The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

Such Messianism may have either preceded or proceeded-on an adoption of the rite of baptism. Given a resort to Messianism by the Jesuists after the fall of Jerusalem, the alleged testimony of the Baptist to Jesus as the Appointed One might be the first step; and the resort to the baptismal rite would follow on the myth that Jesus had been actually baptized by John. In [Acts, i, 5], Jesus is in effect made to represent John’s baptism with water as superseded by a baptism in the Holy Ghost.[83] In the Pauline epistles we have trace of a conflict over this as over other Judaic practices, Paul being made to declare ([1 Cor. i, 17]) that “Christ sent me not to baptize but to preach the gospel,” though he admits having baptized a few.[84] All that is clear is that the Jesuists were not primarily baptizers; that they began to baptize “in the name of Jesus Christ,”[85] with a formula of the Holy Ghost and fire, but really in the traditional manner with water; and that long afterwards they feigned that the Founder had prescribed baptism with a trinitarian formula.[86]

Thus far, the local movement was not only Jewish but Judaic. It may or may not have been before the fall of Jerusalem that a Jesuist “apostle” named Paul conceived the idea of creating by propaganda a new Judæo-Jesuist movement appealing to Gentiles. Such an idea is not the invention of Paul or any other Jesuist; the idea of a Messianic Kingdom in which the Gentiles should be saved is found in the Jewish Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written in Hebrew by a Pharisee between the years 109 and 106 B.C.[87] But, thus made current, it might well be adopted by Jesuists. The reason for supposing this to have begun before the year 70 is not merely the tradition to that effect but the fact that in none of the epistles do we have any trace of that “gospel of the Kingdom” which in the synoptics is posited as the evangel of Jesus. That evangel, which is a simple duplication of the alleged evangel of the Baptist, and which we have seen to be wholly mythical, being devoid of possible historic content,[88] is part of the apparatus of the retrospective Messianic claim. But the Pauline Epistles, even as they show no knowledge of the name Nazareth, or Nazaræan, or Nazarene, or of any gospel teaching, also show no concern over a “gospel of the Kingdom.” Whether or not, then, they are wholly pseudepigraphic, they suggest that a Paulinism of some kind was an early feature in the Jesuist evolution.

According to the Acts, Paul’s name was originally Saul, though no such avowal is ever made in the epistles. The purpose of the statement seems to be to strengthen the case as to his Jewish nationality, which is affirmed in the epistles, as is the item that he had been a murderous persecutor of the early Jesuists. All this suggests a late manipulation of the traditions of an early strife. To claim that the Gentilizing apostle had been a Jew born and bred would be as natural on the Gentilizing side as to allege that the typically Judaic Peter had denied his Lord; while the charge of persecuting the infant church would be a not less natural invention of the Judaic Christians who accepted the tradition that Paul had been a Pharisee and a pupil of Gamaliel. In point of fact we find the Ebionites, the typical Judaic Jesuists, knowing him simply as “Paul of Tarsus” in their version of the Acts or in a previous document upon which that founded.[89] And many Jewish scholars have declared that they cannot conceive the Pauline epistles to have been written by a Rabbinically trained Jew.[90] This does not preclude the possibility that the original Paul, of whose “few very short epistles” personally penned[91] we have probably nothing left that is identifiable,[92] may have been such a Jew, but the presumption is to the contrary.

On the face of the case, nothing was more natural than that the Jesuist movement should appeal to civilized Gentiles. Judaism itself did so, striving much after proselytes. The question was whether the Jesuist proselytes should be made on a strictly Judaic basis. Now, even if the fall of Jerusalem had not given the impetus to a severance of the cult from the dominating religion, the sacred domicile being gone, it is obvious that an abandonment of such a Jewish bar as circumcision would give the developing cult a great advantage over the other in propaganda among Gentiles. Circumcision must have been a highly repellent detail for Hellenistic Gentiles in general; and a gospel which dispensed with it would have a new chance of making headway. And such a severance certainly took place, though we can put no reliance on the chronology of the Acts.[93] Paul[94] remains a doubtfully dated figure, because the chronology of the whole cult is problematic.

But we can broadly distinguish between a “Petrine” and a “Pauline” Christism. In the Acts ([ii, 22–40]), which clearly embodies earlier lore, prior to that of the gospels, the Jesus Christ preached by Peter is not represented as a saving sacrifice. As little is he a Teacher, though he is a doer of “mighty works and wonders and signs.” If we were to apply the biographical method, the presentment might be held to indicate the Talmudic Jesus. Only after his resurrection “God hath made him both Lord and Christ”—that is, Messiah; and the Jewish hearers are invited to “repent” and be “baptized ... in the name of Jesus Christ unto the remission of your sins.” Peter’s Jesus, like him of the Teaching, is the “Servant” of God, not his Son. And there is no mention of a sacrament, though there is noted a “breaking of bread at home” (42, 46) recalling the “broken” (bread) of the Didachê. The sacrament, then, was apparently a secret rite for the Jewish group.

The speeches, of course, are quite unhistorical: we can but take them as embodying a traditional “Petrine” teaching with later matter. Thus we have baptism figuring as a Jesuist rite, whereas in the synoptics, as we have seen, there had been no such thing. The story of Peter being brought to the pro-Gentile view is pure ecclesiastical myth, probably posterior to the Pauline epistles, which are ignored but counteracted in so far as they posit strife between Pauline and Petrine propaganda. Peter and Paul alike are made to teach that “it behoved the Christ to suffer” (iii, 18; xvii, 3), even as they duplicate their miracles, their escapes, and their sufferings. But while Peter is pretended to have accepted Gentilism, it is Paul who acts on the principle; and he it is who is first represented as fighting pagan polytheism, notably at Ephesus (xix, 26). At Athens, in a plainly fictitious speech, he is made to expound the “unknown God” of an Athenian agnostic cult in terms of Jewish opposition to image-worship, indicating Jesus merely as “a man” raised by God from the dead to judge the world at the judgment day. It is after this episode that he is made to tell the Jews of Corinth he will “henceforth go unto the Gentiles.” Nevertheless he is made to go on preaching to the Jews. The narrative as a whole is plainly factitious: all we can hope to do is to detect some of its historic data.

Two things must be kept clearly and constantly in view: first, that what we understand by a literary and a historical conscience simply did not exist in the early Christian environment; second, that in all probability the Acts, which to start with would be a blend of tradition and fiction, is much manipulated during a long period. We are not entitled to assume that an “original” writer duplicated the careers of Peter and Paul for purposes of edification. One or more may have wrought one narrative, and a later hand or hands may have systematically interpolated the other.[95] We are to remember further that it was an age in which most Christians, assimilating the eschatology of the Persians and the Jews—the spontaneous dream of crushed peoples—expected the speedy end of the world, and did their thinking on that basis. In such a state of mind, critical thought could not exist save as a small element in religious polemic.

Let us then see what we reach on the hypothesis that early Jesuism even in the first century, and possibly even before the fall of Jerusalem, was running in two different channels—one movement adhering to Jewish usage, making Jesus the Servant of God, and conceiving him as a God-gifted Healer whose death raised him to the status of the Messiah, the promised Christ or Anointed One who should either close the earthly scene or bring about a new God-ruled era for the Jews. For the holders of this view, the Kingdom of God was coming. Jesus was ere long to come in the clouds in great glory and inaugurate the new life. To ask for clear conceptions on such a matter from such minds would be idle. There were none. The one idea connected with the mythical evangel was that Jews should repent and prepare for the new life. To that elusive minimum the latest biographical analysis, assuming the historicity, reduces the “ministry” of the gospel Jesus.[96] The rest is all post-apostolic accretion. On the other hand, the Petrine Jesus has proved his mission for his devotees, first and last, by miracles, and by his resurrection—things which the biographical school rejects as imaginary.

Upon this movement there enters an innovator, Paul of Tarsus. Round him, as round Peter, there are clouds of myth. That he was originally Saul, a Pharisee, a pupil of Gamaliel; that he began as a bitter persecutor of the Jesuists; and that he was converted by a supernatural vision, become common data for the church. That the charge of persecution was a Judaic figment, on the other hand, is perhaps as likely as that the story of Peter’s denial of his Master was a Gentile figment. We are in a world of purposive fiction. But the broad divergence of doctrine seems to underlie all the fables. Saul, on the later view, changes his Jewish name to the Grecian Paul when he plans to make the Jesus-cult non-Jewish, using the tactic of monotheism against pagan polytheism in general, in the very act of adding a Son-God to the Jewish Father-God, as so many Son-Gods had been added to Father-Gods throughout religious history. To the early Jewish Jesuists, the notion of the Son had been given by the old cult of sacrifice, with its Jesus the Son—an idea obscurely but certainly present, as we have seen, in the lore of the Talmudists.

Clearly it was the Pauline movement that made of Christism a “viable” world religion. As an unorganized Saviour-cult it would have died out like others. As a phase of Judaism, it could have had no Jewish permanence, simply because its Messianism was a matter of looking daily for an “end of the world” that did not come. After two centuries of waiting, the Jews would have had as clear a right to pronounce Jesus a “false Messiah” as they had in the case of Barcochab or any other before or since. The mere belief in a future life, at one time excluded from their Sacred Books, had become the common faith, only the aristocratic Sadducees (probably not all of them) rejecting it. On that side, Jesuism gave them nothing. Well might Paul “turn to the Gentiles”—albeit not under the circumstances theologically imagined for him in the book of Acts.