The traditionalist is here unconsciously substituting a new and different argument for the first. Hitherto the thesis has been that of the “vividness” of the record, the “human touches,” the “speaking and feeling like a real man,” the “freedom and variety of life.” Apparently he has had a shadow of misgiving over these simple criteria. If, indeed, he had given an hour to the perusal of Albert Kalthoff’s Rise of Christianity, instead of proceeding to vilipend a literature of which he had read nothing, he would have learned that his preliminary thesis is there anticipated and demolished. Kalthoff meets it by the simple observation that the books of Ruth and Jonah supply “human touches” and “freedom and variety of life” to a far greater degree than does the Gospel story considered as a life of Jesus; though practically all scholars are now agreed that both of the former books are deliberately planned fictions, or early “novels with a purpose.” Ruth is skilfully framed to contend against the Jewish bigotry of race; and Jonah to substitute a humane ideal for the ferocious one embalmed in so much of the sacred literature. Yet so “vividly” are the central personages portrayed that down till the other day all the generations of Christendom, educated and uneducated alike, accepted them unquestioningly as real records, whatever might be thought by the judicious few of the miracle element in Jonah.
It is thus ostensibly quite expedient to substitute for the simple thesis of “vividness” in regard to the second Gospel the quite different argument that some of the details exclude the notion that “the author” regarded Jesus as a supernatural person. But this thesis instantly involves the defence in fresh trouble, besides breaking down utterly on its own merits. In the early chapters of Mark, Jesus is emphatically presented as a supernormal person—the deity’s “beloved Son,” “the Holy One of God,” who has the divine power of forgiving sins, is “lord even of the sabbath,” and is hailed by the defeated spirits of evil as “the Son of God,” and the “Son of the Most High God.” Either the conception of Jesus in [Mark vi] is compatible with all this or it is not. If not, the case collapses, for the “derogatory” episode must be at once branded as an interpolation. And if it be argued that even as an interpolation it testifies at once to a non-supernaturalist view of the Founder’s function and a real knowledge of his life and actions, we have only to give a list of more or less mythical names in rebuttal. To claim that the episode in [Mark vi, 1–6], is “derogatory from the point of view of conventional hero-worship,” and therefore presumptively historical, is to ignore alike Jewish and Gentile hero-worship. In the Old Testament Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Judah, Moses, Aaron, Samson, David, and Solomon are all successively placed in “derogatory” positions; and the Pagan hero-worshippers of antiquity are equally with the Jewish recalcitrant to Mr. Sinclair’s conviction of what they ought to do.
Professor Schmiedel is aware, though Mr. Sinclair apparently is not, that Herakles in the myth is repeatedly placed in “derogatory” positions, and is not only seized as a madman but actually driven mad. The reader who will further extend Mr. Sinclair’s brief curriculum to a perusal of the Bacchæ of Euripides will find that the God, who in another story is temporarily driven mad by Juno, is there subjected to even greater indignities than those so triumphantly specified by our hierologist. Herakles and Dionysos, we may be told, were only demigods, not Gods. But Professor Schmiedel’s thesis is that for the writer of Mark or of his original document Jesus was only a holy man. On the other hand—to say nothing of the myths of Zeus and Hêrê, Arês and Aphroditê, Hephaistos and Poseidon—Apollo, certainly a God for the framers of his myth, is there actually represented as being banished from heaven and living in a state of servitude to Admetus for nine years. A God, then, could be conceived in civilized antiquity as undergoing many and serious indignities. These simple à priori arguments are apt to miscarry even in the hands of careful and scrupulous scholars like Professor Schmiedel, who have failed to realize that no amount of textual scholarship can suffice to settle problems which in their very nature involve fundamental issues of anthropology, mythology, and hierology. As Professor Schmiedel is never guilty of browbeating, I make no disparagement of his solid work on the score that he has not taken account of these fields in his argument; but when his untenable thesis is brandished by men who have neither his form of scholarship nor any other, it is apt to incur summary handling.
Elsewhere I have examined Professor Schmiedel’s thesis in detail.[2] Here it may suffice to point out (1) as aforesaid, that the argument from derogatory treatment is not in the least a proof that in an ancient narrative a personage is not regarded as superhuman; (2) that a suffering Messiah was expressly formulated in Jewish literature in the pre-Christian period;[3] and (3) that there are extremely strong grounds for inferring purposive invention—of that naïf kind which marks the whole mass of early hierology—in the very episodes upon which he founds. The first concrete details of the Founder’s propaganda in Mark, as we have seen, exhibit him as clashing with the Judaic environment. In later episodes he clashes with it yet further. The “derogatory” episodes exhibit him as clashing with his personal environment, his family and kin, concerning whom there has been no mention whatever at the outset, where we should expect to find it. All this is in line with the anti-Judaic element of the Gospel. If at early stages in the larger Jesuine movement there were reasons why the Founder should be represented as detaching himself from the Mosaic law; as being misunderstood and deserted by his disciples; and as disparaging even the listening Jewish multitude (concerning whom [Mark, iv, 10] sq., makes him say that “unto them that are without, all things are done in parables, that seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest haply they should turn again, and it should be forgiven them”), is there anything unlikely in his being inventively represented as meeting antipathetic treatment from his family?[4] At a time when so-called “brothers of the Lord” ostensibly claimed authority in the Judæo-Gentile community, an invented tale of original domestic hostility to the Teacher would be as likely as the presence of authorities so styled is unlikely on the assumption that the story in Mark was all along current. The very fact that allusions to the family of the Lord suddenly appear in a record which had introduced him as a heavenly messenger, without mention of home or kindred or preparation, tells wholly against the originality of the later details, which in the case of the naming of “the carpenter” and his mother have a polemic purpose.[5]
[1] Note the identity of terms, εὐεργετῶν in Acts (x, 38), εὐεργετήσας in Diodorus. [↑]
[2] Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 441 sq.; Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 229–236. A notably effective criticism is passed on the thesis in Prof. W. B. Smith’s Ecce Deus, p. 177 sq. Mr. Sinclair, of course, does not dream of meeting such replies. [↑]
[3] What else is signified by [Acts iii, 18]; [xvii, 3]? [↑]
[4] Dr. W. B. Smith sees in the story a mere symbolizing of the rejection of Jesus by the Jews. This may very well be the case. [↑]
[5] Dr. Flinders Petrie even infers a “late” reference to the Virgin-Birth. The Growth of the Gospels, 1910, p. 86. This Loisy rejects. [↑]