The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

Even for the Gentiles, Jesuism was but one of many competing cults, offering similar attractions. In the religions of Adonis, Attis, Isis and Osiris, Dionysos, Mithra, and the Syrian Marnas (“the Lord, a variant of Adonis = Adonai, one of the Jews’ exoteric names for Yahweh”), a resplendent ever-youthful God who had died to rise again was sacramentally adored, mourned for, and rejoiced over, by devotees just as absorbed in their faith as were the Jesuists. With vague pretences of biographical knowledge, to which nobody now attaches any credence, they were as sure of the historicity of their Vegetation-Gods and Sun-Gods as the Christists were of the actuality of theirs. Had a Frazer of the second century told them that their Adonis and Attis were but abstractions of the annual sacrificial victim of old time, they would have told him, in the manner of Festus (not yet obsolete), that much learning had made him mad. They “knew” that their Redeemer had lived, died, and risen again. The unbelief of philosophers, or of scoffers like Lucian, affected them no more than scientific and critical unbelief to-day disturbs the majority of unthinking Christians. The busy sacrificial and devotional life of Hierapolis would be as little affected by Lucian’s tranquil exhibition of it as the life at Lourdes has been by Zola’s novel. On that side, we can very easily understand the past by the present.

So little psychic or intellectual difference was there between Jesuism and the other “isms” that Paul’s propaganda made no measurable sensation in the colluvies of the Roman empire. As Renan avows, even on the assumption of the genuineness of the Epistles, he was the missioner of a number of small conventicles, all convinced that they alone were the “true Church of God upon earth.” It is an error of perspective to ascribe extraordinary faculty to the missionary who either converted or “stablished” such believers; and it is plainly unnecessary to assume in his case any abnormal sincerity or persuasiveness. If we were to estimate him in terms of the records we should describe him either as a halluciné or as a fanatic who had shed Christian blood in his Judaic stage and never in the least learned humility on that score, his phrases of contrition being balanced by the fiercest asperities towards all who withstood him in his Christian stage. But we have no right to draw a portrait of “Paul,” who is left to us a composite of literary figments testifying only to the previous activity of a propagandist so-named.

One conclusion, however, holds alike whether or not we accept any of the epistles as genuine: or rather, the more we lean on the epistles the more it holds: Paul had no concern about the life, teachings, or “personality” of his Jesus.[97] His Jesus, be it said once more, is a speechless abstraction. One of the strangest fallacies in the procedure of the biographical school is the assumption that the acceptance of the epistles as genuine involves the admission of the historicity of the Founder. In actual fact, it was a belief in the substantial genuineness of the main epistles that first strengthened the present writer in his first surmises of the non-historicity of the entire gospel record; just as a perception of the historical situation broadly set forth in Judges confirms doubt as to the historicity of the record of the Hexateuch. The two will not consist. On the other hand, Van Manen, who had previously been troubled about the historicity of Jesus, was positively set at rest on that score when he reached the conclusion that all the Paulines were supposititious. This happened simply because he had scientifically covered the field only on the Pauline side: had he applied equivalent tests to the gospels, he would have reached there too a verdict of fabrication. There is strictly no absolute sequitur in such a case. The myth-theory is neither made nor marred by the rejection of the Paulines.

Even those who cannot realize the indifference of “Paul” to all personal records of his Jesus—or, recognizing it, are content to explain it away by formulas—must see on consideration that belief in a Saviour God no more needed biographical basis in the case of Paul than in the case of the priests of Mithra, who, it may be noted, had a strong centre at Tarsus.[98] There is a certain plausibility in the argument that only a great personality could have made possible the belief in the Resurrection story—though that too is fallacy—but there is no plausibility in inferring that a conception of a personality he had never personally known was needed to impel Paul to his evangel, which is simply one of future salvation by divine sacrifice for all who believe. That is the substitution made by Gentile Christism for the miscarrying Messianism of the Petrine doctrine. It was probably the normal doctrine of many pagan cults—Mithraism for one, which for three hundred years, by common consent, was the outstanding rival of Christianity in the Roman empire.[99] It was, then, no specialty of dogma that ultimately determined the success of the one and the disappearance of the other. It was a concatenation of real or “external” causes, not a peculiarity of mere belief.

§ 5. Real Determinants

The more we study comparatively the fortunes of the Christian and the rival cults, the more difficult it is to conceive that it made headway in virtue of sheer monotheism. If we assume that Judaism had made its proselytes in the pagan world by reason of the appeal made by its monotheism to the more thoughtful minds, we are bound to infer that Christism was on that side rather at a disadvantage, inasmuch as it was really adding a new deity, with a “Holy Spirit” superadded, to the God of the Jews.

But the ordinary argument as to the vogue of “pure monotheism” at any time is in the main a series of traditional assumptions. For the more thoughtful of the ancients, polytheism was always tending to pass into monotheism. We see the process going on in the Vedas, in Brahmanism, in the Egyptian system, in the Babylonian—to say nothing of the Greek.[100] It proceeded partly by way of henotheism—the tendency to exalt any particular deity as the deity: partly by way of the compelled surmise that all the deities of the popular creeds were but aspects or names of one all-controlling Power. Wherever creeds met, the more thoughtful were driven to ask themselves whether the heavens could be a mere reflex of the earth, with every nation represented by its special God; and to fuse the national Gods into one was but a step to fusing the Gods of the various natural forces into one. Since religions became organized, there must always have been monotheists, as there must always have been unbelievers.

Nevertheless, polytheism is just as surely popular as monotheism is inevitable to the more thoughtful who remain “religious” in the natural sense of the term. One of the great delusions maintained by the acceptance of the falsified history of Judaism and the conventional religion of the Bible is the notion that the Jews were a specially monotheistic people. They were not.[101] They were originally tribalists like their neighbours, holding by a tribal God and a hierarchy of inferior Gods. To this day we are seriously told that Abraham made a new departure as a monotheist. Abraham is a mythical patriarch, himself once a deity; and the deity represented to have been believed in by Abraham is a tribal God. And not even the tribal God was monotheistically worshipped. The Sacred Books are one long chain of complaints against the Israelites for their perpetual resort to “strange Gods”—and Goddesses.[102]

Two brilliant French scholars have advanced the thesis that this alleged polytheism is imaginary;[103] and that the Israelites in the mass always worshipped only the One God Yahweh.[104] But this position, which is grounded on the inference that the mass of the historical and prophetic literature is post-exilic, outgoes its own grounds. Even if we assume, with the theorists, that Jewish monotheism was universalist from the moment it took shape as monotheism in literature,[105] we get rid neither of the question of pre-exilic polytheism nor of that of popular survival. To say that the post-exilic Jews are “the only Jews known to history,” and that the apparently old lore in Genesis is “perhaps really the most modern,” being invented for purposes of parable, is only a screening of the fact that the Hebrews evolved religiously like other peoples. A resort to alien Gods is seen to be universal in the religious history of the ancient world. Every conquered race was suspected to have secret power in respect of “the God of the land[106]”; and wherever races mixed, cults mixed. It is only on a provision of special Sacred Books, themselves treated as fetishes, that the attractions of alien cults can be repelled; and not even Sacred Books can make real monotheists of an uncultured majority. Even later Judaism, with its angels, its Metatron, its Satan, was never truly monotheistic.[107] Islam is not. The universalism which in later Judaism still commonly passes for a specialty of the Hebrew mind was really an assimilation and development of Perso-Babylonian ideas;[108] and Satan made a dualism of the Jewish creed even as Ahriman did of the Persian.