The Man of Galilee

by Atticus G. Haygood

3. Myths reflect their time, place, and race. This statement is without exception. Theseus is of ancient Greece and is Greek in every sinew and lineament. Odin and Thor come to us out of the dark German forests, and are but exaggerations, in their virtues and vices, of the mighty barbarians who dwelt in them. Isis and Osiris are as like Egypt as the desert, the Nile, and its mysterious sources. Bel-Merodach is as like Chaldea as the valley of the Euphrates and its lost civilization could make him. Vishnu is as Hindustanee as the Ganges and its terrible jungles and the fierce beasts that made men afraid. And so of them every one, from the loftiest and noblest conceptions of godlike men that ever inspired the Greek imagination with great ideals down to the meanest and most devilish that ever filled the superstitions of African or Australian bushmen with terrors. But in Jesus there is not a trace of coloring from any scene or period in Hebrew history, from Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees to the days of Cæsar Augustus.

4. In all nations myths defy chronology; they are without dates. In the imagination of their people they seem to have existed not only from the beginnings of national life, but to have gone before it. Think of any of them—those that have come down to us from ancient nations, as well as those that still hold their place in the folk-lore of barbarous peoples. They are all without dates. We do not read of Isis and Osiris appearing in the capital of Egypt in the days of Rameses II.; the Egyptian gods are older than any of their dynasties and lived before men kept genealogies. And so of all the gods of mythology; they are without contemporaries known to any history. Myths precede the invention of calendars; if time was counted at all the years were without dates. How utterly different is the story of Jesus, that some men tell us is only a Hebrew myth!

Of Jesus and the time of his appearing it is written:

“And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.” Augustus was emperor; Cyrenius was governor in Syria; Herod was king in Judea.

5. Myths defy topography as they do chronology; they are not only without dates, they are without definite localities. They appeared not only some when that cannot be fixed in time, but somewhere that cannot be found as a place. Their origin is shrouded in mystery. Some of the contemporaries of Jesus made it a point against him, “As to this man we know whence he is.”

In the story of Jesus we are told of places with such exactness that the statements of the evangelists are to this day the best guides to the scholarly men who make explorations in order to find relics and fragments of lost history in Palestine. They do not tell us of Jesus as appearing somewhere in their country, as Galilee, Samaria, Judea. They tell us of Nazareth, Bethlehem, Bethsaida, Capernaum, Bethphage, Bethany, the Mount of Olives. They tell us of the “beautiful gate of the temple” which, he and his disciples looked upon, and of “Jacob’s well” “near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph”—the very spot where Jesus sat to rest, while his disciples went to Sychar to buy bread of the baker—the well from which a woman of the Samaritans drew water and gave him to drink.

6. Myths are not completed at once. They require long time—ages—for their development. But the conception of the character of Jesus comes into the thought of men with his manifestation and abides through the centuries that have followed as it was first given to the world.

There is absolutely nothing like it in all Hebrew history that went before him, as there is nothing like it in the history that comes after him. And the conception of Jesus that is given by the brief accounts of the evangelists is so finished, so complete, that the attempts of after times to add to it in the stories of the so-called apocryphal gospels have utterly failed of their design. No marvelous stories, handed down from one generation to another, have in the least added to or taken from the Jesus of the evangelists. What Jesus signified when the gospels were written he has been through the centuries that have followed him. What he was then he is to-day.

7. All myths belong to the infancy, never to the age of any nation. They spring out of the morning mists; they never appear in the light of day. If the story of Jesus had been placed in Chaldea, before the call of Abraham, it also would have belonged to the infancy of a race. To harmonize with the laws that govern the development of myths the story of Jesus should have anticipated the first chapters in Hebrew history; it should have been placed in that uncertain period that includes the dispersion from Armenia, the second cradle of the human race.

But the story of Jesus is given to the world, fresh and complete, with not one hint of it in all preceding history, in the last years, the closing days of Hebrew national life in Judea.