After generations of expectation, the early eschatology of the Church became a burden to its conductors, inasmuch as expectation of the end of the world made for disorder, and neglect of industry; and Second Thessalonians was written to explain away previous predictions of imminent ending. After the whole mass of such prediction had been falsified by ages of continuance, there was still no critical reaction, simply because religious belief excludes the practice of radical criticism. To this day, orthodoxy has no rational account to give of the pervading doctrine of the New Testament as to the speedy end of the world. The biographical school finds in it a measure of support for its belief in a real Jesus, who shared the delusions of his age. But as that explanation equally applies to all men in the period, it gives the biographical view no standing as against the myth-theory. Christian prophets spoke for “the Lord” just as Jewish prophets did before them.
In this connection, finally, it has to be noted that Professor Schmiedel finds an à priori authenticity in a prediction in which Jesus claims supernatural status, though the ostensibly unhistorical character of such claims was his avowed ground for positing the “pillar-texts” which alone defied all skepticism. And the formula in both cases is the same—“it could not have been invented.”[30] The major premiss involved is: “No passage could be invented which would stultify the position of the believers.” But do none of the admitted inventions[31] in the gospels stultify the position of the believers? The two genealogies do; the anti-Davidic passages stultify these; the pro-Samaritan teaching stultifies the anti-Samaritan; and so on through twenty cases of contradiction. M. Loisy, indeed, claims the pro-Samaritan passage as genuine: does he then admit the anti-Samaritan to be spurious?
The biographical school cannot have it both ways. The very fact that they have to oust so many passages on the score of incompatibility is the complete answer to the plea of “genuine because unsuitable to the purposes of the propaganda.” The fact that a multitude of contradictions are left standing proves simply that when once an awkward passage was installed it was nearly impossible to get rid of it; because some copies were always left which retained it; and in the stage of increasing respect for the written word it was generally restored. The “Jesus” before Barabbas was at last ejected only because everybody recoiled from it. Predictions were not so easily dropped.
On the page on which he claims that Jesus’ prediction of his Second Coming could not have been invented, Professor Schmiedel avows that various passages in [Mt. xxiv] really belong to “a small composition, perhaps Jewish, on the signs of the end of the world, written shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70.” If the one set of passages are borrowed, why not the other? Was it unlikely that Jewish eschatologists should predict the coming of the Son of Man at the near end of the world, and that Jesuists should put the prediction in the mouth of their Lord and make him say it of himself? The à priori negative is quite untenable.
While, then, the argument from unsuitableness is logically barred for the biographical school by their own frequent rejection of passages on the score of incompatibility, no aspect or portion of the New Testament supplies a conclusive argument against the mythological view. The whole constitutes an intelligible set of growths from the point of view of the myth-theory; and from no other is the medley explicable. A biographical theory, having posited a Messiah whose Messianic claim is a mystery, a Teacher whose alleged teachings are a mass of conflicting tendencies, and whose disciples admittedly have no Messianic gospel till after his inexplicable execution, following on an impossible trial, may make the assumption that by way of popular myth he was then fortuitously deified by Messianist Jews, and later transformed by other Jews into a Saviour for Gentiles; but the biographical theory cannot even pretend to account for the Apocalypse and the Didachê; and it has to renounce its own ground principle of “personality” in order to assimilate the Epistles. On critical principles, assent must go to the theory which explains things, reducing the otherwise inexplicable to a natural evolution on the known lines and bases of hierology.
§ 4. Historic Summary
We may now bring together in one outline the series of inductive hypotheses by which we seek to recover the natural evolution of the historic cult.
1. A primitive Semitic sacramental cult, whose sacrament centres in a slain Saviour-God, a Jesus, who has assimilated to an abstraction of the victim annually sacrificed to him—as in the case of the cults of Adonis and Attis, both also Asiatic. Of the sacrificial rite, which in the historic cult is embodied in the Last Supper and the dramatized story of the Passion, the memory was preserved in particular by a Jewish rite of Jesus Barabbas, Jesus the Son of the Father, in which a victim goes through a mock coronation, ending latterly, perhaps, in a mock-execution, where once there had been an actual human sacrifice.
2. This cult, with its sacrament, existed sporadically in various parts of Asia Minor, whence it spread to Greece and Egypt. Its forms would vary, and under Jewish control the sacrificial sacrament tended to be reduced to a Eucharist or thankoffering in which the “body and blood” are only vaguely, if at all, reminiscent of the Divine One’s death. As a God can always be developed indefinitely out of a God-Name, and personal Gods are historically but conceptual aggregates shaped round names or functions, the adherents of this could proselytize like others. When the Temple of Jerusalem fell in the year 70, the adherents of the cult there had a new opportunity and motive, which some of them actively embraced, to cut loose from the Judaic basis and proclaim a religion of universal scope, freed from Judaic trammels and claims. Economic motives played a considerable part in the process.