[22] A propos d’histoire des religions, p. 290. [↑]
Chapter XVIII
THE PAULINE PROBLEM
How much M. Loisy is swayed by prepossession may be further gathered from his argumentation over the “testimony of Paul” in connection with his criticism of the myth theory. Professor Drews, he remarks, does not follow those who contest the authenticity of the Epistles, “though the interest of his thesis imperiously demands it”; and again: “Paul is a dangerous witness for the mythic hypothesis.”[1]
It may be worth while for me here to note that a study of the Pauline epistles, on the view that “the four” were probably genuine in the main, was a determining factor in my own resort to the mythical hypothesis. The critical situation created by realizing that Paul practically knew nothing of the Gospel narratives save the detachable item of the resurrection was for me almost exactly analogous to that created by realizing that the Israel of the Book of Judges knew nothing of the Pentateuchal life in the wilderness. So far from being a witness against the myth theory, the Pauline literature was one of the first clear grounds for that theory. The school of Van Manen can realize, what M. Loisy cannot, that the spuriousness of the whole Pauline literature, so far from being “imperiously required” by the myth theory, sets up for that a certain complication.[2] As a matter of fact, Van Manen took exactly the converse view to that of M. Loisy:—
He was at bottom a man of conservative character, and it was only with great reluctance that he found himself compelled to abandon the Paul consecrated by tradition. But when, as a man of science, he had once made this sacrifice to his convictions, his belief in an historical Jesus received a fresh accession of strength; now at length the existence of Jesus had become probable. If the letters were written a century later than the time when Jesus lived, then his deification in the Pauline letters ceases to be so astonishing.[3]
Decidedly M. Loisy had been somewhat superficial in his estimate of the tendencies of the argument over Paul. Now, the myth theory, as it happens, is neither made nor marred by any decision as to the spuriousness of the Pauline letters. The crucial point is that, whether early or late—and the dating of them as pseudepigrapha is a difficult matter—the cardinal epistles have been interpolated. This became clear to me at an early stage in my studies, independently of any previous criticism. That the two passages, [1 Cor. xi, 23–28]; [xv, 3–11], are interpolations, and that in the second case the interpolation has been added to, are as clear results of pure documentary analysis as any in the whole field of the discussion.[4] And when M. Loisy ascribes to Professor Drews an “entirely gratuitous hypothesis of interpolation,” and implies that such hypotheses are set up because the texts are “extremely awkward for the mythic theory,”[5] he is himself misled by his parti pris. Whereas I came to my conclusions[6] as to interpolation while working towards the myth theory, exactly the same conclusions as mine, I afterwards found, had been previously reached by at least one continental scholar[7] who had not the mythic theory in view; and later by others[8] who equally stood aloof from it. M. Loisy would do well to ask himself whether it is not he who is uncritically swayed by his presuppositions, and whether the men to whom he imputes such bias are not the really disinterested critics.
In regard to the text of [1 Cor. xv, 3] sq., he describes as surprising the argument that the account of the appearance of Jesus to “five hundred at once” is shown to be late by its absence from the Gospels. This very silence of the evangelists, he insists, “renders unplausible [invraisemblable] the entirely gratuitous hypothesis of an interpolation.”[9] One is driven to wonder what conception M. Loisy has formed of the manner of the compilation of the Gospels. On his view, Paul had very early put in currency the record that the risen Jesus had appeared to “above five hundred brethren at once”; yet this record, so welcome to the Church, was never inserted in the Gospels. Why not? In M. Loisy’s opinion, one of them, at least, was penned or redacted in the Pauline interest:—