The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

In many if not in most of these cases, deification of the victim was involved in the theory, the victim being customarily identified with the God.[39] It was so in certain special sacrifices in pre-Christian Mexico.[40] It was so in the human sacrifices of the Khonds of Orissa, which subsisted till about the middle of last century.[41] In the latter instance, of which we have precise record, the annual victims were taken from families devoted by purchase to the function, or were bought as children and brought up for the purpose. They were “bought with a price.” When definitely allotted, the males were permitted absolute sexual liberty, being regarded as already virtually deified. The victim was finally slain “for the sins of the world,” and was liturgically declared a God in the process.

Such rites gradually dwindled in progressive communities from ritual murders into ritual mysteries or masquerades; even as human sacrifices in general, in most parts of the world, dwindled from bodies to parts of bodies, fingers, hair, foreskins; from human to animal victims;[42] from larger to smaller animals; from these to fowls; from real animals to baked or clay models, fruits, grains, sheafs of rushes, figures, paper or other symbols. It seems usually to have been humane kings or chiefs who imposed the improvement on priesthoods. And as with the victim, so with the sacramental meal which accompanied so many sacrifices. Cannibal sacraments were once, probably, universal: they have survived down till recent times in certain regions; but with advance in civilization they early and inevitably tend to become merely symbolic. In Mexico at the advent of Cortes, both the cannibal and the symbolic forms subsisted—the former under conventional limitations; the latter in the practice of eating a baked image which had been raised on a cross and there pierced, for sanctification.[43] This “Eating of the God” was very definitely a sacrament; but so were the cannibalistic sacraments which preceded it.

Surveying the general evolution, we reach the inference that somewhere in Asia Minor there subsisted before “our era” a cult or cults in which a “Son of the Father” was annually sacrificed under one or other of the categories of human sacrifice—Scapegoat, representative Firstling, Vegetation God, or Messenger; possibly in some cases under all four aspects in one. The usage may or may not have subsisted in post-exilic Jerusalem: quite possibly it did, for not only do the Sacred Books avow constant popular and legal resort to “heathen” practices of human sacrifice,[44] but Jewish religious lore preserves in a variety of forms clear evidence of institutions of human sacrifice which are not recognized in the Sacred Books.[45] In any case, in connection with the particular cult or rite in question there subsisted also a Eucharist or Sacrament or Holy Supper, analogous to the sacraments of the cults of Mithra, Dionysos, Attis, and many other Gods.[46] At a remote period it had been strictly cannibalistic: in course of time, it became symbolical. In other words, originally the sacrificed victim was sacramentally eaten; in course of time the thing eaten was something else, with at most a ritual formula of “body and blood.” At a certain stage, whether by regal or other compulsion or by choice of the devotees, the annual rite of sacrifice became a mere ritual or Mystery Drama—as in other cases it became a public masquerade. The former evolution underlay the religions of Dionysos, Osiris, Adonis, and Attis: the latter may or may not have gone on alongside of the former.

What does emerge from the gospel narrative concerning Barabbas and Jesus is, not that such an episode happened: here the myth-theory is at one with M. Loisy, who in effect pronounces the narrative to be myth: but that in the first age of Christianity the name “Jesus Barabbas” was well known, and stood for something well known. It was certainly known to the Jews, for we have Talmudical mention, dating from a period just after the fall of the Temple, that there was a Jewish ritual “Week of the Son, or, as some call it, Jesus the Son,” in connection with the circumcision and redemption of the first-born child.[47] From the inference of the currency of the name there is no escape: attached to a robber and murderer it could never have got into the gospels otherwise. And the myth-theory can supply the explanation which neither the orthodox nor the biographical theory can yield. We have outside evidence that a sacrifice of a “Son of the Father” was customary in parts of the Semitic world. What the gospel story proves is that it was known to have been a practice, either at Jerusalem or elsewhere, to release a prisoner to the multitude in connection with a popular festival, which might or might not have been the Passover. The release may have been for the purpose either of a religious masquerade or of a sacrifice. Either way, the religious rite involved was a rite of “Jesus Barabbas”—Jesus the Son of the Father—and it involved either a real or a mock sacrifice, in which the “Son” figured as a mock king, with robe and crown.

The more the problem is considered, then, the more clear becomes the solution. As soon as the Jesuist cult reached the stage of propaganda in which it described its Son-God as having died, in circumstances of ignominy, as an atoning sacrifice, it would be met by the memory of the actual Barabbas rite. Given that the Barabbas victim was ritually scourged and “crucified” (a term which has yet to be investigated), it follows that wherever the early propaganda[48] went in areas in which the memory of the rite subsisted, the Christists would be told that their Jesus the Son was simply the Jesus Barabbas of that popular rite; and the only possible—or at least the best—way to override the impeachment was to insert a narrative which reduced the regular ritual Jesus Barabbas to a single person, a criminal whom the wicked Jewish multitude had chosen to save instead of the sinless Jesus of the cult. In the circumstances given it was an absolutely necessary invention; and no other circumstances could conceivably have made it necessary. The story, by the unwilling admission of M. Loisy, who conserves whatever he thinks he critically can of the record, is a myth; and it is a myth which on the biographical theory cannot be explained. The myth-theory has explained it. As for the disappearance of the “Jesus” from the name of Barabbas in the records, it hardly needs explanation. When the memory of the old annual rite died away from general knowledge, the elision of the “Jesus” would be desirable alike for the learned who still knew and the unlearned who did not.[49]

§ 3. Contingent Elements

It is needless for the defender of the biographical theory to interject a protest that the Barabbas story is only one item in the case. The other items will all be dealt with in turn: that has been put in the front because of its crucial significance. Incidentally it may be further noted that the myth-theory explains the plainly unhistorical item of “the thirty pieces of silver,” confusedly explained from “the prophet Jeremy” as “the price of him that was priced, whom [certain] of the children of Israel did price” ([Mt. xxvii, 9]). The reference is really to Zechariah ([xi, 12, 13]).

The story of the Betrayal is fiction on the very face of the narrative, Judas being employed to point out a personage of declared notoriety, about whose movements there had been no secrecy.[50] Judas is demonstrably a somewhat late figure in the gospel legend, coming from the later Mystery Drama, not from the rite on which it was built. But, whatever may be the solution of the cryptogram about the potter’s field and the thirty pieces of silver in Zechariah, or the historic fact about Aceldama, one thing is clear: “the price of him that was priced,” in Matthew, tells of the usage of paying a price for sacrificial victims.

It does not follow that a price was regularly paid in the case of the Jesus Barabbas rite, though the record actually insists on the item by way of the Judas story: what is clear is that a memory of bought victims subsisted after the fall of Jerusalem. It is not unlikely that “Aceldama” was a field where sacrificial victims were either slain or buried, or both. A passage in the Kalika Purana suggests the procedure, and the probable significance of Golgotha, the “place of skulls.” In the Hindu rite, the human victim was immolated “at a cemetery or holy place,” upon which the sacrificer was not to look; and the head was presented in “the place of skulls, sacred to Bhoiruvu” (God of Fear). This could be in a special temple, or in a part of the cemetery, “or on a mountain.”[51]