The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions

by J. M. Robertson

Chapter VI

THE VISIONARY EVANGEL

All this applies, of course, to the “Primitive Gospel” held to underlie all of the synoptics, Mark included—a datum which reduces to comparative unimportance the question of priority among these. As collected by the school of Bernhard Weiss,[1] the primitive Gospel, like Mark, set out with a non-historical introduction of the Messiah to be baptized by John. It then gives the temptation myth in full; and immediately afterwards the Teacher is made to address to disciples (who have not previously been mentioned or in any way accounted for) the Sermon on the Mount, with variations, and without any mount. In this place we have the uncompromising insistence on the Mosaic law; and soon, after some miracles of healing and some Messianic discourses, including the liturgical “Come unto me all ye that labour,” we have the Sabbatarian question raised on the miracle of the healing of the man with the dropsy, but without the argument from the Davidic eating of the shewbread.[2]

There is no more of the colour of history here than in Mark: so obviously is it wanting in both that the really considerate exegetes are driven to explain that history was not the object in either writing. In both “the twelve” are suddenly sent—in the case of Mark, after a list of twelve had been inserted without any reference to the first specified five; in the reconstructed “primitive” document without any list whatever—to preach the blank gospel, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” with menaces for the non-recipient, the allocutions to Chorazin and Bethsaida being here made part of the instructions to the apostles.

What, then, are the disciples supposed to have preached? What had the Teacher preached as an evangel of “the Kingdom”? The record has expressly represented that his parables were incomprehensible to his own disciples; and when they ask for an explanation they are told that the parables are expressly meant to be unintelligible, but that to them an explanation is vouchsafed. It is to the effect that “the seed is the word.” What word? The “Kingdom”? The mystic allegories on that head are avowedly not for the multitude: they could not have been. Yet those allegories are the sole explanations ever afforded in the Gospels of the formula of “the Kingdom” which was to be the purport of the evangel of the apostles to the multitude. They themselves had failed to understand the parables; and they were forbidden to convey the explanation. What, then, had they to convey?

And that issue raises another. Why were there disciples at all? Disciples are understood to be prepared as participants in or propagandists of somebody’s teaching—a lore either exoteric or esoteric. But no intelligible view has ever been given of the purpose of the Gospel Jesus in creating his group of Twelve. If we ask what he taught them, the only answer given by the documents is: (1) Casting out devils; (2) The meaning of parables which were meant to be unintelligible to the people: that is, either sheer thaumaturgy or a teaching which was never to be passed on. On the economic life of the group not one gleam of light is cast. Judas carried a “bag,” but as to whence came its contents there is no hint. The whole concept hangs in the air, a baseless dream. The myth-makers have not even tried to make it plausible.

The problems thus raised are not only not faced by the orthodox exegetes; they are not seen by them. They take the most laudable pains to ascertain what the primitive Gospel was like, and, having settled it to the satisfaction of a certain number, they rest from their labours. Yet we are only at the beginning of the main, the historic problem, from which Baur recalled Strauss to the documentary, with the virtual promise that its solution would clear up the other.

A “higher” criticism than that so-called, it is clear, must set about the task; and its first conclusion, I suggest, must be that there never was any Christian evangel by the Christ and the Twelve. These allegories of the Kingdom are framed to conceal the fact that the gospel-makers had no evangel to describe; though it may be claimed as a proof of their forensic simplicity that they actually represent the Founder as vetoing all popular explanation of the very formula which they say he sent his disciples to preach to the populace. An idea of the Kingdom of God, it may be argued, was already current among the Jews: the documents assert that that was the theme of the Baptist. Precisely, but was the evangel of Jesus then simply the evangel of John, which it was to supersede? And was the evangel of John only the old evangel, preached by Pharisees and others from the time of the Maccabees onwards?[3] Whatever it was, what is the meaning of the repeated Gospel declaration that the nature of the Kingdom must not be explained to the people? There is only one inference. The story of the sending forth of the twelve is as plainly mythical as is Luke’s story of the sending forth of the seventy, which even the orthodox exegetes abandon as a “symmetrical” myth; though they retain the allocution embodied in it. What is in theory the supreme episode in the early propaganda of the cult is found to have neither historical content nor moral significance. Not only is there not a word of explanation of the formula of the evangel, there is not a word of description of the apostles’ experience, but simply the usual negation of knowledge:—

And the disciples returned and told him all that they had done, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name. And he said, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven; behold I have given you power to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy; notwithstanding, in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.... ([Luke x, 17–20], with “the disciples” for “the seventy”).