The Christian Faith Under Modern Searchlights

by William Hallock Johnson

Since the rise of the "religious-historical school" in Germany some dozen years ago, the question of Christianity's relation to contemporary religions has come up in a new form, and has been brought into the foreground of theological discussion. The victory of early Christianity, it is asserted, is due to the fact that Paul not merely presented it to the Romans in a juridical form, but that he preached the myth or mystery of a dying and rising Saviour to the myth loving Greeks; and it is even said that the New Testament portrait of Christ, whatever historical reality lies behind it, is in fact a sort of glorified composite photograph made out of the elements of a Jewish Messiah, a Greek Apollo or Adonis and an Egyptian Osiris. The claim is made by the more extreme members of the "religious-historical school" that every feature of Christianity that was supposed to be original, and indeed practically the whole Gospel narrative, can be parallelled closely or remotely in Persian, Hindu, Syrian, Egyptian or Greek religious literature, or in the Old Testament and the teaching of the philosophers.

The reasons for Christianity's triumph over other religions may be still to seek, but its claim to supernatural authority is called in question by the recent movement in scholarship which has taken as its motto, The study of the Christian Faith in the light of the history of religions. "It would be strange indeed," a writer has remarked, "if such parallels did not raise new questionings in the place of old certainties. If the accounts of miraculous births and resurrections are plainly fabulous when we meet with them in other faiths, are they necessarily historical when they occur in the Christian Scriptures? At any rate we feel that stringent evidence will be required to prove them so."[216]

When we study the relation between early Christianity and the religions of the time it is clear that some established principles are needed to control the comparison. When it is discovered, for instance, that Confucius had seventy-two disciples and an inner circle of ten "select ones," and that he spoke the Golden Rule in a negative form, does it follow that the Gospel accounts of the choice of the twelve and of the seventy were borrowed from Confucius? Clemen's formulation of the principles that must govern the comparison will be generally accepted:

(1) "A religious-historical explanation is impossible if it leads to untenable consequences or proceeds from untenable presuppositions. (2) The sense of the New Testament passage, as well as the contents of the non-Jewish idea, must first be fully ascertained. (3) We ought never to assume that ideas of an advanced religion have been altogether borrowed, until we have done our best to discover any germs of them in the native religious literature. (4) The non-Jewish idea that is brought in as an explanation must really in some degree correspond to the Christian one. (5) This element must have been already in existence: an idea that is subsequent in its emergence cannot, of course, have given rise to one previously existent. (6) It must be shown in regard to any foreign idea that it was really in a position to influence Christianity, or Judaism before it, and how."[217] To these might be added that the possibility of coincidence must not be overlooked.

With these principles, most of them self-evident, in our minds, let us glance at the topics of immediate interest in our present field: (1) The Virgin Birth and its parallels; (2) the worship of Christ and the Emperor-cult; and (3) Christianity and the Mystery Religions.

1. In its relation to the stories of current mythology, the Virgin Birth was a subject of active discussion in the time of the fathers. The patristic apologists make two points in referring to the mythological parallels. On the one hand, the similarity of the Gospel story in its supernatural element to the stories prevalent at the time is appealed to in order to commend it to the acceptance of the Greeks. Thus Justin says: "We propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter."[218] Similarly Origen says: "There is no absurdity in employing Grecian histories to answer Greeks with a view to showing that we are not the only persons who have recourse to miraculous narratives of this kind."[219] On the other hand, the difference between the Christian and the heathen stories is appealed to as proof of the moral and historical superiority of the Gospel narratives. Justin says that the Virgin conceived "not by intercourse but by power;"[220] and Origen, referring to a tradition about the birth of Plato, says that such stories are "veritable fables."[221]

The notion is popular to-day that stories of the birth of a god or a hero from a virgin are common in non-Christian religions, and the remark is heard that the Virgin Birth of Jesus would be credible were it not for these parallels. A closer examination shows, however, that while supernatural births were the common property of most ancient religions, the Virgin Birth was a distinctive and spontaneous feature of Christianity. Thus Clemen remarks that "what we find in Indian thought (at any rate in earlier times) is not a Virgin Birth in the proper sense of that term, but only a miraculous birth, and one of quite a different type from the birth of Jesus."[222] Alluding to the fact that Buddhism was so entirely outside the western range of vision as to be noticed very meagrely in the Greek and Roman literature, Clemen says that "if there are similarities that cannot be accidental between this later Buddhistic literature and the New Testament, the question would arise whether the former could not be dependent upon the latter,"[223] since Christianity penetrated early to India.

Clemen quotes Franckh to the effect that "none of these personages that play the part of a mother-goddess is thought of as a virgin. It is only in the course of time that Ishtar is everywhere put in the place of the earlier mother-goddesses.... As mother-goddess, Ishtar has no male god who permanently corresponds to her. This is the reason why she is vaguely spoken of as the 'virgin' Ishtar. But it must be emphatically asserted that here the idea of virginity undergoes a vague deflection."[224]

Of the parallels adduced, only two are clearly cases of birth from a virgin: Simon Magus (Clem. Recog. II, 14) and a certain Terebinthus (Acta Archelai et Manetis, c. 52), both of whom claimed to be born from a virgin; but, as Grützmacher remarks, these stories arose under Christian influences and are found in post-Christian writings so that they are not the root but the product of the Gospel narratives;[225] and E. Petersen admits that in these cases there may be a simple taking over of the supernatural birth of Jesus.[226]

In the Græco-Roman myths there is always some fleshly or sensible medium. Both the essential difference in the Gospel narratives, and the lack of any proved avenue of influence leading to these narratives, with their strongly Jewish colouring, from heathen sources, makes the theory of derivation from these sources most improbable.