The vogue of Apollo, of Dionysos, of Herakles, of Tammuz-Adonis, of Krishna, of Buddha, of Balder, of Athênê, of the Virgin Mary, of the countless deities propitiated by savage peoples who ignore their Supreme Gods, are all testimonies to the natural craving of religious ignorance for a near God. The same craving certainly subsisted among the Hebrews in so far as it was not completely laid by organized legalism. And seeing that the redactors of the Sacred Books had actually reduced many early deities—Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Daoud = David, Moses, Joshua, and Samson—to the status of patriarchs and heroes,[25] the craving would among some be relatively strengthened. Jews who in time of trouble chronically reverted to alien Gods and alien rites, even as did the Greeks and Romans, could not conceivably fail altogether to adopt or cherish cults analogous to those of Dionysos, Adonis, Osiris, so popular among the neighbouring peoples.
The hypothesis forced upon us by the whole history, then, is that there had subsisted in Jewry, in original connection with a sacrificial rite of Jesus the Son of the Father, a Sacrament of a Hero-God Jesus, whose Name was strong to save. If it took the form of a Sacrament of Twelve, with the ritual-representative of the God, it would be closely analogous to the traditional Sacrament of Twelve in which Aaron [the Anointed One = Messiah] and the [twelve] elders of Israel “ate bread with Moses’ father-in-law before God.”[26] Behind that narrative lies a ritual practice. A sacrament of bread and wine is further indicated in the mention of the mythic Melchisedek, “King of Peace” and priest of “El Elyon,”[27] “without father and without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days or end of life, but made like unto the Son of God,” who thus became for Christists a type of Jesus.[28] A sacramental banquet of twelve seems to have been involved in the sacrificial ritual of the Temple itself, where a presiding priest and twelve others daily officiated.[29]
That Galilean or other Jews or semi-Jews, always in a partly hostile relation to priests, scribes, and Pharisees, should in an age of chronic war, disaster and revolution, maintain an old private sacrament, with a subordinate worship of a Hero-God Jesus whose body and blood had once literally and now symbolically brought salvation, is not an unlikely but a likely hypothesis. The gospels themselves indicate an attitude of demotic hostility alike to the king, the priests, the scribes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees. It is not pretended that before and apart from Jesus there was no such hostility, and that he generated it by his teaching. In a united community such hostility could not be so generated. It was there to start with. If then cults of Dionysos and Attis and Adonis, the annually dying and suffering demigods, could openly subsist in the Hellenistic world alongside of the State cults of Zeus and the other chief Gods, a secret cult of a Hero-God Jesus could subsist in some part of Jewry, with its survivals of rural paganism and its many contacts and mixtures with Samaritan schism and Hellenistic culture. Yet further, if the popular needs of the Hellenistic world could elicit and maintain a multitude of private religious associations, each with its own sacramental meal,[30] the same needs could elicit and maintain them elsewhere.
To this thesis it is objected that we have no mention of the existence of a Jesus cult of any kind in the Hebrew books. But that is a necessity of the case. The Sacred Books would naturally exclude all mention of a cult which in effect meant the continued deification of Joshua,[31] who had long been reduced to the status of a mere hero in the history. That Joshua is a non-historical personage has long been established by modern criticism.[32] That he did not do what he is said in the Book of Joshua to have done is agreed by all the “higher” critics. Who or what then was Joshua? He is in many respects the myth-duplicate of Moses, whose work he repeats, passing the Jordan as did Moses the Red Sea, appointing his twelve, “renewing” the rite of circumcision, and writing the law upon stones. But he notably excels Moses in that he causes the sun and moon to stand still by his word;[33] and as this is cited from “Jasher,” he is possibly the older figure of the two.
And for the Jews he retained a special status. In his Book he is made (with a “thus saith the Lord”) to give a list of the conquests effected by him against “the Amorite, and the Perizzite, and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Girgashite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite.” In [Exodus xx], this very list of conquests, barring “the Girgashite,” is promised, with this prelude:—
Behold, I [Yahweh] send an angel before thee, to keep thee by the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Take ye heed of him, and hearken unto his voice: provoke him not, for he will not pardon your transgression; for my name is in him.
The Angel who possesses or embodies the secret or magical name[34] is to do what Joshua in the historical myth says has been done under his leadership:[35] both passages stand. Further, the Angel of the passage in Exodus is in the Talmud identified with the mystic Metatron,[36] who corresponds generally with the Logos of Philo Judæus, the Sophia or Power of the Gnostics, and the Nous of Plotinus. The eminent Talmudic scholar, Emmanuel Deutsch, surmised that the Metatron is “most probably nothing but Mithra,” the Persian Sun-God; and as the promised Divine One in the Septuagint version of [Isaiah, ix, 6], bears the Mithraic titles of “Angel of Great Counsel” and Judge, there is perhaps ground for some such surmise. It may have been, indeed, that the redactors of the sacred books originally meant to substitute the Angel for Joshua in the esteem of the people, giving the former the credit for the exploits of the latter; but such a manipulation would be in itself a confession of Joshua’s renown. And in the Samaritan Targums “the Angel of God” commonly stood for the divine names Jehovah and Elohim.[37]
However that may be, the pseudo-historical Joshua could not have been elevated by the Talmudists to a divine status in other regards had he been a historical personage; and when we find him specially honoured in Samaria[38] we can draw no inference save that he was once a Palestinian deity. The fact that the name means “Saviour”[39] is of capital importance. In Jewish tradition and in his Book he is specially associated with the choosing of the Paschal lamb, the rite of the Passover, and the rite of circumcision.[40] Here then is the presumptive God for the early rite of Jesus the Son of the Father. As we shall see later, “the Angel of the Lord” is found to equate with “the Word of the Lord”—another cue for the gospel-makers. And in the Jewish New Year liturgy, to this day, Joshua-Jesus figures as the “Prince of the Presence,” which again is supposed to identify him with Metatron as = μετα θρόνου, “behind the throne.” Only as a Palestinian deity thus subordinated to Yahweh is he explicable. And as the “Angel of the Presence” again occurs in [Isaiah, lxiii, 9], figuring as Saviour and Redeemer, it is fairly clear that there was some Jewish doctrine which made of Joshua a Saviour deity.
A high authority[41] pronounces that the “Angel of the Presence” is “probably Michael, who was the guardian angel of Israel.” But Michael is a wholly post-exilic figure: was there no Hebrew prototype? However that may be, the ritual connection of the name Jesus (Joshua) with the title of Prince of the Presence has survived the intervention of Babylonian angelology, and remains to testify to a status for Joshua which can be explained only as a result of his original Godhood.[42]
[To this inductive argument the only answer, thus far, seems to be to argue, as does Dr. Conybeare, that while “no one nowadays accepts the Book of Joshua offhand as sound history,” nevertheless Joshua is there “a man of flesh and blood.”[43] On the same reasoning, Samson cannot be an Evemerized deity, though his mythical character is clear to every mythologist. Such considerations our amateur meets by alleging that if “half-a-dozen or more” men “come along” mistaking an “astral myth” for a man, we should “think we were bewitched, and take to our heels.”[44] In this connection Dr. Conybeare represents me as declaring Jesus to be “an astral myth.” It is not clear whether Dr. Conybeare, who supposes totems to be Gods, knows what “astral myth” means, so I impute rather hallucination than fabrication. The rational reader is aware that no such theory has been put or suggested by me.[45] But as to his thesis, which would seem to imply that even solar deities could never be supposed by “half-a-dozen” to be real men, it is sufficient to point out that Herakles, the typical solar Hero-God, was believed by millions in antiquity to be a real man; and that Samson, obviously = the Semitic Shamas or Shimshai, a variant of Herakles, was believed by millions of Jews to have been a real man. It is needless here to go into the cases of Achilles and Ulysses; but the reader who would know more of mythology than has been discovered by Dr. Conybeare and his newspaper reviewers may usefully investigate these themes.