[4] P. 48. After citing the rather problematic allusion to Plato (Rep. ii, 361 D) in the apology of Apollonius (c. 172), the just man shall be tortured, he shall be spat on, and, last of all, he shall be crucified. Harnack has said that there is no other reference to this passage of Plato in old-Christian literature. “Why?” asks Mr. Smith. “Because Christians were not familiar with it? Impossible. The silence of the Christians was intentional, and the reason is obvious. The passage was tell-tale. Similarly we are to understand their silence about the pre-Christian Nazarenes and many other lions that were safest when asleep.” This is in the true vein of a Bacon-Shakesperians armed with his cypher. [↑]
[6] Elsewhere Mr. Smith qualifies this position, p. 35: “Of course, the cult was not intended to remain, and did not in fact remain, secret; it was at length brought into the open.” But perhaps Mr. Smith is here alluding to his own revelation. [↑]
[7] [ Mark xvi, 9]. The circumstance that [ Mark xvi, 9–20], was added to the Gospel by another hand in no way diminishes the significance of the passage here adduced. [↑]
[8] In the same manner, as we know from Origen (Com. in Evang. Ioannis, tom. xiii, 27), the Samaritans had a Messiah named Dositheos, who rose from the dead, and professed himself to be the Messiah of prophecy. His sect survived in the third century, as also his books, which, as Origen says, were full of “myth” about him to the effect that he had not tasted of death, but was somewhere or other still alive. By all the rules of criticism as used by Mr. Robertson and his friends, we must deny that Dositheos ever lived. The idea of a human hero being an angel or divine power made flesh was common among Jews, and in their apocryph, “The Prayer of Jacob” (see Origen, op. cit., tom. ii, 25), that worthy represented himself as such in the very language of Paul and of the Fourth Gospel: “I who spoke to you, I, Jacob and Israel, am an angel of God and a primeval spirit, as Abraham and Isaak were created in advance of all creatures. But I, Jacob, … called Israel by God, a man seeing God, because I am first-born of all living beings made alive by God.” We also learn that Uriel was sent forth by God to herald Jacob’s descent upon earth, where he “tabernacled among men.” Jacob declares himself to be “archangel of the power of God, and arch-captain among the sons of God, Israel the foremost minister of the Presence.” Paul, we observe, did not need to go outside Judaism for his conceptions of Jesus, nor Justin Martyr either, who regularly speaks of Jesus as an archangel. So also among the pagans. In Augustus Cæsar his contemporaries loved to detect one of the great gods of Olympus just descended to earth in the semblance of a man. He was the god Mercury or some other god incarnate. His birth was a god’s descent to earth in order to expiate the sins of the Romans. Thus Horace, Odes, I, 2, v. 29: Cui dabit partes scelus expiandi Juppiter, and cp. v. 45: Serus in cœlum redeas—“Mayest thou be late in returning to heaven.” [↑]
Chapter VII
DR. JENSEN
Babylonian influence on Greek religion slight; The three writers whose views I have so far considered agree in denying that Jesus was a real historical personage; but their agreement extends no further, for the Jesus legend is the precipitate, according to Professor W. B. Smith, of a monotheistic propaganda; according to Mr. Robertson, of a movement mainly idolatrous, polytheistic, and pagan. There exists in Germany, however, a third school of denial, which sees in the Jesus story a duplicate of the ancient Babylonian Gilgamesch legend. The more extreme writers of this school have endeavoured to show that not only the Hebrews, but the Greeks as well, derived their religious myths and rites from ancient Babylon; and their general hypothesis has on that account been nicknamed Pan-Babylonismus. This is not the place to criticize the use made of old Babylonian mythology in explanation of old Greek religion, though I do well to point out that the best students of the latter—for example, Dr. Farnell—confine the indebtedness of the Greeks to very narrow limits.
on Hebrew religion more important; The case of the Hebrew scriptures and religion stands on different ground; for the Jews were Semites, and their myths of creation and of the origin and early history of man are, by the admission even of orthodox divines of to-day, largely borrowed from the more ancient civilization of Babylon. Thus Heinrich Zimmern (art. “Deluge,” in Encyclopædia Biblica) writes: “Of all the parallel traditions of a deluge, the Babylonian is undeniably the most important, because the points of contact between it and the Hebrew story are so striking that the view of the dependence of one of the two on the other is directly suggested even to the most cautious of students.”