This discovery of Mr. Robertson’s is of stupendous interest. It amounts to nothing less than this: that the pre-Pauline secret sect of “Jesuists” which kept up in Jerusalem the cult of the Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, with his late Persian appendage of a virgin mother Miriam; and, not content with doing that, padded it out with ritual dramas of vegetation-gods, cults of Osiris, of Dionysus, Proteus, Hermes, Janus, and fifty other gods and heroes (whose legends Mr. Robertson has studied in Smith’s Dictionary of Mythology)—this sect, I say, had for its president the Jewish High Priest, and for its “pillars” the apostles, or messengers, whom the said High Priest was in the habit of sending out to the Jews of the Dispersion for the collection of the Temple tribute!
This High Priest, we further learn on p. 342, was the “man” who sent out the apostles in the first verse of Galatians, from which apostles Paul expressly dissociates himself when he writes: “Paul, an apostle, not from men, neither through a man, but through Jesus Christ.” Here we are to understand that Paul is pitting his Sun-God-Saviour Joshua against the Jewish High Priest. The Sun-god has sent him forth, though not the other apostles. That must be Mr. Robertson’s interpretation, and we must give up the older and more obvious one which saw in the words “not from men, neither through man,” no reference to a Jewish high priest or priests, but a mere enhancement of the claim, ever reiterated by Paul, that he owed his apostleship direct to the risen Jesus Christ and God the Father; so that he held a divine and spiritual, not an earthly and carnal, commission.
My readers must by now feel very much like poor little Alice when the Black Queen was dragging her across Wonderland. If they find the sensation delightful, they can, I daresay, enjoy plenty more of it by a closer study of Mr. Robertson’s books on the subject. If they do not like it, then they must not blame me for taking him seriously; for is he not acclaimed by Dr. Drews as our greatest exegete of the New Testament, Dr. Frazer alone excepted? Is he not the spiritual guide of learned German orientalists like Winckler and Jensen? Has not Professor W. B. Smith assured us of how much he feels he can learn from such a scholar and thinker, though “he has preferred not to poach on his preserves.”[4] It is, therefore, incumbent on me to probe his work a little further. Let us return to the passage, [ 1 Cor. xv, 5], where we are told that Jesus appeared first to Cephas. We have already seen that the Peter of the Gospels is in this new system alternately a sign of the Zodiac, a Mithraic myth, an alias of Janus, of Proteus, a member of any other Pantheon you like. Obviously he has nothing to do with Paul’s acquaintance. The latter in turn is “not one of the pupils and companions of the crucified Jesus” (p. 348). How, indeed, could he be, seeing that Jesus is a Sun-god crucified upon the Milky Way? No, he is something much humbler—to wit, “simply one of the apostles of a Judaic cult that preaches circumcision,” and, more definitely, as we have seen, one of the twelve apostles of the Jewish High Priest. James and John must equally have belonged to this interesting band of apostles.
Jesus of Nazareth was Jesus Ben Pandira, This being so, it is pertinent to ask why Paul so persistently indicates that these apostles and pillars of the Church had seen Jesus and conversed with him in the flesh. To this question Mr. Robertson attempts no answer. For he believes that the crucified Jesus, to whom Paul refers on every page of his Epistles, was not the Jesus of Christian tradition, but “Jesus Ben Pandira, dead long before, and represented by no preserved biography or teachings whatever” (p. 378). This Jesus had “really been only hanged on a tree” (ibid.); but “the factors of a crucifixion myth,” among which we must not forget its “phallic significance,” for that “should connect with all its other aspects” (p. 375),—these factors, says Mr. Robertson, “were conceivably strong enough to turn the hanging into a crucifixion.”
who had died one hundred years before It follows that Paul was quite mistaken in indicating the apostles whom he conversed with at Jerusalem to be apostles of the crucified one; in order to be so, they must all have been over-ripe centenarians, since Pandira had died at least a hundred years before. It matters nothing that on the next page (379) Mr. Robertson entertains doubts as to whether this worthy ever lived at all. Who else, he asks (p. 364), could “the Pauline Jesus, who has taught nothing and done nothing,” be, save “a doctrinal evolution from the Jesus of a hundred years before?” We must, he adds with delightful ignoratio elenchi, “perforce assume such a long evolution.” Otherwise it would not be “intelligible that, even if he had been only hanged after stoning, he should by that time have come to figure mythically as crucified.” He admits that Paul’s “references to a crucified Jesus are constant, and offer no sign of interpolation.” And he is quite ready to admit also that, “if the Jesus of Paul were really a personage put to death under Pontius Pilate, the Epistles (of Paul) would give us the strongest ground for accepting an actual crucifixion.” But, alas, the Jesus put to death under Pontius Pilate, the Javelin-man, is no more than an allegory of Joshua the ancient Palestinian Sun-god, rolled up with a vegetation-god and other mythical beings, and slain afresh once a year. There is thus no alternative left but to identify Paul’s crucified Jesus with Jesus Ben Pandira; and Mr. Robertson, with a sigh of relief, embraces the alternative, for he feels that Paul’s evidence is menacing his whole structure.
It was nasty of Paul not to indicate more clearly to us that by his crucified Jesus he intended Jesus Ben Pandira; and, in view of the circumstance that we have left to us no “biography or teachings whatever” of this Jesus, Paul might surely have communicated to us some details of his career. It would have saved Mr. Robertson the trouble of inventing them.
James, brother of Jesus, only in a Pickwickian sense At first sight, too, it was extremely inconsiderate of Paul to “thicken the plot” by bringing on his stage a brother of Jesus Ben Pandira or of the solar myth Joshua. I am not sure which. But Mr. Robertson, like Alice, is out for strange adventures, and prepared to face any emergency. “Brother,” therefore, is here to be taken in a Pickwickian sense only. And here we will let Dr. W. B. Smith take up the parable, for it is he who has, with the help of St. Jerome, found his friends a way out of their difficulty. Moreover, he is more in need of a way out than even Mr. Robertson; for he declines to admit behind Jesus of Nazareth even—what Mr. Robertson styles, p. 364—“a Talmudic trace of a Jesus (Ben Pandira), who was put to death on the eve of the Passover about a century before the time of Pontius Pilate.” Professor Smith cannot hesitate, therefore, to be of opinion that, when Paul calls James a brother of the Lord, he does not “imply any family kinship,” but one of a “class of earnest Messianists, zealots of obedience” to the Mosaic Law. He appeals in confirmation of his conjecture to the apostrophe of Jesus when his mother and brethren came to arrest him as an ecstatic ([Mark iii, 31–35]):—
Who is my mother and my brethren? … whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother and sister and mother.
He also appeals to [ 1 Cor. ix, 5], where Paul alludes to “the brethren of the Lord” as claiming a right to lead about a wife that is a sister. And he argues that those who in Corinth, to the imperilling of Christian unity, said, some, “I am of Cephas”; others, “I am of Christ”; others, “I am of Apollos,” were known as brethren of Christ, of Cephas, etc. Now it is true that Paul and other early Christian writers regarded the members of the Church as brethren or as sisters, just as the members of monastic society have ever styled themselves brothers and sisters of one another. But there is no example of a believer being called a brother of the Lord or of Jesus.[5] The passage in Mark and its parallels are, according to Professor Smith, purely legendary and allegorical, since he denies that Jesus ever lived; and he has no right, therefore, to appeal to them in order to decide what Paul intended by the phrase when he used it, as before, not of a mythical, but of a concrete, case. However, if Professor Smith is intent on appealing to the Gospels, then he must allow equal weight to such a text as [ Matthew xiii, 55]: “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us?”
Did all these people, we may ask, including his mother, stand in a merely spiritual relationship to Jesus? Impossible. If they were not flesh and blood relations, then the passage is meaningless even as allegorical romance. Again, in the very passage to which Professor Smith appeals ([Mark iii, 31–35]), we read that his mother and brethren came and stood without, and it was their interference with him that provoked the famous apostrophe. Were they, too, only spiritually related to him? Were they, too, “earnest Messianists, zealots of obedience”? In John’s Gospel we hear afresh that his brethren believed not in him. Were they, too, mere “earnest Messianists, zealots of obedience”? When Josephus, again, alludes to “James the Just who was brother of Jesus,” is he, an enemy of the Christian faith, adopting Christian slang? Does he, too, mean merely to “denote religious relation without the remotest hint of blood kinship”? In [ 1 Cor. ix, 5], the most natural interpretation is that the brothers of the Lord are his real brothers, whose names are supplied in the Gospels.