The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory

by J. M. Robertson

3. The first tendency of the new Jewish promoters had been to develop the Saviour-God of the sacramental rite (which they may at this stage have adopted in its “pagan” form, now taken as canonical) into a Messiah who was to “come again,” introducing the Jewish “kingdom of heaven.” At a later stage they adopted the rite of baptism, traditionally associated with John, whom they represented as a Forerunner of the Messiah who had met, baptized, and acclaimed him, playing the part assigned by Jewish prophecy to Elias.

4. As time passed on, such a cult would of necessity die out among Jews, in default of the promised “Second Coming.” The connection of the idea of salvation with a future life for all believers, Jew or Gentile, gave it a new and larger lease of life throughout the Roman Empire, in every part of which there were Asiatics. But the Jewish doctrine of the Second Coming remained part of the developed teaching.

5. Further machinery was accordingly necessary to spread and sustain the cult; and this was spontaneously provided by (a) developments of the early and simple propagandist organization, and (b) provision for the needs of the poor, who among the Gentiles as among the Jews were the natural adherents of a faith promising the speedy closing of the earthly scene. Richer sympathizers won esteem by giving their aid; but the poor, as always, helped each other. The propaganda included the services of travelling “prophets,” and “apostles” who would be the natural compilers and inventors of Jesuine lore. The administrative organization, framed on Hellenistic lines, put more and more power in the hands of the bishop, whose interest it was to develop his diocese. At first the “prophets” and “apostles” were strictly peripatetic, being called upon to avoid the appearance of mercenariness. In course of time they were enabled to settle down, being systematically provided for.

6. Under the hands of this organization grew up the Christian Sacred Books, which gave the cult its footing as against, or rather alongside of, the Jewish, which in the circumstances had an irresistible and indispensable prestige. Thus on the literary side the Jewish influence overlaid the non-Jewish, assimilating the outside elements of scattered Jesuism. The earliest literature is Jewish, as in the case of the Didachê, or a Jewish-Jesuist manipulation of outside Semitic matter, as in the Apocalypse. On these foundations are laid “Christian” strata.

7. The Didachê (“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles of the Lord”) was primarily a brief manual of monotheistic and moral instruction used by the Twelve Apostles of the Jewish High Priest. To this, Jesuist matter was gradually added. The result was that “Twelve Apostles” became part of the Christian tradition; and they had ultimately to be imposed on the gospel record, which obviously had not originally that item.

8. The Epistles represent a polemic development, perhaps on the basis of a few short Paulines. That of James, which has no specific “Christian” colour, represents Judaic resistance, in the Ebionite temper of “voluntary poverty,” to the Gentilizing movement. The Paulines carry on doctrinal debate and construction against the Judaistic influence. The synoptic gospels, which in their present forms were developing about the same time, reflect those struggles primarily in anti-Samaritan and pro-Samaritan pronouncements, both ascribed to Jesus. Primarily the gospels are Judaic, and the Gentilizing movement had naturally not employed them. Paul is made in effect to disclaim their aid. In time they are adopted and partly turned to anti-Judaic ends.

9. The chief Gentile achievement in the matter is the development of the primitive sacrament-motive and ritual (fundamentally dramatic) into the mystery-play which is transcribed in the closing chapters of Matthew and Mark. Previous accounts of the foundation of the Sacrament and the death of the Lord are now superseded by a vivid though dramatically brief narrative in which the Jewish people are collectively saddled with the guilt of his death and the Roman government is crudely and impossibly exonerated. The apostles in general are made to play a poor part; one plays an impossible rôle of betrayer; and the legendary Judaizing apostle is made to deny his Master. The whole story is thoroughly unhistorical, from the triumphal Entry to the quasi-regal crucifixion; but it embodied the main ritual features of the traditional human sacrifice, and, there being simply no biographical record to compete with it, it held its ground. The mystery-play in its complete form was inferribly developed and played in a Gentile city; and its transcription probably coincided with its cessation as a drama. But the Sacrament was long a quasi-secret rite.

10. The picture drawn in the Acts, in which Peter and Paul alike “turn to the Gentiles”—Peter taking the initiative—is the work of a late and discreet redactor, bent on reconciling Jewish and Gentile factors. It is a highly factitious account of early Christism; but it preserves traces of the early state of things, in which no Jesuine teaching was pretended to be current, and the cult is seen to exist in a scattered form independently of the central propaganda. It evidently had a footing in Samaria. The synoptics themselves reveal the absence of baptism from the early procedure of the cult. Only in the latest of the four canonical gospels is it pretended that either Jesus or his disciples had baptized.

11. The fourth gospel is only one more systematic step in the process of myth-making. The biographical school, in giving this up as unhistorical, in effect admits that the “personality” of the alleged Teacher had been so ineffectual as to admit of a successful interposition of a new and thoroughly mythical figure, entirely supernatural in theory, but more “impressive” as a speaking and quasi-human personage. The “Logos” of John is again an adaptation of a Jewish adaptation of a pagan conception, the doctrine of the Logos set forth by the Alexandrian Jew Philo having come through Greek and Eastern channels.[32] There was no critical faculty in the early Church that could secure its rejection, though it was somewhat slow of acceptance. The doctrine of the Trinity is again an assimilation from paganism, proximately Egyptian.[33]

Such, in outline, is our working hypothesis. As explained at the outset, it is not supposed that so complex a problem can in so brief a space and time be conclusively solved; and criticism will doubtless involve modification when criticism is scientifically applied. To such scientific criticism the production of a complete outline may be an aid; previous debate, even when rational in temper, having been spent on some of the “trees” without regard to the “wood” in general. All that is claimed for the complete hypothesis is that it is at all points inductively reached, and that for that reason it squares better with the whole facts than any form of the biographical theory—including the highly attenuated “eschatological” form in which Jesus is conceived solely as a proclaimer of “the last things.” That thesis, indeed, reduces the biographical theory to complete nullity by leaving the mass of the record without any explanation save the mythical one, which suffices equally to account for eschatology.