I will not pursue the analogy further. To do so would be endless. Indeed, I do not think there is an element in the Gospel story which does not bear out the parallel here suggested. The slight incident of the visit to Herod, for example, is exactly analogous to the visit of the false Osiris in modern Egypt to the governor’s house, and the visit of the temporary or mock king in so many other cases to the real king’s palace. The episode where Herod and his men of war array the Christ in a gorgeous robe is the equivalent of the episode of the Mexican king arraying the god-victim in royal dress, and is also paralleled in numerous other like dramas elsewhere. The women who prepare spices and ointments for the body recall the Adonis rites; Pilate washing his hands of the guilt of condemnation recalls the frequent episode of the slaughterers of the god laying the blame upon others, or casting it on the knife, or crying out, “We bought you with a price; we are guiltless.” Whoever will read carefully through the > Gospel accounts, side by side with Mr. Frazer’s well-chosen collection of mock-king narratives, will see for himself that endless other minor traits crop up in the story which may be equated with numerous similar incidents in the death and resurrection of the man-god elsewhere.
The very subjects of the parables are in themselves significant: the lord of the vineyard who sends his son, whom the hirers slay; the labourers who come at the eleventh hour: the sower and the good and bad ground: the grain of mustard-seed: the leaven of the Pharisees: the seed growing secretly: the sons in the vineyard. It will be found that almost all of them turn on the key-note subjects of bread and wine, or at least of seed-sowing.
By what precise stages the story of the Galilæan man-god arose and fixed itself around the person of the real or mythical Jesus it would be hard to say. Already in the epistles we may catch stray glimpses, in the germ, of most of it. Already we notice strange hints and foreshadowings. Probably the first Jewish disciples had arrived at the outline of the existing story even before the Gentiles began to add their quotum. And when we look at documents so overloaded with miracle and legend as the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, we find it hard indeed to separate any element of historical truth from the enormous accretion of myth and legend. Still, I see no grave reason to doubt the general truth of the idea that the Christian belief and practice arose first among Galilæan Jews, and that from them it spread with comparative rapidity to the people of Syria and Asia Minor. It even seems probable that one Saul or Paul was really the person who first conceived the idea of preaching the new religion throughout the empire, and especially in the great cities, as a faith which might be embraced by both Jew and Gentile.
Certainly, while the young cult contained most of the best features of Judaism, viewed as a possible universal religion,—its monotheism, its purity, its comparative freedom from vile and absurd legends of the gods and their amours—it surpassed the elder faith in acceptability to the world at large, and especially to the people of Syria and western Asia. Every one of them could have said with perfect truth, “Nothing is changed; there is but one god more to worship.”
As the church spread, the legend grew apace. To the early account of the death and resurrection of the King of the Jews, later narrators added the story of his miraculous birth from a virgin mother, who conceived directly from the spirit of God wafted down upon her. The wide extent and the origin of this belief about the conception of gods and heroes has been fully examined by Mr. Sidney Hartland in his admirable study of the Legend of Perseus. The new believers further provided their divine leader with a royal genealogy from David downward, and made him by a tolerably circuitous argument be born at Bethlehem, according to the supposed prophecy—though if there ever was really a Jesus at all, it would seem that the one fact of which we could feel tolerably sure about him, was the fact of his being a man of Nazareth. Later writers put into his mouth a high moral teaching for its time, somewhat anticipated by Hillel and other rabbis, and perhaps in part of Buddhist origin; they also made him announce for himself that divine rôle of mediator and atoner which they themselves claimed for the Saviour of Mankind. He calls himself the vine, the bread of life, the good shepherd; he is called “the lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world,” by John the Baptist, an enthusiast whose fame has attracted him at last into the Christian legend. Very early, the old rite of water-lustration or baptism, adopted by John, was employed as one of the chief Christian ceremonies, the ceremony of initiation, which replaced with advantage the bloody and dangerous Jewish circumcision.
This allowed for far freer proselytism than Judaism could ever expect; and though no doubt at first the Christians regarded themselves as a sect of the Jews, and though they always adopted entire the Jewish sacred books and the Jewish God, with all the Jewish history, cosmogony, and mythology, yet the new religion was from the beginning a cosmopolitan one, and preached the word unto all nations. Such a faith, coming at such a moment, and telling men precisely what they were ready to believe, was certain beforehand of pretty general acceptance. When Constantine made Christianity the official creed of the empire, it is clear that he did but put an official stamp of approval on a revolution that had long been growing more and more inevitable.
In one word, Christianity triumphed, because it united in itself all the most vital elements of all the religions then current in the world, with little that was local, national, or distasteful; and it added to them all a high ethical note and a social doctrine of human brotherhood especially suited to an age of unification and systematic government.
Occasionally, even in the Gospels themselves, we get strange passing echoes of a mysterious identification of the Christ with the ancient Hebrew ethnical god, not as the Lord of the Universe alone, but vaguely remembered as the sacred stone of the ark, the Rock of Israel. “The stone which the builders rejected, that one has become the head of the corner.” “Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.” And in a speech put into the mouth of Christ, he says to Peter, “Rock thou art, and on this Rock will I build my assembly.” *
* I can honestly assure the polemical Protestant divine
that I am well aware of the difference in gender in this
passage—and of its utter unimportance. The name Peter could
not well be made feminine to suit a particular play upon
words or to anticipate the objections of a particular set of
trivial word-twisters.
Sometimes, too, in the epistles the two ideas of the corn-god and the foundation stone-god are worked upon alternately. "I have planted; Apollos watered.” “Ye are God’s husbandry; ye are God’s building.” “I have laid the foundation, and another builds thereon. Let every man take care how he builds upon it. For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is the Christ, Jesus.” Or again, “You are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus, the Christ, being himself the chief corner stone.” Whoever rereads the epistles by the light of the analogies suggested in this book will find that they positively teem with similar references to the familiar theology of the various slain man-gods, which must have been known to every one along the shores of the Mediterranean.