The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

In positing, further, a rapid “triumph” of Christism in virtue of its monotheism, Professor Smith seems to me to outgo somewhat the historical facts. There is really no evidence for any rapid triumph. Renan, after accepting as history the pentecostal dithyramb of the Acts, came to see that no such quasi-miraculous spread of the faith ever took place; and that the Pauline epistles all presuppose not great churches but “little Bethels,” or rather private conventicles, scattered through the Eastern Empire.[44] He justifiably doubted whether Paul’s converts, all told, amounted to over a thousand persons. At a much later period, sixty years after Constantine’s adoption of the faith, the then ancient church of Antioch, the city where first the Jesuists “were called Christians,” numbered only about a fifth part of the population.[45] “At the end of the second century, probably not a hundredth part even of the central provinces of the Roman Empire was Christianized, while the outlying provinces were practically unaffected.”

Rather we seem bound to infer that Christianity made headway by assimilating pagan ideas and usages on a basis of Judaic organization. It is ultimately organization that conserves cults; and the vital factor in the Christian case is the adaptation of the model set by the Jewish synagogues and their central supervision. Of course even organization cannot avert brute conquest; and the organized pagan cults in the towns of the Empire went down ultimately before Christian violence as the Christian went down before violence in Persia in the age of the Sassanides. But Christian organization, improving upon Jewish, with no adequate rivalry on the pagan side, developed the situation in which Constantine saw fit to imperialize the cultus, as the one best fitted to become that of the State.

How then did the organization begin and grow? The data point insistently to a special group in Jerusalem; and behind the myth of the gospels we have historical and documentary ground for a hypothesis which can account for that as for the other myth-elements.

§ 2. The Silence of Josephus

When we are considering the possibilities of underlying historical elements in the gospel story, it may be well to note on the one hand the entirely negative aspect of the works of Josephus to that story, and on the other hand the emergence in his writings of personages bearing the name Jesus. If the defenders of the historicity of the gospel Jesus would really stand by Josephus as a historian of Jewry in the first Christian century, they would have to admit that he is the most destructive of all the witnesses against them. It is not merely that the famous interpolated passage[46] is flagrantly spurious in every aspect—in its impossible context; its impossible language of semi-worship; its “He was (the) Christ”; its assertion of the resurrection; and its allusion to “ten thousand other wonderful things” of which the historian gives no other hint—but that the flagrant interpolation brings into deadly relief the absence of all mention of the crucified Jesus and his sect where mention must have been made by the historian if they had existed. If, to say nothing of “ten thousand wonderful things,” there was any movement of a Jesus of Nazareth with twelve disciples in the period of Pilate, how came the historian to ignore it utterly? If, to say nothing of the resurrection story, Jesus had been crucified by Pilate, how came it that there is no hint of such an episode in connection with Josephus’ account of the Samaritan tumult in the next chapter? And if a belief in Jesus as a slain and returning Messiah had been long on foot before the fall of the Temple, how comes it that Josephus says nothing of it in connection with his full account of the expectation of a coming Messiah at that point?

By every test of loyal historiography, we are not merely forced to reject the spurious passage as the most obvious interpolation in all literature: we are bound to confess that the “Silence of Josephus,” as is insisted by Professor Smith,[47] is an insurmountable negation of the gospel story. For that silence, no tenable reason can be given, on the assumption of the general historicity of the gospels and Acts. Josephus declares himself[48] to be in his fifty-sixth year in the thirteenth year of Domitian. Then he was born about the year 38. By his own account,[49] he began at the age of sixteen to “make trial of the several sects that were among us”—the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes—and in particular he spent three years with a hermit of the desert named Banos, who wore no clothing save what grew on trees, used none save wild food, and bathed himself daily and nightly for purity’s sake. Thereafter he returned to Jerusalem, and conformed to the sect of the Pharisees. In the Antiquities,[50] after describing in detail the three sects before named, he gives an account of a fourth “sect of Jewish philosophy,” founded by Judas the Galilean, whose adherents in general agree with the Pharisees, but are specially devoted to liberty and declare God to be their only ruler, facing torture and death rather than call any man lord.

A careful criticism will recognize a difficulty as to this section. In § 2, as in the Life, “three sects” are specified; and the concluding section has the air of a late addition. Seeing, however, that the sect of Judas is stated to have begun to give trouble in the procuratorship of Gessius Florus, when Josephus was in his twenties, it is quite intelligible that he should say nothing of it when naming the sects who existed in his boyhood, and that he should treat it in a subsidiary way in his fuller account of them in the Antiquities. It is not so clear why he should in the first section of that chapter call Judas “a Gaulanite, of a city whose name was Gamala,” and in the final section call him “Judas the Galilean.” There was a Gamala in Gaulanitis and another in Galilee. But the discrepancy is soluble on the view that the sixth section was added some time after the composition of the book. There seems no adequate ground for counting it spurious.

On what theory, then, are we to explain the total silence of Josephus as to the existence of the sect of Jesus of Nazareth, if there be any historical truth in the gospel story? It is of no avail to suggest that he would ignore it by reason of his Judaic hostility to Christism. He is hostile to the sect of Judas the Galilean. There is nothing in all his work to suggest that he would have omitted to name any noticeable sect with a definite and outstanding doctrine because he disliked it. He seems much more likely, in that case, to have described and disparaged or denounced it.

And here emerges the hypothesis that he did disparage or denounce the Christian sect in some passage which has been deleted by Christian copyists, perhaps in the very place now filled by the spurious paragraph, where an account of Jesuism as a calamity to Judaism would have been relevant in the context. This suggestion is nearly as plausible as that of Chwolson, who would reckon the existing paragraph a description of a Jewish calamity, is absurd. And it is the possibility of this hypothesis that alone averts an absolute verdict of non-historicity against the gospel story in terms of the silence of Josephus. The biographical school may take refuge, at this point, in the claim that the Christian forger, whose passage was clearly unknown to Origen, perhaps eliminated by his fraud a historic testimony to the historicity of Jesus, and also an account of the sect of Nazaræans.