These very attempts, naturally, are constantly made the objects of still more hasty counter-attack. Every form of the myth-theory with which I am acquainted, whatever its defects, has been the result of much labour, and even if astray can be fairly pronounced “hasty” only in the sense that it proves to be inadequate. It is not so with most of the counter-criticism. The reader may rest assured that it is not possible for any exposition of the new theory to be as “hasty” as is usually its rejection.[1] Professional theologians who cast that epithet are in general recognizably men who believed their hereditary creed before they were able to think, and have at no later stage made good the first inevitable omission.
Myth-theories, sound or unsound, are the attempts of students who find the record incredible as history to think out, in the light of the documents and of comparative mythology and hierology, the process by which it came to be produced; and even as all myth is but a form of traditionary error, so any attempt to trace its growth runs the risk of error. It is one thing to show, for instance, that the Pentateuch cannot have been written by “Moses,” seen to be a non-historical figure: it is another thing to settle how the books were really made. In such cases, the “something in the place” of the tradition is to be ascertained only after long and patient investigation and counter-criticism. So with the investigation of the fabulous history of early Rome. After several scholars had set forth grounded doubts, the problem was ably and systematically handled by the French freethinker Louis de Beaufort in 1738. Early in the nineteenth century, Niebuhr, confidently undertaking “with the help of God” to get at the truth, and falsely disparaging Beaufort’s work as wholly “sceptical,” effected a reconstruction which has since been found to be in large measure unsound, though long acquiesced in by English students.[2] In such matters there is really no finality. If well-documented history must in every age be rewritten, no less inevitable is the re-writing of that which is reached only by processes of inference. And the gospel problem is the hardest of all. Still more than in the case of the Pentateuch problem, many revisions will probably be needed before a generally satisfactory solution is reached.
There is nothing for it but to trace and retrace, consider and reconsider, the inferrible historic process. Met as he is by alternate charges of reckless iconoclasm and “hasty” construction, the proper course for the holder of the myth-theory is to repeat with dispassionate vigilance both of his processes—to show first that the progressive effort to extract from the gospels a tenable biography has ended in complete critical collapse, revealing only a tissue of myth; and then to attempt to indicate how the pseudo-history came to be compiled: in other words, how the myth arose. Such has been my procedure in the preceding volume and in this.
It may of course be argued that the previous negative criticism of the gospel record is indecisive; that the avowal of Loisy: “If the trial and condemnation of Jesus, as pretended Messiah, could be put in doubt, we should have no ground for affirming the existence of the Christ,” does not commit other inquirers, or that the historicity of the trial story has not really been exploded; that the nullity of the alleged Evangel has not been established; or that the complete destruction of previous biographical theories claimed by Schweitzer for himself and Wrede has not been accomplished. The answer is that these issues are not re-opened in the following chapters. They were carefully handled in the previous volume, to which I have seen no attempt at a comprehensive and reasoned answer.
[The latest attack I have seen comes from a former antagonist, who appears to lay his main complaint against the book on the ground that it “omits to notice the theory of the synoptic problem which appears in every modern text-book,” that is, “the two-documents hypothesis.” And there emerges this indictment:—
As the theory has a vital bearing on the relative values of different strata of tradition, Mr. Robertson cannot afford to ignore it. If we apply to himself the crude principle he applies to Paul and the evangelists, to wit, that if they don’t mention a thing they don’t know it, we must assume that Mr. Robertson is still ignorant of the very elements of the problem he is professing to solve. Since he has no clear or tenable view of the documents and their relations to one another, he obviously cannot answer the historical questions they raise.[3]... Presumably he omits to mention it because he does not see its significance.[4]
Before coming to the main matter, it is necessary to elucidate the charge as to a “crude principle” applied to Paul and the evangelists. The “principle” really applied was this, that if “Paul” in all his writings, apart from two interpolated passages, shows no real knowledge whatever of the gospels, and no knowledge whatever either of the life or the teachings of Jesus as there recorded, we are compelled to infer either that these details were not in any form known to Paul, or that, if he knew them, he did not believe them. It is not a matter of his not knowing “a thing”: that is the sophism of the critic; it is a matter of his not knowing anything on the subject. And so with the synoptics and the fourth gospel. When one side relates something vital to the record, of which the other side shows no knowledge whatever[5]—as, for instance, great miracles—we are bound to infer that the silent side, when it is the earlier record, either did not know or did not believe the story. Or, again, when John alleges that the disciples baptized freely and the synoptics make no mention of it, it is clear that we cannot suppose them, in the alleged circumstances, to have been ignorant of such a fact; while, if they are supposed to have known it and yet to have kept silence, their credit as historians is gravely shaken. The “principle,” in fact, is that of critical common-sense; and the critic’s version of it is a forensic perversion.
On the next issue, it is perhaps well to explain to the lay reader that the “two-documents hypothesis” is simply what Schmiedel—with a very justifiable implication—named “the so-called theory of two sources,” a mere aspect of “the borrowing hypothesis” which constitutes the main substance of the bulk of the documentary discussion of the gospels in the last century, and which is simply the most obvious way of attempting to explain the documentary phenomena. It dates from Papias. As the critic asseverates, it is the theory of the text-books in general. And for the main purposes of historic comprehension, it is neither here nor there. The theory of two sources cannot possibly cover all the data, even from the biographical point of view. The effect of Schmiedel’s article—a model of critical honesty and general good sense which his successors might usefully strive to copy in those regards—is to show that the hypothesis is quite inadequate even as a documentary theory; and from the point of view of the rational student it is simply neutral to the vital question, What really did happen, in the main? He who has realized that the Entry, the Betrayal, the Last Supper, the Agony, the Trials, and the Crucifixion, are all as mythical as the Resurrection, is not at that point concerned with the dispute as to priority among the gospels, or any sections of them. No documentary hypothesis can possibly make the myth true.
At the vital point, in fact, the two-documents hypothesis is not even ostensibly applicable: the synoptic narrative is one primary narrative, subjected to minor modifications. It is admitted by Harnack to have been absent from “Q,” the Logoi “source” held to have been drawn upon by Matthew and Luke. And that one narrative, as I have argued, is not in origin a “gospel” narrative at all, but the simple transcript of a mystery-drama, with almost the minimum of necessary narrative insertion. If the exegete could bring himself to contemplate rationally my hypothesis, he might find his documentary labours lightened.[6]