The theologians, reluctantly admitting, of late, that the Devil could not carry Jesus through the air, anxiously debate as to whether or not Jesus had strange psychic experiences which he communicated to his disciples; and, utterly ignoring comparative mythology, look for motivation, as usual, only in the Old Testament. Spitta, after checking these researches, and declaring that the man is not to be envied who hopes to explain the story by Old Testament parallels from the forty years of wandering in the wilderness,[34] confidently concludes that it stands for the spiritual experience of Jesus in regard to his Messianic ideal.[35] To such a biographical inference he has not the slightest critical right on his own principles. The gospels say nothing whatever of any communication on the subject by Jesus to his disciples. The story is myth pure and simple, and belongs to universal mythology.
Mark turned the story to the illustration of the doctrine laid down in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,[36] that devils and wild beasts will flee from the righteous man; and Luke and Matthew turn it into an affirmation of the theological maxims of Jewish monotheism; but these are simply the invariable practices of the evangelists, steeped in the habits of thought of Jewish symbolism. The myth remains; and the story, as story, has counted for a great deal more in Christian popular lore than the theology. When the writer of the fourth gospel put the miracle of turning water into wine in the forefront of his work, he doubtless had symbolic intentions;[37] but his story is simply an adaptation of the annual Dionysiac rite of turning water into wine at the festival of the God on Twelfth Night.[38] It may have come either from the Greek or from the eastern side. The duplicated tale of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, again, is either an adaptation of or an attempt to excel the story of the feeding of the host of Dionysos in a waterless desert in his campaign against the Titans.[39] As the God had the power of miraculously producing, by touch, corn and wine and oil, his lore doubtless included miracles of feeding. The touch of the seating of the people “in ranks, by hundreds, and by fifties” ([Mk. vi, 40]) suggests a pictorial source.
Thus did paganism, chased out of the window of early Judaic Christianity, re-enter by all the doors, supplying the growing Church with the forms of psychic and literary attraction which ultimately served to give it a general hold over the ignorant and uncivilized masses of decadent and barbaric Europe.[40] Even with that machinery, the Church was dissolving in universal schism when Constantine saved it—or at least its body—by establishing it. As the Church broadened its basis, especially after its establishment, its assimilation of pagan ideas, names and practices, became so general that the process has long been made a standing ground of Protestant impeachment of the Church of Rome.[41] Middleton’s Letter from Rome (1729) may be said to begin the scientific investigation, which is still going on.[42]
Of that process the myth-theory is simply the attempted scientific consummation. It is resisted as every previous step was resisted, before and after Middleton, partly in sincere religious conviction, partly on the simple instinctive resentment felt for every “upsetting” theory about matters which men have habitually taken for granted. Some of the best reasoned resistance comes from professional theologians who have been disciplined by the habit of exact argument in the documentary field; some of the worst, as we have seen, comes from professed rationalists or Neo-Unitarians, who bring to the problem first and last the temper of spleen and bluster which history associates with the typical priest. Bluster never settles anything: argument, given free play under conditions which foster the intellectual life, in the end settles everything, even for the emotionalists who worship their instincts. But as historical like physical science is a process of continuous expansion and reconsideration, there can in this contest be no “triumph” for anything but the principle of unending renewal of thought, which is but an aspect of the principle of life. Insofar as the solution now offered is inadequate, it will in due course be improved upon; insofar as it is false, it will be ousted.
The average cleric, of course, does not attempt confutation. Realizing that it is prudent to avoid debate on such matters, he relies on the proved proclivity of “human nature” to beliefs which fall-in with habit, normal emotion, and normal religiosity; and his faith is, practically speaking, not ill-grounded. A thesis which looks first and last to scientific truth is therefore not addressed to him. It is addressed to the more earnest of the laity and the clerisy—hardly to those indeed who hold, as an amiable curate once put it to me, that “in the providence of God” all heresy is short-lived; but to those who, caring for righteousness, do not on that score cast out the spirit of truth. Many such are honestly convinced that the teaching on which they have been taught to found their conceptions of goodness cannot be the accretion of a myth; and many who acknowledge an abundance of myth in the documents are still insistent on elements of “religious” truth which they find even in systematic forgeries. The countenance thus given by the more liberal and critical theologians to the more uncritical stands constantly in the way even of the acceptance of the comparatively rational views of the former.[43] There is reason then to ask whether the notion that human conduct is in any way dependent on visionary beliefs is any sounder than those beliefs themselves. On this head, something falls to be said in conclusion.
[1] Compare the story of Joseph, [Gen. xxxix]. [↑]