The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions

by J. M. Robertson

Chapter VII

THE ALLEGED CONSENSUS OF SCHOLARS

Such is the historical impasse at which open-minded students find themselves when they would finally frame a reasoned conception of the origin of the Christian religion. The documentary analysis having yielded results which absolutely repel the accepted tradition, however denuded of supernaturalism, we are driven to seek a solution which shall be compatible with the data. And some of us, after spending many years in shaping a sequence which should retain the figure of the Founder and his twelve disciples, have found ourselves forced step by step to the conclusion that these are all alike products of myth, intelligible and explicable only as such. And when, in absolute loyalty to all the clues, with no foregone conclusions to support—unless the rejection of supernaturalism be counted such—we tentatively frame for ourselves a hypothesis of a remote origin in a sacramental cult of human sacrifice, with a probable Jesus-God for its centre in Palestine, we are not surprised at being met by the kind of explosion that has met every step in the disintegration of traditional beliefs from Copernicus to Darwin. The compendious Mr. Sinclair, who makes no pretension to have read any of the works setting forth the new theories, thus describes them:—

The arguments of Baconians and mythomaniacs are alike made up of the merest blunders as to fact and the sheerest misunderstanding of the meaning of facts. Grotesque etymologies,[1] arbitrary and tasteless emendations of texts, forced parallels, unrestrained license of conjecture, the setting of conjecture above reasonably established fact, chains of argument in which every link is of straw, appeals to anti-theological bias and to the miserable egotism which sees heroes with the eyes of the valet—these are some of the formidable “evidences” in deference to which we are asked to reverse the verdicts of tradition, scholarship, and common sense. They have never imposed on anyone fairly conversant with the facts. Those who have not such knowledge may either simply appeal to the authority of scholars, OR, BETTER STILL, SUPPORT that authority by exercizing their own IMAGINATION AND COMMON SENSE.

That tirade has seemed to me worth preserving. It is perhaps a monition to scholars, whose function is something higher than vituperation, to note how their inadequacies are sought to be eked out by zeal without either scholarship or judgment, and, finally, without intellectual sincerity. The publicist who alternately tells the unread that they ought to accept the verdict of scholars, and that it is “better still” to “support” that verdict by unaided “imagination and common sense,” has given us once for all his moral measure.

Dismissing him as having served his turn in illustrating compendiously the temper which survives in Unitarian as in Trinitarian traditionalism, we may conclude this preliminary survey with a comment on the proposition that we should take the “verdict of scholars.” It has been put by men, themselves scholars in other fields, whom to bracket with Mr. Sinclair would be an impertinence. But I have always been puzzled by their attitude. They proceed upon three assumptions, which are all alike delusions. The first is that there is a consensus of scholars on the details of this problem. The second is that the professional scholars have a command of a quite recondite knowledge as regards the central issue. The third is that there is such a thing as professional expertise in the diagnosis of Gods, Demigods, and real Founders in religious history. Once more, the nature of the problem has not been realized.

Let us take first the case of a real scholar in the strictest sense of the term, Professor Gustaf Dalman, of Leipzig, author of “The Words of Jesus, considered in the light of Post-Biblical Jewish Writings and the Aramaic Language.”[2] To me, Professor Dalman appears to be an expert of high competence, alike in Hebrew and Aramaic—a double qualification possessed by very few of those to whose “verdict” we are told to bow. By his account few previous experts in the same field have escaped bad miscarriages, as a handful of excerpts will show:—

M. Friedmann, Onkelos und Akylas, 1896, still holds fast to the traditional opinion that even Ezra had an Aramaic version of the Tora. In this he is mistaken.

H. Laible, in Dalman-Laible’s Jesus Christ in the Talmud, etc., incorrectly refers it [the phrase “bastard of a wedded wife”] to Jesus. The discussion treats merely of the definition of the term “bastard.”