Yet affirms that Christists, indistinguishable from Jews, did so borrow wholesale And yet he asks us to believe that a nucleus of Jews, hidden in Jerusalem, the heart of Judaism, a sect whose apostles were Judaizers and vehement defenders of circumcision—all this he admits—were, as late as the last half of the first century, maintaining among themselves in secret a highly eclectic pagan cult; that they evolved “a gospel myth from scenes in pagan art” (p. 327); that they took a sort of modern archæological 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, Æsculapius, 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); that Maria is the true and original form of the Hebrew Miriam, and is the same name as Myrrha and Moira (μοῖρα), etc., etc.
The central idea of a God Joshua a figment of Robertson’s fancy 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, unreconciled 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 explain the birth legends of the ChristiansIt 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 comparison 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): “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 composition, which obviously began at what is now the third chapter, has no hint of the taxing.”
Evidence of the Protevangelion This is good sense, and I am indebted to him for pointing out that so loosely was the myth compacted that in the Protevangelion (c. 17) the statement is that it was decreed “that all should be enrolled who were in Bethlehem of Judæa,” not all Jews over the entire world.
Robertson assumes the antiquity of the legend merely to suit his theory Surely all this implies that the legend of the miraculous birth was no part of the earliest tradition about Jesus. Nevertheless, it is so important for Mr. Robertson’s thesis (that Jesus was a mythical personage) that he should from the first have had 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.
The “Christists” at once extravagantly pagan and extravagantly monotheist and Jewish I have adduced in the preceding pages a selection of the mythological equations of Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews in order that my readers may realize how faint a resemblance between stories justifies, in their minds, a derivation or borrowing of one from the other. Nor do they ever ask themselves how Jewish “Christists” were likely to come in contact with out-of-the-way legends of Bacchus or Dionysus, of Hermes, 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 Æsculapius, 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, O Israel: “Christians borrowed myths of all kinds from Paganism” (Christianity and Mythology, p. xii). And we are pompously assured (p. xxii, op. cit.) that this new “mythic” system is, “in general, more ‘positive,’ more inductive, less à priori, more obedient to scientific 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 anthropological basis, in terms of the concrete phenomena of mythology, for a pseudo-philosophical presupposition.” Heaven help the new science of anthropology!
A receipt for the concoction of a gospel And what end, we may ask, had the “Jesuists” and “Christists” (to use Mr. Robertson’s jargon) in view, when they 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 popular pagan myth-motives,[4] with some Judaic elements as nucleus and some explicit ethical teaching superadded” (p. 34). 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. You 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-Shakesperians we have seen nothing like it.
[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. [↑]
[2] For example, he gravely asserts (Die Weltanschauung des 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., p. 96), 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 compiled. [↑]
[3] Cp. p. 342: “In all his allusions to the movement of his day he (Paul) is dealing with Judaizing apostles who preached circumcision.” And p. 348: “Paul’s Cephas is simply one of the apostles of a Judaic cult that preaches circumcision.” [↑]