Colonel Conder, who accepts without misgiving all four gospel narratives, and attempts to combine them, avows that the “Garden Tomb” chosen by General Gordon, in the latterly selected Calvary, is impossible, being probably a work of the twelfth century;[128] and for his own part, while inclined to stand by the new Golgotha, avows that “we must still say of our Lord as was said of Moses, ‘No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’”[129] Placidly he concludes that “it is well that we should not know.”[130] But what does the biographical theory make of such a conclusion? Its fundamental assumption is that of Renan, that the personality of Jesus was so commanding as to make his disciples imagine his resurrection. In elaborate and contradictory detail we have the legends of that; and yet we find that all trace of knowledge alike of place of crucifixion and tomb had vanished from the Christian community which is alleged to have arisen immediately after his ascension. The theory collapses at a touch, here as at every other point. There is no more a real Sepulchre of Jesus than there is a real Sepulchre of Mithra; and the bluster which offers the solution that at Jerusalem every one was buried in a rock tomb is a mere closing of the eyes to the monumental fact of the myth.
The critic is all the while himself committed to the denial that there was any tomb. Professing to follow the suggestion[131] of M. Loisy that Jesus was thrown into “some common foss,” which in his hands becomes “the common pit reserved for crucified malefactors,” he affirms[132] that “the words ascribed in [Acts xiii, 29], to Paul certainly favour the Abbé’s view.” They certainly do not. The text in question runs:
And when they had fulfilled all things that were written of him they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a tomb.
The Greek word is μνημεῖον—that used in the gospel story. There is thus no support whatever either for the suggestion of “a common foss” or for the allegation about “the common pit reserved for crucified malefactors”—a wholly unwarranted figment. The second “they” of the sentence is indefinite: it may mean either the Jews of the previous sentence or another “they”: but either way it expressly posits a tomb. Yet after this deliberate perversion of the document, which of course he does not quote, the critic proceeds (p. 302) to aver that “the genuine tradition of Jesus having been cast by his enemies into the common pit reserved for malefactors ... survived among the Jews”; and that the tomb story was invented as “the most effective way of meeting” the imagined statement. Such an amateur inventor of myth is naturally resentful of mythological tests!
§ 10. The Resurrection
If a suffering Messiah was arguable for the Jews, his resurrection after death was a matter of course. The biographical theory, that the greatness of the Founder’s personality led his followers to believe that he must rise again, is historically as unwarrantable as any part of the biographical case. The death and resurrection of the Saviour-God was an outstanding feature of all the most popular cults of the near East; Osiris, Herakles, Dionysos, Attis, Adonis, Mithra, all died to rise again; and a ritual of burial, mourning, resurrection, and rejoicing was common to several. On any view such rituals were established in other contemporary cults; and it is this fact that makes it worth while in this inquiry to glance at a myth which is now abandoned by all save the traditionally orthodox.
On the uncritical assumption that nothing but pure Judaism could exist in Jewry in the age of the Herods, the notion of a dying and re-arising Hero-God was impossible among Jews save as a result of a stroke of new constructive faith. That simple negative position ignores not only the commonness of the belief in immortality among Jews (the Pharisees all held it) before the Christian era, but the special Jewish beliefs in the “translation” of Moses and Elijah, and the story of Saul, the witch of Endor, and the spirit of Samuel. The very belief that the risen Elias was to be the forerunner of the Messiah was a lead to the belief that the Messiah himself might come after a resurrection.
But it is practically certain that a liturgical resurrection was or had been practised in contemporary cults which had at one time enacted an annual sacrifice of the representative of the God, abstracted in myth as the death of the God himself. And in our own time the survival of an analogous practice has been noted in India. At the installation of the Rajahs of Keonjhur it was anciently the practice for the Rajah to slay a victim: latterly there is a mock-slaying, whereupon the mock-victim disappears. “He must not be seen for three days; then he presents himself to the Rajah as miraculously restored to life.”[133]