The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

It is after the avowals above cited that he writes:—[10]

Nor do I ask whether in Jesus’ faith and ethical system what he had to offer was new. Was it able to give me something that would warm my heart and strengthen my life?—that is all I ask. What does it matter if one of the ideas of Jesus had been expressed once already in India, another once already in Greece, a third once already, or many times, by the Old Testament prophets, or by the much-praised Jewish Rabbis shortly before the time of Jesus? Such ideas may be found in books: that is all. What we ought to feel grateful to Jesus for, is that he was destined for the first time to make the ideas take effect and influence the lives of mankind in general.

It would, I think, be difficult to over-estimate the amount of psychic bias involved in that pronouncement, which contains a theorem no more fitly to be taken for granted than any concrete historic proposition. The Professor, it will be observed, does not specify a single teaching of Jesus as new, while admitting that some were not. What he says is, in effect, that other utterances of Jesuine doctrines do not “warm the heart”; that those of Jesus do; and that they “for the first time” caused certain doctrines to “take effect and influence the lives of mankind in general.” What doctrines then are meant, and what effects are posited? And why do other utterances of the doctrines not “warm the heart”?

Presumably the doctrines in question are those of mutual love, of forgiveness of enemies, of doing as we would be done by. Concerning the gospel doctrine of reward the Professor makes a disclaimer; and concerning the doctrine that God cares for men as for the lilies and the birds he pronounces that it is “to-day not merely untrue: it is not even religious in the deepest sense of the term.”[11] It is not then clear that he would acclaim the doctrine that to help the distressed is to succour the Lord. In any case, the detailed religious prescription of beneficence was not merely a Jewish maxim: it was an article of Egyptian religion;[12] and it can hardly be in respect of such teaching that the Professor affirms a new “influence on the lives of mankind in general.”

Is it then in respect of mutual love and the forgiveness of enemies? If so, when did the change begin? Among the apostles? Among the Fathers? Among the bishops? Among the Popes? To put the issue broadly, was there more of good human life in Byzantium than in pagan Greece; or even in the Rome of the Decadence and the Dark and Middle Ages than in the Rome of the Republic? Was it because of Christian goodness that the decline of Rome was accelerated instead of being checked? And, to come to our own day, is the World War an evidence for an ethical change wrought by the teaching of Jesus—a war forced on the world by a Germany where there are more systematic students of the gospels than in all the rest of Europe? I leave it to Professor Schmiedel and Professor Drews to settle the point between them. They would perhaps agree—though as to this I am uncertain—on the Jesuine doctrine that morality is “nothing more than obedience to the will of God”; and that “every deed is to be judged by the standard, Will it bear the gaze of God?”[13] In any case I will affirm, for the consideration of those who on any such ground cling to the notion of something unique in the teaching of Jesus, that humanity is likely to make a much better world when it substitutes for such a moral standard, which is but a self-deluding substitution of God for the conscience that delimits God, the principle of goodwill towards men, and the law of reciprocity, articulately known to the mass of mankind millenniums before the Christian era, and all along disobeyed, then as now, partly because religious codes intervene between it and life.[14]

If it be admitted—and who will considerately deny it?—that the moral progress of mankind is made in virtue of recognition of the law of reciprocity, the case for the general moral influence of Christianity is disposed of, once for all. If the affirmation be still made, let it confront the challenge of rational sociology,[15] founded on the survey of all history—and the World War. Professor Schmiedel’s large affirmation is vain in the face of all that. His real psychic basis, which in my judgment determines his critical presuppositions, lies in the phrase: “warms my heart.” And that phrase is a tacit confession of religious partisanship, the result of his Christian training.[16]

The more the moral teaching of the gospels is comparatively studied, as apart from their myths of action and dogma, the more clear becomes its entire dependence on previous lore,[17] and its failure even to maintain the level of the best of that. The Sermon on the Mount is wholly pre-Christian.[18] It is a Christian scholar who points out that the Christian doctrine of forgiveness is fully set forth in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a century before the Christian era. In his view, those verses[19] “contain the most remarkable statement on the subject of forgiveness in all ancient literature.”[20] Why then does it not warm the heart of Professor Schmiedel equally with the doctrine of the gospels? Simply because he was brought up to assign pre-eminence to the teaching of Jesus—God or Man. And here we have, in its fundamental form, that unchecked assumption of “uniqueness” which secretly dictates the bulk of the denials of the myth-theory. Canon Charles explicitly traces the Jesuine teaching to the verses in question:

That our Lord was acquainted with them, and that His teaching presupposes them, we must infer from the fact that the parallel is so perfect in thought and so close in diction between them and [Luke xvii, 3]; [Matt. xvii, 15].[21] The meaning of forgiveness in both cases is the highest and noblest known to us....

One puts with diffidence the challenge, Was it then high and noble for the Teacher to give out as his own the teaching of another, instead of acknowledging it? Is it not incomparably more likely, on every aspect of the case, that the older teaching was thus appropriated by gospel-makers bent at once on giving the Divine One a high message and on securing acceptance for it by putting it in his mouth? Is not this the strict critical verdict, apart from any other issue?

The bias which balks at such a decision is the sign of the harm done to intellectual ethic by the inculcated presupposition. It ought to “warm the heart” of a good man to realize that the ideas which he has been taught to think the noblest were not the “unique” production of a Superman, but could be and were reached by Jews and Gentiles—for they are Gentile also—whose very names are unknown to us. A doctrine of forgiveness arose in prostrate Jewry precisely because rancour had there reached its maximum. As a doctrine of asceticism rises in a society where license has been at the extreme, so the phenomena of hate breed a recoil from that. The doctrine of non-resistance was current among the Pharisees of the period of the Maccabean revolt; and the Testaments of the Patriarchs is the work of a Pharisee. And the gospels have nevertheless taught all Christians to regard the Pharisees collectively, with the Scribes, as a body devoid of all goodness. There is, be it said—not for the first time—a pessimism in the Christian conception of things; a pessimism which denies the element of goodness in man in the very act of ascribing it as a specialty to One, and relying on his “influence” to spread it among men incapable of rising to it for themselves. The story of Lycurgus and Alcander is the best ancient example to the precept, quite transcending that of the good Samaritan,[22] and it is one of the antidotes to the Christian pessimism which stultifies its own parable by denying in effect that The Samaritan could think as ethically as The Jew.