The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

Chapter IX

CONCLUSION

Not only to the myth-theory but to every attempt at ejecting historical falsity from religion there has been offered the objection that religion “does good”; that mankind needs “some religion or other”; and that to “undermine faith” does social harm, even if it be by way of driving out delusion. This position is not at all special to orthodoxy. It was taken up by Middleton; by Kant, when he shaped a “practical” basis for theistic belief after eliminating the theoretic, and counselled unbelieving clergymen to use the Bible for purposes of popular moral education; by Voltaire when he combated atheism after bombarding Christianity; and by Paine when he wrote his Age of Reason to save the belief in God.

Insofar as the general plea merely amounts to saying that mankind cannot conceivably give up its traditional religion at a stroke; that liberal-minded priests are better than illiberal, for all purposes; and that in a world dominated by economic need it is impossible for many enlightened clergymen to secure a living save in the profession for which they were trained, I am not at all concerned to combat it. For the liberal priest, enlightened too late to reshape his economic career, I have nothing but sympathy, provided that he in no way hampers the intellectual progress of others. Insofar, again, as the plea for “religion” is merely a plea for a word, or a thesis that all earnest conviction about life is religion, it is quite irrelevant to the present discussion. The rationalists who feel they cannot face the world without the label of “religion” for their theory of the cosmos and of conduct will be in the same position whether they believe in a “historical Jesus” or not; and those who must have a humanist “liturgy” of some sort in place of the ecclesiastical are apparently not troubled by problems of historicity. What we are concerned with is the notion that to deny the historicity of Jesus is somehow to imperil not only ethics but historical science.

M. Loisy puts the last point in his suggestion, in criticism of Drews, that he who thinks to break down either all the traditional or the “liberal” orthodoxies by denying the historic actuality of Jesus will find he has “only furnished to their defenders the occasion to persuade a certain not uncultivated public that the divinity of Christ, or at least the unique character of his personality, is as well guaranteed as the reality of his life and his death.”[1] Had M. Loisy then forgotten that his own attempts to elide from the documents a number of details which he saw to be mythical have given occasion to the defenders of the faith to assure a not uncultivated public that the disintegration of the gospels destroyed all ground for belief in any part of them?[2]

We on this side of the Channel might meet such challenges, grounded on the susceptibilities of the “public,” with the demand of our great humorist, Mr. Birrell: “What, in the name of the Bodleian, has the general public got to do with literature? The general public ... has its intellectual, like its lacteal sustenance, sent round to it in carts.”[3]

But we must not turn the jest to earnest. There are plenty of honest laymen to play the jury; and to them let it be put. The issue between us and M. Loisy, as he virtually admits, must be fought out by argument. It is perfectly true, as he says, that “in principle, nothing is more legitimate, more necessary, than the comparative method; but nothing is more delicate to handle.”[4] Every issue, then, must be vigilantly debated. But the obligation is reciprocal. In these inquiries we have found M. Loisy many times in untenable positions, and resorting to inconsistent arguments. The tests which he applies to a mass of tradition are equally destructive to most of what he retains.

Let illicit employments of the comparative method be discredited by all means; but let us also have done with a criticism which on one leaf claims that Jesus gave a “homogeneous” teaching which his disciples could not have “combined,” and on the next avows that “the gospel ethic is no more consistent than the hope of the kingdom.”[5] And when the myth-theorists are called upon to make no unwarranted assumptions, let us also have an end of such assertions as that “twenty-five or thirty years after the death of Jesus the principal sentences and parables of which the apostolic generation had kept memory were put in writing.”[6] This is pure hypothesis, unsupported by evidence.

The issue between us and M. Loisy, once more, is not one in which merely he assails the myth-theory as outgoing its proofs: it is one in which his positions are at the same time assailed all along the line, and particularly at its centre, as incapable of resisting critical pressure. By all means let us seek that “the science of religion should be applied without preoccupations of contemporary propaganda or polemic.” The present writer reached the myth-theory not by way of propaganda but as a result of sheer protracted failure to establish a presupposed historical foundation. Professor Smith disclaims all criticism of “Christianity.” And if Professor Drews be blamed for avowing a religious aim, the answer is that he would otherwise be assailed as “irreligious,” alike in his own country and elsewhere. The myth-theory has to meet other foes than M. Loisy.

It is remarkable that Professor Schmiedel, who has gone nearly as far as M. Loisy in recognizing in detail the force of the pressures on the historical position, makes the avowal: “My inmost religious convictions would suffer no harm, even if I now felt obliged to conclude that Jesus never lived,”[7] though as a critical historian he “sees no prospect of this.” He further avows that his religion does not require him “to find in Jesus an absolutely perfect model,” and that in effect he does not find him so.[8] And he wrote in 1906 that “for about six years the view that Jesus never really lived has gained an ever-growing number of supporters,”[9] adding that “it is no use to ignore it, or to frame resolutions against it.” It is accordingly with no kind of polemic motive as against so entirely candid a writer that I suggest certain criticisms of his emotional positions as tending unconsciously to affect his judgment of the critical problem.