We have more than once criticized this tendency of Mr. Robertson to insist on the primitiveness of the Virgin Birth legend. He urges it throughout his volume, although here and there he seems to see the truth, as, e.g., on p. 189, where he remarks that “only the late Third Gospel tells the story” of Mary and Joseph going to Bethlehem to be taxed, and “that the narrative in Matthew” was “added late to the original composition, which obviously began at what is now the third chapter.” If the legend was part of the earliest tradition, why does it figure for the first time in the late Third Gospel and in a late addition to the first? In another passage he assures us that chapters i and ii of Luke are “a late fabulous introduction.” Clearly, his view is that, just in proportion as any part of the Gospels is late, the tradition it contains must be early; and he it is who talks about “the methodless subjectivism” of Dr. Pfleiderer, who, he says, “like Matthew Arnold, accepts what he likes” (p. 450).
and in connection with Schmiedel’s “Pillars” The same inability to distinguish what is early from what is late is shown by Mr. Robertson in his criticism of Dr. Schmiedel’s “pillars”—i.e., the nine Gospel texts (seven of them in Mark)—“which cannot have been invented by believers in the godhood of Jesus, since they implicitly negate that godhood.” Of these, one is [ Mark x, 17] ff., where Jesus uses—to one who had thrown himself at his feet with the words: “Good teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” (i.e., life in the kingdom to come)—the answer: “Why callest thou me good? No one is good, save one—to wit, God.” Here many ancient sources intensify Jesus’s refusal of a predicate which is God’s alone; for they run: “Call thou me not good.” This apart, the Second and Third Gospels may be said to agree in reading, “Good master,” and, “Why callest thou me good?”
In Matthew, however (xix, 16), we read as follows: “Behold, one came to him and said: Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto him, Why askest thou me concerning that which is good? One there is who is good,” etc.
Now, it is a result of criticism universally accepted to-day that Matthew and Luke compiled their Gospels with Mark before them, and that any reading in which either of them agrees with Mark must be more original than the discrepant reading of a third. Here Matthew is the discrepant witness, and he has remodelled the text of Mark to suit the teaching which had established itself in the Church about A.D. 100 that Jesus was without sin. He accordingly makes Jesus reply as a Greek sophist might reply, and not as a Jewish rabbi; and, by omitting the predicate “good” before teacher, he turns the words, “One there is who is good,” into nonsense. By adding it before “thing” he creates additional nonsense; for how could any but a good action merit eternal life? The epithet is here superfluous. Even then, if we were not sure on other grounds that the Marcan story is the only source of the Matthæan deformed text, we could be sure that it was, because in Mark we have simplicity and good sense, whereas in Matthew we have neither. Mr. Robertson, on an earlier page, has, indeed, done lip-service to the truth that Mark presents us with the earliest form of evangelical tradition; but here he betrays the fact that he has not really understood the position, nor grasped the grounds (set forth by me in Myth, Magic, and Morals) on which it rests. For he is ready to sacrifice it the moment it makes havoc of his “mythological” argument, and writes (p. 443): “On the score of simple likelihood, which has the stronger claim? Surely the original text in Matthew.”
Even if Matthew, Mark, and Luke were rival and independent texts, instead of the first and third being, as they demonstrably are, copies and paraphrases of Mark, the best—if not the only—criterion of originality would be such an agreement of two of them as Mark and Luke here present against Matthew. Mr. Robertson, with entire ignoratio elenchi, urges in favour of the originality of Matthew’s variant the circumstance that the oldest MS. sources of that Gospel reproduce it. How could they fail to do so, supposing it to be due to the redactor or editor of Mark, who was traditionally, but falsely, identified with the apostle Matthew? If the reading of Mark be not original, how came Luke to copy it from him? The most obvious critical considerations are wasted on Mr. Robertson and his friends.
Schmiedel on the disbelief of Mary in her son Dr. Schmiedel again draws attention to the narrative of how Jesus, at the beginning of his ministry, was declared by his own household to be out of his senses, and of how, in consequence, his mother and brethren followed him in order to put him under restraint. The story offended the first and third evangelists, and they partly omit it, partly obscure its drift. The fourth evangelist limits the disbelief to the brethren of Jesus. The whole narrative is in flagrant antagonism to the Birth stories in the early chapters of Matthew and Luke, and to the whole subsequent drift of Church tradition. Being gifted with common sense, Schmiedel argues that it must be true, because it could never have been invented. It, anyhow, makes for the historicity of Jesus. What has Mr. Robertson to say about it? He writes (p. 443): “Why should such a conception be more alien to Christian consciousness than, say, the story of the trial, scourging, and crucifixion?” Here he ignores the point at issue. In Christian tradition, whether early or late, it was not the mother and brethren of Jesus who tried and scourged and crucified him, but inimical Jews and pagans. The latter are at no time related to have received an announcement of his birth from an angel, as his mother was presently believed to have done. We have, therefore, every reason for averring that the conception or idea of his being flouted by his own mother and brethren was a thousand times more alien to Christian consciousness—at least, any time after A.D. 100—than that of his being flouted by a Sadducean priesthood and by Roman governors. Once the legend of the Virgin Birth had grown up, such a story could not have been either thought of or committed to writing in a Gospel. It is read in Mark, and must be what we call a bed-rock tradition. If Mr. Robertson cannot see that, he is hopeless. Did he not admit (p. 443) that it is “certainly an odd text,” so revealing his inmost misgivings about it, we should think him so.
Jesus is not deified in the earliest documents, nor do they reveal a “cult” of him The same vice of mixing up different phases of the Christian religion shows itself in the insistence of this school of critic that it was from the first a cult of a deified Jesus. Thus Mr. Smith writes (Ecce Deus) as follows (p. 6):—
We affirm that the worship of the one God under the name, aspect, or person of the Jesus, the Saviour, was the primitive and indefectible essence of the primitive teaching and propaganda.
On the contrary, in the two basal documents, Mark and Q, no such worship is discernible. Jesus first comes on the scene as the humble son of Joseph and Mary to repent of his sins and purge them away in Baptism; he next takes up the preaching of the imprisoned John, which was merely that Jews should repent of their sins because the kingdom of God, involving a dissolution of the existing social and political order, was at hand. This was no divine rôle, and he is represented not as God, but only as the servant of God; for such in the Aramaic dialect of that age was the connotation of the title “Son of God.” In Mark there is no sign of his deification, not even in the transfiguration scene; for in that he is merely the human Messiah attended by Elias and Moses. From a hundred early indicia we know that in the Semitic-speaking churches of the East he remained a human figure for centuries; and the Syrian Father Aphraat, as late as 336 in Persia, is careful to explain in his homilies that Jesus was only divine as Moses was, or as human kings are. It was not till the religion was diffused in a pagan medium in which gods had children by mortal women that the gross deification of Jesus emerged. The purport of these basal documents, moreover, is not to deify Jesus, but to establish as against the Jews that he was their promised Messiah and the central figure of the Messianic kingdom he preached. That figure, however, was never identified with Jehovah, but was only Jehovah’s servant, anointed king and judge of Israel, restorer of Israel’s damaged fortunes, fulfiller of her political ideals and hopes. Mr. Smith argues that Jesus was deified from the first because his name was so often invoked in exorcisms. He even makes the suggestion (p. 17) that the initial letter J of Jesus “must have powerfully suggested Jehovah to the Jewish consciousness.” There is no evidence, and less likelihood, of any such thing. The name of Jesus was during his lifetime invoked against demons by exorcists who rejected his message; just as they used the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, so they were ready to exploit his powerful name; but neither Jews nor Christians ever confounded with Jehovah the names or personalities they thus invoked; any Jew in virtue of his birth and breeding would have regarded such a confusion of a man with his God as flat blasphemy.
Worship of a slain God no part of the earliest Christianity Messrs. Robertson and Drews similarly insist that Jesus was from the first worshipped as a slain God. In the Gospel documents there is no sign of anything of the sort. It was Paul who first diffused the idea that the crucified Jesus was a victim slain for the redemption of human sins. We already have Philo proclaiming that the just man is the ransom of the many, so that there is no need to go to pagan circles, no need to go outside the pale of Greek Jews, of whom Paul was one, for the origin of the idea. He probably found it even in the teaching of Gamaliel, in which he was brought up. Mark asks no more of his readers than to attribute the Messiahship—a thoroughly human rôle—to his hero, Jesus of Nazareth. Nor does Matthew, who seeks at every turn to prove that the actions of Jesus reported by Mark were those which, according to the old prophets, a Messiah might be expected to perform. How can writers who end their record of Jesus by telling us how in the moment of death he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” realizing no doubt that all his expectations of the advent of God’s kingdom were frustrated and set at naught; how, I say, can such writers have believed that Jesus was Jehovah? The idea is monstrous. The truth is these writers transport back into the first age of Christianity the ideas and beliefs of developed Catholicism, and are resolved that the first shall be last and the last first. They have no perspective, and no capacity for understanding the successive phases through which a primitive Messianism, at first thoroughly monotheistic and exclusively Jewish in outlook and ideals, gradually evolved itself, with the help of the Logos teaching, into the Athanasian cult of an eternal and consubstantial Son of God.