The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

§ 1. The Primary Impulsion

Professor W. B. Smith, whose brilliant, independent, and powerful advocacy of the myth-theory has brought conviction to readers not otherwise attracted by it, has stressed two propositions in regard to the evolution of the Jesus-cult. One is that the movement was “multifocal,” starting from a number of points;[1] the other that the essential and inspiring motive was the monotheistic conception, as against all forms of polytheism; Jesus being conceived as “the One God.”[2] That the first proposition is sound and highly important, I am convinced. But after weighing the second with a full sense of the acumen that guides all Professor Smith’s constructive speculation, I remain of the opinion that it needs considerable modification.[3] In clearing up these two issues, we shall go a long way towards establishing a clear theory of the whole historical process.

In the first place, a “multifocal” movement, a growth from many points, is involved in all our knowledge of the highly important matters of the history of the early Christian sects, and the non-canonical Christian documents. Perhaps the proposition is even more widely true than Professor Smith indicates. To begin with, we find at an early stage the sects of (1) Ebionites and (2) Nazarenes or Nazareans, in addition to (3 and 4) the Judaizing and Gentilizing movements associated with “the Twelve” and Paul respectively; and yet further (5) the movement associated with the name of Apollos. Further we have to note (6) the Jesuism of the Apocalypse, partly extra-Judaic in its derivation; and (7) that of the ninth section of the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, which emerges as a quasi-Ebionitic addition to a purely Judaic document—not yet interpolated by the seventh section. Yet further, we have (8) the factors accruing to the religious epithet “Chrēstos”[4] (= good, gracious), which specially attached to the underworld Gods of the Samothracian mysteries; also to Hermes, Osiris, and Isis; and (9 and 10) the Christist cult-movements connected with the non-Jesuine Pastor of Hermas and the sect of the Eleesaites.[5] And this is not an exhaustive list.

(11) That there was a general Jewish ferment of Messianism on foot in the first century is part of the case of the biographical school. That there actually arose in the first and second centuries various Jewish “Christs” is also a historical datum. But the biographical school are not wont in this connection to avow the inference that alone can properly be drawn from the phrase of Suetonius as to a movement of Jewish revolt at Rome occurring in the reign of Claudius impulsore Chresto, “(one) Chrestus instigating.”[6] This is not an allusion to the Greek epithet Chrēstos before referred to: it is either a specification of an individual otherwise unknown or the reduction to vague historic status of the source of a general ferment of Jewish insurrection in Rome, founding on the expectation of the Christos, the Messiah. In the reign of Claudius, such a movement could not have been made by “Christians” on any view of the history. As the words were pronounced alike they were interchangeably written, Chrestos (preserved in the French chrétien) being used even among the Fathers. Giving to the phrase of Suetonius the only plausible import we can assign to it, we get the datum that among the Jews outside Palestine there was a generalized movement of quasi-revolutionary Christism which cannot well have been without its special literature.

(12) In this connection may be noted the appearance of a quasi-impersonal Messianism and Christism on the border-land of Jewish and early Christian literature. Of this, a main source is the Book of Enoch, of which the Messianic sections are now by general consent assigned to the first and second centuries B.C. There the Messiah is called the Just or Righteous One;[7] the Chosen One;[8] Son of Man;[9] the Anointed;[10] and once “Son of the Woman.”[11] Here already we have the imagined Divine One more or less concretely represented. He is premundane, and so supernatural, yet not equal with God, being simply God’s deputy.[12] When then we find in the so-called Odes of Solomon, recently recovered from an Ethiopic version, a Messianic psalmody in which, apparently in the first Christian century, “the name of the gospel is not found, nor the name of Jesus;” and “not a single saying of Jesus is directly quoted,”[13] it is critically inadmissible to pronounce the Odes Christian, especially when a number are admitted to have no Christian characteristics.[14] When, too, the writer admittedly appears to be speaking ex ore Christi, a new doubt is cast on all logia so-called. Such literature, whether or not it be pronounced Gnostic, points to the Gnostic Christism in which the personal Jesus disappears[15] in a series of abstract speculations that exclude all semblance of human personality. All the evidence points for its origination to abstract or general conceptions, not to any actual life or teaching. It spins its doctrinal web from within.

(13) And it is not merely on the Jewish side that we have evidence of elements in the early Jesuist movement which derive from sources alien to the gospel record. M. Loisy[16] admits that the hymn of the Naassenes, given by Hippolytus,[17] in which Jesus appeals to the Father to let him descend to earth and reveal the mysteries to men, “has an extraordinary resemblance to the dialogue between the God Ea and his son Marduk in certain Babylonian incantations.”[18] He disposes of the problem by claiming that before it can weigh with us “it must be proved that the hymn of the Ophites is anterior to all connection of their sect with Christianity.” The implication is that Gnostic syncretism could add Babylonian traits to the Jewish Jesus. But when we find signal marks of a Babylonian connection for the name Jesus in the Apocalypse we cannot thus discount, without further evidence, the Babylonian connection set up by the Naassene hymn. Nor can the defenders of a record which they themselves admit to contain a mass of unhistorical matter claim to have a ground upon which they can dismiss as a copyist’s blunder the formula in which in an old magic papyrus Jesus, as Healer, is adjured as “The God of the Hebrews.”[19] The very gospel records present the name of Jesus as one of magical power in places where he has not appeared. A strict criticism is bound to admit that the whole question of the pre-Christian vogue of the name Jesus presents an unsolved problem.

There are further two quasi-historical Jesuses, one (14) given in the Old Testament, the other (15) in the Talmud, concerning which we can neither affirm nor deny that they were connected with a Jesuine movement before the Christian era. One is the Jesus of Zechariah ([iii, 1–8]; [vi, 11–15]); the other is the Jesus Ben Pandira, otherwise Jesus Ben Satda or Stada, of the Talmud. The former, Jesus the High Priest, plays a quasi-Messianic part, being described as “The Branch” and doubly crowned as priest and king. The word for “branch” in Zechariah is tsemach, but this was by the pre-Christian Jews identified with the netzer of [Isaiah xi, 1]; which for some the early Jesuists would seem to have constituted the explanation of Jesus’ cognomen of “Nazarite” or “Nazaræan.”[20] The historic significance of the allusions in Zechariah appears to have been wholly lost; and that very circumstance suggests some pre-Christian connection between the name Jesus and a Messianic movement, which the Jewish teachers would be disposed to let slip from history, and the Christists who might know of it would not wish to recall. But the matter remains an enigma.

Equally unsolved, thus far, is the problem of the Talmudic Jesus. Ostensibly, there are two; and yet both seem to have been connected, in the Jewish mind, with the Jesus of the gospels. One, Jesus son of Pandira, is recorded to have been stoned to death and then hanged on a tree, for blasphemy or other religious crime, on the eve of a Passover in the reign of Alexander Jannæus (B.C. 106–79).[21] But in the Babylonian Gemara he is identified with a Jesus Ben Sotada or Stada or Sadta or Sidta, who by one rather doubtful clue is put in the period of Rabbi Akiba in the second century C.E. He too is said to have been stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover, but at Lydda, whereas Ben Pandira is said to have been executed at Jerusalem. Some scholars take the unlikely view that two different Jesuses were thus stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover: others infer one, whose date has been confused.[22] As Ben Pandira entered into the Jewish anti-Christian tradition, and is posited by the Jew of Celsus in the second century, the presumption is in favour of his date. His mother is in one place named Mariam Magdala = “Mary the nurse” or “hair-dresser”—a quasi-mythical detail. But even supposing him to have been a real personage, whose name may have been connected with a Messianic movement (he is said to have had five disciples), it is impossible to say what share his name may have had in the Jesuine tradition. Our only practicable clues, then, are those of the sects and movements enumerated.

It soon becomes clear from a survey of these sects and movements (1) that a cult of a non-divine Jesus, represented by the Hebraic Ebionites, subsisted for a time alongside of one which, also among Jews, made Jesus a supernatural being. Only on the basis of an original rite can such divergences be explained. The Ebionites come before us, in the account of Epiphanius, as using a form of the Gospel of Matthew which lacked the first two chapters (an addition of the second or third century), denying the divinity of Jesus, and rejecting the apostleship of Paul.[23] It is implied that they accepted the story of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. Here then were Jewish believers in a Hero-Jesus, the Servant of God (as in the Teaching), not a Son of God in any supernatural sense. Ebionism had rigidly restricted the cult to a subordinate form.

On the other hand, we have in the Nazarean sect or fraternity a movement which added both directly and indirectly to the Jesuist evolution. In the so-called Primitive Gospel, as expiscated by the school of B. Weiss from the synoptics, there is no mention of Nazareth, and neither the epithet “Nazarene” nor “Nazarite” for Jesus. All three names are wholly absent from the Epistles, as from the Apocalypse: Jesus never has a cognomen after we pass the Acts. The inference is irresistible that first the epithet “Nazarean,” and later the story about Nazareth, were additions to a primary cult in which Jesus had no birth-location, any more than he had human parents.