§ 2. Schmiedel’s Tests
Either the first chapter of Mark is primordial gospel-writing or it is not. If it is, the biographical theory is as idle as those ridiculed by Socrates in the Phædrus. If it is not, upon what does the biographical theory found? The details of “mending their nets” and “in the boat with the hired servants”? Professor Schmiedel, conscious of the unreality of such narrative, falls back upon nine selected texts, seven of them in Mark, which he claims as “pillars” of a real biography of Jesus,[13] on the score that they present him as (a) flouted in his pretensions or (b) himself disclaiming deity, or (c) declining to work wonders, or (d) apparently denying a miracle story, or (e) crying out to God on the cross that he is forsaken. Now, of all such texts, only b and e types can have any such evidential force as Schmiedel ascribes to them.[14] Type a counts for nothing: not only the suffering Saviour-Gods but Apollo and Arês, to say nothing of Hephaistos, Hêrê, and Aphroditê, are flouted in the pagan literature which treats them as Gods. If to quote “he is beside himself” is to prove historicity, why not quote the taunts to Jesus in the fourth gospel, nay, the crucifixion itself?
In his able and interesting work on The Johannine Writings, Schmiedel carefully developes the thesis that the Johannine Jesus is an invented figure, conceived from the first as supernatural; and he puts among other things the notable proposition that when Jesus weeps it is implied by the evangelist that he does so not out of human sympathy, but “simply because they [the kinsfolk of Lazarus] did not believe in his power to work miracles.”[15] Assuming for the argument’s sake that this is a true interpretation, we are driven to ask how the thesis consists with that of the “pillar texts.” The Johannine writer starts with a supernatural Jesus, yet not only represents his attached personal friends as not believing in his power to work miracles but describes Jesus as weeping because of their unbelief. Nothing in Mark is for moderns more incongruous with a supernaturalist view of Jesus, yet Schmiedel sees no difficulty in believing that the Johannine writer could deliberately frame the incongruity. Why then should even an original author of Mark be held to regard Jesus as mortal because in Mark he is flouted, or declines to work wonders, or is unable to do so at Nazareth? If one writer can represent the Eternal Logos as weeping from chagrin, why should not the other think him God even when he cries out that God has forsaken him? And if, finally, the cry is held to cite [Psalm xxii, 1], and to imply the triumphant conclusion of that psalm, what value has the passage for the critic’s purpose?
An unbiassed criticism will of course recognize that the “Jesus wept” may be an interpolation, for it is admitted that the Greek words rendered “groaned in the spirit” may mean “was moved with indignation in the spirit”; and, yet again, Martha is represented (xi, 22) as avowing the belief that “even now” Jesus can raise Lazarus by the power of God. Nay, the whole story may be an addition, not from the pen of the writer who makes Jesus God. But equally the incongruities in Mark may come of interpolation. A fair inference from the characteristics of that document is that parts of it, notably the first dozen paragraphs, represent a condensation of previously current matter, while others are as plainly expansive; and even if these diversely motived sections be from the same hand, interpolations might be made in either.
In reply to my argument[16] that texts in which Jesus figures as a natural man would at most represent only Ebionitic views, Professor Schmiedel puts the perplexing challenge, concerning the Ebionites:—“Were they not also worshippers of Jesus as well? Were they really men of such wickedness that they sought to bring the true humanity of Jesus into acceptance by falsifying the Gospels? And if they were, was it in their power to effect this falsification with so great success?”[17] I cannot think that Dr. Schmiedel, who is invariably candid, has thought out the positions here taken up. The point that the Ebionites were “worshippers” of Jesus is surely fatal to his own thesis. “Worshippers” could in their case go on worshipping while maintaining that the worshipped one was a mortal. Then to assert that he avowed himself a mortal was not inconsistent with “worship.” But the challenge obscures the issue; and it is still more obscured when the Professor goes on to ask: “Had they [the Ebionites] no predecessors in this view of his person? Must we not suppose that precisely the earliest Christians, the actual companions of Jesus—supposing Him really to have lived—were their predecessors?” This argument, the Professor must see, has small bearing on my position.
Three questions are involved, from the mythological point of view: first, whether actual believers in an alleged divinity could represent him as flouted, humiliated, or temporarily powerless; second, whether the Ebionitic view of Jesus can be accounted for otherwise than as the persistence of a proto-Christian view, arising among the immediate adherents of a man Jesus; third, whether in the second century Jesuists of Ebionitic views could invent, and insert in the gospels, sayings of or concerning Jesus which were meant to countervail the belief in his divinity.
On the first head, the answer is, as aforesaid, that throughout all ancient religion we find derogatory views of deity constantly entertained, at different stages of culture, without any clear consciousness of incongruity. Yahweh in the Old Testament “repents” that he made man; wrangles with Sarah; and is unable to overcome worshippers of other Gods who have “chariots of iron.” Always he is a “jealous” God; and at a later stage he is alleged to be consciously thwarted by the Israelites when they insist on having a king. These are all priest-made stories. Among the early Greeks, the Gods are still less godlike. In Homer, Athênê is almost the only deity who is treated with habitual reverence: the others are so constantly satirized, humanized, thwarted, or humiliated, that it is difficult to associate reverence, in our sense, with the portrayal at all. The statement of Arno Neumann that “it is impossible (here every historian will agree) for one who worships a hero to think and speak in such a way as to contradict or essentially modify his own worship”[18] is an astonishingly uncritical pronouncement, which simply ignores the main mass of ancient religious literature.
As regards the Demigods in particular it belongs to the very nature of the case that they should be at times specially thwarted and reviled by mortals, since it is their fate to die, albeit to rise again. If, then, sayings were once invented which fastened human limitations upon the Divine One for the Jesuists, there was nothing in the psychology of worshippers on their intellectual plane that should make them pronounce such sayings forgeries. As we have seen, even in the fourth gospel, which puts the Divine One higher than ever, he is made, on Professor Schmiedel’s own view, to weep for sheer chagrin.