whose hypothesis is self-destructive, In the Homeric hymns and other religious documents 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 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, Æsculapius, and who knows what other gods besides. And—strangest feature of all—it is Jews, men circumcised, 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?
and irreconcilable with ascertained history of Judaism The Gospels, like any other ancient document, have to be accounted for. They did not engender themselves, like a mushroom, nor drop out of heaven ready written. I have admitted as possible, though 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 Palestinian rite of human sacrifice in which the annual victim was ‘Jesus the Son of the Father.’ ” There is 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?
Prof. Smith’s hypothesis of a mythical Jesus mythically humanized in a monotheistic propaganda, I was taught in my childhood to venerate the Gospels; but I never knew before what really wonderful documents they are. Let us, however, turn to Professor W. B. Smith, who does not pile on paganism so profusely as his friends, nor exactly insist on a pagan basis for the Gospels. His hypothesis 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 Robertson, a myth. Professor Smith allows (Ecce Deus, 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 be 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 any human character at all; on the contrary, the individuality 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, throughout. He wears only a transparent garment of flesh. Mark historizes only.”
lacks all confirmation, defies the texts, How is it, we ask, that humanity has pored over the Synoptic Gospels for nearly two thousand years, 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. Moreover, 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. As 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 all that Lord or Son of God[1] implies in Mark’s opening verses). He has become the eternal Logos or Reason, essentially divine and from the beginning with God. and rests on an obsolete and absurd allegorization of themHere 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 goes out of his way to call our attention to the fact 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 superimposition on the man Jesus of the Logos scheme, and the reflection back into the human life of Jesus of the heavenly rôle 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 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.
Why should the robber chief Joshua have been selected as prototype of Jesus? A thesis that begins by flying in the face of the documents demands paradoxical arguments for its support; and the pages of all three writers teem with them. Of a Jesus that is God from the first it is perhaps natural to ask—anyhow our authors have asked it of themselves—which God was he? And 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 Iesouē, and later as Iesous. 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 ancient history and mythology,[2] 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–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, et sic ad infinitum.
Why make him the central figure of a monotheistic cult? What, asks Professor Smith (Ecce Deus, p. 67), was the active principle of Christianity? What its germ? “The monotheistic impulse,” he answers, “the instinct 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 earliest Christianity was no monotheistic propaganda This is, no doubt, true of Christianity when we pass outside the Gospels. It is only not true of them, because on their every page Jewish monotheism is presupposed. Why are no warnings against polytheism put into the mouth of Jesus? Why is not a 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 knowledge 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 you if you address him in the detested German tongue.
Robertson and Drews allow the Jesuists to have been mainly Jewish in cult and feeling Messrs. Robertson and Drews concede that the original stock of Christianity was Jewish. Thus we read in Christianity and Mythology (p. 415) that the Lord’s Prayer derives “from pre-Christian Jewish lore, and, like parts of the Sermon (on the Mount), from an actually current Jewish document.” The same writer 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, 6–13], and parallel passages, being “in all probability a late addendum” to the “primitive gospel” of Bernhard Weiss’s theory, “made after the movement had become pronouncedly Gentile,” he presupposes that, to start with anyhow, the movement was mainly Jewish. He admits that in the first six paragraphs of the early Christian document entitled the Didaché 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.”[3] 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-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.
If so, how could they devote themselves to pagan mystery plays? What I want to know is how it came about that a society of which Jerusalem was the focus, and of which 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.”
Robertson admits that Jews could never borrow from pagan rituals in that age We are far better acquainted with Jewish belief and ritual during the period B.C. 400–A.D. 100 than we 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. Here we have the prophets, old and late; for the two centuries B.C. 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 centuries. Here let Mr. Robertson speak. As regards the Lord’s Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount, he insists (p. 415 foll.) 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 borrowed from the rituals of the pagans.”