[16] See [ Luke x, 17–20]. [↑]
[17] La Vie Religieuse, p. 134. [↑]
[18] In his De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus libri tres, printed at the Hague in 1686, but largely written twenty years earlier. [↑]
[19] The Christ Myth, 2nd ed., p. 18. [↑]
[20] 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, derives exclusively from Jewish sources, and was part of the common stock of popular Jewish aspirations. [↑]
Chapter II
PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS
Is Mark’s Gospel a religious romance? I can imagine some people arguing that Mark’s Gospel might be a religious novel, of which the scene is laid in Jerusalem and Galilee among Jews; that it was 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 exclude 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?
Certainly not in the way assumed by Drews and Robertson, In view of what we know of the dates and diffusion of the Gospels, of their literary connections with one another, and of the reappearance of their chief personæ dramatis in the Pauline letters, such a hypothesis is of course wildly improbable, yet not utterly absurd. We have to assume in the writer a knowledge 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?