But what Jew of the first century, however fond of the tales about Joshua which he read in his scriptures, was ever minded to substitute his name for that of Jehovah merely because it began with a J and has been explained by twentieth-century Hebraists as meaning Jah-help? The idea is exquisitely humorous. While they were about it why did the Nazarenes not adopt the name Immanuel, which in that allegorical romance (which from Mr. Smith we know to be the character of Matthew’s Gospel) they fished up out of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah? If Jehovah was not good enough for them, Immanuel was surely better than the name Jeshua, with its associations of pillage and murder. But apart from these considerations, as the name Jeshua is Hebrew, it follows that the secret sectaries who had this cult must have been of a Jewish cast. But, if so, what Jew, we ask, ever heard of a God called Jeshua or Joshua? As I have already pointed out, the very memory of such a God, if there ever was one, perished long before the Book of Joshua could have been written. Like the gods Daoud and Joseph, with whom writers of this class seek to conjure our wits out of our heads, a god Joshua is a mere preposterous superfetation of a disordered imagination. “There were abundant reasons,” writes Mr. Smith (p. 16),
why the name Jesus should be the Aaron’s rod to swallow up all other designations. Its meaning, which was felt to be Saviour, was grand, comforting, uplifting. The notion of the world-Saviour thrust its roots into the loam of the remotest antiquity.
Supposed confusion of Jesus with iēsomai One regrets to have to criticize such dithyrambic outpourings of Mr. Smith’s heart. But, granted there was a widespread expectation, such as Suetonius records, of Messiahs who were to issue from Judæa and conquer all the world, who ever heard of the name Joshua being assigned in advance to one of them? Who ever in that age felt the name Jesus to be grand, comforting, uplifting? Is not Mr. Smith attributing his own feelings, as he sat in a Sunday school, to Jews and Gentiles of the first century? I add Gentiles, for he pretends that the name Jesus appealed to the Greek consciousness also as a derivative of the Ionic future Ἰήσομαι iēsomai = I will heal. Now what Christian writer ever made this rapprochement? Not a single one. Surely, if we are minded to argue the man Jesus out of existence, we ought to have a vera causa to put in his place, a belief, or, if we like it better, a myth which was really believed, and is known to have entered deeply into the lives and consciences of men? It is true that the idea of a Messiah did so enter, but not in the form in which Mr. Smith loves to conceive it. The Messiah was such a human figure as Suetonius had heard of; he was a man who should, as we read in Acts, restore the kingdom of David. “Lord, dost Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” is the question the apostles are said ([Acts i, 7]) to have put to Jesus as soon as his apparitions before them had revived the Messianic hopes which his death had so woefully dashed. The incident is probably apocryphal, yet its presence in the narrative illustrates what a Messiah was then expected by Christians to achieve. Judas Maccabæus, Cyrus, Bar Cochba, Judas of Galilee—these and other heroes of Israel had the quality of Messiahs. They were all men, and not myths. The suggestion, then, that the name Jesus was one to conjure with is idle and baseless; and if his name had been Obadiah or Nathaniel, Professor Smith would have been equally ready to prove that these were attractive names, bound to triumph and “swallow up all other designations.” He only pitches on the name of Jesus for his pre-Christian Saviour-god because he finds it in the Gospels; but inasmuch as he sees in them mere allegorical romances, entirely unhistorical and having no root in facts, there is no reason for adopting from them one name more than another. How does he know that the appellation Jesus is not as much of a Nazarene fiction as he holds every other name and person and incident to be which the Gospels contain? Is it not more probable that this highly secretive sect, with their horror of “tell-tale,” would keep secret the name of their Saviour-god, as the Essenes kept secret the names of their patron angels? The truth is, even Mr. Smith cannot quite divest himself of the idea that there is some historical basis for the Gospels; otherwise he would not have turned to them for the name of his Saviour-god.
Mr. Smith denies all historicity to Acts and Epistles More consistently, however, than Mr. Robertson, Professor Smith denies that there are any allusions to the real Jesus in the rest of the New Testament. The Acts and Epistles do not, he says (p. 23), “recognize at all the life of Jesus as a man,” though “their general tenour gives great value to the death of Jesus as a God.” This is a new reading of the documents in question, for the Pauline conviction was that Jesus had been crucified and died as a man, and, being raised up from death by the Spirit, had been promoted to be, what he was antenatally, a super-human or angelic figure[8]—a Christ or Messiah, who was to come again on earth and judge mankind. Of his mere humanity while on this earth, and as long as he was associating with human disciples, Paul entertained no doubts. How could he, inasmuch as he had stayed with them at Jerusalem? Mr. Robertson, as we saw, although he dissipates Jesus in the Gospels into a Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, nevertheless is so impressed by the Pauline “references to a crucified Jesus” (p. 364) that he resuscitates Jesus Ben Pandira out of the limbo of the Talmud. Perhaps he strains at a gnat after swallowing a camel. Anyhow, I will leave Mr. Smith to settle accounts with him, and turn to a fresh point, which has not occurred to either of them.
Contrast of Christian belief in Jesus with cult of Adonis or Osiris It is this. Adonis and Osiris were never regarded by their votaries as having been human beings that had recently lived and died on the face of this earth. The Christians, in strong contrast with them and with all other pagans ever heard of, did so regard Jesus from first to last. Why so, when they knew that from the first he was a God and up in heaven? Why has the fact of his unreality, as these writers argue it, left no trace of itself in Christian tradition and literature? According to this new school of critics, the Nazarenes, when they wrote down the Gospels, knew perfectly well that Jesus was a figment, and had never lived at all. And yet we never get a hint that he was only a myth, and that the New Testament is a gigantic fumisterie. Why so? Why from the very first did the followers of Jesus entertain what Mr. Smith denounces as “an a priori concept of the Jesus” (p. 35)? Why, in other words, were they convinced from the beginning that he was a man of flesh and blood, who had lived on earth among them? The “early secrecy,” the “esoterism of the primitive cult” (p. 39), says Mr. Smith, “was intended to be only temporary.” If so, why could not the Nazarenes, primarily interested as they were, not in lies and bogus, but in disseminating their lofty monotheism, have thrown off the disguise some time or other, and explained to their spiritual children that the intensely concrete life of Jesus which they had published in our Gospel of Mark meant nothing; that it was all an allegory, and no more, of a Saviour-god, who had never existed as a human being, nor even as the docetic phantasmagoria of the Gnostic? “Something sealed the lips of that (Nazarene) evangelist,” and the Nazarenes have kept their secret so well through the ages that it has been reserved for Mr. Smith first to pierce the veil and unlock their mystery. He it is who has at last discovered that “in proto-Mark we behold the manifest God” (p. 24).
Now what possessed the Nazarenes so firmly to impose on the world through the Gospels an erroneous view of their God, that for 2,000 years not only their spiritual offspring, the Christians, but Jews and pagans as well, have believed him to have lived on earth, a man of flesh and blood and of like passions with themselves? Was the deception necessary? The votaries of Osiris and Adonis were never so tricked. The adherents of the Augustalian cult, the pious Greeks and Syrians who thronged to be healed of their diseases at the shrines of Apollonius, believed, of course, that their patron saints and gods had lived, prior to their apotheosis, upon earth; and so they had. But a follower of Osiris or Æsculapius would have opened his eyes wide with astonishment if you asked him to believe that his Saviour had died only the other day in Judæa. Not so a Christian; for the Nazarene monotheists had so thoroughly fooled him with their Gospels that he was ready to supply you with dates and pedigrees and all sorts of other details about his Saviour’s personal history. And yet all the time, had he only known it, his religion laboured under the same initial disadvantage as the cult of Osiris or Æsculapius—that, namely, of its founder never having lived at all. What, then, did “such students of religion, as the first Christians were” (Ecce Deus, p. 65), imagine was to be gained by hood-winking their descendants for the long centuries which have intervened between them and the advent of Professor W. B. Smith?
[1] Mr. Robertson recognizes (p. 124), though without realizing how much it damages his theory, that the miracles of the Gospels are “visibly unknown to the Paulinists”—presumably the early churches addressed by Paul in his Epistle. Do we not here get a glimpse of an early stage of the story of Jesus before it was overlaid with miracles? Yet Mr. Robertson, in defiance of logic, argues that the absence of miraculous tales of Jesus in the Paulines confirms what he calls “the mythological argument.” [↑]
[2] It is true that this is from a speech put into Paul’s mouth by the author of Acts; but Paul himself is no less emphatic in [ Romans i, 23], where of the Greeks he writes that, “though they knew God, they glorified him not as God …. Professing themselves wise, they were turned into fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of a corruptible man.” Such were the feelings excited in Paul by a statue of Pheidias; how different from those it roused in his contemporary Dion, who wrote as follows of it: “Whoever among mortal men is most utterly toilworn in spirit, having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before this image must utterly forget all the terrors and woes of this mortal life.” So strong was the prejudice of the Church (due exclusively to its Jewish origin) against plastic or pictorial art that Eusebius and Epiphanius condemned pictures of Christ as late as the fourth century, while the Eastern churches, even to-day, forbid statues of Jesus and of the Saints. Of the great gulf which separated Jew from Gentile on such points Mr. Robertson seems not to have the faintest notion. [↑]
[3] I trust my readers will forgive my use of a fox-hunting phrase in so serious a context, but I cannot think of any other so apt. [↑]