Abuse of the comparative method by this school of writers Thirdly, these writers abuse the comparative method. Applied discreetly and rationally, this method helps us to trace myths and beliefs back to their homes and earlier forms. Thus M. Emmanuel Cosquin (in Romania; Paris, 1912) takes the story of the cat and the candle, and traces out its ramifications in the mediæval literature and modern folklore of Europe, and outside Europe, in the legends of the Pendjab, of Cashmir, Bengal, Ceylon, Tibet, Tunisia, Annam, and elsewhere. But the theme is always sufficiently like itself to be really recognizable in the various folklore frames in which it is found encased. The old philologists saw in the most superficial resemblance of sound a reason for connecting words in different languages. They never asked themselves how a word got out of Hebrew, say, into Greek, or out of Greek into Mexican. Volumes were filled with these haphazard etymologies, and the idea of the classification of languages into great connected families only slowly made its way among us in the last century. I have pointed out that in regard to names Messrs. Drews and Robertson are still in this prephilological stage of inquiry; as regards myths or stories of incident, they are wholly immersed in it. They fit anything on to anything no matter how ineptly,They never trouble themselves to make sure that the stories they connect bear any real resemblance to one another. For example, what have the Zodiacal signs and the Apostles of Jesus in common except the number twelve? As if number was not the most superficial of attributes, the least characteristic and essential. The scene of the Gospel is laid in Judæa, where from remote antiquity the Jews had classed themselves in twelve tribes. Is it not more likely that this suggested the twelve missionaries sent out by Jesus to announce the coming kingdom than the twelve signs of the Zodiac? Even if the story of the Twelve be legendary, need we go outside Judaism for our explanation of its origin?
What, again, have the three Maries in common with the Greek Moirai except the number three and a delusive community of sound? Yet Mr. Robertson insists that the three Maries at the tomb of Jesus were suggested by the Moirai, because these, “as goddesses of birth and death, naturally figured in many artistic presentations of religious death scenes.” As a matter of fact, the representation of the Parcae or Fates in connection with death is rare except on Roman sarcophagi, mostly of later date than the Gospel story. And when they are so found, they represent, not women bringing spices for the corpse or mourning for the dead, but the forces, often thought of as blind and therefore represented as veiled, which govern the events of the world, including birth, life and death. and forget the innate hostility of Jews to PaganismThere was, therefore, nothing in the Moirai to suggest the three Maries at the tomb; nor is it credible that the Hebrew Christists, given as they must have been to monotheism and detesting all statuary, pagan or other, would have chosen their literary motives from such a source. Where could they see such statuary in or about Jerusalem? It is notorious that the very presence of a symbolic eagle used as a military standard was enough to create an émeute in Jerusalem. The scheme of the emperor Caligula or Caius to set up his statue in Jerusalem in 39–40 A.D. provoked a movement of revolt throughout Palestine, with which the Jews of Egypt and elsewhere were in full sympathy. A deputation headed by Philo of Alexandria went to Rome to supplicate the emperor not to goad the entire race to frenzy. In the magnificent statues which surrounded him on the Parthenon hill, Paul could see nothing but idols, monuments of an age of superstition and ignorance which God had mercifully overlooked.[2] The hostility of the Jews to all pagan art and sculpture was as great as that of Mohammedans to-day. Yet Mr. Robertson asks us to believe (p. 327) that the Gospel myths, as he assumes them to be, are “evolved from scenes in pagan art.” On the top of that we afterwards learn from him that it was the Jewish high priest with legalistic leanings that presided over the Christists or Jesuists. Imagine such a high priest’s feelings when he beheld his “secret society” evolving their system under such an inspiration as Mr. Robertson outlines in the following canons of criticism:—
As we have seen and shall see throughout this investigation, the Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage (p. 305).
Christism borrowed myths of all kinds from paganism (p. xii).
… the whole Christian legend, in its present terminology, is demonstrably an adaptation of a mass of pre-Christian myths (p. 136).
What a budget of mutually destructive paradoxes; and to crown them all Mr. Robertson claims in his introduction (p. xxii) that the method of his treatise is
in general more “positive,” less a priori, more obedient to scientific canons than that of the previous critics … who have reached similar anti-traditionalist results. It substitutes an anthropological basis, in terms of the concrete phenomena of mythology, for a pseudo-philosophical presupposition.
Credulity attends hypercriticism Fourthly, it is essential to note the childish, all-embracing, and overwhelming credulity of these writers. To them applies in its full force the paragraph in which MM. Langlois and Seignobos describe the perils which beset hypercriticism (p. 131, op. cit.):—
The excess of criticism, just as much as the crudest ignorance, leads to error. It consists in the application of critical canons to cases outside their jurisdiction. It is related to criticism as logic-chopping is to logic. There are persons who scent enigmas everywhere, even where there are none. They take perfectly clear texts and subtilize on them till they make them doubtful, under the pretext of freeing them from imaginary corruptions. They discover traces of forgery in authentic documents. A strange state of mind! By constantly guarding against the instinct of credulity they come to suspect everything.
For these writers, in their anxiety to be original and new, see fit to discard every position that earlier historians, like Mommsen, Gibbon, Bury, Montefiore—not to mention Christian scholars—have accepted as beyond doubt. Their temper is that of the Bacon-Shakesperians; and the plainest, simplest, most straightforward texts figure in their imaginations as a laborious series of charades, rebuses, and cryptograms. That Jesus never existed is not really the final conclusion of their researches, but an initial unproved assumption. In order to get rid of him, they feign, without any evidence of it, a Jewish secret society under the patronage of the Jewish High Priest, that existed in Jerusalem well down into the Christian era. This society kept up the worship of an old Palestinian and Ephraimitic Sun-god and Saviour, named Joshua, son of a virgin, Miriam. Where is the proof that such a god was ever heard of in ancient Palestine, either early or late, or that such a cult ever existed? There is none. It is the emptiest and wildest of hypotheses; yet we are asked to accept it in place of the historicity of Jesus. What, again, do we know of secret societies in Jerusalem? Josephus and Philo knew of none. For the Therapeutæ, far from affecting secrecy, were anxious to diffuse their discipline and lore even among the Hellenes, while the Essenes had nothing secret save the names of the angels they invoked in spells. They were a well-known sect, and so numerous that a gate of Jerusalem was called the Essene Gate, because they so often came in and went forth by it. Were the Pharisees and Sadducees, the Scribes, or the Sicarii or zealots, secret sects? We know they were not. But is it likely that a sect composed in the main of Jews, and patronized, as Mr. Robertson argues, by the High Priest, would have kept up in the very heart of monotheistic Judaism a cult of Sun-gods and Vegetation-spirits? Could they there have given themselves up to the study of pagan statuary, art, and ritual dramas? What possible connection is there between the naïve picture of Hebrew Messianism we have in the Synoptic Gospels and the hurly-burly, the tagrag and bobtail of pagan mythologies which Mr. Robertson and his henchman Drews rake together pell-mell in their pretentious volumes? How did all this paganism abut in a Messianic society which reverenced the Old Testament for its sacred scriptures, which for long frequented the Jewish Temple, took over the feasts and fasts of Judaism, modelled its prayers on those of the Synagogue, cherished in its eastern branches the practice of circumcision?
Mr. Robertson accepts the historicity of Jesus after allAfter hundreds of pages devoted to the task of evaporating Jesus into a Solar or Vegetation-god, and all the personages we meet in the Gospels into zodiacal signs or pagan demigods, Mr. Robertson, as we have noticed above, finds himself, after all, confronted with the same personages in Paul’s Epistles. There they are too real even for Mr. Robertson to dissipate them into cloud-forms, and too numerous to be cut out wholesale. He feels that, if all Paul’s allusions to the crucified Jesus are to be got rid of as interpolations, then no Pauline Epistles will remain. He cuts out, indeed, all he can, but there is a residuum of reality. To identify Paul’s Jesus with the Jesus of the Gospels is too humdrum and obvious a course for him. So common-sense and commonplace a scheme does not suit his subtle intelligence; moreover, such an identification would upset the hundreds of pages in which he has proved that Jesus of Nazareth and all his accessories are literary symbols employed by the Jewish “Jesuists” to disguise their pagan art and myths. Accordingly, he asks us to believe that Paul’s Jesus is a certain Jesus Ben Pandira, stoned to death a hundred years earlier. This Jesus is a vague figure fished up out of the Talmud; but, on examination, we found Mr. Robertson’s choice of him as an alias for Paul’s Jesus to be most unfortunate, for competent Talmudic scholars are agreed that Jesus Ben Pandira in the Talmud was no other than Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels. Jesus most unkindly insists on being in at his own death,[3] in spite of all Mr. Robertson can say or do; and his house of cards is crowned with the discovery that the apostles whom Paul knew—not being identical with the signs of the Zodiac, like those of the Gospels—were no other than the twelve apostles of the Jewish High Priest, and that they were the authors of the lately-discovered “Teaching of the Apostles.” He is very contemptuous for other early Christian books which affect apostolic authorship in their titles, but falls a ready victim to the relatively late and anonymous editor of this “teaching,” who to give it vogue entitled it “The Teaching of the Lord by the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles.” “The Jesuist sect,” he writes (p. 345), “founded on it (the Didaché) the Christian myth of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus.” Everywhere else in his books he has argued that the “myth” in question was founded on the signs of the Zodiac. Why give up at the eleventh hour the astral explanation for an utterly different one? I may add that in the body of the Didaché the Twelve are nowhere alluded to; that it must be a much later document than the Gospels and Paulines, since it quotes them in scores of passages; and that the interpolation of the title, with a reference to the Twelve Apostles, was a literary trick scarcely older than the fourth century, long before which age the Pauline account of the resurrection was cited by a score of Christian writers. Lastly, we are fain to inquire of Mr. Robertson with whom he identifies “the Lord” of the above title—with the Jewish High Priest, or with Jesus Ben Pandira, or with the Sun-God-Saviour Joshua.