A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

Such a clearly dramatic composition can be accounted for only as a development, after the fashion of the pagan mystery-dramas, from a remote, primitive rite of human sacrifice, such as we know to have been long habitual among the Jews as among other Semites. To the ancient rite the very name of Jesus probably belonged; and the existing document is presumptively an adaptation, made after the fall of Jerusalem by Gentile Christists, of a simpler and earlier Judaic ritual-drama. We are thus left facing a myth, not a history—a Jesus who compares not with Mohammed but with Dionysos and Osiris.

When the historic Church set about a statement of its history it could not even fix satisfactorily the year of its supposed founder’s birth; and the “Christian era” was made to begin some years—two, three, four, five, or eight—after that on which the chronologists were later fain to fix, by way of conforming to their most precise document. Their data, however, have no more value than any other guess. So little of the semblance of historical testimony do the gospels yield that it is impossible to establish from them any proposition as to the duration of the God-man’s ministry; and the early Church in general held by the tradition that it lasted exactly one year, an opinion which again points straight to myth, since it is either a dogmatic assumption based on the formula of “the acceptable year of the Lord,” or a simple reversion to the story of the Sun-God. Of the life of the alleged teacher from the age of twelve to thirty—another mythological period—there is not a single trace, mythical or non-mythical, though at his death he is represented as the centre of a large and adoring following. Ultimately, his birth was placed at the winter solstice, the birth-day of the Sun-God in the most popular cults; and while that is fixed as an anniversary, the date of his crucifixion is made to vary from year to year in order to conform to the astronomical principle on which the Jews, following the sun-worshippers, had fixed their Passover. Between those fabulous points everything the gospels affirm as biographical fact is fortuitous or purposive invention, which on scientific analysis “leaves not a wrack behind” in the nature of objective history.

Before accepting such a verdict the sympathetic seeker is apt to grasp at the old argument that such a figure as the gospel Jesus cannot have been created either by fortuitous fable or by fictions; that its moral stature is above that of any of the men we can trace in the gospel-making period; that its spiritual unity excludes the theory of a literary mosaic. It must first be answered that these positions beg the question and falsify the data. That the figure of the gospel Jesus is actually devoid of moral unity is made clear by the very attempts to unify it, since they one and all leave out much of the records; and the claim to moral superiority collapses, even apart from the obvious fact that the texts are aggregations, as soon as we compare them with the contemporary and previous ethical literature of the Jews, Greeks, Romans, and Hindus. There is not one teaching in the gospels that is not there paralleled; and the passages which have been claimed as most characteristic—for instance, the Sermon on the Mount—are mere compilations of earlier Jewish utterances. Thus the unity credited to the records, and the personality ascribed to the founder, are but creations of the same sympathetic human imagination that wove tissues of poetry and pathos round the figures of Dionysos and Buddha, and framed for the cult of Krishna its most impressive document when the cult was already ancient beyond reckoning. As man has made his Gods, so he has made his Christs: it would be strange indeed if the faculty which wrought the one could not create the other.

§ 4. Myth of the Twelve Apostles

In one of the Pauline epistles, which are usually understood to belong to the second generation after that of the founder, there is mention of three chief Apostles with whom Paul had disputes, but none of any contemporary group of Twelve; and the only historical allusion to the latter number is in one of the interpolations in First Corinthians, where it appears to be a patch upon a patch. In the Acts of the Apostles, which though a fraudulent is an ancient compilation, there is a preliminary story of the election of an apostle to fill the place of Judas, deceased and disgraced; but not only is there no further pretence of such a process of completion, the majority of the twelve themselves speedily disappear from the history. Once more we are dealing with a myth. In the Apocalypse, again, after the original Judaic document has pictured a New Jerusalem with twelve gates and angels, named after the twelve tribes, the Christian interpolator has betrayed himself by the awkward invention of twelve “basement courses” named after the “twelve Apostles of the Lamb,” where an original Christian author would have given the apostles the gates if anything, had a list of twelve Jesuist apostles existed for him. In heaven the Lamb is surrounded, not by twelve disciples, but by the “four and twenty presbyters” of an older cult, probably that of Babylonia, which had twenty-four “Counsellor Gods.”

In the gospels the lack of historic foundation is no less decisive. Circumstantial but irreconcilable accounts, obviously mythical, are given of the selection of four or five apostles, whereafter the narratives, without a word of preparation or explanation, proceed to a sudden constitution of the group of twelve, with only the mythological detail, in one case, that they were “called” by the Master on a mountain. Thus the element of the Twelve is not even an early item in the records. It has been imposed on documents which set out with no such datum, but with primary groups of five, four, and three.

The historical solution of the problem as to the source of the fiction is now tolerably certain. It is on record that the Jewish High Priest of the latter days of the Temple, and after him the Patriarch at Tiberias, employed certain “Apostles” as tribute-collectors and supervisors of the many faithful Jews scattered throughout the neighbouring kingdoms. By common Jewish usage these would number twelve. As the dispersed Jewish race multiplied abroad after the fall of the Temple, it is probable that under the upper grade of twelve there was created a body of seventy-two collectors, who answered to the traditional number of “the nations” in Jewish lore. Such a body is the probable basis for the admittedly mythical “seventy” or “seventy-two” of the third gospel. At this stage the twelve appear to have exercised chiefly teaching and regulative functions, for it is clear that the quasi-Christian document, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, recovered in 1873 and published in 1883, was originally a purely Jewish manual of moral exhortation, and as such bore its existing title. To the six or seven purely Judaic and non-Jesuist chapters which seem to constitute the original document, and which contain passages copied in the so-called Sermon on the Mount, there were gradually added others, introducing the rites of baptism and the eucharist, the name of Jesus, the doctrine of the Trinity, and various rules of economic procedure. In this gradual fashion a Jesuist cult, in which Jesus is called the “servant” of God, was grafted on an originally Judaic moral teaching, the prestige of the Jewish “Twelve Apostles” being all the while carried on. It was to give a Christian origin for this document, or for the institution pointed to by its title, that the gospel myth of the Twelve Apostles was framed. After the time of Athanasius, the expanded document, being still unduly Judaic and otherwise unsuitable for the purposes of the organized Church, passed into disuse; but the myth remained.

As regards the three “chief” apostles named in one of the Pauline epistles, there is a reasonable presumption that they were either leading propagandists of the Jesuist cult as it existed at the time of the writing, or so reputed by later tradition; but the assumption that they had been associates and disciples of the founder must be abandoned with the rest of the gospel tradition. They were necessarily woven into the gospel narrative by the later compilers; but the Epistle to the Galatians lies under the general suspicion of having been interpolated, if not wholly forged; and its very naming of the Judaic apostles is as much a ground for question as a datum for construction. It is probable, further, that the title “brethren of the Lord” was originally a group-name, and that the literal construction of it was a misconception by the later readers or interpolators of the epistles and the gospels. Nothing in the gospels or the Acts can make intelligible the appearance of certain actual brothers of the gospel Jesus at the head of a Jesuist cult. The name of Peter, finally, became a nucleus for many myths; and the two epistles which bear his name have so little relation to the personality set forth in the gospels that both have been widely discredited as forgeries; the second having indeed been so reputed in the days of Eusebius. The Simon-Petros (Cephas) of the gospels, however, is in himself a mere literary creation. Represented there as basely denying his captured Master, he figures in the Acts as the supernatural slayer of Ananias and Sapphira for a much slighter sin. The gospel story must be one of the products of the anti-Judaic animus of later Gentile Jesuists, for even the Ananias story is late. All that holds good is the fact that a tradition grew round the names in question, both of which hint of mythology—Petros (“the Rock”) being the name of an Egyptian God and of the popular Eastern deity Mithra; and Simon the name of a no less popular Semitic God. In his final aspect as leader of the twelve, basis of the Church, and keeper of the heavenly keys, Peter combines the attributes of Mithra and of Janus, both official deities of the Roman military class, as well as of the Egyptian Petra—who is door-keeper of heaven, earth, and the underworld.

The Epistle of James, by whomsoever written, is in no sense a Christist document—containing as it does not a single Jesuist or Christian doctrine, save perhaps the appended invective against the rich, which is Ebionitic. Of its two namings of Jesus, one is clearly an interpolation, and the other is presumptively so. There remains only a moral exhortation to Jews meeting in synagogues, a teaching strictly comparable to that of the original and pre-Jesuine “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” though the epistle makes no mention of any other apostles. Such writing tells of an essentially different propaganda from that of the Christists proper; and its preservation by them testifies to its priority. The epistles ascribed to John, on the contrary, belong to a considerably later period; telling as they do of a fanatical movement which swears by the name of Jesus the Christ as one who has died to take away sin, but which is full of apprehension as to the advent and functions of a number of Anti-Christs.