The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions

by J. M. Robertson

The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism,[4] endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb....

He passes by our time and returns to his own....

The historical foundation of Christianity as built up by rationalistic, by liberal, and by modern theology no longer exists; but that does not mean that Christianity has lost its historical foundation....

Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our time also[5]....

“Loves me, loves me not,” as the little girls say in counting the flower petals. We seem entitled to suggest in the interests of simple science, as distinguished from Germanic Kultur, that temperament might perhaps usefully be left out of the debate; and that the question of what Jesus stands for may be left over till we have settled whether the film presented to us by Dr. Schweitzer can stand between us and a scientific criticism which assents to all of his verdict save the reservation in favour of his own thesis.

Meantime, let us not seem to suggest that the English handling of the historical problem during the nineteenth century has been any more scientific than the German. Hennell’s treatment of it was but a simplification of Strauss’s; and Thomas Scott’s Life of Jesus was but an honest attempt to solidify Renan. In the early part of the nineteenth century little was achieved beyond the indispensable weakening of the reign of superstition by critical propaganda. In early Victorian England, where Freethought had been left to unprofessional freelances, still liable to brutal prosecution, an anonymous attempt was made to carry the matter further in a curious book entitled “The Existence of Christ Disproved by Irresistible Evidence, in a Series of Letters by a German Jew.” It bears no date, but seems to have been published between 1841 and 1849, appearing serially in thirty penny weekly numbers, printed in Birmingham, and published in London by Hetherington. As Hetherington, who died in 1849, was imprisoned in 1840 for the “blasphemous libel” of publishing Haslam’s Letters to the Clergy, but not earlier or later on any similar charge, he would seem to have been allowed to publish this without molestation.

About the author I have no information. He writes English fluently and idiomatically, and had read Strauss in the original. But though he presses against Hennell the argument from the case of Apollos, latterly developed by Professor W. B. Smith with such scholarly skill, the book as a whole has little persuasive power. The author is one of the violent and vehement men who alone, in the day of persecution, were likely to hazard such a thesis; and he does it with an amount of vociferation much in excess of his critical effort or his knowledge. It made, and could make, no impression whatever on the educated world; and I never met any Freethinker who had seen or heard of it.

It is in another spirit, and in the light of a far greater accumulation of evidence than was available in the first half of the last century, that the mythical theory has been restated in our day. In particular it proceeds upon a treasury of anthropological lore which was lacking to Bruno Bauer, as it was to Ghillany, who was so much better fitted than Bauer to profit by such light. As knowledge of the past gradually arranges itself into science, and the malice of religious resistance recedes from point to point before the sapping process of culture, the temper of the whole debate undergoes a transmutation. After a generation in which a Lyell could only in privacy avow his views as to the antiquity of man, came that in which Tylor, without polemic, could establish an anthropological method that was to mean the reduction of all religious phenomena, on a new line, to the status of natural phenomena. And even the malice of the bigoted faithful, which will subsist while the faith endures, falls into its place as one of these, equally with the malice of the conventional theorists who meet the exposure of their untenable positions with aspersion in defect of argument.

But the fact that a recent German exegete has been found capable of facing the problem in a spirit of scientific candour and good temper, and with something of the old-time detachment which made Rosenkranz marvel at Carlyle’s tone towards Diderot, may be a promise of a more general resort to civilized controversial methods. In any case, the fact that a trained New Testament critic, undertaking to establish the historicity of Jesus, has affirmed the scientific failure of all the preceding attempts, and offered a historic residuum which few will think worth an hour’s consideration, seems a sufficient demonstration that the mythical theory is the real battleground of the future.

In that connection it is interesting to note that Sir J. G. Frazer, who has so warmly contended that, as history cannot be explained “without the influence of great men,” we must accept the historicity of Jesus,[6] latterly propounds a tentative theory of a historic original for Osiris, whom he supposes to have been perhaps evolved from the idealized personality of an ancient King Khent, buried at Abydos.[7] It is a mere suggestion, and it at once evokes the reminder that, on the theorist’s own general principles, King Khent may be regarded as having been theocratically identified with the already existing God. However that may be, the hypothesis does nothing to save Sir James’s irrelevant plea about the operation of “great men” and “extraordinary minds” in the founding of all religions, for he does not suggest that King Khent’s career in any way resembled the myth of Osiris, or that he first taught the things Osiris is said to have taught. So that, in the case of Osiris as of Jesus, the required great men and extraordinary minds may still, in the terms of the claim, be inserted at any point rather than in the personage named or suggested as Founder.[8] If we agree to call the compiler of the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of the Kingdom and the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan great men and extraordinary minds, Sir James’s very simple argument is turned. And we should still be left asking who were the historic founders of the cults of Zeus and Brahma and Attis and Adonis, Dionysos and Herakles and Krishna and Aphrodite and Artemis.