If this be so, we had better abolish our chairs of history at the universities, and give up teaching it in the schools; for, in the absence of the camera and gramophone, this method is the only one we can use. When a Mommsen sets Polybius’s, Livy’s, and Plutarch’s lives of Hannibal side by side and “tests them down to an apparent nucleus of primitive narrative,” does Mr. Robertson take him as a text for a disquisition on “the psychological Resistance to Evidence”? If not, why does he forbid us to take the score or so of independent memories and records of the career of Jesus which we have in ancient literature between the years A.D. 50 and 120, and to try to sift them down? Why, without any evidence, should we rush to the conclusion that the figure on whom they jointly converge was a Sun-god, solar myth, or vegetation sprite?
New Testament literature taken en bloc Secondly, we may note how this disinclination to sift sources and test documents prompts them to take en bloc sources and documents which arose separately and in succession. Yet it is not simple laziness which dictates to them this short and easy method of dealing with ancient documents. Rather they have inherited it from the old-fashioned orthodox teachers of a hundred years ago, who, convinced of the verbal inspiration of the Bible, forbade us to estimate one passage as evidence more highly than another. All the verses of the Bible were on a level, as also all the incidents, and to argue that one event might have happened, but not another, was rank blasphemy. All were equally certain, for inspiration is not given by measure. Their mantle has fallen on Mr. Robertson and his friends. All or none is their method; but, whereas all was equally certain, now all is equally myth. “A document,” says (p. 159) the excellent work by MM. Langlois and Seignobos which I cited above,
(still more a literary work) is not all of a piece; it is composed of a great number of independent statements, any one of which may be intentionally or unintentionally false, while the others are bonâ fide and accurate …. It is not, therefore, enough to examine a document as a whole; each of the statements in it must be examined separately; criticism is impossible without analysis.
We have beautiful examples of such mixed criticism and analysis in the commentaries on the Synoptics of Wellhausen and Loisy, both of them Freethinkers in the best sense of the word.
Incapacity of this school to understand evolution of Christian ideas, I have given several minor examples of the obstinacy with which the three writers I am criticizing shut their eyes to the gradual evolution of Christian ideas; they exhibit the same perversity in respect of the great development of Christological thought already traceable in the New Testament.
Paul conceived of Jesus as a Jewish teacher elevated through his death and resurrection to the position of Messiah and Son of God. On earth he is still a merely human being, born naturally, and subject to the law—a weak man of flesh. Raised from the dead by the energy of the Spirit, he becomes future judge of mankind, and his gospel transcends all distinctions of Jew and Gentile, bondsman or free. In Mark he is still merely human; he is the son of Joseph and Mary, born and bred like their other sons and daughters. As a man he comes to John the Baptist, like others, to confess and repent of his sins, and wash them away in Jordan’s holy stream. Not till then does the descent of the Spirit on him, as he goes up from the Jordan, confer a Messiahship on him, which his followers only recognize later on. Astounding miracles and prodigies, however, are already credited to him in this our earliest Gospel. In the non-Marcan document, or Q, so far as we can reconstruct it, he has become Messiah through baptism (supposing this section to have belonged to Q, and not to some other document used by Luke and Matthew); but few or no miracles[1] are as yet credited to him, and the document contained little except his teaching. His death has none of the importance assigned to it by Paul, and is not mentioned; his resurrection does not seem to have been heard of by the author of this document. In Matthew and Luke the figure before us is much the same as in Mark; but human traits, such as his mother’s distrust of his mission, are effaced. We hear no more of his inability to heal those who did not believe in him, and we get in their early chapters hints of his miraculous birth. In John there is, indeed, no hint of such birth; but, on the other hand, the entire Gospel is here rewritten to suit a new conception of him as the divine, eternal Logos. Demonology tales are ruled out. His rôle as a Jewish Messiah, faithful to the law, has finally retired into the background, together with that tense expectation of the end of the world, of the final judgment and installation in Palestine of a renovated kingdom of David, which inspires the teaching and parables of the Synoptic Gospels, just as it inspired Philo, and the Apocalypse of the Fourth Esdras and other contemporary Jewish apocrypha.
especially in connection with the legend of Virgin Birth, Now, in Mr. W. B. Smith’s works this development of doctrine about Jesus, this succession of phases, is not only reversed, but, with singular perversity, turned upside down. Similarly, Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews, in order to secure a favourable reception for their hypothesis that Jesus was a Sun-god, insist in the teeth of the evidence that the belief in the Virgin Birth was part and parcel of the earliest tradition. As a matter of fact, it was comparatively late, as the heortology or history of the feasts of the Church shows. Of specially Christian feasts, the first was the Sunday, which commemorated every week the Resurrection, and the hope of the Parousia, or Second Coming. The next was the Epiphany, on January 6, commemorative of the baptism when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus and conferred Messiahship.
This feast we cannot trace before the year 125 or 150, and then only among Basilidians; among Catholics hardly before 300. Just as the story of the Virgin Birth was the latest addition to evangelical tradition, so it was the latest of the dominical feasts; and not till 354 did it obtain separate recognition in Rome on December 25. Of the feast of the Annunciation and of the other feasts of the Virgin we first hear in the sixth and succeeding centuries. From this outline we can realize at how late a period the legend of the Virgin Birth influenced the mind of the Church at large; yet Mr. Robertson, to smooth the way for his “mythic” theory, pretends that it was the earliest of all Christian beliefs, and without a tittle of evidence invents a pre-Christian Saviour-Sun-god Joshua, born of a virgin, Miriam. The whole monstrous conception is a preposterous coinage of his brain, a figment unknown to anyone before himself and bristling with impossibilities. Witness the following passage (p. 284 of Christianity and Mythology), containing nearly as many baseless fancies as it contains words:—
The one tenable historic hypothesis left to us at this stage is that of a preliminary Jesus “B.C.,” a vague cult-founder such as the Jesus ben Pandira of the Talmud, put to death for (perhaps anti-Judaic) teachings now lost; round whose movement there might have gradually clustered the survivals of an ancient solar or other worship of a Babe Joshua son of Miriam.
Such is the gist of the speculations of Messrs. Drews and Robertson, as far removed from truth and reality as the Athanasian Creed and from sane criticism as the truculent buffooneries of the Futurists from genuine art.