[4] To wit, of a Sun-god, who is also Mithras and Osiris, and of a Vegetation-god annually slain on the sacred tree. We are gravely informed that “not till Dr. Frazer had done his work was the psychology of the process ascertained.” Dr. Frazer must be blushing at this tribute to his psychological insight. [↑]
Chapter III
THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE
Multiplicity of documents converging on and involving an historical Jesus I have remarked above that if the Gospel of Mark were an isolated writing, if we knew nothing of its fortunes, nothing of any society that accepted it as history; if, above all, we were without any independent documents that fitted in with it and mentioned the persons and events that crowd its pages, then it would be a possible hypothesis that it was like the Recognitions of Clement, a skilfully contrived romance. Such a hypothesis, I said, would indeed be improbable, yet not unthinkable or self-destructive. But as a matter of fact we have an extensive series of documents, independent of Mark, yet attesting by their undesigned coincidences its historicity—not, of course, in the sense that we must accept everything in it, but anyhow in the sense that it is largely founded on fact and is a record of real incident. Were it a mere romance of events that never happened, and of people who never lived, would it not be a first-class miracle that in another romance, concocted apart from it and in ignorance of its contents, the same outline of events met our gaze, the same personages, the same atmosphere, moral, intellectual, and religious, the same interests? If in a third and fourth writing the same phenomenon recurred, the marvel would be multiplied. Would any sane person doubt that there was a substratum of fact and real history underlying them all? It would be as if several tables in the gambling saloon of Monte Carlo threw up the same series of numbers—say, 8, 3, 11, 7, 33, 21—simultaneously and independently of one another. A few of the habitués—for Monte Carlo is a great centre of superstition—might take refuge in the opinion that the tables were bewitched; but most men would infer that there was human collusion and conspiracy to produce such a result, and that the croupiers of the several tables were in the plot.
Mark and Q the two earliest documents Now Mark’s Gospel does not stand alone. As I have pointed out in Myth, Magic, and Morals, Luke and Matthew hold in solution as it were a second document, called Q (Quelle), or the non-Marcan, which yields us a few incidents and a great many sayings and parables of Jesus. Now this second document, so utterly separate from and independent of Mark that it does not even allude to the crucifixion and death episodes, nevertheless has Jesus all through for its central figure. No doubt it ultimately came out of the same general medium as Mark; but that consideration does not much diminish the weight of its testimony. If I met two people a hundred yards apart both coming from St. Paul’s Cathedral, and if they both assured me that they had just been listening to a sermon of Dr. Inge’s, I should not credit them the less because they had been together in church.
That both these documents—I mean Mark and the non-Marcan—were in circulation at a fairly early date is certain on many grounds. So great a scholar as Wellhausen, a scholar untrammelled by ties of orthodoxy, shows in his commentary that Mark, as it lies before us, must have been redacted before the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70; so vague are its forecasts of disasters that were to befall the holy city. In Luke, on the other hand, these forecasts are accommodated to the facts, as we should expect to be the case in an author who wrote after the blow had fallen.
The first and third Gospels constitute two more such documents And another consideration arises here. Matthew and Luke wrote quite independently of one another—for they practically never join hands across Mark—and yet they both assume in their compilations that these two basal documents, Mark and the non-Marcan, are genuine narratives of real events. They allow themselves, indeed, according to the literary fashion of the age, to re-arrange, modify, and omit episodes in them; but their manner of handling and combining the two documents is in general inexplicable on the hypothesis that they considered them to be mere romances. They are too plainly in earnest, too eager to find in them material for the life of a master whom they revered. Luke in particular prefixes a personal letter to one Theophilus, explaining the purpose of his compilation. In it we find not a word about the transcribing of Osiris dramas. On the contrary, it will set in order for Theophilus a story in which he had already been instructed. It is clear that Theophilus had already been made acquainted with “the facts about Jesus,” perhaps insufficiently, perhaps along lines which Luke deprecated. Luke’s prologue argues an indefinite number more of such documentsHowever this be, Luke desires to improve upon the information which Theophilus had so far acquired about Jesus. It is clear that written and unwritten traditions of Jesus were already disseminated among believers. The prologue is inexplicable otherwise, and it implies a whole series of witnesses to the historicity of Jesus prior to Luke himself, of whom, as I have said, we still have Mark and can reconstruct Q. Both Matthew (whoever he was) and Luke, then, are convinced of the historicity of Jesus, and regarded Mark and Q as historical sources. They exploit them, and they also try to fill up lacunas left in these basal documents, and in particular to supply their readers with some account of his birth and upbringing. Both supplements, of course, are largely fictitious, that of Matthew in particular; but they both testify to a fixed consciousness and belief among early Christians that the Messiah was a real historical person. Such an interest in the birth and upbringing of Jesus as Matthew and Luke reveal could never have been felt by sectaries who were well aware that he was not a real person, but a solar myth and first cousin of Osiris. Had he been known, even by a few believers and no more, to have been not a man but a composite myth, people would not have craved for details, even miraculous, about his birth and parentage and upbringing. Was it necessary to concoct human pedigrees for a solar myth, and to pretend that Jacob begat Joseph, and Joseph begat Jesus? The very idea is absurd. They wanted such details, and got them, just as did the worshippers of Plato, Alexander, Augustus, Apollonius, and other famous men. In connection with Osiris and Dionysus such details were never asked for and never supplied.
Implications of Luke’s exordium In the covering letter which forms a sort of exordium to his Gospel the following are the words in which Luke assures us that others before himself had planned histories of the life of Jesus:—
Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have been fully established (or fulfilled) among us, even as they delivered them unto us which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having traced out the course of all things accurately from the first, to write them unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus; that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed.