The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions

by J. M. Robertson

Chapter XII

FAILURE OF THE LOGIA THEORY

To the open-minded reader it must be already plain that, unless we are to be led into mere chaos, there must at once be added to the statistical test either the proviso that given sayings may for the purposes of certain sections of the Church have been left out in certain Gospels, or that for the purposes of certain sections they may have been invented. And the moment such a concession is made, the primary assumption of necessary authenticity is destroyed. If the anti-Samaritan precept is the utterance of the Founder, the pro-Samaritan parable is not; or else the Founder was literally all things to all men. If either could be foisted on a gospel, anything could be; and the futile historical argument to save the prediction of the fall of Jerusalem—an argument proceeding, as we have seen, on a quite uncritical view of one uninvestigated and loosely described case—becomes doubly irrelevant. Dr. Petrie’s Nucleus of triple tradition contains the prophecy:—

The Son of Man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify him; and the third day he shall rise again.

Is that to be salved as historical, on the pretext that Blass has by the case of Savonarola “exploded the dogma” of omne vaticinium post eventum, or is to be salved by the plea that Savonarola, like Lincoln, predicted his own death at the hands of his enemies? And if prudence perforce abandons that course, why was the vaguer prophecy about Jerusalem sought to be salved at all? Why was not the miracle prediction included in the Savonarola argument? Considered as a whole, the other is not at all a bare prediction of the sacking of a city, fortuitously fulfilled forty years after utterance: it is a Messianic judgment, carrying a whole eschatology bound up with it.[1] And the fact that different gospels give it differently is not to be rationally explained by Professor Blass’s device of saying that Jesus must have said a great deal more still, and that Luke selected what would appeal to Gentiles, while Matthew and Mark omitted what would give pain to Jews. This conception of evangelists playing fast and loose with the known divine oracles to suit men’s susceptibilities ought to be disturbing to any believer’s moral sense; while that of a set of propagandists inventing oracles to suit their own religious aim puts the Gospel-makers in a line with the whole succession of Jewish and early Christian framers of supposititious documents, as men of their age, well-meaning, narrow, deluded, devoted.

We have come back to the fundamental issue between authoritarian supernaturalism and free reason. If the prediction of the betrayal, the trial, the scourging, the mocking, the crucifixion, and the resurrection is to stand, there need be no more discussion over miracles or anything else. “It is written,” and there an end. Biblical criticism has once more become blasphemy. If reason is to have any access to the matter, the prediction must fall as a fiction; and if the “exploded” argument from Savonarola is to be revived, it will have to be restricted to the case of the prediction to which it was so prudentially applied. But if one hopeless prophecy is to be dropped as post eventum, it is mere irrelevance to debate over another which is only in one selected and isolated aspect less hopeless, while as a whole it is equally so.

Savonarola’s prediction of the fall of Rome was one of many, motived by religion and invited by the absolute fact of previous invasions, of which the last had occurred only two years before. The one concrete detail in which it was “fulfilled” was simply a specification of a common feature in the warfare of the age. Another invasion of Italy was believed to be imminent, and actually took place in the year of the prophecy, without fulfilling that in any detail. The Gospel prophecy is Messianic, devoid of political motivation, accompanied by a whole apparatus of Christian eschatology, and backed by other predictions of pure miracle. The details of the siege and the sequel are as plainly supplied after the event as those of the betrayal, the mockery, the scourging, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. To hold by one set of predictions and abandon the other is mere critical trifling. Even orthodox critics give up the early chapters of Luke as late accretions. What kind of credit is it that is to be saved by making him the faithful chronicler of a real prophecy?

The prediction of the fall of the temple, which is in the Nucleus as being common in matter and order to all three synoptics, is in no better case. On Dr. Petrie’s principle, it is one of the earliest accepted sayings—that is, it was embodied when the Jesuist movement was pre-occupied over the law, and yet it did not disturb that pre-occupation. On his theory, it should not have appeared in the Nucleus at all, or in any Gospel until the occasion arose. Thus incompatible with Dr. Petrie’s own theory, it is equally incompatible with any critical principle. This is a concrete Messianic prophecy, not to be salved by any juggling with mere historiography. In the terms of the case, it was made at a time when there was no politically visible reason for making it,[2] and is not in the least to be explained as were the vaticinations of Savonarola. On the principles of Professor Blass, it ought to have been far too “painful” for preservation by men adhering to the Jewish law.

It is quite thinkable, of course, that the compilers of the Gospels may have found such quasi-predictions already committed to writing, and merely embodied them. But that admission only carries us back to the problem of authenticity. If any current “scrap of paper” concerning “Jesus” or “the Lord” could thus secure canonicity, what trust is to be put in the canon? It is recorded in the history of Islam that Abu Daoud, who collected some half-a-million traditions concerning Mohammed, rejected all but 4,800, which included “the authentic, those which seem to be authentic, and those which are nearly so.”[3] This again, it may be argued, proves that false traditions do not negate the historicity of the personage they concern. And that is clearly true. There may conceivably have been a Teacher in whose mouth many invented sayings were put even in his lifetime. But when we thus come to the historicity problem, there is simply no such basis in the Gospels as we have in the life of the confessedly “Illiterate Prophet.” The Gospel life begins and ends in miracle, and it yields no intelligible evangel apart from that ostensibly founded on the sacrificial death—the death, that is, of the God.