The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

Organization, which in our days has become “a word to conjure with,” is no new factor in human life. It is the secret of survival for communities and institutions; and the survival of Christism in its competition with other cults must be traced mainly to the early process of adaptation. That, however, takes place in terms of three concurrent factors: (1) the appeal made by the cult which is the ground of association; (2) the practice of the community as regards the relations of members; (3) the administration, as regards propaganda, expansion and co-ordination of groups. And it is through primary adaptations in respect of the first and second, with a constant stimulus from the third, that the Christian Church can be seen to have succeeded in the struggle for existence. That is to say, it is in the element in which conscious organization is most prominent as distinct from usage or tradition that the determining influence chiefly lies.

The writer who in England was the first to take a comparatively scientific view of church organization from the ecclesiastical side, the late Dr. Edwin Hatch, puts in the forefront of his survey “the preliminary assumption that, as matter of historical research, the facts of ecclesiastical history do not differ in kind from the facts of civil history.”[7] For those who see in the religion itself a processus of natural social history, this assumption is a matter of course; but the ecclesiastical recognition of the fact is an important step; and the churchman’s analysis of the process is doubly serviceable in that he keeps the study avowedly separate from that of the evolution of doctrine. What he could not have supplied on scientific lines without falling into heresy, the rationalist can supply for himself.

As our historian recognizes, the Christian movement in the Eastern Empire had from the outset a strong basis in the democratic spirit which it derived alike from Jewish and from Hellenistic example. In the day of universal autocracy, social life lay more and more in the principles of voluntary association; and the first Christian churches were but instances of an impulse seen in operation on all sides. In the Jewish environment, the synagogue; in the Hellenistic the ecclesia or private association, were everywhere in evidence. Greek religious associations—thiasoi, eranoi, orgeones—were but types of the prevailing impetus to find in voluntary organized groups a substitute for the democratic life of the past.[8] Whereas the older associations for the promotion of special worships were limited to male free citizens, the new admitted foreigners, slaves, and women. Besides religious associations there were a multitude of others which had the double aspect of clubs and friendly societies; trade guilds existed “among almost every kind of workmen in almost every town in the empire:”[9] and burial clubs, dining clubs, financial societies, and friendly societies met other social needs.

Almost every society, however, had its tutelary divinity, “in the same way as at the present day similar associations on the continent of Europe”—as in England before the Reformation—“invoke the name of a patron saint; and their meetings were sometimes called by a name which was afterwards consecrated to Christian uses—that of a ‘sacred synod.’”[10] In many of them “religion was, beyond this, the basis and bond of union.... Then, as now, many men had two religions, that which they professed and that which they believed; for the former there were temples and State officials and public sacrifices; for the latter there were associations; and in these associations, as is shown from extant inscriptions, divinities whom the State ignored had their priests, their chapels, and their ritual.”[11]

The Christists, then, when they began to form groups, were doing what a swarm of other movements did. Their ecclesiæ were called by a pagan name, as were the Jewish synagogues. Two things it behoved them to do if they were collectively to gain ground and outlive or out-top the rest: they must multiply in membership, and they must co-ordinate their groups; and both things they did on lines of common action. Membership was from the first promoted by the simplest of all methods, systematic almsgiving to poor adherents; a practice long before initiated by the Jewish synagogues and to this day fixed among them. Given the basis of free association, the inculcated duty of almsgiving, the eastern belief in its saving virtue,[12] and the special Christian belief in the speedy end of the world, the problem of membership was early solved. The poor, helped one day, would themselves help the next, as is their human way in all ages; and in an age of general poverty, the result of an autocratic fiscal system in the Empire as afterwards in the Turkish Empire which in the East took its place, such mutual sympathy constituted a broad social basis of corporate existence.

For our ecclesiastical historian, the poverty is the main determinant on the side of early organization. With a note of profound pessimism, which alternates strangely with passages of professional eulogy of the Church, he notes that pauperism and philanthropy were going hand in hand already throughout the Empire before the advent of Christianity, rich men and municipalities proclaiming an “almost Christian sentiment” on the subject. “The instinct of benevolence was fairly roused. And yet to the mass of men life was hardly worth living. It tended to become a despair.”[13] And he claims that the Christian practice of almsgiving—which he knows to have been warmly inculcated among the Jews, as it has always been in Eastern countries—was one of the conservative forces that “arrested decay. They have prevented the disintegration, and possibly the disintegration by a vast and ruinous convulsion, of the social fabric. Of those forces the primitive bishops and deacons were the channels and the ministers.... They bridged over the widening interval between class and class. They lessened to the individual soul the weight of that awful sadness of which, then as now, to the mass of men, life was the synonym and the sum.”[14]

The generalization as to the widening of the interval between classes is hardly borne out by the evidence; and the pessimism of the last sentence partly defeats the argument, by putting the life of the early Christian period on the same general level with that of to-day and of all the time between. The true summary would be that in that age the springs of social life were lamed by the suppression of all national existence; that the rule of Rome tended to general impoverishment in respect of a vicious system of taxation; and that the subject peoples, deprived of the old impulses to collective energy, at once turned more and more to private association and became ready to believe in a coming “end of the world” which in some way was to mean a new life. And as the Church’s doctrine was pre-eminently one of salvation in that new life, it behoved it in every way to resort to propaganda while maintaining the eleemosynary system which gave it a broad basis of membership. Thus the organization which controlled the simple financial system must also have regard to the spread of doctrine. And for the means of spreading doctrine, again, as we have already noted, the cue was obviously given by Judaism, which stood out from all religious systems in the Roman world as a religion of Sacred Books. Sacred Books of its own the Jesuist movement must have if it was to hold its own against the prestige of the Jewish Bible. The production of Sacred Books, then, was a task which devolved upon the organizers of the Christian ecclesiæ throughout the Eastern Empire, equally with the task of co-ordination, of which, in fact, it was a main part. A common religious literature was the basis of Jewish cohesion. Only by means of a common religious literature could Christism cohere.

No literature, indeed, could avert schism. Schism and strife are among the first notes sounded in the epistles; and a religion which aimed at dogmatic teaching, as against the purely liturgical practice of the old pagan cults, was bound to multiply them. Judaism itself was divided into antagonistic groups of Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes, to say nothing of the Zealots, the Essenes, and other diverging groups. But sects do not destroy a religion any more than parties destroy a State; and the way of success for Christism was a way which, while it involved a multiplication of schism so long as the voluntary basis remained, made a growing aggregate which was at least a unity as having a special creed, distinct from all competing with it.

Thus the Christian movement was doubly a copy and competitor of Judaism, upon whose books it primarily founded. As the dispersed Jewish synagogues were co-ordinated from Jerusalem by the High Priest, and later from Tiberias by the Patriarch, by means of Twelve Apostles and possibly by a subordinate grade of seventy-two collectors who brought in the contributions of the faithful scattered among the Gentiles, so the Jesuists, beginning with an organization centred in Jerusalem and likewise aiming at the collection of funds for which almsgiving in Jerusalem was the appealing pretext, were bound after the fall of the Temple to aim at a centralization or centralizations of their own. A literature became more and more necessary if the new faith was to extend. That was the way at once to glorify the new Hero-God and to multiply his devotees. And it would seem to have been from the starting-point of the Jewish Teaching of the Twelve Apostles that the new departure on one line was made.

To say who, or what class in the new organization, began the evolution, seems impossible in the present state of our knowledge. The point at which the Christist organization in course of time most noticeably diverges from the Jewish model is in the creation and aggrandisement of the episcopos, the bishop, a title and a function borrowed from the pagan societies. These had officials called epimelētai (superintendents) and episcopoi, whose function it was to receive funds and dispense alms.[15] The early Christists adopted the latter title, and constituted for each group a single official so named, who as president of the assembly received the offerings of donors and was personally responsible for their distribution. This is not the place to trace the effects of the institution in the general development of the churches. It must suffice to note that while in their presbyters these preserved the democratic element which they had derived from Judaism and which gave them their social foundation, their creation of a supreme administrator, whose interest it was always to increase the influence of his church by increasing his own, gave them a special source of strength in comparison with the Judaic system.[16]