The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

Mr. Cassels, in the section on the Teaching added by him in the one-volume reprint of his great work, points[62] to the fact that in the recovered fragment of a Latin translation of an early version of “The Two Ways,” there do not occur the passages connecting with the Sermon on the Mount which are found in the Teaching; and as the same holds of the Two Ways section of the Epistle of Barnabas, it may fairly be argued that it was a Christian hand that added them here. But when we note that at the points at which the passages in the Teaching vary from the gospel—as “Gentiles” for “tax-gatherers,”[63]—the term in the former is perfectly natural for Jewish teachers addressing Jews in Gentile countries, and that in the latter rather strained in an exhortation to Jews in their own country, it becomes very conceivable that this is the original, or a prior form, of the gospel passage. The Sermon on the Mount is certainly a compilation. This then may have been one of the sources. And it is quite conceivable that the Jewish Apostles should teach their people not to pray “as do the hypocrites,” an expression which Mr. Cassels takes to be directed by Jesuists against Jews in general.

Seeing that even conservative critics have admitted the probable priority of the Teaching to Barnabas, it is no straining of the probabilities to suggest that the Two Ways section of Barnabas is either a variant, inspired by the Teaching, on what was clearly a very popular line of homily,[64] or an annexation of another Jewish homily of that kind. That in the Teaching is distinctly the better piece of work, as we should expect the official manual of the Apostles of the High Priest to be. It is inexact to say, as does Dr. M. R. James,[65] that the section “reappears” in Barnabas. There are many differences, as well as many identities. The other is not a mere copy, but an exercise on the same standard theme, with “light and darkness” for the stronger “life and death.” It is a mistake to suppose that there was a definite “original” of “The Two Ways”: it is a standing ethical theme, evidently handled by many.[66] If, then, the Teaching preceded Barnabas, it may already have contained, in its purely Jewish form, the Lord’s Prayer, which is so thoroughly Jewish, and items of the Sermon on the Mount, which is certainly a Jewish compilation. And the justified critical presumption is that it did contain them. The onus of disproof lies on the Christian side.

We now reach our solution. The original document was in any case a manual of teaching used among the scattered Jews and proselytes of the Dispersion by the actual and historical Twelve Apostles either of the High Priest before or of the Patriarch after the fall of Jerusalem. The historic existence of that body before and after the catastrophe is undisputed;[67] and the nature of its teaching functions can be confidently inferred from the known currency of a Judaic ethical teaching in the early Christian period. The demonstration of that is supplied by an expert of the biographical school who considers the Teaching to have been “known to Jesus and the Baptist.”[68] Such a document cannot rationally be supposed to be a compilation made by or for Christists using the gospels: such a compilation would have given the gospel view of Jesus.[69] The primary Teaching, including as it probably does the Lord’s Prayer, is the earlier thing: the gospels use it. It is in fact one of the first documents of “Christianity,” if not the first. And its titular “twelve apostles” are Jewish and not Christian.

Given, then, such a document in the hands of the early Jesuist organization—or one of the organizations—twelve apostles had to be provided in the legend to take the credit for the Teaching.[70] The new cult, once it was shaped to the end of superseding the old, had to provide itself to that extent, by myth, with the same machinery. No step in the myth-theory is better established than this; and no non-miraculous item in the legend is more recalcitrant than the twelve story to the assumptions of the biographical school. The gospel list of the twelve is one of the most unmanageable things in the record. In a narrative destitute of detail where detail is most called for, we get a list of names, most of which count for nothing in the later history, to give a semblance of actuality to an invented institution. We have clearly unhistorical detail as to five, no detail whatever as to further accessions, and then a body of twelve suddenly constituted. For some of us, the discovery of the Teaching was a definite point of departure in the progression toward the myth-theory; and it supplies us with the firmest starting-point for our theoretic construction of the process by which the organized Christian Church took shape.

§ 4. The Process of Propaganda

On the view here taken, there was at Jerusalem, at some time in the first century, a small group of Jesuist “apostles” among whom the chief may have been named James, John, and Cephas. They may have been members of a ritual group of twelve, who may have styled themselves Brothers of the Lord; but that group in no way answered to the Twelve of the gospels. Of the apostle class the number was indefinite. Besides the apostles, further, there would seem to have been an indefinite number of “prophets,” indicative of a cult of somewhat long standing. The adherents believed in a non-historic Jesus, the “Servant” of the Jewish God, somehow evolved out of the remote Jesus-God who is reduced to human status in the Old Testament as Joshua. And their central secret rite consisted in a symbolic sacrament, evolved out of an ancient sacrament of human sacrifice, in which the victim had been the representative of the God, sacrificed to the God, in the fashion of a hundred primitive cults. This rite had within living memory, if not still at the time from which we start, been accompanied by an annual popular rite in which a selected person—probably a criminal released for the purpose—was treated as a temporary king, then derided, and then either in mock show or in actual fact executed, under the name of Jesus Barabbas, “the Son of the Father.”

Of this ancient cult there were inferribly many scattered centres outside of Judea, including probably some in Samaria, the special region of the celebration of the Hero-God Joshua. There was one such group in Ephesus; and probably another at Alexandria, and another at Antioch; Jews of the Dispersion having possibly taken the cult with them. But the cult outside Jewry may have had non-Jewish roots, though it merged with Jewish elements. So long as the Temple at Jerusalem lasted, the small cult counted for very little; and it was probably after the fall of Jerusalem[71] that its leaders added to their machinery the rite of baptism, which the synoptic gospels treat as a specialty of the movement of John the Baptist. Him they represent as a “forerunner” of the Christ, who under divine inspiration recognizes the Messianic claims of Jesus. All this is plainly unhistorical, even on the assumption of the historicity of Jesus.[72] Whatever may be the historic facts as to John the Baptist, who is a very dubious figure,[73] the marked divergence between the synoptics and the fourth gospel on the subject of baptism[74] show that that rite was not originally Jesuist, but was adopted by the Jesuists as a means of popular appeal.

The recognition of this fact is a test of the critical good faith of those who profess to found on the synoptics for a history of the beginnings of the Jesuist cult. Canon Robinson[75] treats as unquestionably historical one of the contradictory statements in [John iv, 1–2], of which the first affirms that Jesus baptized abundantly, while the second, an evidently interpolated parenthesis, asserts that only the disciples baptized, not Jesus. Though this interpolation hinges on the first dictum, the Canon accepts it to the exclusion of that, its basis. But the original writer could not have put the proposition thus had he believed it. What he affirmed was abundant baptizing by Jesus. Of this, however, the synoptics have no more hint than they have of baptizing by the disciples. On any possible view of the composition of the synoptics, it is inconceivable that they should omit all mention of baptizing by Jesus or the disciples if such a practice was affirmed in the early tradition. For them baptism is the institution of the Forerunner, who is mythically represented as hailing in Jesus his successor or supersessor, with no suggestion of a continuance of the rite. If there is to be any critical consistency in the biographical argument, it must at least recognize that baptism is non-Jesuine.

The embodiment of the rite of baptism on the basis of the Baptist’s alleged acclamation of Jesus as the Messiah, either carried with it or followed upon the claim that Jesus, hitherto regarded as a simple Saviour-God, was a Messiah. After the fall of Jerusalem, the old dream of an earthly Messiah who should restore the Kingdom of Judah or Israel[76] was shattered for the vast majority of Jews. Even in the Assumption of Moses, in the main the work of a Quietist Pharisee, written in Hebrew probably between 7 and 29 of the first century,[77] there is a virtual abandonment of Messianism, the task of overthrowing the Gentiles being assigned to “the Most High.”[78] In the composite Apocalypse of Baruch, written in Hebrew, mainly by Pharisaic Jews, in the latter half of the first century, probably as an implicit polemic against early Jesuism,[79] we see the effect of the catastrophe. In the sections written before the fall of Jerusalem, the hope of a Messianic Kingdom is proclaimed; in those written later there is either at most a hope of a Messianic Kingdom without a Messiah or a complete abandonment of mundane expectations.[80] What the Jesuist movement did was to develop, outside of Jewry,[81] the earlier notion of a Messiah “concealed,” pre-appointed, and coming from heaven to effect the consummation of all things earthly.[82]