As to Joshua, Dr. Conybeare, attempting academic humour, argues (p. 17) that if the hero is “interested in fruitfulness and foreskins” he ought to be conceived as a “Priapic god.” The humorist, who pronounces his antagonists “too modest,” seems to be unaware that Yahweh had the interests in question. Becoming “serious,” he argues (p. 30) that “even if there ever existed such a cult, it had long vanished when the book of Joshua was compiled.” For other purposes, he resorts (p. 16) to the test, “How do you know?” “Vanished,” for Dr. Conybeare, means, “is not mentioned in the canonical Hebrew books.” With his simple conceptions of the religious life of antiquity, he supposes himself to be aware of all that went on, religiously, in the lives of the much-mixed population of Palestine. His statement (p. 31) that “the Jews” in the fifth century B.C. “no longer revered David and Joshua and Joseph as sun-gods” is as relevant as would be the statement that they did not worship Zeus. No one ever said that “the Jews” carried on all their primitive cults in the post-exilic period: the proposition is the expression of mere inability to conceive the issue.
When, on the other hand, Dr. Conybeare proceeds to notice the thesis that the ancient Jesuine sacrament would presumably survive as a secret rite, he disposes of the proposition by calling it “a literary trick.” That would be a mild term for his express assertion (p. 34) that I have claimed that “the canonical Book of Joshua originally contained” the tradition that Joshua was the son of Miriam—an explicit untruth. My reference to deletions from the book expressly pointed to the theses of Winckler, a scholar whom Dr. Conybeare supposes himself to discredit by expressions of personal contempt. Winckler never put the hypothesis as to Miriam.[46]
As to the survival of many private “mysteries” among the Jews, I may refer the reader to the section in Pagan Christs on “Private Jewish Eucharists” (p. 168 sq.), and in particular to the dictum, there cited, of the late Professor Robertson Smith (who has not yet, I believe, incurred Dr. Conybeare’s tolerably indiscriminate contempt), that “the causes which produced a resuscitation of obsolete mysteries were at work at the same period [after the Captivity] among all the Northern Semites,” and that “they mark the first appearance in Semitic history of the tendency to found religious societies on voluntary association and mystic initiation.” To the “first” I cannot subscribe, save on a special construction of “appearance.” But Robertson Smith’s proposition was founded on the documentary evidence; and when he writes that “the obscure rites described by the prophets have a vastly greater importance than has been commonly recognized,” with the addendum that “everywhere the old national Gods had shown themselves powerless to resist the gods of Assyria and Babylon,” we are listening to a great Semitic scholar, an anthropologist, and a thinker, not to a “wilful child,” as Dr. Conybeare may charitably be described, in words which, after his manner of polemic, he applies to me.]
Finally, we have seen that a rite of “Jesus the Son,” otherwise known as the “Week of the Son,” was actually specified by the Talmudists of the period of the fall of the Temple. Taken with the item of the name Jesus Barabbas, “Jesus the Son of the Father,” and the five-days’ duration of the ritual of the sacrificed Mock-King, it completes a body of Jewish evidence for the pre-Christian currency of the name Jesus as a cult-name of some kind. It is now possible to see at once the force of the primary thesis of Professor W. B. Smith[47] that the phrase τὰ περὶ τοῦ Ἰησοῦ, “the things concerning the Jesus,” in the Gospels and the Acts,[48] tells of a body of Jesus-lore of some kind prior to the gospel story; and also the significance of the fact that the narrative of the Acts represents the new apostle as finding Jesus-worshippers, albeit in small numbers, wherever he went.
To suppose that this could mean a far-reaching and successful propaganda by “the Twelve” in the short period represented to have elapsed between the Crucifixion and the advent of Paul is not merely to take as history, or summary of history, the miracle of Pentecost, but to ignore the rest of the narrative. First we are told ([viii, 1]) that after the martyrdom of Stephen the Christists “were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judæa and Samaria, except the apostles.” It is only to Samaria that Philip goes at that stage, and his doings are on the face of them mythical. Yet Saul on his conversion finds the “disciple” Ananias at Damascus. Then Peter “went throughout all parts” ([ix, 32]), reaching Lydda, where he finds “saints”; and then it is that “the apostles and the brethren that were in Judæa heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God” ([xi, 1]). It is after this that “they that were scattered abroad upon the tribulation that arose about Stephen travelled as far as Phœnicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to none save only to Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who when they were come to Antioch spake unto the Greeks [or Grecian Jews] also, preaching the Lord Jesus” ([xi, 19]). Already there is an ecclesia at Antioch ([xiii, 1]) with nothing to account for its existence.
At this stage it is represented that Saul and Barnabas customarily preach Jesuism in the Jewish synagogues; and that only after “contradiction” from jealous Jews at Antioch of Pisidia do they “turn to the Gentiles” ([xiii, 46]), continuing, however, to visit synagogues, till the Jewish hostility becomes overwhelming. At Jerusalem, meanwhile, after all the gospel invective against the Pharisees, there are found “certain of the sect of the Pharisees who believed,” and who stand firm for circumcision. Ere long we find at Ephesus the Alexandrian Jew Apollos, who “taught carefully the things concerning Jesus, knowing only the baptism of John,” having been “orally instructed in the way of the Lord” ([xviii, 25]), but had to be taught “more carefully” by Priscilla and Aquila. Then he passes on to Corinth. Paul in turn ([xix]) shows at Ephesus, where he finds other early Jesuists, that they of the baptism of John, though by implication they held that “Jesus was the Christ,” had not received “the Holy Ghost,” which went only with the baptism of Jesus—the baptism which only the fourth gospel alleges (with contradictions), the synoptics knowing nothing of any baptism by Jesus or the disciples; and only Matthew and Mark even alleging that after resurrection he prescribed it. In all this the hypnotized believer sees no untruth. To the eye of reason there is revealed a process of primitive cult-building.
In whatever direction we turn, we thus find in the Jesuist documents themselves the traces of a “pre-Christian” Jesuism and Christism. At Ephesus, the believers “were in all about twelve men”—the number required for the primitive rite. The subsequent statement ([xix, 9–10]) that after Paul had debated daily for two years at Ephesus “all they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks,” is typical of the method of the pseudo-history. Either the whole narrative is baseless fiction or there were prior developments of the Jesus-cult.
It may be argued, indeed, that such a work of manipulation as the Acts is no evidence for anything, and that its accounts indicating a prior spread of Jesuism are no more to be believed than its miracle stories. But however fictitious be its accounts of any one person, it is certain that there was a cult; and all critics are now agreed that the book is a redaction of previous matter—probably of Acts of Paul, Acts of Peter, Acts of the Apostles, and so on. And whereas the most advantageous fiction from the point of view of the growing “catholic” church would be an account of the apostles as everywhere making converts, stories of their finding them must be held to have been imposed on the redactor by his material. There also it must be held to stand for some reality in the history of the cult, for the same reason, that there was nothing to be gained by inventing such a detail.