The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

The Jesus of the Gospels is at once a Messiah (with no definite mission as such), a Saviour God with whom the indefinite Messiah coalesces, and a Teaching God who coalesces with both. The biographical school, in the mass, posit a human Teacher, round whose teaching a Messianic conception combined with a doctrine of salvation by blood sacrifice has nucleated. If in this tissue there cannot be inserted the historical detail of the trial before Pilate, there is nothing left but the quasi-mythical detail of the crucifixion as an ostensible historical basis for the Messianic and other teaching, so much of which is alien to the early cult, so much of which is critically to be assigned to previous and contemporary Jewish sources, and so much to later Jesuist editors and compilers. Those laymen who are content to pick out of the gospels certain teachings, such as the Sermon on the Mount, and call these “Christianity,” have not realized how completely documentary analysis has disintegrated the teachings into pre-Jesuine Jewish and post-Jesuine Gentile matter. The latest professional analysis, as we have seen, leaves no Jesuine “Teaching” save an eschatology, a doctrine of “last things,” coming from a visionary Messiah with no political or social message.[17] The bulk of the biographical school, on the other hand, cling diversely to “something” in the Teaching which shall be somehow commensurate with the “impression” made by the life and death of the Teacher, which, from Renan onwards, they regard as the real genesis of the myth of the Resurrection and the consequent cult.

Having shown, then, the cogent critical reasons for dismissing the entire record of the triple episode of the Supper, the Agony, and the Trials, as unhistorical,[18] it concerns us to show (1) that the whole is intelligible only as myth, and (2) how the myth probably arose. The sequence culminates in the Crucifixion, which, with the Sacrament, is for the rational hierologist as for the orthodox theologian the centre of Christianity. Equally the biographical school are committed to maintaining the historicity of the event, without which they cannot explain the rise of the cult. If then the myth-theory is to stand, it must show that the central narrative belongs to the realm of myth.

§ 2. The Sacrificial Rite

In the Christian record, the Crucifixion is essentially a sacrifice. “The essence of the Sacrament is not merely partaking of a common cup or a common meal, but feasting upon a sacrifice ... and this was found everywhere among Jews and Gentiles.”[19] Thus the term “Eucharist,” which means “thanksgiving” or “thank-offering,” applied in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles to the kind of sacrament there indicated, and thence taken by Justin and other Fathers, is clearly a misnomer for the thing specified in the gospels. Of the gospel sacrifice, the sacrament is the liturgical and symbolic application.[20] Or, otherwise, the crucifixion is the fulfilment of the theory of the sacrament. On the view of the historicity of the former, or of both, it would be necessary to show why the procedure set forth in the gospels so closely simulated a human sacrifice; and this is incidentally attempted in passing by M. Loisy. The scene of derision by the soldiers, he says, “was perhaps connected with some pagan festival usage.”[21] But this at once admits the entrance of the myth-theory, which affirms that an immemorial “festival” usage is indicated. If Jesus was executed to please the Jewish multitude, as is the view even of the most destructive of the later German exegetes[22]—why should the execution take a pagan form? M. Loisy, who had previously accepted as history the narrative of the Entry into Jerusalem, with the public acclamation of Jesus as “the Son of David,” is unprepared to believe with the German critic that within a week the multitude cried “Crucify him!”; and he therefore wholly eliminates that item from his biographical sketch. He implies, however, that the doom of Jesus was passed by Pilate to please the priests, which is equally fatal to the thesis of a pagan festival usage. He accepts, further, the scene of the Mocking, with no ostensible critical reason, but presumably in order to establish a history which would explain the subsequent growth of the cult. In this process the salient episode of Barabbas is dismissed by him as unhistorical.[23]

Thus the most distinguished critic of the biographical school has no account to give of a second salient item in the record which, being entirely non-supernatural, must be held to have been inserted for some strong reason. It in fact closely involves the whole myth-theory. Barabbas was in all probability a regular figure in Semitic popular religion; and the name connects documentarily with that of Jesus. The reading “Jesus Barabbas,” in [Mt. xxvii, 16], as we have noted,[24] was long the accepted one in the ancient Church; and its entrance and its disappearance are alike significant. It is obviously probable that such a name as “Jesus the Son of the Father” (= Bar-Abbas[25]), applied to a murderer, would give an amount of offence to early Christian readers which would naturally lead in time to its elimination from the current text.[26] But on that view there is no explanation of its entrance. Such a stumbling-block could not have been set up without a compulsive reason.

The anthropological and hierological data go to show that an annual sacrifice of a “Son of the Father” was a long-standing feature in the Semitic world. A story in Philo Judæus about a mummery in Alexandria in ridicule of the Jewish King Agrippa, the grandson of Herod, points pretty clearly to a local Jewish survival from that usage. A lunatic named Karabas is said to have been paraded as a mock-king, with mock-crown, sceptre and robe.[27] In all likelihood the K is a mistranscription for B. In any case, “the custom of sacrificing the son for the father was common, if not universal, among Semitic peoples,”[28] as among others; and the Passover[29] was originally a sacrifice of firstlings, human and animal,[30] the former being probably most prevalent in times of disaster. “Devotion” was the principle: surrogate sacrifices would normally be substituted. Sacrifice of a king’s son, in particular, was held to be of overwhelming efficacy by early Hebrews and other Semites, as among other races in the savage and barbaric stages.[31]

There is nothing peculiar to the Semites either in the general or in the particular usage, both being once nearly universal; but it is with the Semites that we are here specially concerned. The story of Abraham and Isaac, to say nothing of that of Jephthah’s daughter, is a finger-post in the evolution of religion, being inferribly a humane myth to promote the substitution of animal for human sacrifice. And the Phœnician myth of “Ieoud,” the “only-begotten” son of King Kronos, “whom the Phœnicians call Israel,” sacrificed by his father at a time of national danger, after being dressed in the trappings of royalty,[32] points towards the historic roots of Christianity. Again and again we meet the conception of the “only-begotten” “Son of the Father”—Father Abraham, Father Kronos, Father Israel, the Father-King—as a special sacrifice in Hebrew and other Semitic history. Kronos is a Semitic God; and in connection with the Roman Saturnalia we have the record of a Greek oracle commanding to “send a man to the Father”—that is, to Kronos.[33]

What is certain is that sacrifices of kings, which were at one stage of social evolution normal,[34] inevitably tended to take other tribal or communal forms; and a multitude of rites preserved plain marks of the regal origin. Kings would inevitably pass off their original tragic burden; the community, bent on the safeguard of sacrifice, shifted it in turn.[35] Sacrifice of some kind, it was felt, there must be, to avert divine wrath:[36] that conviction lies at the base of the Christian as of the Jewish religion: it is fundamental to all primitive religion; and it is happily beyond our power to realize save symbolically the immeasurable human slaughter that the religious conviction has involved.

Primarily, voluntary victims were desired; and in Roman and Japanese history there are special or general records of their being forthcoming, annually or in times of emergency.[37] Even in the case of animal sacrifice, the Romans had a trick of putting barley in the victim’s ear to make him bow his head as if in submission.[38] But as regards human sacrifices, which were felt to be specially efficacious, the progression was inevitable from willing to compelled victims; and out of the multitude of the forms of human sacrifice, for which war captives and slaves at some stages supplied a large proportion of the victims, we single that of the evolution from the voluntary scape-goat or the sacrificed king or messenger, through the victim “bought with a price,” to the released criminal or other desperate or resigned person bribed with a period of licence and abundance to die for the community at the end of it.