Now, if the Moses legend is to be held Egyptian, the Miriam legend may well be so too; and in the items that the Egyptian princess who saves the child Moses is in a Jewish legend named Merris, and that one of the daughters of Ramses II is found to be named Meri,[15] the analogy is worth noting. But the central mythological fact is that a Mother-Goddess, a “Madonna” nursing a child, is one of the commonest objects of ancient worship throughout Asia and North Africa.[16] When, then, mothers of Gods born in caves, or Dying Demigods, are found bearing such names as Myrrha and Maia; when Maia is noted to have the meaning “nurse,” and Mylitta that of “the child-bearing one,” we are not only moved to surmise a Mother-Goddess-name of many variants, of which Miriam-Mariam is one, but to infer a wide diffusion of legends concerning such a goddess-type. Figures of such a goddess abounded throughout the East.[17] That is, in brief, the mythological case at this point. Mary in the gospels, the virgin bearing a divine child, flying from danger, and bearing her child on a journey, in a cave, is the analogue of a dozen ancient myths of the Divine Child; the Menaced Child is common to the myths of Moses and Sargon, Krishna and Cyrus, Arthur and Herakles; the stable-ritual of the Adoration is prehistoric in India in connection with Krishna; the “manger” (a basket) belongs equally to the myths of Zeus, Hermes, Ion and Dionysos; and the threatening king is a myth-figure found alike in East and West.[18]
All this is ostensibly “sun-myth.” And we are asked by Dr. Conybeare to believe, on the strength of one late and palpable interpolation in Mark, which has no other word concerning the childhood, parentage, or birthplace of Jesus, its Son of God, that his mother Mary was a well-known figure in Nazareth about the year 30, and that it is merely she who is made to play the mythic part in Matthew about a century later. The simple use of common-sense, even by a reader who has not studied comparative mythology, will reveal the improbability of such a development; and Dr. Conybeare, who vehemently denies, for other purposes, that the early Christians in Palestine could have any knowledge of pagan myths, is the last person who could consistently affirm it. But when we realize that under the shell of official Judaism there subsisted in Palestine as everywhere else the folk-lore of the past;[19] when we remember the “weeping for Tammuz” at Jerusalem and the location of the birth of Adonis in the very stable-cave of the Christ-legend at Bethlehem, we can quite rationally conceive how, once the Jesus-myth was well re-established, old pre-Judaic elements of it came to the front, and found from the later gospel-compilers a welcome they could not have had in the Judaizing days.[20]
The Joseph myth, again, is a very obvious construction. In Mark, which Dr. Conybeare repeatedly and shrilly declares to be the primary authority, Joseph is never once mentioned, though Dr. Conybeare, with the eye of imagination, finds that he is. In Matthew, he figures throughout the birth-story of the opening section, admittedly a late addition. In Luke, still later, he is still further developed, Mark’s “son of Mary” becoming ([iv, 22]) “the son of Joseph,” in a palpably late fiction. Any critical method worthy of the name would reckon with such plain marks of late fabrication. Joseph has been super-imposed on the myth for a reason; and the reason is that a Messiah “the Son of Joseph” was demanded from the Samaritan side as a Messiah the Son of David was demanded (albeit not universally) from the Judaic side.[21] By naming Jesus’ earthly putative father Joseph, in the Davidic descent, both requirements were met, on lines of traditionalist psychology.
When this solution is met by the Unitarian thesis that the idea of a Messiah Ben Joseph is late in Judaism, and that it arose out of the gospel story, we can but appeal to the common-sense of the reader.[22] For the Rabbis to set up such a formula on such a motive would be an inconceivable self-stultification. The lateness of Rabbinical discussion on the subject can be quite reasonably explained through its Samaritan origination. All the while, the Joseph story in the gospels belongs precisely to that late legend which the neo-Unitarian school is bound in consistency to reject as myth. But the prepossession in favour of a “human Jesus” balks at no inconsistency, and selects its items not on critical principles but simply in so far as they can be made to compose with a “human” figure that is to be conserved at all costs.
The curious myth-motive of the “taxing”[23] at Bethlehem in Luke, an utterly unhistorical episode, has a remarkable parallel in the Krishna-myth,[24] which has been cited in support of the thesis that that myth in general is derived from the Christian story. The general thesis breaks down completely;[25] and in this one instance we are obviously entitled to ask whether the Christian myth is not derived from some intermediate Asiatic source connecting with the Indian.[26] As a mere invention to motive the birth at Bethlehem the story seems exceptionally extravagant.
§ 3. Minor Myths
To discuss in similar detail the myths of the Apocryphal gospels and the still later myths of Catholic Christendom would only be to extend the area of our demonstration without adding to its scientific weight. The general result would only be to prove derivations from pagan sources and to exhibit more fully the process (a) of inventing sayings of Jesus to vindicate different views of his Messianic and other functions, and (b) of enforcing ethical views by his authority. The legend of St. Christopher, for instance, is but a variant, probably iconographic in motive, of a multiform pagan myth which probably roots in a ritual of child-carrying.[27] Iconography yields many evidences. The conventional figure of the Good-Shepherd carrying a sheep, which like the Birth-Story has counted for so much in popularizing Christianity, is admittedly derived from pagan art,[28] like the conventional angel-figure. Even the figure of Peter[29] as the bearer of the keys, head of the Twelve, and denier of his Lord, connects curiously with the myths of Proteus and Janus Bifrons,[30] both bearers of the cosmic keys.
Iconography, again, is probably the source, for the gospels, of the myth of the Temptation, which professional scholars continue solemnly to discuss as a “biographical” episode to be somehow reduced to historicity. The story coincides so absolutely with the Græco-Roman account, evidently derived from painting or sculpture, of Pan (in figure the Satan of the Jews) standing by the young Jupiter on a mountain-top before an altar,[31] that it might seem unnecessary to go further. But, recognizing that “of myth there is no ‘original,’ save man’s immemorial dream,” and remembering that there are similar Temptation myths concerning Buddha and Zarathustra, we are bound to extend the inquiry. The results are very interesting.
We are specially concerned with the versions of Matthew and Luke, of which Dr. Spitta, by analysis, finds the Lucan the earlier,[32] pronouncing the Marcan to be a curtailment and manipulation, not the primary source, as was maintained by Von Harnack and many others.[33] The essence of the story, as episode, is the presence of the God and the Adversary on a high place, surveying “the kingdoms of the world.” This originates proximately in Babylonian astronomy and astrology, where the Goat-God is represented standing beside the Sun-God on “the mountain of the world,” that is, the height of the heavens, at the beginning of the sun’s yearly course in the sign Capricorn, which, personified, figures as the sun’s tutor and guide. Graphically represented, it is the origin of a series of Greek myths—Pan and Zeus; Marsyas and Apollo; Silenus and Dionysos—all turning on a goat-legged figure beside a young God on a mountain-top. Satan and Jesus are but another variant, probably deriving from Greek iconography, but possibly more directly from the East, where the idea of a Temptation goes back to the Vedas.