Theory of interpolations I have given many examples of the tendency of all these authors to condemn as an interpolation any text which contradicts their hypotheses. There is only one error worse than that of treating seriously documents which are no documents at all. It is that of the man who cannot recognize documents when he has got them. It is well, of course, to weigh sources, and the critical investigation of authorship lies at the basis of all true history. But, as the authors above cited justly remark (p. 99):—
We must not abuse it. The extreme of distrust in these matters is almost as mischievous as the extreme of credulity. Père Hardouin, who attributed the works of Virgil and Horace to medieval monks, was every whit as ridiculous as the victim of Vrain-Lucas. It is an abuse of the methods of this species of criticism to apply them, as has been done, indiscriminately, for the mere pleasure of it. The bunglers who have used this species of criticism to brand as spurious perfectly genuine documents, such as the writings of Hroswitha, the Ligurinus, and the bull unam sanctam, or to establish imaginary filiations between certain annals, on the strength of superficial indications, would have discredited criticism before now, if that had been possible.
It is unhappily easier to discredit criticism in the realm of ecclesiastical than of secular history; and this school of writers are doing their best to harm the cause of true Rationalism. They only afford amusement to the obscurantists of orthodoxy, and render doubly difficult the task of those who seek to win people over to a common-sense and historical envisagement, unencumbered by tradition and superstition, of the problems of early Christianity.
Professor Smith’s monotheistic cult Lastly, it is a fact deserving of notice that the genesis of Christianity as these authors present it is much more mysterious and obscure than before. Their explanation needs explaining. What, we must ask, was the motive and end in view of the adherents of the pre-Christian Jesus or Joshua in writing the Gospels and bringing down their God to earth, so humanizing in a story their divine myth? Let Professor W. B. Smith speak: “What was the essence, the central idea and active principle, of the cult itself?” Here he means the cult of the pre-Christian Christ that invented the Gospels and diffused them on the market place. “To this latter,” he continues, “we answer directly and immediately: It was a Protest against idolatry; it was a Crusade for monotheism.”
And yet he cannot adduce a single text from the Gospels—not even from the Fourth—which betrays on the part of Jesus, their central figure, any such crusading spirit. Jesus everywhere assumes his hearers to be monotheists like himself—he speaks as a Jew to Jews—and perpetually reminds them of their Father in heaven. Thus [ Matt. vi, 8]: “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of”; [ Matt. v, 48]: “Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
The monotheism of those who stood around the teacher is ever taken for granted by the evangelists, and in all the precepts of Jesus not one can be adduced that is aimed at the sins of polytheism and idolatry. His message lies in a far different region. It is the immediate advent of the Messianic kingdom, and the need of repentance ere it come. Only when Paul undertakes to bear this message to pagans outside the pale of Judaism do we get teaching directed against idolatry; and in his Epistles such precepts have a second place, the first being reserved to the preaching of the coming kingdom and of the redemption of the world by the merits of the crucified and risen Messiah, the man Jesus. Most of Paul’s letters read as if those for whom he wrote them were already proselytes familiar with the Jewish scriptures.
His great Oriental cryptogram Such is Mr. Smith’s fundamental assumption, and it is baseless. On it he bases his next great hypothesis of “the primitive secrecy of the Jesus cult,” which “was maintained in some measure for many years—for generations even” (p. 45). “Why,” he asks, “was this Jesus cult originally secret, and expressed in such guarded parabolic terms as made it unintelligible to the multitude?” The reason lay in the fact that “it was exactly to save the pagan multitude from idolatry that Jesus came into the world” (p. 38).
Here the phrase “Jesus came into the world,” like all else he did or suffered, is, of course, to be understood in a Pickwickian sense, for he never came into the world at all. The Gospels are not only a romance concocted by “such students of religion as the first Christians were” (p. 65), and inspired by their study of Plato,[4] and of the best elements in ancient mythology; they are a romance throughout—an allegory of a secret pre-Christian Nazarene society and of its secret cult (p. 34). Of this society, he tells us, we know nothing; esoterism and cult secrecy were its chief interests; the “silence of the Christians about it was intentional,”[5] and, except for the special revelation vouchsafed the other day to Professor W. B. Smith, it would have remained for ever unknown, and Christianity for ever enigmatic.
In accordance with this postulate of esoterism and cult secrecy among the pre-Christian Nazarenes, who subsequently revealed themselves to the world as the Christian Church, though even then they “maintained for generations the secrecy[6] of their Jesus cult,” the Gospels, as I said, are an allegory or a charade. Their prima facie meaning is never the true one, never more than symbolic of a moral and spiritual undersense such as old allegorists like Philo and Origen loved to discover in the Bible. Thus, as we saw above, when Jesus is reported to have cast out of the Jews who thronged around him devils of blindness, deafness, lameness, leprosy, death, what is really intended is that he argued pagans out of their polytheism. “It was spiritual maladies, and only spiritual, that he was healing” (p. 38). We ask of Mr. Smith, why was so much mystification necessary? We are only told that “it was in the main a prudential measure, well enough justified, but intended to be only temporary” (p. 39). What exact risks they were to shun which the sect kept itself secret, and only spake in far-fetched allegory, Mr. Smith does not inform us. Is he, too, afraid of being regarded as a “tell-tale” (p. 48)?
Professor Smith resolves all the New Testament as symbolic and allegorical As with the exorcisms, so with all else told of Jesus. None of it really happened. As he never lived, so he never died. His human life and death are an allegory of the spiritual cult and mysteries which the pre-Christian Nazarenes and their descendants, the Christians, so jealously and for so long guarded in silence. If he never lived, then he never taught, not even in parables. By consequence the entire record of his parables, still more of his having chosen the parable as his medium of instruction in order to veil his real meaning from his audience, is all moonshine. Here, as elsewhere, the Gospel text does not mean what it says, but is itself only a Nazarene parable conveying, or rather concealing, a Nazarene secret—what sort of secret no one, save Professor Smith, the self-appointed revealer of their mysterious lore, can tell, and he is silent on the point. On Mr. Smith’s premisses, then, we cannot rely on the Gospels to inform us of anything historical, and, so far as we can follow him, we must, if we would discern through them the mind of their Nazarene authors, take them upside down. We must discern a pagan medium and homilies against polytheism in discourses addressed to monotheistic Jews who needed no warnings against idolatry; we must also read the stories of Jesus healing paralytics and demoniacs as secret and disguised polemics against idolatry.