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 
 
 W\TTS AXD CO., PRINTERS, JOHNSON's COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C, 
 
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