Yet claims, where it suits him, to treat it as historical narrative But here mark Professor Smith’s inconsistency. Why is he sure that the Nazarenes, and after them the earliest Christians, were a secret society with a secret cult? They must have been so, he argues, because Jesus taught in parables. “The primitive esoterism,” he tells us, “is admittedly present in [ Mark iv, 11, 12], [ 33, 34].” These verses begin thus: “And he said unto them, unto you is given the mystery of the kingdom of heaven: but unto them that are without, all things are done in parables.”
Now, Mr. Smith’s postulate is that he—i.e., Jesus of Nazareth—never lived, and so never said anything to anyone. How, then, can he appeal to what he said to prove that there was a pre-Christian Jesus or Joshua sect, itself secret with a cult and ritual which its members were ever on their guard not to reveal? Surely he drops here into two assumptions which he has discarded ab initio: first, that there is a core of real history in the Gospels; and, second, that the Gospel can mean what it says, and that its Nazarene author is here not allegorizing, as he usually did.
His theory contradicts itself But even if we allow Mr. Smith to break with his premisses wherever he needs to do so in order to substantiate them, do these verses of Mark support his hypothesis of a sect which kept itself, its rites, and its teaching secret? I admit that it was pretty successful when it veiled its anti-idolatrous teaching under the outward form of demonological anecdotes, and wrote Jews when it meant Pagans and Polytheists. But in [ Mark iv, 34], we are told that “to his own disciples Jesus privately expounded all things” after he had with many parables spoken the word to such as “were able to hear it.” It appears, then, that for all their love of secrecy, and in spite of all their precautions against “tell-tale” writing, the Nazarenes on occasions went out of their way, in their allegorical romance of their God Joshua, to inform all who may read it what their parables and allegories meant; for in it Jesus sits down and expounds to the reader over some twenty-four verses (verses 10–34) the inner meaning of the parables which he had just addressed to the multitude. What on earth were the Nazarenes doing to publish a Gospel like this, and so let the cat out of the bag? Instead of keeping their secret they were proclaiming it on the housetops. Again, if the Gospels are to such an extent merely allegorical, that we must not assume their authors to have believed that Jesus ever lived, how can we possibly rely on them for information about such an obscure matter as a secret and esoteric pre-Christian Nazarene sect? We can only be sure that the evangelists never under any circumstances meant what they said; yet Mr. Smith, in defiance of all his postulates, writes, p. 40, as follows: “On the basis, then, of this passage alone [i.e., [ Mark iv, 10–34]] we may confidently affirm the primitive secrecy of the Jesus cult.” Even if the passage rightly yielded the sense he tries to extort from it, how can we be sure that that sense is not, like the rest of the Gospel, an allegory of something else?
The other passage of the Gospels, [ Matthew x, 26, 27], to which, with like inconsistency, Mr. Smith appeals by way of showing that the Nazarenes of set purpose hid their light under a bushel, does not bear the interpretation he puts on it. It runs thus: “Fear them not therefore: for naught is covered that shall not be revealed, and hidden that shall not be known. What I tell you in the darkness, speak ye on the housetops; and what ye hear in the ear, proclaim upon the housetops.”
Absence of esoterism about Jesus’s teaching The reasonable interpretation of the above is that Jesus, being in possession, as he thought, of a special understanding, perhaps revelation, of the true nature of the Messianic kingdom, and convinced of its near approach, instructed his immediate disciples in privacy concerning it in order that they might carry the message up and down the land to the children of Israel. He therefore exhorts them not to be silent from fear of the Jews, who accused him of being possessed of a devil, somewhat as his own mother and brethren accused him of being an exalté and beside himself. No, they were to cast aside all apprehensions; they must go, not to the supercilious Pharisees or to the comfortable priests who battened on the people, still less to Gentiles and Samaritans, who had no part in the promises made to Israel, but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and they must preach as they went, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. They were to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils, and in general give freely the good tidings which freely they had received from their Master, and he from John the Baptist. If they so acted, discarding all timidity, then no human repression, no human time-serving, could prevent the spread of the good news. What was now hidden from the poor and ignorant among his compatriots would henceforth, thanks to the courage and devotedness of his emissaries, be made known to them; what was now covered, be revealed.
Such is the context of “this remarkable deliverance,” as Mr. Smith terms it; and nothing in all the New Testament savours less than it does of a secret cult of mysterious sectaries, waiting for Mr. Smith to manifest their arcana to us twenty centuries later. Here, as everywhere else in the New Testament, he has discovered a monstrous mare’s nest; has banished the only possible and obvious interpretation, in order to substitute a chimera of his own.
It was not a protest against paganism Mr. Smith credits his hypothetical pre-Christian Nazarenes with an ambition and anxiety to purge away the errors of mankind. The “essence, the central idea, and active principle of the cult itself,” he tells us (p. 45), “was a protest against Idolatry, a crusade for monotheism.” “The fact of the primitive worship of Jesus and the fact of the primitive mission to all the Gentiles are the two cardinal facts of Proto-Christianity” (p. xvii). Why on earth, then, in concocting that pronunciamento of their cult which we call the Gospels, did these Nazarenes represent the Jesus or Joshua God, even in allegory, as warning his disciples on no account to disseminate his cult among Gentiles and Samaritans, but only among Jews, who were notoriously monotheists and bitterly hostile to every form of idolatry? Why carry coals to Newcastle on so huge a scale?
Why turn God Jeshua into a man at all And granted that the Nazarenes, in their anxiety to be parabolical and misunderstood of their readers, wrote Jews when they meant Pagans, was it necessary in the interests of their monotheistic crusade to nickname their One God Jesus, to represent him as a man and a carpenter, with brothers and sisters, and a mother that did not believe in him; as a man who was a Jew with the prejudices of a Jew, a man circumcised and insisting that he came not to destroy the law of Moses, but to fulfil it; as a man who was born like other men of a human father and mother; was crucified, dead and buried; whose disciples and Galilean companions, when in the first flush of their grief they heard from Mary Magdalene the strange story of his first appearing to her after death, still “disbelieved”?[7]
The comfort of the initial “J” These Nazarenes were, in their quality of “students of religion” (p. 65), intent on converting the world from polytheism. Why, then, did they call their sublime deity by the name of Jesus? “The word Jesus itself,” writes Mr. Smith,
also made special appeal to the Jewish consciousness, for it was practically identical with their own Jeshua, now understood by most to mean strictly Jah-help, but easily confounded with a similar J’shu’ah, meaning Deliverance, Saviour, Witness, [ Matthew i, 21]. Moreover, the initial letter J, so often representing Jah in Hebrew words, must have powerfully suggested Jehovah to the Jewish consciousness.