederhall von Gilgamesch's Begegnung mit Eabani.
DR. JENSEN 209
Gilgamesch epic more fully and systematically than
the other evangelists, and on that account we must
assign to John's setting of the life of Christ a certain
preference and priority. He is truer to the only
source there was for any of it. The other lacuna of
the Synoptic Gospels is the feasting in Erech and
Eabani's entry amid general feasting into that city.
The corresponding episode in the Gospels, we are
assured, is the triumphant entry of Jesus into
Jerusalem, which the Fourth Gospel, again hitting
the right nail on the head, sets at the beginning of
Jesus's ministry, and not at its end. But what, we
still ask, is the Gospel counterpart to the honours
heaped by Gilgamesch on Eabani ? How dull we
are ! *' The baptism of Jesus by John must, apart
from other considerations, have arisen out of the
fact that Eabani, after his arrival at Gilgamesch's
palace, is by him allotted kingly honours."^
So then Eabani, who as a hairy man was John the
Baptist, is now, by a turn of Jensen's kaleidoscope,
metamorphosed into Jesus, for it is John who did
Jesus the honour of baptizing him. Conversely,
Gilgamesch, who began as Jesus, is now suddenly
turned into John. In fact, Jesus- Gilgamesch and
John-Eabani have suddenly changed places with one-
another, in accordance, I suppose, with the rule of
interpretation, somewhere laid down by HugO'
Winckler, that in astral myths one hero is apt to»
swop with another, not only his stage properties, but
his personality. But fresh surprises are in store for
Jensen's readers.
1 p. 820. Jesu Taufe durch Johannes wiire sonst auch daraus
geworden, dass Eabani, nach dem er an Gilgamesch's Hof gelangt
ist, durch Diesen Koniglicher Ehren teilhaft wird.
P
210 DR. JENSEN
Over scores of pages he has argued that John the
Baptist is no other than Eabani, because he so faith-
fully fulfils over again the role of the Eabanis we
meet with in the Old Testament. For example,
according to Luke (i, 15, and vii, 33) John drinks no
wine, and is, therefore, a Nazirean, who eschews
wine and forbears to cut his hair. Therein he
resembles Joseph-Eabani, and Simson-Eabani, and
Samuel-Eabani, and also Absolom, who, as an Eabani,
had at least an upper growth of hair. And as the
Eabani of the Epic, with the long head-hair of a
woman, drinks water along with the wild beasts in the
desert, and as Eabani, in company with these beasts,
feeds on grass and herbs alone, so, at any rate
according to Luke, John ate no bread. ^
Imagine the reader's consternation when, after
these convincing demonstrations of John's identity
with Eabani, and of his consequent non-historicity, he
finds him a hundred pages later on altogether elimi-
nated, as from the Gilgamesch Epic, so from the Gospel.
For the difficulty suddenly arises before Dr. Jensen's
mind that John the Baptist, being mentioned by
Josephus, must after all have really lived ; but if he
lived, then he cannot have been a mere reflex of
Eabani. Had he only consulted Dr. Drews's work on
the Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus (English trans-
lation, p. 190), he would have known that " the John
^ Nach Lukas (i, 15 and vii, 33) tvinkt Johannes keinen Wein, ist
also ein Nasiraer. der keinen Wein trinkt und dessen Haar nicht
kekiirzt wird, ebenso wie Joseph-£a7;aJU, wie Simson als ein Eabani,
wie Samuel- A'a?>a?a, wie Absolom als^a^auiwenigstens einen iippigen
ifaa7*wuchs besitzt, und wie der Eabani des Epos, mit dem langen
Haupthaar eines Weibes, in der VViiste mit den Tieren zusammen
Wasser trinkt, und wie Eabani mit diesen Tieren zusammen nur Gras
und Krauter frisst, so isst Johannes, naeh Lukas wenigstens, kein
Brot.
DR. JENSEN 211
of the Gospels "is no other than " the Babylonian
Cannes, Joannes, or Hanni, the curiously-shaped
creature, half fish and half man, who, according to
Berosus, was the first law-giver and inventor of letters
and founder of civilization, and who rose every morn-
ing from the waves of the Red Sea in order to instruct
men as to his real spiritual nature."
Why could not Dr. Jensen consult Dr. Drews " as
to the real spiritual nature " of John the Baptist ? Why
not consult Mr. Robertson, who overwhelms Josephus's
inconvenient testimony to the reality of John the
Baptist (in 18 Antiq., v, § 2) with the customary
*' suspicion of interpolation." Poor Dr. Jensen lacks
their resourcefulness, and is able to discover no other
way out of his impasse than to suppose that it was
originally Lazarus and not John that had a place in
his Gilgamesch Epic, and that some ill-natured editor
of the Gospels, for reasons he alone can divine, every-
where struck out the name of Lazarus, and inserted
in place of it that of John the Baptist, which he
found in the works of Josephus. Such are the
possibilities of Gospel redaction as Jensen under-
stands them.
One more example of Dr. Jensen's system. In the
Gospel, Jesus, finding himself on one occasion sur-
rounded by a larger throng of people than was desir-
able, took a boat in order to get away from them, and
passed across the lake on the shore of which he had
been preaching and ministering to the sick. The
incident is a commonplace one enough, but nothing
is too slight and unimportant for Dr. Jensen to detect
in it a Gilgamesch parallel, and accordingly he writes
thus of it : "As for Xisuthros, so for Jesus, a boat is
lying ready, and like Xisuthros and Jonas, Jesus
212 DE. JENSEN
'flees' in a boat."^ Xisuthros, I may remind the
reader, is the name of the flood-hero in Berosus.
Hardly a single one of the parallels which crowd the
thousand pages of Dr. Jensen is less flimsy than the
above. Without doing more violence to texts and to
probabilities, one could prove that Achilles and
Patroclus and Helen, ^Eneas and Achates and Dido,
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and Dulcinea, were
all of them so many understudies of Gilgamesch,
Eabani and his temple slave ; and we almost expect
to find such a demonstration in his promised second
volume.
I cannot but think that my readers will resent any
further specimens of Dr. Jensen's system. He has
not troubled himself to acquire the merest a b c ol
modern textual criticism. He has no sense of the
differences of idea and style which divide the Fourth
from the earlier Gospels, and he lacks all insight into
the development of the Gospel tradition. He takes
Christian documents out of their historical context,
and ignores their dependence on the Judaism of the
period b.c. 100 to a.d. 100. He has no understanding
of the prophetic, Messianic and Apocalyptic aspects of
early Christianity, no sense of its intimate relations
with the beliefs and opinions which lie before us in
apocryphs like the Book of Enoch, the Fourth Esdras,
the Ascent of Isaiah, the Testaments of the Patriarchs.
He has never learned that in the four Gospels he has
before him successive stages or layers of stratification
of Christian tradition, and he accordingly treats them
as a single literary block, of which every part is of
1 p. 838 : Wie fiir Xisuthros, liegt fiir Jesus ein Schiff bereil, und,
wie Xisuthros und Jonas, " flieht " Jesus in ein Schiff.
DE. JENSEN 213
the same age and evidential value. Like his Gilga-
mesch Epic the Gospels, for all he knows about them,
might have been dug up only yesterday among the
sands of Mesopotamia, instead of being the work of
a sect with which, as early as the end of the first
century, we are fairly well acquainted. Never once
does he ask himself how the authors of the New
Testament came to have the Gilgamesch Epic at the
tips of their tongues, exactly in the form in which he
translates it from Babylonian tablets incised 2,000
years before Christ ? B}^ what channels did it reach
them ? Why were they at such pains to transform it
into the story of a Galilean Messiah crucified by the
Roman Governor of Judaea ? And as Paul and Peter,
like everyone else named in the book, are duplicates
of Gilgamesch and Eabani, where are we to draw the
line of intersection between heaven and earth ; where
fix the year in which the early Christians ceased to be
myths and became mere men and women ? This is
a point it equally behoves Dr. Drews and Mr.
Robertson and Professor W. B. Smith to clear up our
doubts about.
EPILOGUE
Of the books passed in review in the preceding pages,
as of several others couched in the same vein and
recently published in England and Germany, perhaps
the best that can be said is this, that, at any rate, they
are untrammelled by orthodox prejudice, and fear-
lessly written. That they belong, so to speak, to the
extreme left, explains the favour with which they are
received by that section of the middle-class reading
public which has conceived a desire to learn some-
thing of the origins of Christianity. Unschooled in
the criticism of documents, such readers have learned
in the school Bible-lesson and in the long hours of
instruction in what is called Divinity, to regard the
Bible as they regard no other collection of ancient
writings. It is, as a rule, the only ancient book they
ever opened. They have discovered that orthodoxy
depends for its life on treating it as a book apart,
not to be submitted to ordinary tests, not to be sifted
and examined, as we have learned from Hume and
Niebuhr, Gibbon and Grote, to sift ancient documents
in general, rejecting ab initio the supernatural myths
that are never absent from them. The acuter minds
among the clergy themselves begin nowadays to
realize that the battle of Freethought and Rationalism
is won as far as the miracles of the Old Testament
are concerned ; but as regards those of the New they
are for ever trying to close up their ranks and rally
214
EPILOGUE 215
their hosts afresh. Nevertheless, the man in the
street has a shrewd suspicion that apologetics are
so much special pleading, and that miracles cannot be
eliminated from the Old and yet remain in the New
Testament. He has never received any training in
methods of historical research himself, and it is no
easy thing to obtain ; but he is clever enough to
detect the evasions of apologists, and, with instinctive
revulsion, turns away to writers who " go the whole
hog" and argue for the most extreme positions, even
to the length of asserting that the story of Jesus is
a myth from beginning to end. Any narratives, he
thinks, that have the germs of truth in them would
not need the ai:)ologetic prefaces and commentaries,
the humming and hawing, the specious arguments
and wire-drawn distinctions of divines, any more than
do Froissart or Clarendon or Herodotus. If the New
Testament needs them, then it must be a mass of
fable from end to end. Such is the impression
which our modern apologists leave on the mind of
the ordinary man.
I can imagine some of my readers objecting here
that, whereas I have so rudely assailed the method
of interpretation of New Testament documents adopted
by the Nihilistic school — I only use this name as a
convenient label for those who deny the historical
reality of Jesus Christ — I nevertheless propound no
rival method of my own. The truth is there is no
abstract method of using documents relating to the
past, and you cannot in advance lay down rules for
doing so. You can only learn how to deal with them
by practice, and it is one of the chief functions of
any university or place of higher education to imbue
students with historical method by setting before
216 EPILOGUE
them the original documents, and inspiring them to
extract from them whatever solid results they can.
A hundred years ago the better men in the college
of Christchurch at Oxford were so trained by the
dean, Cyril Jackson, who would set them the task of
" preparing for examination the whole of Livy and
Polybius, thoroughly read and studied in all their
comparative bearings." ^ No better curriculum, indeed,
could be devised for strengthening and developing
the faculty of historical judgment ; and the schools
of Literae Humaniores and Modern History^ which
were subsequently established at Oxford, carried on
the tradition of this enlightened educationalist. In
them the student is brought face to face in the
original dialects with the records of the past, and
stimulated to "read and study them in their com-
parative bearings." One single branch of learning,
however, has been treated apart in the universities
of Oxford and Cambridge, and pursued along the
lines of tradition and authority — I mean the study
of Christian antiquities. The result has been deplor-
able. Intellectually-minded Englishmen have turned
away from this field of history as from something
tainted, and barely one of our great historians in a
century deems it worthy of his notice. It has been
left to parsons, to men who have never learned to
swim, because they have never had enough courage
to venture into deep water. As we sow, so we reap.
The English Church is probably the most enlightened
of the many sects that make up Christendom. Yet
1 I cite an unfinished memoir of my grandfather, W. D. Conybeare,
himself a pioneer of geology and no mean palaeontologist, who owed
much of his discernment in these fields to such a training in historical
method as he describes.
EPILOGUE 217
what is the treatment which it accords to any member
of itself who has the courage to dissociate himself
from the " orthodoxy " of the fourth century, of those
Greek Fathers (so-called) in whom the human intelli-
gence sank to the nadir of fanaticism and futility?
An example was recently seen in the case of the
Rev. Mr. W. H. Thompson, a 3'oung theological
tutor of Magdalen College in Oxford, who, animated by
nothing but loyalty for the Church, recently liberated
his soul about the miracles of the Gospels in a
thoroughly scholarly book entitled Miracles in the
New Testament. The attitude of the clergy in general
towards a work of genuine research, which sets truth
above traditional orthodoxy, was revealed in a con-
ference of the clergy of the southern province, held
soon after its publication on May 19, 1911. The
following account of that meeting is taken from the
Guardian of May 26, 1911 : —
The Rev. R. F. Bevan, in the Canterbury Diocesan
Conference on May 19, 1911, proposed "that this
Conference is of opinion that the clergy should make
use of the light thrown on the Bible by modern
criticism for the purposes of religious teaching." The
Bishop of Crojdon moved the following rider : *' But
desires to record its distrust of critics who, while
holding office in the Church of Christ, propound
views inconsistent with the doctrines laid down in
the creeds of the Church."
He said it was needful to define what was meant
by modern criticism. He referred to a book which
had been published quite lately by the Dean of
Divinity of Magdalen College, Oxford, a review of
which would be found in the Guardian of May 12.
He must honestly confess he had not read the book
for himself He then premised from the review
that the work in question rejects the evidence both
for the Virgin Birth of Christ and for his bodily
218 EPILOGUE
Kesurrection from the tomb , and added that
the toleration by Churchmen of such doctrines and
such views being taught within the bosom of the
Church was to him most sad and inexplicable. If such
was the instruction which young Divinity students
were receiving at the universities, no wonder that the
supply of candidates for ordination was falling off.
The Rev. J. 0. Bevan said it was not in the power
of any man or any body of men to ignore the Higher
Criticism or to suppress it. It had " come to stay,"
and its influence for good or evil must be recognized.
The President (Archbishop of Canterbury) said that
" Bible teaching ought to be given with a background
of knowledge on the part of the teacher. He should
deprecate as strongly as anybody that men who felt
that they could not honestly continue to hold the
Christian creeds should hold office in the Church of
England. But he saw no connection between the
sort of teaching which the Conference had now been
considering and the giving up of the Christian creed.
The Old Testament was a literature which had come
down to them from ancient days. Modern investiga-
tion enabled them now to set the earlier stages of that
literature in somewhat different surroundings from
those in which they were set by their fathers and
grandfathers." With regard to the book which had
been referred to, the Archbishop said that, if the rider
proposed was intended to imply a censure upon a
particular writer, nothing would induce him to vote
for it, inasmuch as he had not read the book, and
knew nothing, at first hand, about it. He thought
members ought to pause before they lightly gave
votes which could be so interpreted.
The motion, on being put to the meeting, was
carried with one dissentient. The rider was also
carried by a majority.
It amounts, then, to this, that a rule of limited
liability is to be observed in the investigation of
early Christianity. You may be critical, but not up
to the point of calling in question the Virgin Birth
EPILOGUE 219
or physical resurrection of Christ. The Bishop of
Croydon opines that the free discussion of such
questions in University circles intimidates young
men from taking orders. If he lived in Oxford, he
would know that it is the other way about. ^ If
Mr. Thompson had been allowed to say what he
thought, unmolested ; if the Bishops of Winchester
and of Oxford had not at once taken steps to silence
and drive him out of the Church, students would
have been better encouraged to enter the Anglican
ministry, and the more intellectual of our young
men would not avoid it as a profession hard to
reconcile with truth and honesty and self-respect.
In the next number of the same journal (June 2,
1911) is recorded another example of how little our
bishops are inclined to face a plain issue. It is
contained in a paragraph headed thus : —
SYMBOLISM OF THE ASCENSION.
The Bishop of Bikmingham on the Second Coming.
Preaching to a large congregation in Birmingham
Cathedral the Bishop of Birmingham said that
people had found difficulty in modern times about the
Ascension, because, they said, " God's heaven is no
more above our heads than under our feet." That
was perfectly true. But there were certain ways of
^ Within the last two months the theological faculties of Oxford
and Cambridge, and the examining chaplains (of various bishops)
resident in those universities, have addressed a petition to the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury praying him to absolve candidates for Ordina-
tion of the necessity of avowing that "they believe unfeignedly in the
whole of the Old and New U'estaments," because so many competent
and well-qualified students are thereby deterred from taking holy
orders. The Archbishop would, it seems, make the individual clergy-
man's conscience the sole judge (to the exclusion of the Bishop of
Croydon) of the propriety of his retaining his orders in spite of his
rejection of this and that tradition or dogma. That is at least a sign
that opinion is on the move.
220 EPILOGUE
expressing moral ideas rooted in human thought, and
we did not the less speak continually of the above and
the below as expressing what was morally high and
morally low, and we should go on doing so to the end.
The ascension of Jesus Christ and his concealment in
the clouds was a symbolical act, like all the acts after
his Resurrection ; it was to impress their minds with
the truth of his mounting to the glory of God.
Symbols were the best means of expressing the truth
about things which lay outside their experience ; and
the Ascension symbolized Christ's mounting to the
supreme state of power and glory, to the perfect yision
of God, to the throne of all the world The Kingdom
was coming — had to come at last — " on earth as it is
in heaven "; and one day, just as his disciples saw him
passing away out of their experience and sight, would
they see him coming back into their experience and
their sight, and into his perfected Kingdom of
Humanity.
Now, I am sure that what people in modern times
chiefly want to know about the Ascension is whether
it really happened. Did Jesus in his physical body
go up like a balloon before the eyes of the faithful,
and disappear behind a cloud, or did he not? That
is the plain issue, and Dr. Gore seems to avoid it. If
he believes in such a miracle, why expatiate on the
symbolism of all the acts of Jesus subsequent to his
resurrection ? Such a miracle was surely sufficient
unto itself, and never needed our attention to be
drawn to its symbolical aspects and import. Does
he mean that the legend is no more than " a certain
way of expressing moral ideas rooted in human
thought " ? May we welcome his insistence on its
moral symbolism as a prelude to his abandonment
of the literal truth of the tale ? I hope so, for in not
a few apologetic books published by divines during
the last twenty-five years I have encountered a
EPILOGUE 221
tendency to expatiate on the moral significance of
extinct Biblical legends. It is, as the Rev. Mr. Figgis
expresses it, a way of " letting down the laity into the
new positions of the Higher Criticism." Would it not
be simpler, in the end, to tell people frankly that
a legend is only a legend ? They are not children in
arms. Why is it accounted so terrible for a clergy-
man or minister of religion to express openly in the
pulpit opinions he can hear in many academical
lecture-rooms, and often entertains in the privacy of
his study ? When the Archbishop of Canterbury
tells his brother-doctors that " modern investigation
enables them now to set the earlier stages of Old
Testament literature in somewhat different surround-
ings from those in which they were set by their
fathers and grandfathers," he means that modern
scholarship has emptied the Old Testament of its
miraculous and supernatural legends. But the
Anglican clergyman at ordination declares that he
believes unfeignedly the whole of the Old and New
Testaments. How can an Archbishop not dispense
his clergy from belief in the New, when he is so ready
to leave it to their individual consciences whether they
will or will not believe in the Old ? The entire posi-
tion is hollow and illogical, and most of the bishops
know it ; but, instead of frankly recognizing facts, they
descant upon the symbolical meaning of tales which
they know they must openly abandon to-morrow.
One is inclined to ask Dr. Gore why Christ could not
have imparted in words to his followers the secret of
his mounting to the supreme state of power and
glory ? Did they at the time, or afterwards, set any
such interpretation on the story of his rising up from
the ground like an airship or an exhalation ? Of
222 EPILOGUE
course they did not. They thought the earth was
a fixed, flat surface, and that, if you ascended through
the several lower heavens, you would find yourself
before a great white throne, on which sat, in Oriental
state, among his winged cherubim, the Most High.
They thought that Jesus consummated the hackneyed
miracle of his ascension by sitting down on the right
hand of this Heavenly Potentate. If Dr. Gore doubts
this, let him consult the voluminous works of the
early Fathers on the subject. The entire legend
coheres with ancient, and not with modern, cosmo-
gony. How can it possibly be defended to-day on
grounds of symbolism, or on any other? The same
criticism applies to the legend of the Virgin Birth.
The Bishop of London is reduced to defending this
thrum of ancient paganism by an appeal to the
biological fact of parthenogenesis among insects.
Imagine the mentality of a modern bishop who
dreams that he is advancing the cause of true
religion and sound learning by assimilating the birth
of his Saviour to that of a rotifer or a flea !
The books of Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson and
others of their school are, no doubt, blundering
extravaganzas, all the more inopportune because they
provoke the gibes of Dr. Moulton ; but they are at
least works of Freethought. Their authors do not
write with one eye on the truth and the other on the
Pope in the Vatican, or on the obsolete dogmas of
Byzantine speculation. It is possible, therefore, to
discuss with them, as it is not with apologists, who
take good care never to lay all their cards on the
table, and of whom you cannot but feel, as the great
historian Mommsen remarked, that they are chatter-
ing in chains {ex vinculis sermocinantes) , In the
EPILOGUE 223
investigation of truth there can he no mental reserves,
and argument is useless where the final appeal lies to
a Pope or a creed. You cannot set your hand to the
plough and then look hack.
It was not, then, within the scope of this essay to
try to determine how much and what particular inci-
dents traditionally narrated of Jesus are credible.
Such a task would require at least a thousand pages
for its discharge ; I have merely desired to show how
difficult it is to prove a negative, and how much
simpler it is to admit that Jesus really lived than to
argue that he was a solar or other myth. The latter
hypothesis, as expounded in these works, offends every
principle of philology, of comparative mythology,
and of textual criticism ; it bristles with difficulties ;
and, if no better demonstration of it can be offered, it
deserves to be summarily dismissed.
On the other hand, no absolute rules can be laid
down a priori for the discerning in early Christian or
in any other ancient documents of historical fact.
But students embarking on a study of Christian
origins will do well to la}^ to heart the aphorism of
Renan {Les Apotres, Introd. xxix), that " one can
only ascertain the origin of any particular religion
from tlie narratives or reports of those who believed
therein ; for it is only the sceptic who writes history ad
narrandum.'' It is in the very nature of things human
that we could not hope to obtain documents more
evidential than the Gospels and Acts. It is a lucky
chance that time has spared to us the Epistles of Paul
as well, and the sparse notices of first-century con-
gregations and personalities preserved in Josephus and
in pagan writers. For during the first two or three
generations of its existence the Church interested few
224 EPILOGUE
except itself. In the view of a Josephus, the Jewish
converts could only figure as Jews gone astray after a
false Messiah, just as the Gentile recruits were mere
Judaizers, objects — as he remarks, B. J., II, 18, 2 —
of equal suspicion to Syrian pagans and Jews alike,
an ambiguous, neutral class, spared by the knife of
the pagans, yet dreaded by the Jews as at heart aliens
to their cause.-^ There were no folklorists or compara-
tive religionists in those days watching for new cults
to appear ; and there could be little or no inclination
to sit down and write history among enthusiasts who
dreamed that the end of the world w^as close at hand,
and believed themselves to be already living in the last
days. For this is the conviction that colours the
whole of the New Testament ; and that it does so is a
signal proof of the antiquity of much that the book
contains. If a Christian of the first century ever
took up his pen and wrote, it was not to hand down
an objective narrative of events to a posterity whose
existence he barely contemplated, but, as against
unbelieving Jews, to establish from ancient prophecy
his belief in Jesus as the promised Messiah, or
perhaps as the Word of God made flesh. All Chris-
tians were aware that Jews, both in Judaea and of the
Dispersion, roundly denied their Christ to have been
anything better than an impostor and violator of the
Law. They heard the pagans round them echoing
the scoffs of their Messiah's own countrymen. Accord-
ingly, the earliest literature of the Church, so far as
it is not merely homiletic and hortative, is controver-
^ Such is Kenan's interpretation of this passage in L^ Ante- Christ,
ed. 1873, p. 259, and he is undoubtedly right in detecting in it a
reference to the Ciiristians scattered abroad in the half-Syrian and
pagan, half -Jewish and monotheist, cities of Syria.
EPILOGUE 225
sial, and aims at proving that the Jewish people were
mistaken in rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. The
Jews neither then nor now have fought with mere
shadows ; and just in proportion as they bore witness
against his Messiahship, they bore witness in favour
of his historical reality. It is a pity that the extreme
negative school ignore this aspect of his rejection by
the Jews.
Let me cite one more wise rule laid down by Renan
in the same Introduction: "An ancient writing can
help us to throw light, firstly, on the age in which it
was composed, and, secondly, on the age which pre-
ceded its composition."
This indicates in a general fashion the use which
historians should make of the New Testament. We
have at every turn to ask ourselves what the circum-
stances its contents reveal presuppose in the imme-
diate past in the way both of ideas or aspirations
and of fact or incidents.
In conclusion, I cannot do better than quote the
words in which Renan defines in general terms the
sort of historical results we may hope to attain in the
field of Christian origins. It is from the Introduction
already cited, pp. vi and vii : —
In histories like this, where the general outline
(eufientble) alone is certain, and where nearly all the
details lend themselves more or less to doubt by
reason of the legendary character of the documents,
hypothesis is indispensable. About ages of which we
know nothing we cannot frame any hypothesis at all.
To try to reconstitute a particular group of ancient
statuary, which certainly once existed, but of which
we have not even the debris, and about which we
possess no written information, is to attempt an
entirely arbitrary task. But to endeavour to recom-
pose the friezes of the Parthenon from what remains
22G EPILOGUE
to us, using as subsidiary to our work ancient texts,
drawings made in the seventeenth century, and avail-
ing ourselves of all sources of information ; in a word,
inspiring ourselves by the style of these inimitable
fragments, and endeavouring to seize their soul and
life — what more legitimate task than this? We
cannot, indeed, after all, say that we have rediscovered
the work of the ancient sculptor; nevertheless, we
shall have done all that was possible in order to
approximate thereto. Such a method is all the more
legitimate in history, because language permits the
use of dubitative moods of which marble admits not.
There is nothing to prevent our setting before the
reader a choice of different suppositions, and the
author's conscience may be at rest as soon as he has
set forth as certain what is certain, as probable what
is probable, as possible what is possible. In those
parts of the field where our footstep slides and slips
between history and legend it is only the general
effect that we must seek after Accomplished facts
speak more plainly than any amount of biographic
detail. We know very little of the peerless artists
who created the cJiefs iV(cuvre of Greek art. Yet
these chefs d\eavre tell us more of the personality of
their authors and of the public which appreciated
them than ever could do the most circumstantial
narratives and the most authentic of texts.
INDEX
Acts of the Apostles, their testi-
mony in favour of the his-
toricity of Jesus, 113 foil.
their evidence, outside the
we sections, with respect to
Paul, 120 foil.; it agrees with
that of the Pauline Epistles, 131
Anthropology, how conceived of
by liobertson and Drews, 94,
178 foil.
Antiochus Epiphanes, legend of
his finding a human victim in
the Holy of Holies accepted by
Mr. Robertson, 51
Aphraates, the Syrian Father, on
the divinity of Jesus, 17G
Apion, his fables accepted by Mr.
liobertson, 51, 54
Apollonius of Tyana, in spite of
the parallelisms of his story
with that of Jesus, is allowed
by Mr. liobertson to have really
lived, 6, 45 ; his exorcisms, 13 ;
mythical elements in his his-
tory do not deter Mr. liobert-
son from allowing that he
really lived, 46 foil.
miracles worked at his
shrine, 200
Apollonius, Senator of Home,
c.A.D. 182 ; his apology for
Christianity, 188 iiote
Apollos and " the things concern-
ing Jesus," 35 foil.
Apologetic works awake legi-
timate suspicion, among
moderns, even of the histori-
city of Jesus, 214
Apostles known to Paul were not
companions of Jesus, but
leaders of the Sun-myth sect
and subordinates of the Jewish
High Priest, 140 ; tliey con-
cocted the Didache or Teaching
of the Twelve Apostles, 141, 185
Apparitions of Jesus to the faith-
ful, 149
Arnold, Matthew, Mr. Robert-
son's appreciation of him, 172
Ascension into heaven of Jesus,
a symbolic act according to
Dr. Gore, 219 foil.
Asses, Jesus's ride on the two,
explained by Mr. liobertson,
22, 76
Athanasian orthodoxy, based on
the Fourth Gospel, 103
Athanasius's Christology, 3
Augustus Caesar, worshipped as
an incarnate God, 57, 198 note
Babylonian myths in the Bible,
203
Bacon-Shakesperians find their
rivals in the domain of New
Testament exegesis in Messrs.
Robertson, Drews, and W. B.
Smith, 182, 188 note
Baptism of John to be astrally
explained according to Dr.
Drews, 155
Bevan, Rev. R. F. , pleads for
recognition in English pulpits
of scientific methotls, 217
Rev. J. 0., his plea for
recognition in English Church
of the Higher Criticism, 218
Bifroiis, new meaning of, dis-
covered by Mr. Robertson, 63,
77
Birth legends of Jesus, as sup-
plied by Luke and Matthew,
227
228
INDEX
evidence a popular belief that
he had lived, 99
Brethren of Jesus, only such in a
Pickwickian sense, according to
Robertson, Drews, and W. B,
Smith, 145 foil.
Burkitt, Prof.'F. C, on Nazareth,
42
Canterbuky, Archbishop of, on
Bible criticism, 218
Carpenter, Dr. Estlin, his criti-
cisms of Mr. Robertson, 76, 113
Celsus's Gospel contained story of
Judas Iscariot, 137
Cephas, or Peter, personally
opposed by Paul, 135
Christ, or Messiah, meaning of
the name, 11
Christian literature of early cen-
turies mainly anti-Jewish, 224,
225
Christianity, early, in the travel
document of Acts, 116, 117
" Christist " receipt for manufac-
turing a Gospel, 95
Christians, first so called at
Antioch, 165
Church objects to sane criticism
of the Bible, 1, 3
Circumcision accepted by the
earliest Christians, according
to Drews and Robertson, 89
Clement of Rome cites the
Pauline Epistles, 126 ; his
description of the Neronian
persecution, 161
Clement's RecognitioJis, 81
Comparative religion, its true
methods, 11 foil, 178 foil.
" Composite myth " invoked by
Drews and Robertson in ex-
planation of Jesus itself wholly
inexplicable, 25, 48, 74, 77, 79 ;
how "the composite myth"
waged war on the gods and
goddesses he was composed of,
69 ; a wilfully absurd hypo-
thesis, 90, 95, 181
Conybeare, William Daniel, on
Oxford historical studies, 216
Cosquin, M. Emmanuel, his work
a model of the comparative
method, 178
Cox, Sir George, on Sun-myths, 18
Credulity of the hypercritical
school of writers, 124, 182
Croce, Benedetto, upon nature of
history, 1
Croydon, Bishop of, his obscurant-
ism shared by the majority of
the clergy, 217 foil.
Crucifixion, absurdity of the
parallels invoked by Mr. Robert-
son, 50 foil.
Cumont, Prof. F, , on Mithras, 64
Deacons, the Seven, in Acts, 117
Deification of men common in
antiquity — e.g., Augustus
Csesar, the Pharaohs — com-
patible with the reality of the
persons deified, 57, 86, 198
Demoniacs exorcized alike by
Jesus and Apollonius, 13
Demonology of earlier Gospels
excluded from Fourth Gospel,
86, 170
Demons in Gospels explained by
W. B. Smith as heathen gods
and goddesses, 67, 189
Didache, or Teaching, of the
Twelve Apostles, a Jewish
document adopted by the
Christists, 89
Dieterich's Abraxas, 39
Diogenes Laertius's life of Solon,
4 ; of Plato, 58
Dion of Rome on the art of
Phidias, 180 note
Dionysias-Jesus rides two asses
at once according to Mr.
Robertson, 22, 76
Docetes, nature of their tenets,
86, 103 foil.
Docetism in Philo and in Book
of Tobit, 106
Documents, historical, conditions
of their right and legitimate
use, 215
Dositheos, the Samaritan Mes-
siah, 198 note
INDEX
229
Drews, Robertson, W. B. Smith,
Jensen, their critical canons
condemn nearly all historical
figures to unreality, 6, 7
Drews, Dr., embraces the figment
of a Sun-god Joshua, SO foil. ; es-
pouses Mr. Robertson's misun-
derstanding of El Tabari, 35 ;
on Joseph-Kinyras, 65 ; on the
home life of the Messiah, 67 ;
he admits much of early Chris-
tian literature besides the
Gospels to be prior to the
year 100, 3, 4, 100; admits
Mark to be the oldest Gospel,
9 ; on Pilate, Longinus, the
Javelin man, and the Milky
Way, 27 foil.; espouses the
pre-philological etymologies of
Mr. Robertson, 69, 70 ; admits
presence of Jewish rites and
beliefs in earliest Christianity,
89 ; misunderstands nature of
Gnostic Docetism, 104 foil.;
also of Jewish Messianic belief
in early second century, 107 ;
attaches importance to Paul as
the real founder of Christianity,
113 ; opines that Tacitus was
interpolated from Sulpicius
Severus by Poggio, 161 foil. ;
on the Chreatiani or votaries of
Serapis, 165 ; his account of
John the Baptist, 210
Durkheim, Emile, on primitive
religion, 19 ; on the right
limits of comparison, 72
Eabani alternately identified by
P. Jensen with Jesus and John
the Baptist, 209
Elephantine, papyri of fifth cen-
tury D.c. lately recovered there,
32
El Tabari's allusions to Joshua,
misused by Mr. Robertson, 34
Ephrem'scommentaryonActs,120
Epimenides according to the
canons of the hypercritics never
lived, 5
Eschatology of New Testament
inexplicable on Mr. Robertson's
hypothesis, 102, 224 ; ruled
out in the Fourth Gospel, 170
Esotericism of early Christianity
feigned by Drews, Robertson,
and Smith, 16 ; a cloak for
the wild improbability of their
views, 31, 90, 91, 183, IQ^ foil.
Esi^ene meant a healer, according
to Prof. W. B. Smith, 37
Eusebius of Cissarea testifies from
ancient documents to the early
hatred of Jews for the memory
of Jesus, 112
Farnell, Dr., Rector of Exeter
College, on Babylonian ele-
ments in ancient religion and
civilization of Greece, 202
Figgis, Rev. Mr., on Higher
Criticism, 221
Fish symbolism, misunderstood
by Mr. Robertson, 21
Fourth Gospel, its characteristics,
86, 102, 103, 170
Frazer, Dr. J. G., and Dr. Drews,
142 ; esteemed by Dr. Drews
as being almost as great an
authority as Mr. Robertson, 35
Galatians, Epistle of Paul to, in
relation to the narrative of Acts,
131 ; its genuineness, 139
Gardner, Prof. Percy, on the two
asses, 76, 113
Gospels, transcripts of an an-
nually recurring mystery-play
representing the death of a
Sun-god, vegetation sprite,
called Joshua, and same as
Attis, Tammuz, Osiris, etc.,
48 foil.; a monotheistic alle-
gory according to W. B. Smith,
74, 85, 145, 191; not Mes-
sianic romances, 81 ; begin-
nings of the deification of Jesus
traceable in the later ones, 86 ;
evolution in them of Christo-
logy, UOfoll.
Synoptic, their true inter-re-
lations ignored by Mr. Robertson
230
INDEX
whenever it suits his purpose,
173 foil.
Hardy, Mr. E. G., his work on
Christianity in relation to the
Roman Government, 161
Hawkins, Sir John, his linguistic
studies of Luke's Gospel and
of Acts, 118
Hebrews, epistle to, testifies to
historicity of Jesus, 152
High priest of the Jews pre-
sided over the secret society of
"Christists," 135; and sent
forth the Twelve Apostles
known to Paul, 142, 185
Hippolytus, Bishop of Ostia, on
the Docetism of the second
century, 107
Historical evidence, nature of,
according to Benedetto Croce,
1 ; conditions of, 7, 8
Historical method. See Jack-
son, Langlois, Eenan
Historical reality and dates rarely
ascribed by their votaries to
such Gods as Adonis and
Osiris, 199
Historical statements in ancient
authors so many problems to
be explained, whether admitted
or denied, 7, 8
Horace regarded Augustus Caesar
as a god from heaven made
flesh, 198 note
Humanity of Jesus in belief of
early Christians, 176 foil.
Human sacrifice discarded by
Jews long before other races
discarded it, 50
Hyginus's myth of Bacchus and
the two asses, 25, 76
Hypercriticism of Drews, Robert-
son, and W. B. Smith involves
the unreality of Solon, Epime-
nides, Pythagoras, Apollonius
of Tyana, 4-6 ; its wilful im-
probabilities, 31 ; resembles
old-fashioned orthodoxy in its
failure to appreciate evidence,
43 ; consents in profane history
to separate ofJ miracles from
normal events, yet refuses to
do so in sacred history, 4:5 foil. ;
becomes mere credulity, 124,
182 ; would abolish all history,
167 ; is a repercussion from
orthodox obscurantism, 168;
damages the cause of Rational-
ism, 186
Ignatius of Antioch on Docetism
of the early second century, 105
Ignatian testimony to Pauline
Epistles, 126
Independent witnesses to the
same facts, their importance
explained, 8, 9, 96, 97, 123
Interpolations of New Testament,
hypothesis of, invoked at ran-
dom by the hypercritical school
as suits their argument, 125, 135
Jackson, Cyril, Dean of Christ
Church, his educational ideals,
216
Jacob's prayer, a Jewish apocryph,
cited by Origen, 198 note
Jairus's daughter, miracle of her
being raised from the dead
paralleled in the life of Apol-
lonius, 47
James, brother of Jesus, visited
by the author of the travel-
document, 100
Janus— Peter, 63, 77, 143
Jensen, Dr. P., 142; traces the
entire Bible to the myth of
Gilgamesch, 203; on "the
Jesus-saga," 205 foil. ; his
account of John the Baptist,
206 foil. ; criticism of his
method, 212
Jerome, on encratite grounds,
represented James, not as the
brother, but as the cousin, of
Jesus, 148
Jesus Barabbas, 50, 52
Jesus Ben Pandira, Mr. Robert-
son takes refuge in him in
order to escape admitting the
identity of Paul's Jesus with
INDEX
231
Jesus of Nazareth, 143 foil.;
turns out to be identical, after
all, Ibl foil.; 184, 199
Jesus, his birth at winter solstice,
20
Jesu.f, the name, connected by
Prof. Smith with the Greek
word iesomai — "I will heal,"
196
Jesus cult, its original secrecy as
conjectured by Prof. W. B.
Smith, 192
" Jesus, the God of the Hebrews,"
in the papyrus of Wessely, 89
Jews, their Messianic hopes in
early second century, 108 ;
their hatred and ridicule of
the man Jesus, 108 foil.; their
hostility to pagan myths and
art regularly ignored by Drews
and Kobertson, 25, 29, 73, 90,
91, dSfolL, 180, 183
Johannine Epistles testify to his-
toricity of Jesus, 153
John the Baptist, alternately an
astral myth and an Essene,
according to Dr. Drews, 155
Josephus describes the Christians
as Judaizers of an ambiguous
and neutral class, detested alike
by Jews and pagans, 224 ; his
notice of John the Baptist, 154 ;
of Jesus, 156 ; of James the
brother of Jesus, 151 foil.
Joseph in the Gospels an alias of
the God Joseph, of the old man
in Apuleius, of Kiiiyras, etc.,
65
Joshua ben Jehozadak turned into
a Sun-myth by Dr. Drews, 32
Joshua, Samaritan Book of, its age
over-estimated by Dr. Drews, 33
Joshua the Sun-god not deducible
from the Book of Joshua, 17,30;
an invention of Mr. Robertson's,
17 note ; his pagan aliases,
29 ; adopted by Dr. Drews,
30 ; deliberately suppressed by
Old Testament writers, accord-
ing to Mr. Robertson, 33, 34;
his virgin mother Miriam an
invention of Mr. Robertson's,
33/oZL, 92 ; why chosen out as
the god to be humanized by
ChrUtist<>, 87 ; why should he
have died annually? S2 foil.
Judaic elements in early Chris-
tianity admitted by Drews and
Robertson, 89
Judaic exclusiveness of Jesus's
idea of the Kingdom of God,
13, 132, 133
Judas Iscariot, 137
Jude, Epistle of, testifies to a real
Jesus, 153
Judgment of Israel, naive picture
of it in the Gospels, 14
Justin Martyr on Jewish Mes-
sianic hopes in early second
century, 108 ; on Jewish exe-
cration of the real man Jesus
in the same age, 109 foil.;
regarded Jesus as an incarnate
archangel, 198 note
Keys and Peter, meaning of, 64
Khonds of India, their human
sacrifices invoked by Mr. Robert-
son in explanation of the
Crucifixion, 55
Kingdom of God, old Persian
elements therein, 10, 11; its
immediate advent preached in
turn by John the Baptist and
by Jesus, 10 foil., 101 foil, 178
Kraus, Samuel, on Talmudic and
Jewish traditions of Jesus, 151
foil.
Lamb, Jesus represented as —
why? 21
Langlois and Seignobos on the
value and limitations of the
Argument from Silence, 129 ;
on nature of ancient docu-
ments, 168; on the credulity
which besets hypercriticism,
182, 186
Last judgment assigned to Jesus-
Osiris, 21
Last Supper, how handled by Mr.
Robertson, 150
232
INDEX
Liddon, Canon, his superstitious
attitude towards Biblical criti-
cism, 128
Lightfoot's Hor(e Hehraicce on
Jesus Ben Pandira, 152
Loisj, Prof. Alfred, his commen-
taries, 169
Longinus the Centurion, his
legend set back in reign of
Nero by Dr. Drews, 28
Lorinser, Dr., censured by Eobert-
son for his derivation of Krish-
naism from Christianity, 75
full., 78
Luke expressly mentioned as
author of the travel document
in Ephrem's text of Acts, 120
Luke's Gospel, its date and rela-
tions to Matthew and Mark, 98
Maia= Maria, 69, 70
Maira= Maria, 70
Marcion's use of Luke's Gospel,
119
Marett on right method in com-
parative investigations of reli-
gion, 73, 74, 77
Mark's Gospel, admitted by Dr.
Drews to be the oldest, 9 ;
resume of its contents, 10 foil.;
its priority denied by Mr.Robert-
son whenever it suits his pur-
pose, 23 ; its author had never
heard of the legend of the
Virgin Birth, UfolL, 175
Mary, Mother of Jesus. Her
name a form of Mi/rrha,Moira,
Maya, Maia, etc., according to
Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews,
69
Matthew's Gospel, its date and
relations to Mark and Luke,
99
Max Muller, Friedrich, on Sun-
myths, 18
Maya = Maria, 69, 70
Melito of Sardis, his Apology for
Christianity, 150
Merris= Maria, 70
Messianic expectations in early
second century, as reflected in
Justin Martyr, 108 ; they domi-
nate the Synoptic Gospels,
178
Messianism of the New Testa-
ment ignored or misunderstood
by Messrs. Drews, Robertson,
W, B. Smith, and other deniers
of the historicity of Jesus,
101
Miracles of the Gospels, 2
Miraculous and non-miraculous
elements according to Messrs.
Robertson and Drews co-exist
in works of profane history
without prejudicing their vera-
city, but in the Gospels they
pretend that they form an im-
penetrable block of myth, 45
foil., 168 /oZL
Mithras-Peter, 63, 143
iJ/oira=: Maria, 69, 70
Moirai, the three, identified by
Mr. Robertson with the three
Maries, 179
Mommsen, his verdict on Apolo-
gists, 3, 222
Monotheistic propaganda absent
from the Gospels, w^hich never-
theless, on W. B. Smith's view,
reflect a monotheistic crusade,
187, 190
Mount, Sermon upon the, ex-
plained by Robertson on astral
principles, 20, 21
Myrrha = Maria, 69, 70
Myth, Maqic, and Morals cited,
1, 44
Mythical accretions differently
estimated by Messrs. Robertson
and Drews in secular and in
sacred history, io foil.
Myths of ancient gods, in what
way they contrast with the
Gospels, 82
Nazabeth same as Chorazin
according to F. C. Burkitt, 41
Nazoraei of Epiphanius, how
Prof. W. B. Smith conjures
with them, 41 ; for Matthew
the word meant simply
INDEX
233
" dwellers in Nazareth," ibid.
note
Nero's persecution of Christianity,
160 foil.
Novels, ancient Greek, contrasted
with the Gospels, 82
Cannes or Ea equated with John
the Baptist by Dr. Drews, 155
Orthodox obscurantism responsi-
ble for the vagaries of Messrs.
Robertson, Drews, W. B.
Smith, and similar writers, 1,
128, 108
Origen on the Samaritan Messiah
Dositheos, 198 ?io^^/ his con-
fused citations of Josephus mis-
lead Prof. W. B. Smith, Ibl foil.
Osiris- Jesus in the last judg-
ment, 21 ; his death, 48 ; his
statuette suggested the scourg-
ing of the money-changers by
Jesus, 02, 77
Oxford, Bishop of, on the symbo-
lical character of the Ascension,
219
Paii-Bobi/lonismus, 202
Papias's evidence about the Gos-
pels, 10 ; on Judas Iscariot, 137
Parables of Jesus mainly turn on
the imminence of the kingdom
of heaven, 13
Paton, W. K., on the Sacaea, 53
Paul's general aloofness from the
historical Jesus, 138 ; did not
prevent his testifying to the
main facts of his life, 132 foil.
Paul's lack of appreciation of
Greek art, 180 ; his rivalry
with the older Apostles, 134
Pauline Epistles, how handled by
the deniers of Jesus's histori-
city, 125 ; evidence of their
antiquity in Marcion, Ignatius,
and Clement of Rome, 125
foil.; mainly genuine, if judged
by their contents, 131 ; their
evidence as regards historicity
of Jesus, 132 /b^f.; theirpicture
of Jesus, 169
Peter, an understudy of Mithras
or of Janus or of Proteus, 02
foil., 143; his Epistle testifies
to an historical Jesus, 153
Peter, Gospel ascribed to, recog-
nizes the Twelve Apostles, 130
Pfleiderer, Dr., Mr, Robertson's
judgment of him, 172
Philonean character of Johannine
Gospel, 103, 111
Philo's embassy to Caligula, 180 ;
his docetic views as to angels
visiting Abraham, 100 ; his
description of mob-mockery in
Alexandria of the King of the
Jews, 53
Pilate, the Javelin man of Dr.
Drews, 27
Plato, his supposed prophecy of
Jesus, 188 note ; Mr. Robert-
son's arguments leave no room
for historicity, 57 ; his virgin
birth compatible, according to
Mr. Robertson, with his reality,
58
Play, annual mystery-plays of
Jesus invented by Mr, Robert-
son, 48 foil., 91, ISo foil.
Pliny's notice of the Christians
of Bithynia, 40, 102/oZL; Prof.
W. B. Smith's attempt to
explain it away, 103
Poggio interpolated Tacitus from
Sulpicius Severus, according
to Dr. Drews, IGl foil.
Pre-Christian Jesus, no evidence
needed to prove his reality,
according to Prof. W, B.
Smith, 32; far-fetched char-
acter of the hypothesis, S5 foil.
Prephilological etymologies of
Messrs. Robertson and Drews,
70, 179
Proteus— Peter, 03, 143
Pythagoras, judged by the rules
of the hypercritics, not an his-
torical figure, 5
Q, or the non-Marcan source
embedded in Matthew and
Luke, 10
234
INDEX
Keduplications, rhetorical, their
frequency in Hebrew literature,
24, 76
Eenan, on character of early
history of Christianity, 223
foil.
Resurrected Jesus appears to
five hundred men at once, 149
Revelation of John, testifies to
a real Jesus, 153
Robertson, Mr. J. M. , not properly
esteemed in Germany, accord-
ing to Dr. Drews, 15 ; his
invention of the Sun - god
Joshua, 17 ; sets Mark later
than Matthew, when it serves
his purpose to do so, 23; his
ideas of evidence exampled in
his handling of El Tabari, 34 ;
his hypothesis of mystery-plays
representing death of Joshua
the Sun-god, 4:8 foil.; censures
Dr. Lorinser for deriving
Krishna myths from Christian-
ity, 75 foil. ; admits presence
of Jewish elements in primitive
Christianity, 89 ; adopts Jesus
Ben Pandira, 143 foil. ; and
passim
Sacaea, character of, 52
Samaritan apocryph of Joshua, 33
Savages deify humble objects
rather than the sublime in
nature, 18
Schmiedel's " Pillars," how dealt
with by Mr. Robertson, 172 foil.
Secrecy of early Christian cult
and propaganda a fiction of
Prof. W. B. Smith's fancy,
188, 190
Silence, argument from, 42, 119,
129 foil.
Slain god cult, the idea not
primitive in Christianity, but
a development of Pauline
thought, 177
Smith, Prof. W. B., uses the
Gospels as historical docu-
ments whenever it suits his
argument, 192, 197 ; on the
sublimity of the initial letter
J, 195 ; on the Acts and
Epistles, 197 ; on esoterism of
early Church, 192 foil.; his
hypothesis of a pre-Christian
Jesus, 32 ; his hypothesis based
on the exiguous evidence of
Acts xviii, 24 foil., 35; insists
on the monotheistic signifi-
cance of the Gospels, 74, 187,
190 ; his hypothesis that Jesus
was an ancient monotheist
deity humanized, 84, 124 ; he
misunderstands the Gospels,
and turns them into allegory,
85 foil., 188 foil.; disputes the
antiquity of the Pauline
Epistles, 126 foil.; his use
of the argument from silence,
130 ; attempts to explain away
the brethren of Jesus, 145 /oZZ.;
his theory that the Gospels
represent a "crusade for mono-
theism," 187 foil.; he contra-
dicts his main presuppositions
in order to argue from the
Gospels at all, 191
Socialism, modern, resembles
apocalyptic faith of earliest
Christians, 102
Solomon, Psalms of, upon the
Messiah as the Last Judge, 21
Solon, doubts implied by the
hypercritics as to his histori-
city, 4
Spencer, Dr. John, on methods
of comparative religion, 72
Suetonius's application of epithet
Malcfica to Christian religion,
161, 165
Suetonius on oriental messiahs,
196 ; his phrase impulsore
Chresto, its meaning according
to Dr. Drews, 164 /oZZ.
Sulzbach, A., on Peter's keys, 64
Sunday-school style of criticism
of Robertson, Drews, and W.
B. Smith, 23, 43, 168, and
passim
Sun-myth phase of comparative
mythology, though obsolete,
INDEX
235
yet upheld in books of Drews
and Eobertson, 18, and passim
Tacitus's references to the Chris-
tians, how handled by W. B.
Smith, 159 foil.; supported by
Clement of Rome, 101
Temple cleansing, story of, origi-
nated according to Mr. Robert-
son in a statuette of Osiris with
a scourge, 01 foil., 77
Thecla, story of, 81
Theophilus, Luke's exordiums
addressed to him attest a belief
on part of both as well as of
many others that Jesus was no
myth, 99, 100
Thomas, apostle, legends of, 81
Thompson, Rev. W. H., his work
on miracles, how received in
the English Church, 217
Tobit, Book of, Docetism in, 100
Toldoth Jeschu, or Jewish tradi-
tion of Jesus, lolfoll.
Travel document, or We sections,
in Acts, 100 ; a summary of
their contents, 115 /oii.; prob-
ably written by the author of
Acts and not merely an inde-
pendent document used up by
him, 118
Twelve Apostles the Twelve Signs
of the Zodiac, 20, 78 ; identical
with the twelve apostles of the
Jewish High Priest, 135 foil.;
Paul's rivalry with them, 134,
138
Universities of Oxford and Cam-
bridge have ignored the study
of Christian antiquities, 216
Van Manen's favourable estimate
of Acts accepted by Messrs.
Drews and Robertson, 113 foil.',
his absurd system of dating
ancient literature espoused by
Messrs. Robertson and Drews,
119, 125 foil., 137
Virgin Birth Legend, Messrs.
Robertson and Drews insist
that it was part and parcel of
the earliest evangelical tradi-
tion, 44 foil, 170, 175; in
spite of their virgin births,
Plato and Augustus are ad-
mitted by Mr. Robertson to
have been real men, 49 foll.\
lateness of Gospel records
thereof admitted by Mr. Robert-
son, 50, 92
Virgin Mary, late introduction of
her feasts in the Church, 171
Weiss, Prof. Jo., on influence of
the Septuagint on Luke's ac-
count of the birth of John the
Baptist, 200
Wellhausen's commentary on the
Gospels, 109 ; his view of the
date of composition of the
Gospels of Mark and Luke, 97
Wendland, Prof. Paul, on the
Sacaea, 53
Wessely's papyrus mentions
" Jesus the God of the
Hebrews," 39
William Tell myth, 42
Winckler, Prof. Hugo, his astral
methods of interpreting myths,
209 ; on Sun and Moon myths
in the Old Testament, 87, 142
XisuTHRos = Jesus, in Dr. Jen-
sen's Gilgamesch Epos, 211
ZiMMERN, Prof. Heinrich, on the
Deluge, 203
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