Difficulties about Judas And yet he notes (p. 354) that in the fragments of the Peter Gospel recently recovered from the sands of Egypt, Jesus is still credited with twelve disciples immediately after the crucifixion, and it is therein related that they “wept and grieved” at the loss of their master. No hint, Mr. Robertson justly remarks, is here given of the defection of Judas from the group. No more is any hint given of it in Paul’s Epistle. These two sources, therefore, support each other in a most unexpected manner in ignoring the Judas story. At the same time twelve disciples or apostles (in the context they are the same thing) are incredible as an interpolation; for an interpolator would have adjusted his interpolation to the early diffused story of Judas’s treason, and have written not “the Twelve,” but “the Eleven.”
Mr. Robertson admits that “at the stage of the composition of this (the Peter) Gospel, the Judas myth was not current,” and that therefore the “Judas myth” is later than that of the Twelve. It must, by parity of reasoning, be later than the text of Paul, which, therefore, if interpolated, must have been interpolated before the legend, if such it be, of Judas the traitor got abroad. Now we already meet with this legend in Mark, and it is taken over from him by the other evangelists, Matthew embellishing it with the tale of Judas hanging himself, and Luke in Acts with that of his bursting asunder. Papias, before A.D. 140, knew of further details of Judas’s story of a most macabre kind; the story stood also in the lost form of gospel used by Celsus, about 160–180, against whom Origen wrote. The tale of Judas, then, was of wide and early diffusion; yet Mr. Robertson, as we have seen, admits that at the time when the Peter Gospel emerged the Judas myth was not yet abroad. Neither, then, can it have been current at the stage of the interpolating of Paul’s Epistle, and this interpolation, therefore, is prior to all the Gospels, to Acts, and to the sources used by Papias and by the authors of the Peter Gospel and of Celsus’s Gospel. Nevertheless, on p. 357, Mr. Robertson, as a last method of avoiding Paul’s testimony on another point, is inclined to “decide with Van Manen that all the Pauline Epistles are pseudepigraphic,” and merely express the views of “second-century Christian champions.” He therefore commits himself to the supposition that Epistles forged not earlier than A.D. 130, were yet interpolated in the interests of a tradition in which “the Twelve are treated as holding together after the resurrection (p. 354),” which tradition, however, must have long before that date been abrogated by the growing popularity of the Judas myth. Could texts be treated with greater levity? I may also note that the inconsistency of Paul’s statement that Jesus “was seen” by the Twelve with the Judas story was so patent to scribes of the third and fourth centuries that they had already begun to alter it in the Greek texts and versions to the statement that “he was seen by the Eleven.” Now is it likely that Paul’s text at any time would have been interpolated in such a way as to make it contradict so early and popular a Christian belief as that in the treason and hurried suicide of Judas? The hypothesis is absurd, and not the less absurd because it is framed merely to save the other hypothesis that the twelve apostles of the Gospels were for the authors of the Gospels and for their readers an allegory of the twelve signs of the Zodiac revolving round the solar myth Joshua. Such are the lengths to which the exigencies of his “mythic” system drive Mr. Robertson.
Paul testifies that the older apostles conversed with Jesus Some texts which imply that Paul, if he did not actually see Jesus walking about on this earth, yet imply that he might have done so, he seems to despair of, and passes them over in silence. Such is the text, [ 2 Cor. v, 16]: “Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh: even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more.”
The older apostles, as is implied in verse 12 of the same chapter, prided themselves on their personal intercourse with Jesus, and twitted Paul with never having enjoyed it. Paul’s answer is that henceforth—i.e., now that he is converted—he has no interest in any man, not even in Jesus, as a being of flesh and blood, but only as a vessel filled with the spirit of election, and so a new creature in Christ, the first member of the heavenly kingdom on earth. He seems to aver that he had actually seen his Redeemer in the flesh, but before he was converted. But such knowledge with him counts nothing in his own favour; nor will he allow it to count in favour of the older apostles. Their association with Jesus in the flesh failed to render them apostles in any other sense than his vision of the risen Jesus rendered him one also.
But there are other texts in Paul most inconvenient to the zodiacal theory of the apostles. Such are the texts I have cited from Galatians. How does Mr. Robertson get rid of their evidence?
Epistle to Galatians attests reality of Peter, John, and James He begins (p. 342) with the usual caveat that the Epistle to the Galatians is probably not genuine, and, even if it be, is nevertheless “frequently interpolated.” And yet any reader, with eyes in his head and an intelligence behind them, must recognize in this Epistle a writing which, above all other ancient writings, rings true, and is instinct with the personality of a missionary, who in it bares his inmost heart to his converts. Against this impression, which it must leave upon anyone but a pedant, and against the fact that in the external tradition there is nothing to suggest either that it is not genuine or that it is a mass of interpolations, what has Mr. Robertson to offer us in support of his thesis? Nothing, except his ipse dixit. We are to accept on a purely philological question the verdict of one whose mythological equations are on a par with those of the editors of the Banner of Israel. However, he does condescend to explain away the apostles with whom, at Jerusalem, Paul held personal converse; and, taking from Professor W. B. Smith a cue, which is also caught at by Professor Drews, he assures us that the Peter (or Cephas), James, and John, whom Paul knew personally, were not men who had been “in direct intercourse with Jesus,” but were merely “leaders of an existing sect”—i.e., of the secret sect of Jews who, after celebrating endless ritual dramas of annually slain Joshuas and vegetation-gods, had, by dint of prolonged archæological study of pagan mythology, art, and statuary, elaborated the four Gospels, adopted the Old Testament as their holy scripture, and Messianic Judaism as their distinctive creed; for such in essence the Christianity of the last half of the first century was, as even Mr. Robertson will hardly deny.
But Paul ([Gal. i, 18, 19]) expressly ranks Peter, or Cephas, together with James, among the apostles, using that word in a wide sense of persons commissioned by Jesus; and he describes James and Cephas and John ([ii, 9]) as men “who were reputed to be pillars,” or leading men of the Church. He declares that in the end they made friends with him, and arranged that he should preach the Kingdom to the uncircumcised Gentiles as they were doing to the circumcised Jews.
The “Twelve” were apostles of the Jewish High Priest! Now who had commissioned these three apostles, if not Jesus? Who had taught them about the Kingdom and sent them forth to proclaim it? Mr. Robertson, oddly enough, scents a difficulty in the idea of a Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, albeit son of Miriam a virgin, sending forth apostles; so he decides that “apostles” in Galatians means “the twelve apostles of the Patriarch, of whom he must have had knowledge” (p. 342). Of what Patriarch? Why, of course, “of the Patriarch or High Priest,” whose “twelve apostles” formed “an institution which preceded and survived the beginning of the Christian era” (p. 344). And, to use Mr. Robertson’s own phrase in such connections, “the plot thickens” when we find (ibid.) that
the twelve Jewish Apostles aforesaid, who were commissioned by the High Priest—and later by the Patriarch at Tiberias—to collect tribute from the scattered faithful,
were no others than the Twelve Apostles who wrote the And they wrote the Didaché!“teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” recovered in 1873 by Bryennios! These “Judaizing apostles preached circumcision,”[3] and “were among the leaders of the Jesuist community in its pre-Pauline days.”