Apart from the sacramental rite, the whole body of the Teaching is but a mass of incompatibilities, telling of a dozen standpoints, legalism and anti-legalism, Judaism and Gentilism, Davidism and non-Davidism, asceticism and the contrary, a meek Messiah and one claiming to be greater than Solomon, a Teacher vetoing invective and one freely indulging in it, a popular and unexplained Gospel for the masses who are declared to be purposely excluded from comprehension of that very Gospel, whereof the esoteric explanations yield nothing that could apply to the alleged propaganda.
Even self-contradictions, it may be argued, do not negate the authenticity of a teaching. Carlyle and Buskin abound in them; who escapes them? Many passages in the Koran are contradicted or abrogated by others, 225 verses being cancelled by later ones.[4] Here indeed there is plain ground for critical doubt; and some of us must emphatically decline to accept Muir’s verdict, endorsing Von Hammer’s, that “we may upon the strongest presumption affirm that every verse in the Koran is the genuine and unaltered composition of Mohammed himself.”[5] But even if we are satisfied that Mohammed in his long life deliberately modified his doctrine, there is no room for such an explanation in the case of a teacher who is never once said to avow modification, and whose whole teaching career ostensibly covers but a year in the synoptic record.
As the tradition stands, whether read with Unitarian or with Trinitarian assumptions, it is a mere mosaic of enigma and contradiction. If the Teacher never called himself the Son of God in a miraculous sense, how came the men for whom his word was law, and who in the terms of the thesis knew his life history and parentage if any one did, to call him so? In Dr. Petrie’s Nucleus, the triple tradition, the Founder does assure his disciples that “in the regeneration” he will sit in the throne of glory, and they on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes. What room is there for Gentilism here? And if downright miracle and miraculous prediction alike be given up as unhistorical, on what grounds can we give credence to this as a really delivered oracle?
On the other hand, no fundamental difficulty remains when we recognize that the whole Gospel record is the composite result of a process of making a life history for a God. The command of the Messiah to Peter to keep silence as to his Messianic character is quite intelligible as providing at once the claim by Jesus and an explanation of the fact that no such Messianic movement was historically recorded. The blank enigma of the early “popular” evangel is solved when we realize that there had been no such evangel; that the cult had really grown out of the ancient sacramental rite; that the growing movement had to evolve a quasi-biography when the God of the rite was to be developed into a Messiah; and that the Judaism of the old Messianic idea had to be transmuted into universalism when the cult came to a Gentile growth. All the contradictory texts fall (more or less clearly) into their orders as survivals of the divergent sects formed by the changing situation—or, let us say, of those changing needs of the widening cult which Dr. Petrie so arbitrarily makes a ground for the mere selection of dicta from a floating mass of written notes, but which may so much more rationally be taken as grounds for producing the required oracle.
That there were such scattered and floating oracles, indeed, we are not critically entitled to deny. The Judæo-Greek world was indeed familiar with oracles of “the Lord.” The Gospel Jesus is made to predict that there would come after him many saying “I am Christ”; and while the traditionalist must accept this as true prediction, the historian must pronounce that various “Christs” or quasi-Christs did come. We have some of their names and their brief secular history.[6] Each of these men would be “the Lord” for his followers; and some of them, surely, propounded some teaching. The Gospel ethic of reciprocity, we know, was put in a saner form by Hillel; did he get it from the Jesuists? Christian scholars do not claim as much.[7] There is no Messianic item in the Gospels, apart from the lore of the sacrament, which may not have been in the legend of any “Christ.” As it happens, the best authenticated saying of “the Lord” is one which no Christian now accepts—the fantastic millenarian prediction given by Papias, who had it from “the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord,” and textually quoted by Irenæus, who is practically corroborated by Eusebius. The latter, it is true, pronounces Papias very limited in his comprehension;[8] but has not the same thing been said many times of the disciples by believers in the gospel Jesus?
The logion preserved from Papias, we know, is in the Apocalypse of Baruch, which imitated the Book of Enoch, both of which are full of oracles of “the Lord.” But this only proves that oracles passing current in other quarters and of another source could pass current with devout Jesuists as oracles of Jesus. The Apocalypse of Baruch is pronounced by Canon Charles, who has so ably edited that and other remains of Jewish literature of the same age, a “beautiful” book, “almost the last noble utterance of Judaism before it plunged in the dark and oppressive years that followed the destruction of Jerusalem”; a book written when “breathing thought and burning word had still their home in Palestine, and the hand of the Jewish artist was still master of its ancient cunning.”[9] It was admittedly long more widely current in Christian than in Jewish circles, and fell into discredit only when it was felt to contain “an implicit polemic against Christianity.” It is to its early Christian vogue that we owe its preservation in a Syriac translation made from the Greek: “of the Hebrew original every line has perished, save a few still surviving in rabbinic writings.”
Who can say how many other such Jewish books may not have furnished items for the compilers of the Gospels? The Sermon on the Mount we know is a Judaic compilation; and the “Slavonic Enoch” contains sets of beatitudes closely analogous to those of the Sermon. To the traditionalist these things are matters of profound perplexity; for the rational critic they are evidences for the naturalist conception of the rise of Christianity.
[1] Bousset (The Anti-Christ Legend, Eng. tr. p. 23) “assumes, with many recent expositors, that the distinctly apocalyptic part of [Matt. xxiv] and [Mark xiii] is a fragment of foreign origin introduced amid genuine utterances of the Lord. It is also evident that, compared with that of Mark, the text of Matthew is the original.” Here we have the old strategy of compromise. [↑]
[2] The assertion of Dr. Conybeare (Myth, Magic, and Morals, p. 46), that the destruction of the temple was “an event which any clear-sighted observer of the growing hostility between Jew and Roman must have foreseen,” is characteristic of that writer’s way of interpreting documents. A second reading may perhaps yield him another impression. Forty years of non-fulfilment is a precious proof of the “must.” [↑]