9. The “resuscitation of obsolete mysteries” among the Jews, and the known survival of private sacraments and symbolic sacrifices of atonement.[9]
10. The actual production of dramatic Greek poetry on Biblical subjects by the Jewish poet Ezechiel (2nd c. B.C.).[10]
The eighth item needs to be specially insisted upon. It is frequently asserted that nothing in the nature of a heteroclite cult could subsist continuously in Jewry; that there were no religious ideas in the Jewish world save those of the Sacred Books of the Rabbis.[11] This is a historical delusion. The historical and prophetic books of the Old Testament affirm a constant resort to pagan rites and Gods before the Exile. There is official record of bitter strife and sunderance between those of the Return and the people they found on the soil. Malachi sounds the note of strife, lamenting popular lukewarmness, sacrilege and unbelief. The simple fact that after the Exile Hebrew was no longer the common language, and that the people spoke Aramaic or “Chaldee,” tells of a highly artificial relation between hierarchy and populace. Never can even Judæa have been long homogeneous. “Neither in Galilee nor Peræa must we conceive of the Jewish element as pure and unmixed. In the shifting course of history Jews and Gentiles had been here so often, and in such a variety of ways, thrown together, that the attainment of exclusive predominance by the Jewish element must be counted among the impossibilities. It was only in Judæa that this was at least approximately arrived at by the energetic agency of the scribes during the course of a century.”[12]
The assumption commonly made is that all Jews and “naturalized” Jews were of one theistic way of thinking, like orthodox Christians, and, like these, could not imagine any other point of view. If for that entirely one-sided conception the inquirer will even substitute one in terms of the mixed realities of life in Christendom he will be much nearer the truth. Over and above the hatreds between sects and factions holding by the same formulas and Sacred Books, there were in Jewry the innovators, then as now: the minds which varied from the documentary norm in all directions, analogues of the devotees of “Christian Science,” Bâbists, British Buddhists, Swedenborgians, Shakers, Second Adventists, Mormons, and so on, who from a more or less common basis radiated to all the points of the compass of creed. What faces us in the rise of Christianity is the development of one of those variants, on lines of adaptation to popular need, with an organization on lines already tested in the experience of Judaism.
Among the common cravings of the age was the need for a near God,[13] one ostensibly more in touch with human sorrows and sufferings than the remote Supreme God. For the earlier Hebrews, Yahweh was a tribal God like Moloch or Chemosh, fighting for his people (when they deserved it) like other tribal Gods; a magnified man who talked familiarly with Abraham and Sarah, and wrestled with Jacob.[14] Even then, the attractions of other cults set up constant resort to them by many Yahwists, unless the historical Sacred Books are as illusory upon this as upon other topics. To say nothing of the continual charges against Jewish kings, from Solomon downwards, of setting up alien worships, and the express assertion of Jeremiah[15] that in Judah there were as many Gods as cities, and in Jerusalem as many Baal altars as streets, we have the equally explicit assertion in Ezekiel[16] that “women weeping for Tammuz” were to be seen in or at the Temple itself. Now, Tammuz was a Semitic deity, borrowed, it would seem, from the Akkadians,[17] an original or variant of Adonis, the very type of the Saviour-God we are now tracing. Tammuz, like Jesus, was “the only-begotten son.” If it be argued that the worship of Tammuz must have disappeared during or after the Exile, since it would not be tolerated in the Second Temple, the answer is that Saint Jerome expressly declares that in his day the pagans celebrated the worship of Tammuz at the very cave in which Jesus was said to have been born at Bethlehem[18]—a detail of some significance in our inquiry. Tammuz = Adonis = “the Lord.” That worship, indeed, might conceivably be a revival occurring after the fall of Jerusalem; but to say that there can have been no folklore about Tammuz in Jewry or Galilee or Samaria between the time of Ezekiel and that of Jerome would be to make an utterly unwarranted assertion. The belief may even have survived under another God-name.
[Among the many obscurations of history set up by presuppositions is that which rules out all evidence for community of source in myths save that of philology, the most precarious of all proofs. The argument on this subject has been conducted even by opposing schools of philology as if all alike believed that every God, like every man, is an entity with a name, traceable by his name, and remaining substantially unchanged in his attributes through the ages. When Max Müller propounded such derivations as that of Zeus from the Sanskrit Dyaus, some scholars for whom Sanskrit was occult matter observed a respectful deference, while others debated whether the derivations were philologically sound. To mythological science, strictly speaking, it mattered little whether they were or were not. God-ideas may pass with little change from race to race through contacts of conquest, the attached God-names changing alike for “absorbed” races and for those which “absorb” them, whereas other God-names may endure with little change for ages while the attributes connected with them are being continuously modified, and the tales told under them are being perpetually added to, and many are dismissed. The Zeus of the Iliad is probably a wholly disparate conceptual figure from the Dyaus of the early “Aryan,” supposing the names to be at bottom the same vocable. The philological fact is one thing, the mythological fact another.
Writers like Dr. Conybeare, who have never even realized the nature of a mythological problem, bewilder their readers by blusterously affirming that there can be no homogeneity between myth-conceptions unless the names attached to them in different regions and by different races are etymologically akin. They irrationally ask for linguistic “equations” where a linguistic equation by itself would count for nothing, the relevant fact being the equation of the myth-concepts. Blind to the salient facts that every “race” concerned had undergone mutation by conquest; that God-names and God-ideas alike passed from race to race by intermarriages,[19] by the effects of enslavement, and by official adoption;[20] and that conquering races constantly adopted wholly or partly the “Gods” of the conquered,[21] they in effect assume that God-names and God-concepts are fixed entities, traceable solely by glossology. As if glossology could possibly pretend to trace, even on its own ground, all the transformations of proper-names and appellatives through different races and languages. The pretence that these are on all fours with the general development of language is mere scientific charlatanism.
What mythology has to consider is the filiation and interconnection of myth-concepts. This is so pervading a process that even Max Müller, after denying that there could have been any “crossing” between Vedic and alien lines of thought in respect of the closely similar Babylonian fire-cult and that of Agni, consented to identify the Indian Soma, God of Wine, with the Moon-God Chandra.[22] The transmutations of a cognate myth-concept under the names of Dionysos (who has a hundred other epithets) and of the Latin Liber, constitute a mythological process which philology cannot elucidate. The scientifically traceable facts are the prevalence and translation of such concepts as Wine-God, Sun-God, War-God, Moon-God, Love-Goddess, Mother Goddess, Babe-God, through many races and regions. One myth-factor of great importance, unrecognized by many who dogmatize on such problems, is that of the influence of sculpture,[23] through which such figures as that of the Mother-Goddess become common property for many lands, setting up community of belief on one line irrespective of prevailing theologies. And it is quite certain that as the nations came to know more and more of each other’s Gods they borrowed traits and tales, thus assimilating the general concepts attached to wholly different names.
Seeing, then, further, that, as in the case of Yahweh, it was often a point of religious taboo that a deity should not be called by “his real name,” and that nearly all had many epithets, there was no limit to the interaction and mutation of cults and God-norms. The exact derivation and history of the worship of Tammuz in Jewry no one can pretend to know; and no one therefore can pretend to know that it was not interlinked with other cults of names associated with sets of attributes, rites, and tales. In view of the idle declamation on the subject, it seems positively necessary to remind the reader that even if he believes in the historicity of Jesus he is not therefore entitled to assume the historicity of Tammuz-Dumzi-Adonis, or Myrrha, or Miriam, or Joshua; and that if he recognizes any connection, in terms of attributes, between the God-concepts Mars and Arês, or Zeus and Jupiter, or Aphroditê and Venus, or Artemis and Diana, and does not in these cases fall back upon the nugatory thesis of “two different deities,” he is not entitled to do so over the suggestion that one popular Syrian cult of a Lord-name may have connected with another. There is really need here for a little critical vigilance, not to say psychological analysis.]
Even if we assume the earlier Jewish cult of Tammuz to have been swept away in the Captivity, the new conditions would tend to stimulate similar popular cults. When, after the Exile, the conception of Yahweh began under Perso-Babylonian influences to alter in the direction of a universalist theism, the common tendency to seek a nearer God was bound to come into play. There is no more universal feature in religious history than the recession of the High Gods.[24] The more “supreme” a deity becomes, in popular religion, the more generally does popular devotion tend to elicit Son-Gods or Goddesses who seem more likely to be “hearers and answerers of prayer.” Sacred Books certainly tend to check such a reversion; and in Islam the check has been successful in virtue of the very fact that Allah, like the early Yahweh, is in effect conceived as a racial God, or God of a single cult. But the tendency is seen at work all over the earth.