There is no evidence that the Jews borrowed the custom of killing a yearly human victim, or practised the habit.
If they did, it was a month after Purim.[8]
If they did, by Mr. Frazer's own statement the killing might be thought that of a vulgar malefactor,[9] and could not cast on all or on any one of the victims a halo of divinity.
Finally, our own history, in the case of the Earl of Atholl (who pretended to the crown at the murder of James I. of Scotland) and in the case of Sir William Wallace (who was accused of saying that he would be crowned in Westminster Hall), proves that pretenders to royalty have been mocked by being indued with symbols of royalty. Wallace was crowned at his trial with laurel; Atholl was tortured to death with a red-hot iron crown. The Victim of Calvary was accused of aiming at a kingdom, and, like Wallace and Atholl, was crowned—with thorns. The preliminary scourging is illustrated by the tyranny of Verres in Sicily.
May we not conclude that Mr. Frazer's 'light bridges' of hypothesis have 'broken down'?[10]
'The importance and interest of the subject' have induced me to examine the hypotheses. But it was needless.
One point has been clear from the beginning. Even if the Sacæan victims were originally supposed to be gods, they could not bequeath a halo of divinity to Christ, unless, as late as the reign of Tiberius, their own godhead was still commonly recognised. Now it certainly was not recognised. When Mr. Frazer published the first edition of his 'Golden Bough,' he doubted that the Sacæan victim could, as civilisation advanced, be identified with a god. But, before publishing his second edition, Mr. Frazer evolved his theory of the origin or partial origin of the belief in the divinity of Christ, as inherited from the criminal slaves at the Sacæa. In his second edition, therefore, the godhead of the Sacæan victims is usually regarded as commonly recognised; though Mr. Frazer had doubted the possibility of this in his first, and preserves the doubt in his second edition. It is needless to say more.
Mr. Frazer, in vol. iii. 120, had already shaken his own theory as given in vol. iii. 195-198.[11] I might have contented myself with comparing these two passages, but in the interest of the nascent science of religion it seemed desirable to point out what I am constrained to think the errors of method that now prevail. In the following essay criticism is applied to an hypothesis with which modern orthodoxy has no concern.
[1] G. B. iii. 195-197.