The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

Contemporary German scholars, such as Wellhausen, working on the synoptics, begin uneasily to note the lack of reality and verisimilitude in the presentment there given, avowing a deficit of biographical quality where English amateurs still heedlessly affirm a veridical naïveté. Wellhausen, tacitly clinging to the biographical assumption, gives up section after section of Mark, where our amateurs primitively acclaim as genuine biographic detail such an item as “asleep on the cushion” ([Mk. iv, 38]). Following another will-o’-the-wisp, Wellhausen is moved to claim the episode of the widow’s mite ([Lk. xxi, 1–4]) as having biographical flavour, as if the admitted inventor of other Lucan episodes could not have doctrinally framed this. There is no science in such tentatives. They do but tell of a search for a subjective basis of belief when criticism has dissolved the objective bases of the old assumption.

When it is pretended, as by Dr. Conybeare, that the mythical theory rests on and grows solely out of the supernaturalist details in the gospel story, the case is simply falsified. This writer never seems to master his subject matter. Before Strauss, as by Strauss, the myth-theory was widely applied to non-supernatural matter; and to surmise a historical Jesus behind those details has been the first step in all modern inquiry. The assertion that the rejection of the historicity of Jesus “is not really the final conclusion of their [myth-theorists’] researches, but an initial unproved assumption”[10] is categorically false. Professor Smith’s biographical statement negates it.[11] As I have repeatedly stated, I began without misgivings by assuming a historical Jesus, and sought historically to trace him, regarding the birth myth and the others as mere accretions. But the very first step in the strictly historical inquiry revealed difficulties which the biographical school and the traditionalists alike had simply never faced. The questions whether Jesus was “of Nazareth,” “Nazarene” in that sense, or “the Nazarite”; and why, if he was either of these, he was never so named in the epistles, stood in the very front of the problem, wholly unregarded by those who profess to trace a historical Jesus by historical method. The problem of “the twelve” is to this day passed with equal heedlessness by critics professing to work on historico-critical lines; and the question of the authenticity of the teachings is no more scientifically met. It was because at every step the effort to find historical foundation failed utterly that after years of investigation I sought and found in a thorough application of the myth-theory the solution of the enigma. Invariably that gives light where the historical assumption yields darkness.

It is thoroughly characteristic of the spirit in which some champions of the biographical view work that, in sequel to the falsification of the problem just noted, we have from them the plea that if we give up the historicity of Jesus, we must give up that of Solon and Pythagoras; and that “obviously Jesus has a far larger chance to have really existed than Solon.”[12] Such a use of the conception of “chance” reveals the kind of dialectic we are dealing with. One recalls Newman’s derision of the Paleyan position that the “chances” were in favour of there being a God. “If we deny all authenticity to Jesus’s teaching,” we are asked, “what of Solon’s traditional lore?” Well, what of it? Is it to be authenticated by the threat that it must go if we deny that the Sermon on the Mount is a sermon at all? The fragments of Solon’s verse purport to have been written by him: have we anything purporting to have been written by Jesus? The very fact that we have only fragments of Solon is in itself an argument in favour of their genuineness: to Jesus any evangelist could ascribe any sayings at will.[13]

As usual, the critic falsifies the debate, affirming that “the stories of Plutarch about him [Solon] are, as Grote says, ‘contradictory as well as apocryphal.’” What Grote really says[14] is that Plutarch’s stories “as to the way in which Salamis was recovered are contradictory as well as apocryphal.” He makes no such assertion as to the stories of Solon’s life in general, though, like every critical historian, he recognizes that many things were ultimately ascribed to Solon which belong to later times.[15] But the genuine fragments of Solon’s verse and laws are sound historical material. As Meyer claims,[16] the Archon list is as valid as the Roman Fasti. It is precisely because of the solid elements in the record that Solon stands as a historic figure, while Lycurgus is given up as a deity Evemerized.[17] On the principles of Dr. Conybeare, we must give up Solon because we give up Lycurgus, or accept Lykurgos if we accept Solon. Historical criticism does no such thing. It decides the cases on their merits by critical tests, and finds the fact of a Solonian legislation historically as certain as the Lycurgean is fabulous. The item that Solon’s family claimed to be descended from Poseidon is no ground for doubting the historicity of Solon, because such claims were normal in early Greece. Is it pretended that claims to be the Son of God were normal in later Jewry?

The device of saying that we must accept the historicity of Jesus if we accept that of Solon is merely a new dressing of the old claim that we must believe in the resurrection if we believe in the assassination of Cæsar. Both theses rest on spurious analogies; and both alike defeat themselves, the older by carrying the implication that the prodigies at Cæsar’s death are as historical as the assassination; the newer by involving the consequence that Solon accredits not only Lycurgus but Herakles and Dionysos, Ulysses and Achilles.

The argument from Pythagoras is a still more fatal device. Of him “it is no easy task to give an account that can claim to be regarded as history.”[18] And “of the opinions of Pythagoras we know even less than of his life.”[19] It is held to be certain that he taught the doctrine of transmigration and originated certain propositions in mathematics; but while the mathematical element has no analogue in the gospels, the residual view of Pythagoras as vending in religion only a “thoroughly primitive” set of taboos[20] would sanction, by analogy, the view that the real Jesus was the Talmudic Ben Pandira, who dates about 100 B.C., and was reputed a worker of wonders by sorcery. This is a sufficiently lame and impotent conclusion from a polemic in favour of the gospel Jesus, whom it leaves, in effect, a myth, as the myth-theory maintains. As for Apollonius of Tyana, one holds him historical[21] just because his myth-laden story is finally intelligible as history, which is precisely what the Jesus story is not.

This said, The Historical Jesus may be left, as it is, open to critical refutation. The present volume is theoretically constructive, and does not unnecessarily return upon the other. It is open in its turn to refutative criticism.

That description, it may be remarked, would not be accorded by me to a mere asseveration that there “must” be a historical basis for the gospels in a person answering broadly to the Gospel Jesus. Any one who confidently holds such a view need hardly trouble himself with the present thesis at all: and for me any one who affects to dispose of the issue by merely fulminating the “must” is simply begging the question. Those who, on the other hand, do but lean instinctively to such a belief may be respectfully invited to reconsider it in the light of all hierology. That there “must” be a historic process of causation behind every cult is a truism: it does not in the least follow that the historic basis must be the historicity of the God or Demigod round whose name the cult centres.

Many Saviour names have been the centres of cults, in the ancient world as in the modern. There were extensive and long-lived worships of Herakles, Dionysos, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, in addition to the age-long cults of the “Supreme” Gods. Is it claimed that there “must” have been a historical Herakles, or Dionysos, or Adonis? If so, is it further contended that there must have been a historical Jehovah, a Jove, a Cybelê, a Juno, a Venus? If the Father-Gods and Mother-Gods could be evolved by protracted mythopœia, why not the Son-Gods?