The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

This will be disputed only by those who, like the first American and German editors, cannot see that the first five or six sections are purely Judaic. After Dr. Charles Taylor and other English editors did so, coinciding with an early suggestion of M. Massebieau,[3] the rest have mostly come into line; and even the American editors at the outset saw that the Epistle of Barnabas, which has so much of the matter of the Teaching, is the later and not the earlier document. Thus the Lord’s Prayer takes its place as originally a Jewish and not a Christian document; and the passages in the early chapters which coincide with the Sermon on the Mount are equally Jewish.[4]

We can now understand the tradition that Matthew, of which the present opening chapters are so plainly late, was the first of the gospels, and was primarily a collection of logia. But the logia were in the terms of the case not logia Iesou at all, being but a compilation of Jewish dicta on the lines of the Teaching, and, as regards the form of beatitude, probably an imitation of other Jewish literature as exampled in the “Slavonic Enoch.”[5]

It must be repeated, however, that the ninth and tenth sections of the Teaching are not to be taken as giving us “the” original Jesus of the Jesuist movement. We have posited, with Professor Smith, a “multifocal” movement; and concerning the Jesus here given we can only say that the document tells of the primary connection of the Jesus-Name with a non-sacrificial Eucharist. Whether the name stood historically for Joshua or for the Jesus of Zechariah, or for yet another, it is impossible to pronounce. What is clear is that it does not point to the Jesus of the gospels. When the Jesus-sections of the Teaching were penned, the gospels were yet to come; and the crucified Saviour-God of Paul was not preached, though his myth was certainly current somewhere.

§ 2. The Apocalypse

The “Revelation of John the Theologian” is also, in respect of much of its matter, pre-gospel, and even in its later elements independent of the gospels. It is noteworthy that the latest professional criticism has after infinite fumbling come (without acknowledging him) to the view of Dupuis that the episode of the woman and the child and the dragon belong to sun-myth;[6] and the exegetes would probably save themselves a good deal of further guessing by contemplating Dupuis’s solution that the special details are simply derived from an ancient planisphere or fuller zodiac, in which the woman and the dragon and the hydra are prominent figures.[7] It is in any case particularly important to realize that this palpably mythical conception of a Jesus Christ, figured as “the Lamb,” evidently with a zodiacal reference, is found in one of the earliest documents of the cult, outside of the gospels.

In these, as we have seen, the original God-Man is progressively humanized from the hieratic figure of the opening chapters of Mark, through Matthew and Luke, till in the fourth, which declares him Logos and premundane, he has close personal friends and (ostensibly) weeps for the death of one. But not even the thoughtless criticism which professes to find a recognizable human figure in Mark can pretend to find one in Revelation. There, admittedly on Jewish bases, there is limned an unearthly figure, who has been “pierced,” we are not told where; who has the keys of death and Hades, and carries on his right hand seven stars; and has eyes like a flame of fire and feet like unto burnished brass. With this pre-Christian apparatus, which on the astrological side goes back to Persia and Babylon, there is carried on a fierce polemic against certain of the “seven churches,” the sect of the Nicolaitans, and “them which say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.” The churches named are not those of the Acts and the Pauline epistles: Jerusalem and Antioch are not named, though Ephesus is. Jewish and pre-Jewish myth and doctrine overlay the Jesuist, which at many points is visibly a mere verbal interpolation; so that the question arises whether even the seven churches are primarily Christian or Jewish.

If “Babylon” stands for Rome, it is but an adaptation of an older polemic; for Babylon is declared to have actually fallen, before it is announced that she “shall be cast down.”[8] The eleventh chapter dilates on the Jewish temple; again and again we listen to a purely Jewish declamation over Jewish woes; the four-and-twenty elders and the Lamb “as though it had been slain, having seven horns, and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God,” are of Babylonian and Persian derivation; and the “second death” is Egyptian. In the new Jerusalem, “coming down out of heaven,” twelve angels are at the gates, which bear the names of the twelve tribes; and the “twelve apostles of the Lamb” are represented only by “twelve basement courses” of the wall.

How much such a document stood for in the early building-up of the cult it is impossible to gather from the records, which indicate that it was long regarded askance by the gospel-reading and epistle-reading churches. But it gives a definite proof that the cult had roots wholly unlike those indicated in the “catholic” tradition, and wholly incompatible with the beginnings set out in the gospels and the Acts.