[30] Cp. the Professor’s work on The Johannine Writings, p. 90, where the same query: “Who could have invented them?” is put as establishing special sayings of Buddha, Confucius, Zarathustra, and Mohammed. I cannot follow the logic. [↑]
[31] The argument is the same whether we say “inventions of the evangelists” or “appropriations from other documents, or from hearsay.” [↑]
[32] P.C. 218 sq.; C.M. 395. [↑]
[33] P.C. 206, 223, 228; C.M. 395. [↑]
Chapter VIII
SUPPLEMENTARY MYTH
§ 1. Myths of Healing
It is significant that the later myth-making of the synoptics is partly by way of reversion to the folk-lore in which the myth had risen, partly by way of meeting non-Jewish Messianic requirements, partly by way of Gentilism, partly by way of concessions to the Gnosticism or occultism whose pretensions in the second century exercised so strong a pressure on the Church. As Professor Smith points out, the story in Mark ([xiv, 51–52]) of the youth who at the betrayal fled naked, leaving his linen cloth in the hands of the captors,[1] is a crude provision for the Docetic theory that the real Christ did not suffer. Cerinthus taught that “at last Christ departed from Jesus, and that then Jesus suffered and rose again, while Christ remained impassible, inasmuch as he was a spiritual being.”[2]