But the thing alleged is unnatural. On the one hand we are asked to believe that the authorities had before sunset collected a number of witnesses, when they could not have any certainty of making the arrest; on the other hand we are to believe that with all this extraordinary fore-planning they had not taken the normal precaution of ascertaining what the witnesses could say. In the transcribed drama as it stands, the authorities are represented as knaves; in the interpretation before us, framed to save the credit of the narrative, they are represented as childishly foolish. The narrative as we have it defies its vindicators. It tells that witnesses were sent for; and only in a drama, in which time-conditions are ignored, could such a fiction have been resorted to.] #/
The story is equally dramatic to the close. Everything is scenic, detached, episodic: it is left to Luke (who elaborates the Supper scene; gives a positive command of Jesus for the future celebration where the previous documents merely show the rite as it was practised; puts the denial of Peter before the trial; and drops the whole procedure of the witnesses) to interpose the episode of the daughters of Jerusalem between the Roman trial and the crucifixion; and even that is parenthetic and dramatic, as are the burial and the seeking; whereafter, in Mark, the gospel abruptly ends. The rest is supplementary documentation. How much of that may have been dramatized, it is impossible to say. That there had been evolution in the mystery-play is involved in our conception of it. It began with the simple Sacrament, at a remote period, the Sacrament itself being evolved from a primitive and savage to a symbolic form, the God being probably first represented, as in kindred rites,[64] by his sacrificial priest; and later by the victim.[65] It is after the primitive and localized cult seeks the status of a world-religion that the ritual developes into a quasi-history; and we can see conflicting influences in that. One writer causes Jesus to be buffeted and mocked at the Jewish trial, as if to counterbalance the derision in the Roman trial; even as Luke interposes a third trial before Herod, to make sure that the guilt should ultimately lie with the Jewish government. In the action as in the doctrine, the Gentile influence finally predominates.
The important point to note in the documentary evolution is that the mystery-play remained a secret representation for some time after written gospels were current. To begin with, all the mystery-plays of the age were on the same footing of secrecy. What takes place finally in the Jesuist cult is a simple adding-on of the mystery-play to the gospels. It was not for nothing that the school of B. Weiss, seeking to expiscate a “Primitive Gospel” from the synoptics, made it end before the Tragedy. This was what they were bound to do by their documentary tests; and the common objection that such an ending is very improbable—a difficulty avowed by Weiss and weakly sought to be solved by some of the school—is seen in the light of the myth-theory to be a difficulty only for those who assume not merely the historicity of a Jesus but the historicity of the whole tragedy story down to the resurrection. Once it is realized that that story is a dramatic development of an originally simple myth of sacrificial death, the documentary difficulty disappears.
[It should not be necessary to point out the absolute falsity of the assertion of Dr. Conybeare (Histor. Christ, p. 49) that in my theory “The Christian Gospels ... are a transcript of the annually performed ritual drama, just as Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare are transcripts of Shakespeare’s plays.” In Pagan Christs (p. 201) it is expressly argued that “the Mystery Play is an addition to a previously existing document.... The transcriber has been able to add to the previous gospel the matter of the mystery-play; and there he loyally stops.” And it is repeatedly pointed out that the transcription has been made with the minimum of necessary narrative connection. Thus the parallel with Lamb’s Tales is false even as regards the matter posited as constituting the play; while the assertion that the whole of the gospel is represented as a transcription of a play is pure fabrication. And this mere falsification of the theory passes with traditionalist critics as a confutation.]
Some account, indeed, the Jesuists must have given of the death of their God or Son-God when they reached the stage of systematic propaganda; and this was in all likelihood a bare statement such as we have in the Epistles, that he was put to a humiliating death and rose again. It is very likely that accounts of the manner of the death varied in the first written accounts, as they certainly would in the traditions or rituals current at various points; and we may grant to the documentary critics that various versions may have attached to early forms or sources of Mark and Matthew. A general statement that Jesus was the “Son of the Father,” and that he had been put to death with ignominy, would elicit, as has been above argued, the objection that “Jesus Barabbas” was certainly no divine personage. The Barabbas story, then, explaining away that objection, is a comparatively late development, of which, accordingly, we find not a single trace in the Acts or the Epistles. But similarly the Supper is not described in the Acts or the Epistles apart from the plainly interpolated account in First Corinthians. And at the outset the Supper would be emphatically secret matter, not to be written down.
Whatever conclusion, then, was given to the earlier gospel or gospels, it did not include that. As little would it give the Agony, or the trials before the Sanhedrim and before Pilate, throwing the guilt of the tragedy on the Jews, or the episodes disparaging the apostles. Judas is in all likelihood primarily a figure of a Gentile form of the play, being just Judaios, a Jew,[66] created by Gentile or Samaritan animus. What inferribly happened was a dramatic development, by Gentile hands, of a primarily simple mystery drama, consisting of the Supper, the death, and the resurrection, into the play as it now stands transcribed in the synoptics, with the Betrayal, the Agony, the Denial, the Trials, and the dramatic touches in the crucifixion scene.
The school of Weiss, then, on our theory, reached by comparatively consistent methods of documentary criticism a relatively sound conclusion. The earlier forms of the gospel certainly had not the present conclusion; and whatever simple conclusions they had were bound to be superseded when the complete mystery play was transcribed—the very transcription being a reason for their disappearance. At some point, probably by reason of the Christian reaction against all pagan procedure, the play, which in its present form must always have been special to a town or towns, was dropped, and though the tendency was to keep the Eucharist an advanced rite for initiates, and withhold it from catechumens,[67] the reduction of the Tragedy to narrative form became a necessity for purposes of propaganda. Without it, the gospels were inadequate to their purposes; and it supplied the needed confutation of the charge that Jesus was simply a victim in the Barabbas rite.
This said, we have still to face the main problem of the evolution of the Jesus-cult into a world-religion in which the God Sacrificed to the God becomes also the Messiah of the Jews and the Teacher of those who believe in him. And the tracing of that evolution must obviously be difficult. The process of extracting true out of false history is always so; and where the concocted history and its contingent literature are the main documents, we can in the nature of things reach only general conceptions. But general conceptions are attainable; and we must frame them as scientifically as we can.
[1] [1 Cor. x, 21]. I say “Paul” as I say “Matthew” or “John,” for brevity’s sake, not at all as accepting the ascriptions of the books. Van Manen’s thesis that all the Epistles of “Paul” are pseudepigraphic is probably very near the truth. [↑]