The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

It is doubtless true that the determination of the earlier as against the later form of a minor narrative episode, or of a teaching, is often essential to the framing of a true notion as to its mode of entrance; and such determination I have attempted many times. But the notion that historicity is a matter of priority of documents is, as Schmiedel sees, the fallacy of fallacies. Prisoned in that presupposition, exegetes defending the record achieve inevitably the very failure they impute: they are “ignorant of the very elements of the problem they are professing to solve”—that is, the problem of what really happened. They cannot realize the conditions under which the gospels were compiled. They construct what they think a “clear or tenable” view of the documents by the process of evading the considerations which make it untenable or inadequate, and then demand that their documentary formula shall be met by one in pari materia. The answer to them is that their psychological as well as their historical assumptions are false. Things did not happen in that way. And two versions of a palpable myth do not make for its historicity. There are two or more versions of most myths.

The indictment before us, in short, is an illustration of the mode of theological fence discussed above. You undertake to show that the most alert presentments of a given historical conception fail to stand critical tests, and you are met with the reply: “We are not concerned to discuss the presentments you deal with, which are not generally accepted: we demand that you discuss instead the documentary theory which in those presentments is treated as obsolete. If you do not do this, you show you are incompetent.” When on the other hand the critical significance of an older theory is indicated, the reply is made that that theory is “obsolete.” One theory is too new, another is too old, for discussion. All the while, the theory founded-on for the defence is really the oldest of all. It was in fact the obvious inadequacy of the familiar documentary hypothesis that dictated our discussion of more up-to-date theories, as it had elicited these. If our exegete’s favourite hypothesis had had any power of satisfying independent students, we should not have had such treatises as those of the Rev. Dr. Wright and Dr. Flinders Petrie, or the searching analysis and commentary of M. Loisy, to say nothing of the vigorous Dr. Blass.

In dealing with such writers, and particularly in following the “real” procedure of M. Loisy on the main issues of historical fact, I took what seemed to me the candid controversial course. To resort instead to a mere exposure of the obvious insufficiency of the “two-documents hypothesis” would be like arguing as if Genesis were the only alternative to the Darwinian theory. Dr. Wright’s “oral hypothesis” is a vivid and interesting revival of what, as I pointed out, had long ago been the “predominant” view.[7] Our exegete nevertheless affirms that I regard it “as something new in England.” To the lay reader I would again explain the situation thus handled. Theological discussion on the gospels has moved in cycles, by reason of the invariable presupposition as to historicity, which was a main factor in the partial failure of the mythical theory as introduced by Strauss. As I expressly stated, the oral hypothesis was before Strauss “well established.” Then ensued the age-long discussion of documentary hypotheses. At the close of the nineteenth century we find Schmiedel saying:

Lastly, scholars are also beginning to remember that the evangelists did not need to draw their material from books alone, but that from youth up they were acquainted with it from oral narration and could easily commit it to writing precisely in this form in either case—whether they had it before them in no written form, or whether they had it in different written form. In this matter, again, we are beginning to be on our guard against the error of supposing that in the synoptical problem we have to reckon merely with given quantities, or with such as can be easily ascertained.[8]

If I had written that, I should doubtless be told that I regarded the oral hypothesis as “new.” Dr. Schmiedel, it is to be hoped, may escape the aspersive method of my critic. In point of fact, a return to the oral hypothesis was inevitable in view of the insufficiency of the other. Unfortunately it has been made on the old and fatal presupposition of the historicity of the myth; but, as made by Dr. Wright, it seemed well worth critical consideration. My critic disparages that and other propaganda as “commanding no large measure of assent anywhere.” My testimony, I fear, will not help Dr. Wright; but I will say that I found him an honest and extremely interesting writer, admirably free from theological malice, and above all exhibiting a thoroughly independent hold of his thesis. What amount of assent he has secured is an irrelevant issue. I can only say that I found him very readable. The scholarly and intellectual status of Dr. Flinders Petrie, again, is such as perhaps to make it unnecessary to say—as against similar disparagement in his case—that a thesis seriously and vigorously embraced by him as superseding the older documentary and oral hypotheses alike, seemed to me well entitled to consideration.]

The examination of the recent positions of independent writers seeking to construct a documentary theory has, I think, sufficed to safeguard the honest lay student of the myth-theory against the kind of spurious rebuttal set up by those who, themselves innocent of all original research, pretend that the fundamental historicity of the gospels is established by a “consensus of scholarship.” There is no consensus of scholarship. I observe that M. Loisy, to whom I devoted special study, is journalistically disparaged by the Very Rev. Dean Inge. That disparagement—which, I also observe, I have the undeserved honour to share—will not impose upon serious students, who will realize that Dean Inge, himself transparently unorthodox, has no resource in such matters but to disparage all who labour with any measure of rational purpose to put concrete conclusions where church dignitaries inevitably prefer to maintain rhetorical mystification. For the purposes of serious students, M. Loisy is an important investigator, Dean Inge a negligible essayist.

It is true that one of the positions I discussed—that of the school of Weiss—is not “new.” But in that case the reason for selection was not merely that it was one of the efforts to reach something less neutral than the “two-documents hypothesis,” but that it is in substance the position of some of the most recent and most virulent English critics of the myth-theory. It is in fact the gist of the polemic of Dr. Conybeare. I have shown, accordingly, that the thesis of a primary biography is psychologically absurd in itself; and, further, that like all the other documentary hypotheses it has been left high and dry by the latest German exegetes, who, expressly assuming the historicity of a Jesus, and founding on the gospels for their case, reduce these to a minimum of tradition at which M. Loisy must stand aghast. It is in England, in short, that the biographical school, as represented by Dean Inge and Dr. Conybeare, is seen to be most entirely out of touch with the movement of rational criticism.

It is in England, too, that we find the most uncritical reliance put upon the “impression of a personality” said to be set up by the gospels. This argument is still used without any attempt at psychological self-analysis, any effort to find out what an impression is worth. A generation or two ago, exactly the same position was taken up in regard to the fourth gospel: both the Arnolds, for instance, were confident that the vision of Jesus there given was peculiarly real. Critical study has since forced all save the sworn traditionalists and the mere compromisers to the conclusion that it cannot be real if there is any substantial truth in the presentment of the synoptics. Slowly it has been realized that the methods which produce a vivid impression of “personality” are methods open to fictive art, and differ only in detail from the methods of the Bhagavat Gîta or the methods of Homer. If a strong impression of a personality be a certificate of historicity, what of Zeus and Hêrê, Athênê and Achilles, Ulysses and Nestor? Most critics who handle the problem seem to work in vacuo, without regard to the phenomena and the machinery of fictive literature in general, even when they are moved to accept a hypothesis of fiction.

The vision presented in the fourth gospel is prima facie more lifelike than that of the synoptics, because its main author is more of an artist than his predecessors. It has been justly affirmed by Professor W. B. Smith that

The received notion that in the early Marcan narratives the Jesus is distinctly human, and that the process of deification is fulfilled in John, is precisely the reverse of the truth. In Mark there is really no man at all: the Jesus is God, or at least essentially divine, throughout. He wears only a transparent garment of flesh. Mark historizes only. Matthew also historizes and faintly humanizes. Luke more strongly humanizes; while John not only humanizes but begins to sentimentalize.[9]