The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

I have suggested[24] that the term may have come in from the Hebrew “Netzer” = “the branch,” which would have a Messianic meaning for Jews. Professor Smith, who makes a searching study of Hebrew word-elements, has developed a highly important thesis to the effect that the word Nazaraios, “Nazarean,” which gives the residual name for the Jesuist sect in the Acts and the predominant name for Jesus in the gospels (apart from Mark, which gives Nazarenos),[25] is not only pre-Christian but old Semitic; that the fundamental meaning of the name (Nosri) is “guard” or “watcher” (= Saviour?), and that the appellation is thus cognate with “Jesus,” which signifies Saviour.[26] On the negative side, as against the conventional derivations from Nazareth, the case is very strong. More than fifty years ago, the freethinker Owen Meredith insisted on the lack of evidence that a Galilean village named Nazareth existed before the Christian era. To-day; professional scholarship has acquiesced, to such an extent that Dr. Cheyne[27] and Wellhausen have agreed in deriving the name from the regional name Gennesareth, thus making Nazareth = Galilee; while Professor Burkitt, finding “the ordinary view of Nazareth wholly unproved and unsatisfactory,” offers “a desperate conjecture” to the effect that “the city of Joseph and Mary, the πατρίς of Jesus, was Chorazin.”[28] In the face of this general surrender, we are doubly entitled to deny that either the appellation for Jesus or the sect-name had anything to do with the place-name Nazareth.[29]

That there was a Jewish sect of “Nazaræans” before the Christian era, Professor Smith has clearly shown, may be taken as put beyond doubt by the testimony of Epiphanius, which he exhaustively analyzes.[30] Primitively orthodox, like the Samaritans, and recognizing ostensibly no Bible personages later than Joshua, they appear to have merged in some way with the “Christians,” who adopted their name, perhaps turning “Nazaræan” into “Nazorean.” My original theory was that the “Nazaræans” were just the “Nazarites” of the Old Testament—men “separated” and “under a vow”;[31] and that the two movements somehow coalesced, the place-name “Nazareth” being finally adopted to conceal the facts. But Professor Smith is convinced, from the evidence of Epiphanius, that between “Nazarites” and “Nazaræans” there was no connection;[32] and for this there is the strong support of the fact that the Jews cursed the Jesuist “Nazoræans” while apparently continuing to recognize the Nazirs or Nazarites. That Professor Smith’s derivation of the name may be the correct one, I am well prepared to believe.

But it is difficult to connect such a derivation of an important section of the early Jesuist movement with the thesis that Jesuism at its historic outset was essentially a monotheistic crusade. On this side we seem to face an old sect for whom, as for the adherents of the early sacrament, Jesus was a secondary or subordinate divine personage. Standing at an early Hebraic standpoint, the Nazaræans would have no part in the monotheistic universalism of the later prophets. The early Hebrews had believed in a Hebrew God, recognizing that other peoples also had theirs. How or when had the Nazaræans transcended that standpoint?

In the absence of any elucidation, the very ably argued thesis of Professor Smith as to the name “Nazaræan” seems broadly out of keeping with the thesis that a monotheistic fervour was a main and primary element in the development of the Christian cult; and that Jesus was conceived by his Jewish devotees in general as “the One God.” This would have meant the simple dethroning of Yahweh, a kind of procedure seen only in such myths as that of Zeus and Saturn, where one racial cult superseded another. But the main form of Christianity was always Yahwistic, even when Paul in the Acts is made to proclaim to the Athenians an “unknown God”—an idea really derived from Athens. Only for a few, and these non-Jews, can “the Jesus” originally have been the One God; unless in so far as the use of the name “the Lord” may for some unlettered Jews have identified Jesus with Yahweh, who was so styled. The Ebionites denied his divinity all along. The later Nazareans were Messianists who did not any more than the Jews seem to conceive that the Messiah was Yahweh.

The whole doctrine of “the Son” was in conflict with any purely monotheistic idea. Nowhere in the synoptics or the Epistles is the Christ doctrine so stated as really to serve monotheism: the “I and the Father are one” of the fourth gospel is late; and the opening verses of that gospel show tampering, telling of a vacillation as to whether the Logos was God or “with God”—or rather “next to God,” in the strict meaning of πρὸς. Here we have a reflex of Alexandrian philosophy,[33] not the evangel of the popular cult. Formally monotheistic the cult always was, even when it had become actually Trinitarian; and all along, doubtless, the particularist monotheism of the Jews was at work against all other God-names in particular and polytheism in general; but that cannot well have been the moving force in a cult which was professedly beginning by establishing an ostensibly new deity, and was ere long to make a trinity.

So far as anything can be clearly gathered from the scattered polemic in the Talmud against “the Minim,” the standing title for Jewish heretics, including Christians as such,[34] they at least appear not as maintaining the oneness of God but rather as affirming a second Deity,[35] and this as early as the beginning of the second century. That the Jewish Rabbis took this view of their doctrine is explained in terms of the actual theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews. If there was any new doctrine of monotheism bound up with Jesuism, it must have been outside of the Jewish sphere, where the unity of God was the very ground on which Jesuism was resisted. As such, the Jewish Christians did not even repudiate the Jewish law, being expressly aspersed by the Rabbis as secret traitors who professed to be Jews but held alien heresies.[36]

I have said that “the Jesus” can have been “the one God” only for non-Jews. Conceivably he may have been so for some Samaritans. There is reason to believe that in the age of the Herods only a minority of the Samaritan people held by Judaism;[37] and there is Christian testimony that in the second century a multitude of them worshipped as the One God Sem or Semo, the Semitic Sun-God whose name is embodied in that of Samson. Justin Martyr, himself a Samaritan, expressly alleges that “almost all the Samaritans, and a few even of other nations” worship and acknowledge as “the first God” Simon, whom he describes as a native of Gitta or Gitton, emerging in the reign of Claudius Cæsar.[38] Justin’s gross blunder in identifying a Samaritan of the first century with the Sabine deity Semo Sancus, whose statue he had seen in Rome,[39] is proof that he could believe in the deification of an alien as Supreme God, in his lifetime, in a nation with ancient cults. The thing being impossible, we are left to the datum that Sem or Semo or Sem-on = Great Sem was widely worshipped in Samaria, as elsewhere in the near East.[40]

Returning to the subject of “the magician Simon” in his Dialogue with Trypho,[41] Justin there repeats that the Samaritans call him “God above all power, and authority, and might.” Remembering that the Jewish Shema, “the Name,” is the ordinary appellative for Yahweh, we note possibilities of syncretism as to which we can only speculate. The fact that the Jews actually called their God in general by a word meaning “Name” and also equating with the commonest Semitic name for the Sun-God, while in their sacred books they professedly transmuted the sacred name (altering the consonants) to Adonai = Lord (“plural of majesty”), the name of the Syrian God Adonis, is a circumstance that has never been much considered by hierologists. It suggests that the Samaritan Sem also may have been “known” by other names; and the certain fact of the special commemoration of Joshua among the Samaritan Judaists gives another ground for speculation. The words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman in the fourth gospel, “Ye worship ye know not what,” seem to signify that from the Alexandrian-Jewish standpoint Samaritans worshipped a name only.

What does emerge clearly is that Samaria played a considerable part in the beginnings of Christism. In a curious passage of the fourth gospel ([viii, 48]) the Jews say to Jesus, “Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a daimon?”: and he answers with a denial that he has a daimon, but makes no answer on the other charge. The fact that Matthew makes the Founder expressly forbid his disciples to enter any city of the Samaritans, while an interpolator of Luke[42] introduces the story of the good Samaritan to counteract the doctrine, tells that there was a sunderance between Samaritan and Judaizing Christists just as there was between the Judaizers and the Gentilizers in general. From Samaria, then, came part of the impulse to the whole Gentilizing movement; and the Samaritan Justin shows the anti-Judaic animus clearly enough.

That Samaritan Jesuism, then, may early have outgone the Pauline in making Jesus “the One God,” in rivalry to the Jewish Yahweh, is a recognizable possibility. But still we do not reach the conception of a zealously monotheistic cult, relying specially on a polemic of monotheism. Justin fights for monotheism as against paganism, but on the ordinary Judaic-Christian basis. This is a later polemic stage. Nor does the thesis of a new monotheism seem at all essential to the rest of Professor Smith’s conception of the emergence of Jesuism. He agrees that it exfoliated from a scattered cult of secret mysteries: the notion, then, that it was at the time of its open emergence primarily a gospel of One God, and that God Jesus, is ostensibly in excess of the first hypothesis. It is also somewhat incongruous with the acceptance of the historic fact that it spread as a popular religion, in a world which desired Saviour Gods.[43] Saviour Gods abounded in polytheism; the very conception is primarily polytheistic; and all we know of the cast and calibre of the early converts in general is incompatible with the notion of them as zealous for an abstract and philosophical conception of deity. Whether we take the epistles to the Corinthians as genuine or as pseudepigraphic, they are clearly addressed to a simple-minded community, not given to monotheistic idealism, and indeed incapable of it.