Eusebius’s evidence on this point At first sight the above is a mere réchauffé of [ Matt. xxviii, 13]; but Eusebius, who had in his hands much first- and second-century literature of the Christians and Hellenized Jews that we have not, attests a similar tradition, and declares that he found it in the publications of the ancients.[1]
The priests and elders of the Jewish race who lived in Jerusalem wrote epistles and sent them broadcast to the Jews everywhere among the Gentiles, calumniating the teaching of Christ as a brand-new heresy and alien to God; and they warned them by letters not to receive it. And their apostles took their epistles, written on papyrus … and ran up and down the earth, maligning our account of the Saviour …. It is still the custom of the Jews to give the name of Apostles to those who carry encyclical letters from their rulers.
Note that Eusebius does not weave in the story of the disciples stealing their Master’s body from out of the tomb. From his omission of it, and from the dissimilarity of his language, we can infer that the “publications of the ancients” from which he derived his information were not the works of Justin, but an independent source, which may also have been in Justin’s hands. In any case, the Jews were not given to tilting at windmills; their secular and bitter hatred of the very name of Jesus, the relentless war waged with pen and sword from the first between the Christians and themselves—all this is attested by the earliest writings of the Church. It already colours Luke’s Gospel, and is a leading inspiration of the Johannine. It alone is all-sufficient to dissipate the hypotheses of these twentieth-century fabulists.
Evidence of Acts Let us turn to the Acts of the Apostles, the only book of the New Testament which contains a history of the Apostolic age. In the last half of this book is embedded, as even Van Manen admitted, a travel document or narrative of voyage undertaken by its author in common with Paul. Whether or no the fellow-traveller was the compiler of the Third Gospel and of Acts is not certain; but he was assuredly a man named Luke. It does not matter. “It is not,” writes Dr. Drews (Christ Myth, p. 19),
the imagined historical Jesus, but, if anyone, Paul, who is that “great personality” that called Christianity into life as a new religion; and the depth of his moral experience gave it the strength for its journey, the strength which bestowed upon it victory over the other competing religions. Without Jesus the rise of Christianity can be quite well understood; without Paul, not so.
Van Manen on Acts and Paul We infer from the above that, on the whole, Drews accepts the narrative of Paul’s sayings and doings as given in Acts, and does not consider it a mere record of the feats a solar hero performed, not on earth, but in heaven. We gather also that Mr. Robertson takes the same indulgent view of Acts, for he frequently impugns the age of the Pauline epistles and the evidence they contain on the strength of “Van Manen’s thesis of the non-genuineness” of them. “In point of fact,” he writes (p. 453), “Van Manen’s whole case is an argument; Dr. Carpenter’s is a simple declaration.”
But Van Manen never for a moment questioned the historical reality of Jesus. What he insisted upon is[2] that
there is no word, nor any trace, of any essential difference as regards faith and life between Paul and other disciples …. He is a “disciple” among the “disciples.” What he preaches is substantially nothing else than what their mind and heart are full of—the things concerning Jesus.
Van Manen, however, allows
that Paul’s journeyings, his protracted sojourn outside of Palestine, his intercourse in foreign parts with converted Jews and former heathen, may have emancipated him (as it did so many other Jews of the Dispersion) without his knowing it, more or less—perhaps in essence completely—from circumcision and other Jewish religious duties, customs, and rites.