“It is urged that we destroy the basis of religious unity when we take away this historical and personal centre of faith. Men absolutely need, it is said, that concrete form, that individuality, under which the divine is represented to them in the Christ. There would be more cause for this anxiety if it could be shown that they have ever possessed such a centre. But what have they had, after all, but a common name for ever-changing ideals? The belief that all eyes were turned to a common authoritative centre was an illusion, which had its uses, indeed, but becomes a breeder of strife in proportion as men learn the rights of free inquiry. ‘Worship the Christ! follow Jesus!’ cry the ages. But who is Jesus? and what is the Christ? The Jesus of Matthew is one, the Christ of John is another, the ‘second Adam’ of Paul is a third. The moral as well as the theological contents of the name vary with the ages and the sects that appeal to it. As the Christ of Luther was not the Christ of Augustine, nor his the Christ of James, so the Christ of the Unitarian is one, of the Calvinist another. Whom the one will save, the other will destroy; what to the one is moral wrong, to the other is divine right; what love would require in the one, justice would foreclose in the other. What common centre can the liberal Bible scholars and the panic-stricken, text-ridden Revivalists find in the name of Christ? All the warring sects have been ‘standing up for Jesus;’ and which of them knows what Jesus was? The farther you get back toward the original, the less sure do you feel of your own knowledge, and the less right should you feel from what you know in part to assume that you have found the appointed centre of religious thought. It would be easy to show that unity is impossible so long as it is sought to found it on the claims of a person to that position, since the mysterious irrationality of such an office must keep the speculative faculties of mankind in ceaseless self-contradiction and strife. It would be easy to show that this claim of Jesus has been the perpetual root of dogmatic warfare—that all barbarism of the Christian Church in past ages has come of jealousy about the honor due the person of the Christ.” We offer no apology for these long extracts from Mr. Johnson’s inimitable little book of ninety pages. “He being dead yet speaketh,” and his words give no uncertain sound. He was in advance of the times, and if his brethren in the Unitarian ministry would regard Jesus, whom they almost deify, as an ideal (quite imperfect) that has come down to us from pagan peoples, and cease to court the favor of the orthodox, they would have more self-respect and more real regard from the thinking men of the age.
We might as well now come directly to the question whether the Jesus of the Gospels was an ideal rather than a historical individual—an impersonation rather than a person. And here we take the broad ground that whether there was a real man or not makes no difference whatever, because the writings themselves are largely ideal, and so make the man what he was not. No two persons worship the same God, the “personified Infinite.” The conception of God must itself be limited and incomplete, and therefore inadequate and largely ideal. No two persons believe in the same Jesus, so there must be as many ideals as there are believers. The habit of exaggerating, of deifying those whom we have been taught to regard as the greatest and best, is a well-known disposition of the human mind. Indeed, “the function of the Church is the cultivation of the ideal.” This is so palpable that the legends of all religions recognize this principle to such an extent that most of them represent their “saviors” as having been born of virgin mothers. Catholics flock to their temples and in parrot-like utterances worship an ideal Jesus and an equally ideal Virgin, and thus cultivate only the ideal side of their nature. It is very much easier to excite the imagination than to convince the understanding; and this is the real secret of the strength of Catholicism and of the weakness of Protestantism. Catholic worship is mainly spectacular, an appeal to the senses, and is therefore attractive alike to the uneducated and the educated. They believe the Gospels literally, because they have had the principal incidents recorded in them set forth before their eyes from their very birth, and they cannot be reasoned out of what they have never been reasoned into.
But we are told that Jesus must have been a real person or he never could have exerted the influence that he has for the last eighteen hundred years upon so many millions of people. Let us see: If Jesus ever dwelt upon this earth, it must have been several hundred years ago. Not one of the many millions who have worshipped him since his few years of sojourn here but have done so in view of what they have heard of him or read of him. They never saw him and never heard his voice. He wrote nothing, and never authorized any one else to write anything. After the lapse of nearly two centuries the four Gospels appeared. Very little is told of him there. If you take out what is repeated concerning him therein, you would not have, in length, what would make a modern sermon; and that would be found full of contradictions, absurdities, and impossibilities. Those who have believed on him have believed on what they called testimony concerning him; and that testimony would have produced the same effect whether true or false if they really believed it. The real existence of an alleged person is not essential to excite admiration if it is really believed that he existed. The Swiss loved and honored William Tell just as much as if he had not in these latter years been proved a myth. The world’s history teems with the heroic deeds of many noble persons (impersonations) who never had an existence, and the literature of the race would greatly suffer by striking out all that is fictitious. The reason that the ideal Christ has exerted so much greater influence than any other impersonation is because so many skilful artists have bestowed their best labor upon it, and because the figure is so ancient and contains so many features that commend themselves to the human mind and heart.
We find in Natural Genesis, by the English poet Gerald Massey, a passage which so beautifully portrays our own view of this subject that we cannot forbear copying it:
“It has often been said that if there were no historic Christ then the writers who represented such a conception of the divine man must have included amongst them one who was equal to the Christ. But the mythical Christ was not the outcome of any such conception. It was not a work of the individual mind at all, but of the human race—a crowning result of evolution versus any private conception of a hero. This was the hero of all men, who never was and was never meant to be human, but from the beginning was divine; a mythical hero without mortal model, and equally without fault or flaw. This was the star-god who dawned through the outermost darkness; this was the moon-god who brought the message of renewal and immortality; this was the sun-god who came with the morning to all men; this in the Kronian stage was the announcer of new life and endless continuity at the opening of every cycle, and in the psychotheistic phase the typical son of the Eternal as manifester and representative in time.
“As a mental model the Christ was elaborated by whole races of men, and worked at continually, like the Apollo of Greek sculpture. Various nations wrought at this ideal, which long-continued repetition evoked from the human mind at last as it did the Greek god from the marble.
“Egypt labored at the portrait for thousands of years before the Greeks added their finishing touches to the type of the ever-youthful solar god. It was Egypt that first made the statue live with her own life, and humanized her ideal of the divine. Hers was the legend of supreme pity and self-sacrifice so often told of the canonical Christ. She related how the very god did leave the courts of heaven and come down as a little child, the infant Horus born of the Virgin, through whom he took flesh or descended into matter, < crossed the earth as a substitute/ descended into Hades as the vivifier of the dead, their vicarious justifier and redeemer, the first-fruits and leader of the resurrection into eternal life. The Christian legends were first related of Horus, or Osiris, who was the embodiment of divine goodness, wisdom, truth, and purity—who personated ideal perfection in each sphere of manifestation and every phase of power. This was the greatest hero that ever lived in the mind of man—not in the flesh—to influence with transforming force; the only hero to whom the miracles were natural because he was not human. The canonical Christ only needed a translator, not a creator, a transcriber of the ‘sayings’ and a collector of the ‘doings’ already ascribed to the mythical Christ.
“The humanized history is but the mythical drama made mundane. The sayings and marvellous doings of Christ being pre-extant, the ‘spirit of Christ,’ the ‘secret of Christ,’ the ‘sweet reasonableness of Christ’ were all pre-Christian, and consequently could not be derived from any ‘personal founder’ of Christianity. They were extant before the great delusion had turned the minds of men and the figure-head of Peter's bark had been mistaken for a portrait of the builder.
“The Christ of the Gospels is in no sense an historical personage or a supreme model of humanity—a hero who strove, and suffered, and failed to save the world by his death. It is impossible to establish the existence of an historical character even as an impostor. For such an one the two witnesses, astronomical mythology and Gnosticism, completely prove an alibi. The Christ is a popular lay figure that never lived, and a lay figure of pagan origin—a lay figure that was once the Ram and afterward the Fish; a lay figure that in human form was the portrait and image of a dozen different gods.
“The imagery of the Catacombs shows that the types there represented are not the ideal figures of the human reality. They are the sole reality of the centuries after the Christian era, because they had been in the centuries long before. The symbolism, the allegories, the figures, and types remained there just what they were to the Romans, Greeks, Persians, and Egyptians, The iconography of the Catacombs absolutely proves that the lay figure, as Christ, must have sat for the portraits of Osiris, Horus the child, Mithras, Bacchus, Aristæus, Apollo, Pan, the Good Shepherd. The lay figure or type is one all through. The portraits are manifold, yet they all mean the mythical Christ under whatsoever name.