This is not the tone of a man who trades in sun-myths. The passage has a thoroughly bona fide ring, and declares (1) that Theophilus had already been instructed in the Gospel narrative, but not so accurately as the writer could wish; (2) that several accounts of Jesus’s life and teaching were in circulation; (3) that these accounts were based on the traditions of those who had seen Jesus and assisted in the diffusion of his Messianic and other teachings.
The passage cannot be later than A.D. 100, and is probably as early as A.D. 80; many scholars put it earlier. In any case, it reveals a consciousness, stretching far back among believers, that Jesus had really lived and died. Moreover, it is from the pen of one who either had himself visited, with Paul, James the brother (or, according to the orthodox, the half-brother) of Jesus at Jerusalem ([Acts xxi, 17]), or—if not that—anyhow had in his possession and made copious use of a travel document written by the companion of Paul.
Luke probably used a document independent of Mark and Q A study of Luke also suggests that he had a third narrative document of his own. Thus, without going outside the Synoptic Gospels, we have two, if not three, wholly independent accounts of the doings and sayings of Jesus, and an inferential certainty that they were not the only ones which then existed. In the earliest Christian writers, moreover, citations occur that cannot well be referred to the canonical Gospels, but which may very well have been taken from the other narratives which Luke assures us were in the possession of the earliest Church. These narratives, like all other wholly or partly independent documents, must have differed widely from one another in detail; for their authors probably handled the tradition as freely as Matthew and Luke handle Mark. Messianic and apocalyptic character of these early documentsBut the inspiring motive of them all was the belief that a human Messiah had founded, or rather begun, the community of believers in Palestine. That any of them were contemporary is improbable, for the simple reason that the eyes of believers were turned, not backward on the life of the herald, but forward to the Kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven on earth which he heralded. They all felt themselves to be living in the last days, and that the Kingdom was to surprise many of them during their lifetime. Nor among the earliest believers was this expectation confined to Jews alone; it extended equally to Gentile converts. Thus Paul, in his epistles to the Corinthians, labours to answer the pathetic query his converts had addressed to him—namely, why the kingdom to come so long delayed; why many of them had fallen sick and some had died, while yet it tarried. Men and women who breathed such an atmosphere of tense expectation, as a passage like this and as the Gospel parables reveal, could not be solicitous for annals of the past. Still less is the attitude revealed that of people nurtured on ritual dramas of an annually slain and annually resuscitated god; for in that case they only needed to wait for the manifestation they yearned for, until the following spring, when the god would rise afresh to secure salvation for his votaries. The tone of this passage of Paul, as of all the earliest Christian documents, shows that the mind’s eye of the common believer, as had been the founder’s, was dazzled with the apocalyptic splendours soon to be revealed, with the beatitudes shortly to be fulfilled in the faithful. They were as wayfarers walking in a dark night towards a light which is far off, yet, because of its brightness and of the lack of an interposed landscape to fix the perspective, seems close at hand. Many a Socialist workman, especially on the continent, cherishes a similar dream of a good time coming ere long for himself and his fellows. He has no sense of the difficulties which for many a weary year—perhaps for ever—will hinder the realization of his passionately desired ideal. It is better so, for we live by our enthusiasms, and are the better for having indulged in them; if the labourer had none, he would be a chilly, useless being. Happily the Socialist seldom reflects how commonplace he would probably find his ideal if it were suddenly realized around him. Such were the eschatological hopes and dreams rife in the circles among which the Synoptic Gospels and their constituent documents first saw the light; they are revealed on their every page, and, needless to say, are inexplicable on Mr. Robertson’s hypothesis. Devoid of sympathy with his subject, incapable of seeing it against its true background, without tact or perspective, he has never felt or understood the difficulties which beset his central hypothesis. He therefore attempts no explanation of them.
Character of the Fourth Gospel Of the Fourth Gospel I have already said whatever is strictly necessary in this connection. It hangs together with the Johannine epistles; and its writer certainly had the Gospel of Mark before him, for he derives many incidents from it, and often covertly controverts it. It seems to belong to the end of the first century, and was in the hands of Gnostic sects fairly early in the second—say about 128. When it was written, the Gnosis of the Hellenized Jews, and in especial of Philo, was invading the primitive community. The Messianic and human traits of Jesus, still so salient in Mark and Matthew, though less so in Luke, are receding into the background before the opinion that he had been the representation in flesh of the eternal Logos. All his conversations are re-written to suit the newer standpoint; the homely scenes and surroundings of Galilee are forgotten as much as can be, and Samaria and Jerusalem—a more resounding theatre—are substituted. The teaching in parables is dropped, and we hear no more of the exorcisms of devils. Such things were unedifying, and unworthy of so sublime a figure, as much in the mind of this evangelist as of the fastidious Professor W. B. Smith. Hence it may be said that the Fourth Gospel has made the fortune of the Catholic Church; without it Athanasius could never have triumphed, nor the Nicene Creed have been penned, nor Professor Smith’s diatribes have attracted readers. It is half-doceticFor in it Jesus is becoming unreal, a divine pedant masquerading in a vesture of flesh. When it was written, the Docetes, as they were called, were already beginning to dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s” of the teachers who sublimated Jesus into the Philonian Logos; and, as I said above, it is against them, no doubt, that the caveat—so necessary in the context—is entered that in Jesus the Word was made flesh. Similarly, in the Johannine epistles certain teachers are denounced who declared that Jesus Christ had not come in the flesh, and taught that his flesh was only a blind. Ignatius’s account of DocetismWe have a fairly full account of these docetic teachers in the Epistles of Ignatius, which cannot be much later than A.D. 120. From these we gather that they adopted the ordinary tradition about Jesus, and believed that he had been born, and eaten and drunk, had walked about with his disciples, had delivered his teaching by word of mouth, had been crucified by Pontius Pilate, had died, and been buried. But all these operations had been unreal and subjective in the minds of those who were present at them, as are things we see in a dream. They had taken place to the eye and ear of bystanders, but not in reality. The partizans, therefore, of the view that Jesus never lived deceive themselves when they appeal to the Docetes as witnesses on their side. The Docetes lend no colour to their thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus, but just the opposite. Drews writes (p. 57) that
Drews misunderstands Gnosticismthe Gnostics of the second century really questioned the historical existence of Jesus by their docetic conception; in other words, they believed only in a metaphysical and ideal, not an historical and real, Christ. The whole polemic of the Christians against the Gnostics was based essentially on the fact that the Gnostics denied the historicity of Jesus, or at least put it in a subordinate position.
This is nonsense. The Docetes admitted to the full that the Messiah had appeared on earth; but, partly to meet the Jewish objections to a crucified Messiah, and partly inspired by that contempt for matter which was and is common in the East, and has been the inspiring motive of much vain asceticism, they shrank from believing that he shared with ordinary men their flesh and blood, their secretions and evacuations. Matter was too evil for a Messiah, much more for the heavenly Logos, to have been encased in it, and so subjected to its dominion; to ascribe real flesh to him was to humble him before the evil Demiurge, who created matter. Docetes accepted current Christian traditionThe Docetes accordingly took refuge in the idea that his body was a phantom, and that in phantom form he had undergone all that was related of him in Christian tradition; to which their views bear testimony, instead of contradicting it, as Dr. Drews and his friends pretend. “If these things,” writes Ignatius, “were done by our Lord in Semblance, then am I also a prisoner in semblance.” This means that—mutatis mutandis—the arguments of the Docetes would turn Ignatius too, chains and all, into a phantom. Again and again this writer affirms that the Docetes believed quite correctly that Jesus was born of a virgin and baptized by John, was nailed up for our sakes under Pontius Pilate and Herod the Tetrarch, that he suffered, died, and raised himself up out of the grave. They only would not believe that he underwent and performed all this truly—that is, objectively. They insisted that the Saviour had only been among men as a phantom, in the same manner as Helen had gone through the siege of Troy as a mere phantom. She was not really there, though Greeks and Trojans saw and met her daily. She was all the time enjoying herself amid the asphodel meadows of the Nile. Even so the disciples, according to the Docetes, had heard and seen Jesus all through his ministry; yet the body they saw was phantasmal only. The Docetes also argued—so we can infer from Ignatius’s Epistle to the Church of Smyrna—that, as Jesus ate and drank after the resurrection in phantom guise, so he had eaten and drunk before his death in no other than phantom guise. The answer of Ignatius to this is: “I know and believe that he was in the flesh even after the resurrection”; and he forthwith relates how the risen Jesus approached Peter and his company, who thought they were in the presence of a phantom or ghost, and said to them: “Lay hold and handle me, and see that I am not a demon without a body.” Everything, then, that we read about the Docetes shows that on all points, in respect of the miraculous incidents of Jesus’s life no less than of the natural, they blindly accepted the record of evangelical tradition. Their heresy was not to deny what the tradition related, but to interpret it wrongly. Docetism in Philo, Philo had long before set the example of such an interpretation, when in his commentaries, which were widely read by Christians in the second century, he asserted that the angels who appeared to Abraham at the oak of Mambre, and ate and drank with him, only ate and drank in semblance, and not in reality. They laid a spell on the eyes of Abraham, and of the other guests at the banquet. and in TobitSo in the Book of [ Tobit xii, 19], the angel says: “All these days did I appear unto you; and I did neither eat nor drink, but it was a vision ye yourselves saw.”
In the same way, Jesus laid a spell on the eyes of his followers, in the belief of this very early sect of Christian believers. Professor Smith and Hippolytus Professor W. B. Smith, like his two companions, writes as if Docetism were an asset in favour of his thesis that Christianity began as the cult of a slain God, and that “the humanization of this divinity proceeds apace as we descend the stream of tradition.” Yet the Docetic doctrine, as given in the report of Hippolytus, and adduced by Mr. Smith himself (p. 88), exactly bears out the estimate of its import with which one rises from a study of the Ignatian Epistles. It is from Hippolytus’s Refutation of Heresies, viii, 10, and runs thus:—
Having come from above, he (Jesus) put on the begotten (body), and did all things just as has been written in the Gospels; he washed himself in Jordan, etc.
Hippolytus was in contact with Docetes, and familiar with their writings and arguments. What better proof could we have than this citation of the fact that they servilely adopted the traditions of Jesus recorded in the Gospels? They were not supplying an answer to imaginary Jews who had objected to Christianity on the score that Jesus had never lived. Their speciality was to interpret the Gospel record, which they did not dream of disputing, along phantasmagoric lines. There was still left in the Church enough common sense and historic insight to brush their interpretation on one side as nonsensical.
Drews misunderstands Justin Martyr Drews once more has conjured up out of Justin Martyr a Jew of the second century who denied the human existence of Jesus. The relevant passage is at p. 16 of his Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, and runs as follows:—