It is not true, however, as has recently been stated, that no Jew ever questioned the historical reality of Jesus, so that we may see in this some evidence for his existence. The Jew Trypho, whom Justin introduces in his Dialogue with Trypho, expresses himself very sceptically about it. “Ye follow an empty rumour,” he says, “and make a Christ for yourselves.” “If he was born and lived somewhere, he is entirely unknown” (viii, 3). This work appeared in the second half of the second century; it is therefore the first indication of a denial of the human existence of Jesus, and shows that such opinions were current at the time.
Professor Drews has, I regret to say, failed to read his text intelligently. So I will transcribe the passage of Justin in full, premising that it was more probably written in the first than in the second half of the second century. The dialogue is between a Jew and an ex-Platonist who has turned Christian, and the Jew says with an ironical smile to the Christian:—
The rest of your arguments I admit, and I admire your religious enthusiasm. Nevertheless, you would have done better to stick to Plato’s or any other sage’s philosophy, practising the virtues of endurance and continence and temperance, rather than let yourself be ensnared by false arguments and follow utterly worthless men. For if you had remained loyal to that form of philosophy and lived a blameless life, there was left a hope of your rising to something better. But as it is you have abandoned God and put your trust in man, so what further hope is left to you of salvation? If, then, you are willing to take advice from myself—for I already have come to regard you as a friend—begin first by circumcising yourself, and next keep in the legal fashion the sabbath and the festivals and the new moons of God, and in a word fulfil all the commandments written in the Law, and then perhaps you will attain unto God’s mercy. But Messiah (or Christ), even supposing he has come into being and exists somewhere or other, is unrecognized, and can neither know himself as such nor possess any might, until Elias having come shall anoint him and make him manifest unto all. But you (Christians), having lent ear to a vain report, feign a sort of Messiah unto yourselves, and for his sake are now rashly going to perdition.
There is a parallel passage in the Dialogue, c. cx, where the Christian interlocutor, after reciting the prophecy of [ Micah, iv, 1–7], adds these words:—
I am quite aware, gentlemen, that your rabbis admit all the words of the above passage to have been uttered about, and to refer to the Messiah; and I also know that they deny him so far to have come, or, if they say he has come, then that it is not yet known who he is. However, when he is manifested and in glory, then, they say, it will be known who he is. And then, so they say, the things foreshadowed in the above passage will come to pass.
The Jews in Justin testify to Jesus’s historicity The sense, then, of the passage adduced by Drews is perfectly clear, and exactly the opposite of that which he puts upon it. The Christ or Messiah referred to by the Jew is not that man of Nazareth in whom the Christians had falsely recognized the signs of Messiahship. No, he is, on the contrary, the Messiah expected by the Jews; but the latter has not so far come; or, if he has come, still lurks in some corner unrecognized until such time as Elias, to whom the rôle appertains, shall appear again and proclaim him. There is not a word of Jesus of Nazareth not having come, or of his being still unrecognized. The gravamen of the Jew is that the ex-Platonist had been chicaned by Christians into believing that the Messiah had already come in the person of Jesus, and had been recognized in him. The passage, therefore, has exactly the opposite bearing to what Drews imagines.
Second century Jews did not detest mere shadows There is, too, another very significant point to be made in this connection. It is this, that the Jews of that age would not have borne the bitter grudge they did against the Christians if the latter had merely devoted themselves to the cult of a mythical personage, a Sun-God-Saviour, who never existed at all. They were quite well capable of ridiculing myths of such a kind, as the story of Bel and the Dragon shows. Jesus, however, was a real memory to them, and one which they detested. Their hatred for him was that which you bear for a man who has upset your religion and trampled on your prejudices—the sort of hatred that Catholics have for the memory of Luther and Calvin; it was not in any way akin to their mockery of idols, their disgust for the demons that inhabited them, their abhorrence of their votaries. It was hatred of a religious antagonist, odium theologicum of the purest kind, and hatred like that with which the Ebionites for generations hated the memory of Paul. Jesus had violated and set at naught the law of Moses. A solar myth could not do that.
To this hatred of the Jews for the memory of Jesus, and to the early date at which it showed itself, Dr. Drews himself bears witness when, on p. 12 of the work cited, he writes as follows:—
There is no room for doubt that after the destruction of Jerusalem, and especially during the first quarter of the second century, the hostility of the Jews and Christians increased; indeed, by the year 130 the hatred of the Jews for the Christians became so fierce that a rabbi whose niece had been bitten by a serpent preferred to let her die rather than see her healed “in the name of Jesus.”
Chwolson on early Rabbis Chwolson argues from this and similar episodes that the Rabbis of the second half of the first century, or the beginning of the second, were well acquainted with the person of Christ. “Here,” says Drews, “he clearly deceives himself and his readers if the impression is given that they had any personal knowledge of him.” The self-deception is surely on the part of Dr. Drews. Chwolson does not imply that any Rabbis of the years 50–100 had a personal knowledge of Jesus, in the sense of having seen him or conversed with him; for he is not given to writing nonsense. He does, however, imply that they knew of him as a real man who had lived and done them a power of evil. If they had only known him as a solar myth, their hostility to his followers, admitted by Drews, would be inexplicable; equally inexplicable if, as Dr. W. B. Smith contends, he had been a merely heavenly power, a divine Logos or God, incidentally the object of a monotheist cult. In that case the Jews would rather have been inclined to fall on the neck of the Christians and welcome them; and their cult would have been no more offensive to them than the theosophy of Philo the Jew, from which it would have been hardly distinguishable. Justin Martyr furthermore makes statements on this point which perfectly agree with the story of the hostile Rabbi adduced by Drews. In the Jewish synagogues Jesus was regularly execratedNot in one, but in half-a-dozen, passages he testifies that in his day the Jews in all their synagogues, at the conclusion of their prayers, cursed the memory of Jesus, execrated his name and personality (for name meaned personality in that age), and poured ridicule on the soi-disant Messiah that had been crucified by the Romans. “Even to this day,” Justin exclaims (ch. xciii), “you persevere in your wickedness, imprecating curses on us because we can prove that he whom you crucified is Messiah.” He records (ch. cviii) “that the Jews chose and appointed emissaries whom they sent forth all over the world to proclaim that a godless heresy and unlawful had been vamped up by a certain Jesus, a charlatan of Galilee. They were to warn their compatriots that the disciples had stolen him out of the tomb in which, after being unnailed from the cross, he had been laid, and then pretended that he had been raised from the dead and ascended into heaven.”