The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

Still we are met by the objection that whatever the Acts may say the gospels give no indication of any previous Jesus-cult. But that is a position untenable for the biographical school save by a temporary resort to the theory of myth-making. As Professor W. B. Smith has pointed out, the gospels expressly represent that the disciples healed the sick in the name of Jesus in places where Jesus had never been. For the supernaturalists, that is only one more set of miracles. But the biographical school, though it is much inclined to credit Jesus with occult “healing powers,” can hardly affirm such healing by means of a magic name, and has no resource but to dismiss all such matter.[49] Yet why should the evangelists have framed such a narrative save on the knowledge that the name of Jesus was a thing to conjure with in Palestinian villages?

It is true that the story is fully told only of the mission of the Seventy. In Matthew the Twelve are “sent” out but neither go nor return, for the narrative continues with them present. In Mark and Luke, the Twelve go and return without reporting anything, though Mark tells that they preached repentance, cast out many devils, and healed many sick by anointing them with oil. Evidently the mission was a heedless addition to the older gospel or gospels: the third attempts to give it some completeness. It is only the Seventy who make a report; and it is only of them ([Lk. x, 1]) that we are told they were to go to places “whither he himself was about to come.” As the episode of the Seventy is in effect given up as myth even by many supernaturalists (who feel that, if historical, the episode could not have been overlooked in Matthew and Mark), the biographical school are so far entitled to say that for them the record does not posit a previously current Jesus-Name. But what idea then do they connect with the sending-out of the Twelve, if not the kind of idea that is associated with the sending-out of the Seventy?

M. Loisy feels “authorized to believe” (1) that Jesus in some fashion chose twelve disciples and sent them out to preach the simple “evangel” that “the Kingdom of God was at hand”—that is, merely the evangel of John the Baptist over again; and (2) that “it seems” that they went two by two in the Galilean villages, and were “well received: their warning was listened to: sick persons were presented to them to heal, and there were cures.” To say this is to say, if anything, that for the first Christians the Name of Jesus was held to have healing power before his deification, and that it was a known name.

But we have stronger documentary grounds than these. The Apocalypse is now by advanced critics in general recognized to have been primarily a Judaic, not a Christian document.[50] The critics apparently do not realize that this verdict carries in it the pronouncement that Jesus was probably a divine name for some section of the Jews before the rise of the Christian cult. The twelve apostles enter only in an interpolation:[51] in the main document we have the “four and twenty elders” of an older cult,[52] answering to the twenty-four Counsellor Gods of Babylonia. Even if we assign the book to a “Christian” writer of the earliest years, at the very beginning of the Pauline mission,[53] we are committed to connecting the cult at that stage with the doctrine of the Logos,[54] with the Alpha and Omega, and with the Mithraic or Babylonian lore of the Seven Spirits. Of the gospel story there is no trace beyond the mention of slaying: on the other hand the Child-God of the dragon-story is wholly non-Christian, and derives from Babylon.

The entire book, in short, raises the question whether the Jesus-cult may not have come in originally (as so much of Judaism did), or been reinforced, from the side of Babylon, down even to the name of Nazareth, since there was a Babylonian Nasrah. As Samaria, the seat of the special celebration of Joshua, is historically known to have been colonised from Assyria and Babylon, the possibilities are wide. Suffice it that the Apocalypse indicates a strong Babylonian element in some of the earliest real documentary matter we have in connection with the Jesuist cult in the New Testament; and at the same time makes certain the pre-Gospel currency of a Jesus-cult among professed Jews.

Yet another clue obtrudes itself in the Epistle of Jude—or, as it ought to be named, Judas—a document notably Jewish in literary colour. Mr. Whittaker[55] was the first of the myth-theorists to lay proper stress on the fact that the reading “Jesus” (= Joshua) in verse 5,[56] alone makes the passage intelligible:—

Now I desire to put you in remembrance, though ye know all things once for all, how that Jesus [that is, Joshua, instead of “the Lord”] having saved a people out of the land of Egypt the second time[57] [Moses having saved them the first time], destroyed them that believed not. And angels which kept not their own principality, but left their proper habitation, he hath kept in everlasting bonds under darkness unto the judgement of the great day.

The reference is certainly to Joshua, who is here quasi-deified. Plainly, as Mr. Whittaker observes, “the binding of erring angels can only be attributed to a supernatural being, and not to a mere national hero.”

And, as Mr. Whittaker also notes, we have yet another clear indication from the Jewish-Christian side that Joshua in Jewish theology had a heavenly status. In the “Sibylline Oracles” there occurs the passage:—

Now a certain excellent man shall come again from heaven, who spread forth his hands upon the very fruitful tree, the best of the Hebrews, who once made the sun stand still, speaking with beauteous words and pure lips.[58]