The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions

by J. M. Robertson

A little later he takes as historical the “terrible invectives” pronounced against Capernaum and the neighbouring cities, which he attempts to explain. After all, the multitude had not gone beyond a “benevolent curiosity, quite ready to transform itself into an ironical incredulity. They had seen the miracles; they awaited meantime the kingdom, without otherwise preparing for it; and as the kingdom did not come they inclined less and less to believe in it.” So they were doomed to a terrible judgment for their faithlessness. But why then was nothing said of the wholly unbelieving Nazareth?[7] If the towns which would not receive the disciples were to be testified against, what should be the fate of the hostile birthplace?

Before such problems, the method of “liberal” accommodation here as always breaks down. To the eye of the evolutionist there is no great mystery. The avowal that the Founder either could not or did not work wonders at Nazareth might serve any one of several conceivable purposes. It might meet the cavils of those who in a later day found and said that nothing was known at Nazareth of a wonder-working Jesus who had dwelt there; even as the often-repeated story of the command to healed persons to keep silence could avail to turn the attacks of investigating doubters in regard to the miraculous cures. Or it might serve either to impugn the pretensions of those who at one stage of the movement called themselves “Nazarenes” in the sense of followers of the man of Nazareth, or to include the birthplace with the family and the disciples in that disparagement of the Jewish surroundings which would arise step for step with the spread of the Gentile movement. Any of these explanations is reasonable beside the thesis that a man gifted with marvellous healing powers, suddenly developed without any previous sign of them, could either find no one in his own village to let him try them, or to recognize them even when applied there, while the country round about, ex hypothesi, was ringing with his fame. And the criticism which puts us off with such solutions is really not well entitled to impute “superficiality” to those who reject it.

The whole “carpenter” story, in which M. Loisy sees no difficulty, is one of the weakest of the Gospel attempts at circumstantiality. A trade or calling for the Messiah, as a true Jew, was perhaps as requisite in the eyes of some Jews as either a Davidic descent or an argument to prove that Davidic descent was for the Messiah unnecessary—both of which requirements the Gospels meet. Every good Jew, we are told, was required to have a handicraft or profession. A “Ben-Joseph,” again, was called-for to meet the requirement, common among the Samaritans but not confined to them, of a Messiah so named.[8] But how came it that “the carpenter” of Mark is only “the carpenter’s son” in Matthew? We can conceive the Gentilizing Luke putting both statements aside as ill-suited to his purpose, his Jesus being a God competing with Gentile Gods; but if there really was an early knowledge that Jesus was a carpenter, why should Matthew minimize it? And how came it that Origen[9] knew of no Gospel “current in the churches” in which Jesus was described as a carpenter?

In this matter, as about the Infancy generally, the apocryphal gospels are as rich in detail as the canonical are poor. Again and again does Joseph figure in them as a working carpenter, or plough-maker, or house-builder.[10] The words of Origen might imply that it was from some such source that Celsus drew his statement that Jesus was a carpenter; and yet none of the preserved apocrypha speaks of Jesus as working at carpentry save by way of such miracles as that of the elongation of the piece of wood. Having regard to the mythical aspect of the whole, we suggest an easily misinterpreted Gnostic source for the basis. For some schools of the Gnostics, the Jewish God was the Demiourgos, the Artisan or Creator, a subordinate being in their divine hierarchy. The word could mean an artisan of any kind; and architector, the term in the Latin version of Thomas, points to a reflex of the idea of “creator” which attached to the Gnostic term.

That the doctrine of the Demiourgos was already current in Jewish circles before the period commonly assigned to Christian Gnosticism has been shown with much probability by Dr. S. Karppe. In a Talmudic passage given as cited by Rabbi Jochanan ben Saccai before the middle of the first century, C.E., there is denunciation of those who “spare not the glory of the Creator”; and other passages interpret this in the sense of a heresy which “diminishes God” and “sows division between Israel and his God.”[11] Debate of this kind emerges with the name of the Judæo-Christian heretic Cerinthus. For him, Jesus, though naturally born, was entered at his baptism by Christ, the son not of the Jewish God, the Demiourgos, but of the Supreme God.[12] There might well be, however, round Cerinthus, who retained Jewish leanings, Jews who held to the Judæo-Christian primary position that Jesus was the son of Yahweh. By some early Gnostics he could hardly fail to be so named. Could not then the Gnostic “Son of the Demiourgos,” the Artificer, become for more literal Christists “son of the carpenter,” even as the mystic seamless robe of Pagan myth became for some a garment which had to be cut in pieces to be divided?

Met by such suggestions, M. Loisy tells us that we are superficial. But is he otherwise? Is he not simply evading his problem? Can he see nothing strange in the sudden mention of the carpenter in a “primary” gospel which had set out with a divine personage and had never mentioned his parents or upbringing? On the mythic theory the apparition of the Messiah without antecedents is precisely what was to be expected; if there was any clear Jewish expectation on the point, it was that he should come unlooked for, unheralded save, on one view, by “Elias.”[13] Thus the Gospel record fits into the myth theory from the outset, while on the assumption of historicity it is but a series of enigmas.

Holding by that assumption, M. Loisy is forced to violent measures to reconcile the isolated Marcan mention of “the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon” with the repeated mentions in the closing chapters of (1) “Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses and Salome; who when he was in Galilee followed [Jesus] and ministered unto him”; (2) “Mary the mother of Joses”; and (3) “Mary the mother of James and Salome.” In these closing chapters this Mary the mother of James and Joses and Salome figures first as simply one who followed and ministered to Jesus, then as the mother of Joses, then as the mother of James and Salome, but never as the mother of Jesus. By what right does M. Loisy extract his certitude from the prior text?

His simple course is to decide that Mary the mother of James and of Joses and of Salome in the closing chapters is not Mary the mother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon in chapter vi. “Certain Fathers,” he had noted in his great work on the Synoptics (citing in particular Chrysostom), “desirous of making the synoptics accord with John, identify Mary the mother of James and Joses [in ch. xv] with the mother of Jesus; but it is evident that if the synoptics had thought of the mother of the Saviour they would not have thus designated her.”[14] Precisely! And if the Gospel of Mark in its original form had contained the passage in chapter vi, how could it possibly have spoken in chapter xv of a Mary the mother of James and Joses without indicating either that she was or was not the same Mary? Would it have deliberately specified two Maries, each the mother of a James and a Joses, without a word of differentiation?

To the faithful critic there is only one course open. He is bound to conclude that the passage in chapter vi is a late interpolation, the work of an inventor who had perhaps either accepted or anticipated the Johannine record that Mary the mother of Jesus was present at the crucifixion, but who did not—perhaps in his copy of Mark could not—completely carry out his purpose by making the Mary at the crucifixion the mother of the crucified Lord.

We are not here concerned with the exegesis of those Fathers who desired to save the perpetual virginity of Mary; our business is simply with the texts. And we can but say that if, with M. Loisy, we make the Mary of chapter xv another Mary than her of chapter vi, we are bound on the same principle to find a third and a fourth Mary in “the mother of Joses” (xv, 47) and the “mother of James and Salome” (xvi, 1).[15] It will really not do. The mythological theory, which traces the mourning Maries to an ancient liturgy of a God-sacrifice and finds the mother-Mary of chapter vi an alien element, may seem to M. Loisy superficial, but it meets a problem which he simply evades.