In this connection there arises for us the problem, stressed by Professor Smith, as to the significance of the stories of wholesale healing and casting out of devils. His thesis is that they were an occult way of conveying the claim that Jesus by preaching monotheism had cast out in Galilee the diseases and corruptions of polytheism, pagan deities being “devils” for the Jew. And in view of the repeated assertion, on Gnostic lines, that Jesus declared his teaching to be made purposely occult, so as not to be understood by the people, we cannot deny the possibility that some of the stories of healing may have been so intended. Professor Smith, as I understand him, argues[3] that a straightforward claim of wholesale overthrowing of paganism would have offended the Roman Government; and that the claim was put by metaphor to avoid that. The difficulty arises that if the metaphor was not understood by Gentiles it missed its mark with them; while if they did understand it their susceptibilities would be particularly wounded by the metaphors of leprosy and blindness and “devils.” And there is the further difficulty that, as Professor Smith notes, the stories of casting out devils relate solely to half-heathen Galilee, while, as he also notes, there is no ultimate trace of Jesuism there.[4] Why then should an allegory of casting out polytheism have been framed concerning Galilee?

On any view, it can hardly be doubted that the stories of healing made their popular appeal as simple miracles. Professor Schmiedel’s argument that the claim of Jesus ([Mt. xi, 5]; [Lk. vii, 22]) to heal blindness and lameness and leprosy, and to raise the dead, must be understood in a spiritual sense, seems to me a complete failure. He contends that if it be taken literally the final claim that “the poor have the gospel preached to them” is an anti-climax. But if we take the miracle-claims to be merely spiritual, the anti-climax is absolute; for the proposition then runs that the blind, the lame, the leprous, and the spiritually dead have the gospel preached to them, and the poor have the gospel preached to them also. On the other hand, there is no real anti-climax on a literal interpretation. Plainly, the provision of good tidings for the merely poor, the most numerous suffering class of all, was the one thing that could be said to be done for them. It could not be pretended that they had been made wealthy. Thus a “pillar-text” falls, and we are left committed to the literal interpretation as against both Professor Smith and Professor Schmiedel. Both, however, will probably agree that most readers always took the literal view.[5]

§ 2. Birth-Myths

And it was to the popular credulity that appeal was made by the stories of the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth, the Adoration by the Magi and the Shepherds, the stable, the manger,[6] the menace of Herod, the massacre, and the flight.[7] The question that here arises for the mythologist is whether the birth-myths had belonged to the early Jesus-myth at a stage before gospel-making commenced, and had at first been ignored, only to be embodied later. For suggesting that they had been connected with the early myth I have been told by Dr. Carpenter and Dr. Conybeare that I ignored the late acceptance of the Christmas Birthday by “the Church,” after I had expressly noted the late date of that acceptance. These critics, as usual, miss the whole problem.

Either the birth-stories were old lore in Syria (or elsewhere in the East)[8] or they were not. If not, their imposition on the gospel story in the second century represents an assimilation of quite alien pagan matter, with the assent of the main body of Jewish Nazaræans, who accepted the opening chapters of the canonical Matthew. Of such an assent, no explanation can be given from the standpoint or standpoints of Dr. Conybeare and Dr. Carpenter. It would be a gratuitous capitulation to Gentilism in a Jewish atmosphere, and this without any sign on the Pauline side of a Gentile obtrusion of such matter.[9] But if, on the other hand, we put the hypothesis that such matter had been connected in Syrian folk-lore with the old Jesus-myth, we at once find an explanation for the additions to the gospel-story and a new elucidation of the myth-theory. The spread of the Jesus cult would bring to the front the primitive myths connected with it which the reigning Judaic sentiment had at first kept out of sight as savouring of heathenism; and all Jesus-lore would have a progressive interest for converts. Judaism, in its redacted sacred books, admitted of quasi-supernatural births in such cases as those of Sarah and Hannah; but an absolute virgin birth, a commonplace in heathen mythology,[10] had there no recognition. Yet the idea was as likely to survive in folk-lore in Syria as anywhere else; and as Judaism became more and more a hostile thing, Judaic views would tend in various ways to be set aside.

The hypothesis put by me is (1) that the certainly unhistorical Miriam of the Pentateuch is inferribly, like Moses and Joshua, an ancient deity; and that in old Palestinian myth she was the mother of Joshua. In the Pentateuch she is degraded, as part of the Evemeristic process of reducing the ancient popular Gods to human status. That process, which affects Goddesses as well as Gods in several ancient religions,[11] was for the Hebrew priesthood a necessary rule. Polytheism was everywhere, in antiquity, and for the Yahwists it must be cast out. A late Persian tradition that Joshua was the son of Miriam[12] accents the query whether there were no family relationships in the old Palestinian myths. That the birth in a stable, with a ritual of babe-worship at the winter or summer solstice, is very ancient both in the East and in the West, is the conclusion forced on the mythologist by a mass of evidence; and the location of the stable at Bethlehem in a cave connects the Christian myth yet further with a number of those of paganism.[13] If the matter of the myth was ancient for Syria, why should not the names of the mother and the child be so?

The fashion in which the hypothesis is met by the more impassioned adherents of the biographical view is instructive. Dr. Conybeare, who thinks it inconceivable that “a myth” should be mistaken for “a man”—though that mistake is the gist of masses of mythology—finds no difficulty in conceiving that a real woman may be turned into a myth within a century. For him, the gospel “Mary” (Maria or Mariam) must be a real Jewess because in Mark ([vi, 3]) the people of Nazareth ask: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James, and Joses, and Judas, and Simon? and are not his sisters with us?” Any thoughtful reader, comparing such a suddenly projected passage with the opening chapters, realizes that it is on a wholly different plane of ideas; that no one “author” can have posited both; and that the later is part of a process of localization and debate, in connection with the thesis that the healer could “do no wonder-work” at home because of the unbelief of his own people. Furthermore, in [Mark xv, 40], we have the group of women which includes “Mary the mother of James the Little and of Joses,” concerning whom we are told that when Jesus was in Galilee they “followed him, and ministered unto him.” How many Maries, then, were mothers of James and Joses? Evidently the Mary of the latter passage is not regarded by its writer as the mother of Jesus. Then the prior passage is the later in order of time, and alien to the other legends.

Our exegete, nevertheless, is not only at once dogmatically certain that he has found a real Jesus, son of Mary, but proceeds to assert, in three separate passages, that in Mark’s gospel Jesus is known as “the son of Joseph and Mary,” though Joseph is never mentioned in that gospel. It is of a piece with his instantaneous invention of a “genuine tradition” out of a modern hint, perverted. And it is this operator who, meeting with a list of analogies (so described) which suggest that “Miriam” and “Mariam” are variants of a Mother-Goddess name generally current through the East, becomes incoherent in explosive protest, and begins by informing me that the “original form of the name is not Maria but Miriam, which does not lend itself to [these] hardy equations.” As Miriam had been expressly named and discussed by me in the very first instance, the intimation tells only of the mental disconnection which is the general mark of this writer’s procedure.

The question, of course, is not philological at all; and not only was no philological “equation” ever hinted at, but the very passage attacked begins with the avowal that it is impossible to prove historical connections, and that what is in question is analogy of “name and epithets.” Nothing in philology is more speculative than the explanation of early names. Any one who has noted the discussion over “Moses,” and noted the diverging theories, from the Coptic “water-rescued” or “water-child” (mo-use) of Josephus and Philo and Jablonski and Deutsch to the Egyptian “child” (mes or mesu) of Lepsius and Dillmann, and the inference of an “abbreviation of a theophorous Egyptian name” drawn by Renan and Guthe, will see that there is small light to be had from “equations.” When “Miriam” is expertly described as “a distortion either of Merari [misri] or of Amramith,”[14] the mythologist is moved to seek for other clues. The philology of Maria and Mariam is a hopeless problem.