For the purposes of this inquiry, all miracles, strictly so-called, are out of discussion. This does not mean that the myth-theory of Jesus is an outcome of atheistic philosophy. One of the most brilliant of modern books on Jesus is the work of an avowed atheist,1 who accepted substantially the whole of the non-supernatural presentment of Jesus in the gospels, taking it to be a bad biography, and subjecting the doctrine to keen but sympathetic criticism. This writer, dismissing miracles as outside debate, had a conviction of the historicity of Jesus which was in no way affected by a knowledge of modern documentary criticism. On the other hand, Professor Arthur Drews, author of The Christ Myth, expressly claims to urge the myth-theory in the interest of theistic religion. Of course he too dismisses miracles as outside discussion.

Those who are still concerned to discuss them, and to affirm such beliefs as those of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, should turn their attention to the well-known work of the late W. R. Cassels, Supernatural Religion,2 in which the whole supernaturalist case, in its double aspect of “revelation” and miracles, is examined with an abundance of learning, patience, [25]and candour. Disparaged in its day by professional orthodox scholars, that treatise has so completely done its special work in the general criticism of supernaturalist faith that, however common orthodoxy may still be, the matter is now little debated among instructed men. Those who still hold the orthodox position, therefore, are not here addressed. Our inquiry invites the attention only of those who, abandoning the supernaturalist basis of the Christian creed, seek to retain (it may be as the ground for a transformed “Christianity”) (1) the human personality which they believe to have underlain the admitted myths of the record, and (2) the teachings—or some of them—ascribed to the God-Man of the Gospels. The problem is one of historical criticism, and does not turn upon theism or atheism. The historicity of Jesus is maintained not only by “Christians” of various degrees of heterodoxy but by some professed rationalists; by critics eminent for judicial temper, as by Professor Schmiedel of Zürich; and on the other hand by Dr. F. C. Conybeare.

These critics agree in regarding Jesus as a natural man, naturally born, and it is to them that we must reply. When an orthodox Christian like the Rev. Dr. T. J. Thorburn, holding by the Annunciation and the Virgin Birth, sets himself to rebut the myth-theory3 by scouting myth analogies, it would be idle to argue with him. A writer who can believe he has evidence for a story of human parthenogenesis has no conception of evidence in common with us. It is accordingly needless to point out that he constantly and absurdly misunderstands the myth argument;4 that he discusses [26]Evemerism without knowing what it means;5 and that he merely juggles with such cruces as the stories of the Transfiguration and the Ascension. From one at his standpoint we can expect nothing else; and to those whom his exposition satisfies no myth-theory can appeal. When he resorts to the device of denying “spiritual insight” to those who accept scientific tests, he merely exemplifies the normal procedure of orthodox incompetence. The religious reasoner who flouts reason usually certificates and betrays himself in that inexpensive fashion. Our argument is addressed to those who profess to apply to Biblical matters the principles of historical criticism.

The biographical school, as one may inoffensively term the variously minded champions of the historicity of the record, abandon the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection as impossibilities. That is to say, they accept the myth-theory as regards those two cardinal items of the Christian legend. They also in general recognize that the fourth gospel, in so far as it differs vitally from the synoptics, is in the main a process of myth-making. But, clinging to the alleged substratum, most members of the school adhere to the fundamental historicity of the Crucifixion. Here they stand with Strauss, who found in the execution of Jesus by Pontius Pilate a solid historical fact. Strauss is generally explicit as to his reasons for accepting and rejecting; and while he resolves into myth at least nine-tenths of the gospel narratives, finding them mere inventions to “fulfil” supposed Old Testament predictions, he finds the testimony of Tacitus unquestionable as to the execution.6

Now, the Annals of Tacitus is itself a questioned [27]document; but even if we take it as unquestionable it is admittedly only a late statement of a narrative already made current by the Christists, the Annals being commonly dated about 120 C.E. Either Tacitus was founding on a Roman record of the Crucifixion or he was merely saying what Christists said as to the origin of their sect. If the latter, he supplies no historical basis. On the other hand, the unlikelihood of there being a Roman record of executions in Palestine ninety years before is so great that no Christian advocate now appears to affirm it. Tacitus in fact gives no sign of consulting official records,7 his only traceable sources being previous historians, notably Suetonius. Thus Strauss’s express ground for accepting the execution of a “Christ” by Pontius Pilate is really illusory; and when we further find him pronouncing that the Barabbas episode must be held fundamentally historical because it is “so firmly rooted in the early Christian tradition,”8 we are again compelled to reject his test. As we shall see, the Barabbas episode is unintelligible as history, but highly intelligible as myth. At the very outset, then, unverified assumptions are seen to be made by the biographical school as to what may confidently be taken as historical, even when, as in the case of Strauss, they affirm an abundance of myth.

Where Strauss was rash, later rationalistic writers have been more so. My old friend, the English translator of Jules Soury’s early work on Jesus, took for granted that behind legendary heroes in general there is always a nucleus of fact; but Soury, after postulating a large part of the gospel story as veridical, gave up a number of his own items.9 As soon as he began to apply [28]criticism, they were seen to be arbitrary assumptions. Equally arbitrary is the assumption of “some basis,” made upon no scientific principle.

The biographical school in general adhere at least to the trial and condemnation before Pilate, though many abandon as fiction the trial before the Sanhedrim, which indeed was abandoned as long ago as the third gospel, in favour of an equally fictitious trial before Herod. As is seen by M. Loisy, the trial before Pilate is for the historical critic the keystone of the tragedy story. If that goes, there remains only a highly composite body of teaching, with no identifiable historical personality to which to attach it.

But even as regards the trials there is wide divergence among the biographical school. For instance, Mr. Charles Stanley Lester, an ex-clergyman of Milwaukee, in his interesting work The Historic Jesus,10 entirely rejects the Sanhedrim trial, and likewise the gospel account of the Pilate trial, but finds “probable history” in the view that the priests privately persuaded Pilate to condemn Jesus on their accusation without any trial.11 Again, the anonymous author of The Four Gospels as Historical Records,12 an eminently keen, searching, and candid critic, rejects alike the Judas story, the trial before the Sanhedrim, and the trial before Pilate,13 as he does most of the other items of the gospel history, yet throughout seems to take for granted the historicity of the “Great Teacher,” the “Master,” never even raising that issue save in protesting that he has absolutely nothing to say against him.14 So completely does he destroy the whole narrative, indeed, that he can hardly [29]be said to maintain the thesis of historicity, but he never calls it in question: he merely destroys the biography. Mr. Lester, on the other hand, confidently rejects a hundred details as myth, claiming that he presents the gospels “relieved of the drapery of mythology and set free from all dogmatic fictions”;15 and yet no less confidently affirms a hundred “undoubted” things, in a manner that almost outgoes M. Loisy.

If, faced by such procedures, the critical reader asks upon what grounds the historical personality is accepted, he gets from the able anonymous writer no answer, and from Mr. Lester, in effect, only the answer that the teachings which appeal to him in the gospels are self-certified as coming from the “Jesus” in whom he believes, while the others are dismissed by him as inconsistent with his conception. As a rule, the negative criticism is soundly reasoned; the constructive is purely arbitrary. Yet Mr. Lester is an amiable and—apart from his quaint animosity towards “the Semitic mind”16—a temperate critic, warmly concerned for historic truth and loyally opposed to all kinds of priestcraft, ancient and modern. What we must ask from such critics is that they should bring to bear on their biographical assumption the same critical method that they bring to bear on the multitude of details which strike them as obviously unhistorical. Rejecting miracles and self-contradictory narrative, they affirm a miraculous and self-contradictory Person. That conception too must be analysed.

The Jesus of the Gospels is at once a Messiah (with no definite mission as such), a Saviour God with whom [30]the indefinite Messiah coalesces, and a Teaching God who coalesces with both. The biographical school, in the mass, posit a human Teacher, round whose teaching a Messianic conception combined with a doctrine of salvation by blood sacrifice has nucleated. If in this tissue there cannot be inserted the historical detail of the trial before Pilate, there is nothing left but the quasi-mythical detail of the crucifixion as an ostensible historical basis for the Messianic and other teaching, so much of which is alien to the early cult, so much of which is critically to be assigned to previous and contemporary Jewish sources, and so much to later Jesuist editors and compilers. Those laymen who are content to pick out of the gospels certain teachings, such as the Sermon on the Mount, and call these “Christianity,” have not realized how completely documentary analysis has disintegrated the teachings into pre-Jesuine Jewish and post-Jesuine Gentile matter. The latest professional analysis, as we have seen, leaves no Jesuine “Teaching” save an eschatology, a doctrine of “last things,” coming from a visionary Messiah with no political or social message.17 The bulk of the biographical school, on the other hand, cling diversely to “something” in the Teaching which shall be somehow commensurate with the “impression” made by the life and death of the Teacher, which, from Renan onwards, they regard as the real genesis of the myth of the Resurrection and the consequent cult.

Having shown, then, the cogent critical reasons for dismissing the entire record of the triple episode of the Supper, the Agony, and the Trials, as unhistorical,18 it [31]concerns us to show (1) that the whole is intelligible only as myth, and (2) how the myth probably arose. The sequence culminates in the Crucifixion, which, with the Sacrament, is for the rational hierologist as for the orthodox theologian the centre of Christianity. Equally the biographical school are committed to maintaining the historicity of the event, without which they cannot explain the rise of the cult. If then the myth-theory is to stand, it must show that the central narrative belongs to the realm of myth.

In the Christian record, the Crucifixion is essentially a sacrifice. “The essence of the Sacrament is not merely partaking of a common cup or a common meal, but feasting upon a sacrifice ... and this was found everywhere among Jews and Gentiles.”19 Thus the term “Eucharist,” which means “thanksgiving” or “thank-offering,” applied in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles to the kind of sacrament there indicated, and thence taken by Justin and other Fathers, is clearly a misnomer for the thing specified in the gospels. Of the gospel sacrifice, the sacrament is the liturgical and symbolic application.20 Or, otherwise, the crucifixion is the fulfilment of the theory of the sacrament. On the view of the historicity of the former, or of both, it would be necessary to show why the procedure set forth in the [32]gospels so closely simulated a human sacrifice; and this is incidentally attempted in passing by M. Loisy. The scene of derision by the soldiers, he says, “was perhaps connected with some pagan festival usage.”21 But this at once admits the entrance of the myth-theory, which affirms that an immemorial “festival” usage is indicated. If Jesus was executed to please the Jewish multitude, as is the view even of the most destructive of the later German exegetes22—why should the execution take a pagan form? M. Loisy, who had previously accepted as history the narrative of the Entry into Jerusalem, with the public acclamation of Jesus as “the Son of David,” is unprepared to believe with the German critic that within a week the multitude cried “Crucify him!”; and he therefore wholly eliminates that item from his biographical sketch. He implies, however, that the doom of Jesus was passed by Pilate to please the priests, which is equally fatal to the thesis of a pagan festival usage. He accepts, further, the scene of the Mocking, with no ostensible critical reason, but presumably in order to establish a history which would explain the subsequent growth of the cult. In this process the salient episode of Barabbas is dismissed by him as unhistorical.23

Thus the most distinguished critic of the biographical school has no account to give of a second salient item in the record which, being entirely non-supernatural, must be held to have been inserted for some strong reason. It in fact closely involves the whole myth-theory. Barabbas was in all probability a regular figure in Semitic popular religion; and the name connects documentarily with that of Jesus. The reading “Jesus [33]Barabbas,” in Mt. xxvii, 16, as we have noted,24 was long the accepted one in the ancient Church; and its entrance and its disappearance are alike significant. It is obviously probable that such a name as “Jesus the Son of the Father” (= Bar-Abbas25), applied to a murderer, would give an amount of offence to early Christian readers which would naturally lead in time to its elimination from the current text.26 But on that view there is no explanation of its entrance. Such a stumbling-block could not have been set up without a compulsive reason.

The anthropological and hierological data go to show that an annual sacrifice of a “Son of the Father” was a long-standing feature in the Semitic world. A story in Philo Judæus about a mummery in Alexandria in ridicule of the Jewish King Agrippa, the grandson of Herod, points pretty clearly to a local Jewish survival from that usage. A lunatic named Karabas is said to have been paraded as a mock-king, with mock-crown, sceptre and robe.27 In all likelihood the K is a mistranscription for B. In any case, “the custom of sacrificing the son for the father was common, if not universal, among Semitic peoples,”28 as among others; and the Passover29 was originally a sacrifice of firstlings, human and animal,30 the former being probably most prevalent in times of disaster. “Devotion” was the principle: surrogate sacrifices would normally be substituted. Sacrifice of a king’s son, in particular, was held to be of [34]overwhelming efficacy by early Hebrews and other Semites, as among other races in the savage and barbaric stages.31

There is nothing peculiar to the Semites either in the general or in the particular usage, both being once nearly universal; but it is with the Semites that we are here specially concerned. The story of Abraham and Isaac, to say nothing of that of Jephthah’s daughter, is a finger-post in the evolution of religion, being inferribly a humane myth to promote the substitution of animal for human sacrifice. And the Phœnician myth of “Ieoud,” the “only-begotten” son of King Kronos, “whom the Phœnicians call Israel,” sacrificed by his father at a time of national danger, after being dressed in the trappings of royalty,32 points towards the historic roots of Christianity. Again and again we meet the conception of the “only-begotten” “Son of the Father”—Father Abraham, Father Kronos, Father Israel, the Father-King—as a special sacrifice in Hebrew and other Semitic history. Kronos is a Semitic God; and in connection with the Roman Saturnalia we have the record of a Greek oracle commanding to “send a man to the Father”—that is, to Kronos.33

What is certain is that sacrifices of kings, which were at one stage of social evolution normal,34 inevitably tended to take other tribal or communal forms; and a multitude of rites preserved plain marks of the regal origin. Kings would inevitably pass off their original tragic burden; the community, bent on the safeguard of sacrifice, shifted it in turn.35 Sacrifice of some kind, it was felt, there must [35]be, to avert divine wrath:36 that conviction lies at the base of the Christian as of the Jewish religion: it is fundamental to all primitive religion; and it is happily beyond our power to realize save symbolically the immeasurable human slaughter that the religious conviction has involved.

Primarily, voluntary victims were desired; and in Roman and Japanese history there are special or general records of their being forthcoming, annually or in times of emergency.37 Even in the case of animal sacrifice, the Romans had a trick of putting barley in the victim’s ear to make him bow his head as if in submission.38 But as regards human sacrifices, which were felt to be specially efficacious, the progression was inevitable from willing to compelled victims; and out of the multitude of the forms of human sacrifice, for which war captives and slaves at some stages supplied a large proportion of the victims, we single that of the evolution from the voluntary scape-goat or the sacrificed king or messenger, through the victim “bought with a price,” to the released criminal or other desperate or resigned person bribed with a period of licence and abundance to die for the community at the end of it.

In many if not in most of these cases, deification of the victim was involved in the theory, the victim being customarily identified with the God.39 It was so in certain special sacrifices in pre-Christian Mexico.40 It was so in the human sacrifices of the Khonds of Orissa, which subsisted till about the middle of last century.41 In the latter instance, of which we have precise record, [36]the annual victims were taken from families devoted by purchase to the function, or were bought as children and brought up for the purpose. They were “bought with a price.” When definitely allotted, the males were permitted absolute sexual liberty, being regarded as already virtually deified. The victim was finally slain “for the sins of the world,” and was liturgically declared a God in the process.

Such rites gradually dwindled in progressive communities from ritual murders into ritual mysteries or masquerades; even as human sacrifices in general, in most parts of the world, dwindled from bodies to parts of bodies, fingers, hair, foreskins; from human to animal victims;42 from larger to smaller animals; from these to fowls; from real animals to baked or clay models, fruits, grains, sheafs of rushes, figures, paper or other symbols. It seems usually to have been humane kings or chiefs who imposed the improvement on priesthoods. And as with the victim, so with the sacramental meal which accompanied so many sacrifices. Cannibal sacraments were once, probably, universal: they have survived down till recent times in certain regions; but with advance in civilization they early and inevitably tend to become merely symbolic. In Mexico at the advent of Cortes, both the cannibal and the symbolic forms subsisted—the former under conventional limitations; the latter in the practice of eating a baked image which had been raised on a cross and there pierced, for sanctification.43 This “Eating of the God” was very definitely a sacrament; but so were the cannibalistic sacraments which preceded it. [37]

Surveying the general evolution, we reach the inference that somewhere in Asia Minor there subsisted before “our era” a cult or cults in which a “Son of the Father” was annually sacrificed under one or other of the categories of human sacrifice—Scapegoat, representative Firstling, Vegetation God, or Messenger; possibly in some cases under all four aspects in one. The usage may or may not have subsisted in post-exilic Jerusalem: quite possibly it did, for not only do the Sacred Books avow constant popular and legal resort to “heathen” practices of human sacrifice,44 but Jewish religious lore preserves in a variety of forms clear evidence of institutions of human sacrifice which are not recognized in the Sacred Books.45 In any case, in connection with the particular cult or rite in question there subsisted also a Eucharist or Sacrament or Holy Supper, analogous to the sacraments of the cults of Mithra, Dionysos, Attis, and many other Gods.46 At a remote period it had been strictly cannibalistic: in course of time, it became symbolical. In other words, originally the sacrificed victim was sacramentally eaten; in course of time the thing eaten was something else, with at most a ritual formula of “body and blood.” At a certain stage, whether by regal or other compulsion or by choice of the devotees, the annual rite of sacrifice became a mere ritual or Mystery Drama—as in other cases it became a public masquerade. The former evolution underlay the religions of Dionysos, Osiris, Adonis, and Attis: the latter may or may not have gone on alongside of the former.

What does emerge from the gospel narrative concerning Barabbas and Jesus is, not that such an episode [38]happened: here the myth-theory is at one with M. Loisy, who in effect pronounces the narrative to be myth: but that in the first age of Christianity the name “Jesus Barabbas” was well known, and stood for something well known. It was certainly known to the Jews, for we have Talmudical mention, dating from a period just after the fall of the Temple, that there was a Jewish ritual “Week of the Son, or, as some call it, Jesus the Son,” in connection with the circumcision and redemption of the first-born child.47 From the inference of the currency of the name there is no escape: attached to a robber and murderer it could never have got into the gospels otherwise. And the myth-theory can supply the explanation which neither the orthodox nor the biographical theory can yield. We have outside evidence that a sacrifice of a “Son of the Father” was customary in parts of the Semitic world. What the gospel story proves is that it was known to have been a practice, either at Jerusalem or elsewhere, to release a prisoner to the multitude in connection with a popular festival, which might or might not have been the Passover. The release may have been for the purpose either of a religious masquerade or of a sacrifice. Either way, the religious rite involved was a rite of “Jesus Barabbas”—Jesus the Son of the Father—and it involved either a real or a mock sacrifice, in which the “Son” figured as a mock king, with robe and crown.

The more the problem is considered, then, the more clear becomes the solution. As soon as the Jesuist cult reached the stage of propaganda in which it described its Son-God as having died, in circumstances of ignominy, as an atoning sacrifice, it would be met by the memory [39]of the actual Barabbas rite. Given that the Barabbas victim was ritually scourged and “crucified” (a term which has yet to be investigated), it follows that wherever the early propaganda48 went in areas in which the memory of the rite subsisted, the Christists would be told that their Jesus the Son was simply the Jesus Barabbas of that popular rite; and the only possible—or at least the best—way to override the impeachment was to insert a narrative which reduced the regular ritual Jesus Barabbas to a single person, a criminal whom the wicked Jewish multitude had chosen to save instead of the sinless Jesus of the cult. In the circumstances given it was an absolutely necessary invention; and no other circumstances could conceivably have made it necessary. The story, by the unwilling admission of M. Loisy, who conserves whatever he thinks he critically can of the record, is a myth; and it is a myth which on the biographical theory cannot be explained. The myth-theory has explained it. As for the disappearance of the “Jesus” from the name of Barabbas in the records, it hardly needs explanation. When the memory of the old annual rite died away from general knowledge, the elision of the “Jesus” would be desirable alike for the learned who still knew and the unlearned who did not.49

It is needless for the defender of the biographical theory to interject a protest that the Barabbas story is [40]only one item in the case. The other items will all be dealt with in turn: that has been put in the front because of its crucial significance. Incidentally it may be further noted that the myth-theory explains the plainly unhistorical item of “the thirty pieces of silver,” confusedly explained from “the prophet Jeremy” as “the price of him that was priced, whom [certain] of the children of Israel did price” (Mt. xxvii, 9). The reference is really to Zechariah (xi, 12, 13).

The story of the Betrayal is fiction on the very face of the narrative, Judas being employed to point out a personage of declared notoriety, about whose movements there had been no secrecy.50 Judas is demonstrably a somewhat late figure in the gospel legend, coming from the later Mystery Drama, not from the rite on which it was built. But, whatever may be the solution of the cryptogram about the potter’s field and the thirty pieces of silver in Zechariah, or the historic fact about Aceldama, one thing is clear: “the price of him that was priced,” in Matthew, tells of the usage of paying a price for sacrificial victims.

It does not follow that a price was regularly paid in the case of the Jesus Barabbas rite, though the record actually insists on the item by way of the Judas story: what is clear is that a memory of bought victims subsisted after the fall of Jerusalem. It is not unlikely that “Aceldama” was a field where sacrificial victims were either slain or buried, or both. A passage in the Kalika Purana suggests the procedure, and the probable significance of Golgotha, the “place of skulls.” In the Hindu rite, the human victim was immolated “at a [41]cemetery or holy place,” upon which the sacrificer was not to look; and the head was presented in “the place of skulls, sacred to Bhoiruvu” (God of Fear). This could be in a special temple, or in a part of the cemetery, “or on a mountain.”51

At this point a warning must be given against the confusion set up by the habitual assumption that “something of the kind” occurred under Pontius Pilate. It is only on the biographical theory that that date is valid. Pontius Pilate is simply a figure in the later Mystery Drama, originally chosen, probably, because of his notoriety as a shedder of Jewish blood.52 We are not bound to prove that at his date the usage of ritual human sacrifice, real or pretended, survived at Jerusalem, though it may have done, as it survived at Rhodes in the time of Porphyry in the form, perhaps, of a Semitic mystery drama.53

It is the assumption of the historicity of the Crucifixion that partly disarms the theorem of Sir J. G. Frazer as to a coincidence of Jewish sacrificial rites.54 Noting that the details of the Crucifixion closely conform to those of a human sacrifice sometimes practised in the Christian era in connection with the Roman Saturnalia, and also to those of a real or mock rite connected with the Babylonian feast of the Sacæa, he resorts to the alternative hypotheses (a) that the analogous Jewish feast of Purim, imported from Babylon after the Return, and also involving either a real or a mock crucifixion, chanced to coincide with the actual crucifixion of the gospel Jesus; or that (b) Christian tradition “shifted the date of the [42]crucifixion by a month or so” to connect it with the Passover. As the official Purim rite, though cognate with that of the Passover, cannot well have been allowed to coincide with it, the theory of coincidence is barred; and the theorist is assured by an expert colleague that “all that we hear of the Passion is only explicable by the Passover festival,” and that “without the background of the festival all that we know of the Crucifixion and of what led up to it is totally unintelligible.”55

When, however, the unhistorical character of the gospel narrative is realized, such difficulties disappear. The intention was certainly to connect the Crucifixion with the Passover (in which the paschal lamb—symbolizing Isaac—was customarily dressed in the form of a cross56); and in the fourth gospel Jesus becomes an actual Passover sacrifice. But the narrative is simply a reduction to historic form of the procedure of a customary ritual sacrifice, habitual usages of human sacrifice being represented as expedients of a single Roman execution. With the exact seasonal date of the Jesus Barabbas rite which here motived the gospel legend, the myth-theory is not primarily concerned, though it has secondary interest. It was probably a Spring Festival, and at the same time a New Year Festival, the period of the vernal equinox having been both in east and west the time of the New Year before that was placed after the winter solstice. It is thus highly likely that there were analogous sacrificial festivals at Yule and at Easter, one celebrating the new-birth of the sun and the other the revival of vegetation. The Sacæa festival may or may not have been identical with that known from the monuments to have been called the Zakmuk57 (New Year): [43]either way, the features may have been the same. There was in Judea, further, a hieratic year as well as a civil, a Lesser Passover as well as the greater.58 The myth-theory does not depend on an agreed date, though the myth fixes on an astronomical date, itself constantly varying in the calendar.

What leaps to the eyes is that the gospel legend preserves two separated features of the festival of a Sacrificed Mock-King, which as incidents in the life of the Teacher are wholly incompatible, and which the biographical theory cannot reasonably explain—the acclaimed and welcomed Entry into Jerusalem and within a week the demand of the city multitude for the crucifixion. The Entry is an elaboration of several myth elements, but it contains the item of the acclaimed ride of the quasi-king, mounted on an ass (or two asses). If the biographical school would but consider historical probabilities, they would realize that the story as told cannot be historical, with or without the strange antithesis of the multitude’s speedy demand for the prophet’s death. Such a triumphal entry, for such a person as the gospel Jesus, could not spontaneously have taken place: it must have been planned; and, if arranged with such an effect as the record describes, it would have given Pilate very sufficient ground for intervention without waiting for a complaint from the priests. Taken as history, it is wholly irreconcilable with the “Crucify him” ascribed to a multitude whose support of Jesus had been affirmed the day before; and accordingly M. Loisy, accepting the Entry, rejects the latter episode. Strauss, hesitating to go, “as has latterly often been done,” the length of rejecting the Entry on the ass as wholly mythical, finds it very much so;59 and Brandt [44]incidentally dismisses it as “under the strongest suspicion of being framed upon Old Testament motives from beginning to end.”60

Thus the biographical school itself proffers a myth-theory, without indicating an explanatory motive for the positing of a contradiction. But when we realize that an acclamation of a quasi-king riding on an ass was actually part of the ritual in a sacrificial rite in which he was to be crucified, the two clashing elements in the legend are at once explained in the full myth-theory. Their separate handling and development was, just as intelligibly, part of the process of gospel-making, the creation of an ideal Jesus. But seeing that in the Sacæa festival the mock-king had a five days’ reign between his start and his death,61 the original ritual gave the interval which in the gospel story is filled with the acts of the Teaching God. Five days is the accepted traditional interval from Palm Sunday to Crucifixion Day.

Part of the demonstration of the myth-theory, again, lies in the fact that the first act of Jesus after his entry is to “cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrow the tables of the money-changers, and the seats of them that sold the doves.” That this should have been accomplished without resistance seemed to Origen so astonishing that he pronounced it among the greatest miracles of Jesus,73 adding the skeptical comment—“if it really happened.” The myth-theory may here claim the support of Origen.

Strauss could find no ground for rejecting the story as myth upon his method of finding myth-motives only in the Old Testament. If he had lived in our day he would probably have agreed that the episode is singled out of [49]the kinds of exploit which were permitted to the victim in the Sacæa and the Saturnalia and such primitive sacrificial festivals in general, and turned to a doctrinal account. Such liberties as are described, all falling short of sacrilege, are among those which could normally take place. It is by way of anti-Judaism that the episode is utilized in the synoptics.

In the fourth gospel, where so many matters are turned to new account, and so much new doctrine introduced, the purification is put with symbolic purpose at the outset of the Messiah’s career, in a visit to Jerusalem of which the synoptics know nothing; and in this myth Jesus makes “a scourge of small cords” to effect his purpose. That later item was probably suggested by the effigy of the Egyptian Saviour God Osiris, who bears a scourge as the God of retribution. In the synoptics there is no symbol: the story is simply employed as part of the superadded didactic machinery which alternately exhibits the full development of the Messiah and the unfitness of the “Jewish dispensation” to continue. Inferribly, the story of the fig-tree is in the same case, signifying the condemnation of the Jewish cult, though here there may be a concrete motive of which we have lost the clue. But it is significant that while the gospel record could not possibly assign to the holy Messiah such a general course as was followed by the licensed sacrificial victim, it follows the story of his Entry with that of one markedly disorderly act; whereafter he goes to lodge in Bethany (Mt. xxi, 17) at a house which later is indicated as that of a leper (xxvi, 6). There his head is anointed by a woman; who in Luke, in a differently placed episode (vii, 37), becomes “a sinner.” Is not this another echo from the obscure tragedy of the sacrificial victim, who was anointed for his doom? [50]

Separately considered, the Crucifixion in the gospel story is as impossible as the Entry. The cross, we are told, was headed with an inscription: “This is the King of the Jews.” Sir J. G. Frazer74 and M. Salomon Reinach75 concur in recognizing that if the victim had really been executed on the charge of making such a claim, no Roman governor would have dared so to endorse it.76 The argument is that only by turning the execution into a celebration of a popular rite could the procedure have been made officially acceptable. But to extract such an explanation from the record is simply to stultify it as such. If there really occurred such a manipulation of the death-scene of an adored Teacher, how could the narrators possibly fail to say as much? We are asked by the biographical school to believe that the Crucifixion was made a farce-tragedy by treating the Teacher as the victim in a well-known rite of human sacrifice, and also to believe that the devotees who preserved the record, knowing this fact, chose to say nothing about it, preferring to represent the procedure as a unique incident.

It might perhaps be argued, on the biographical view, that the Roman soldiers, who are held to have been Asiatics, chose to improvise a version of a sacrificial rite which was unknown to the Jesuists, and that the latter simply reported the episode without understanding it, interpreting it from their prophets in their own way. But if the record be historical it is incredible that in a cult which is claimed to have made many adherents throughout the Roman Empire in east and west in a [51]generation or two, it should not quickly have become known that the procedure of the Crucifixion was a copy of popular eastern and western rites of human sacrifice. If there had taken place what the hypothesis suggests, there was a purposive suppression. That is to say, the credibility of the narrative is at this point vitally impeached by a supporter of the biographical theory, which expressly rests on the narrative as regards non-miraculous data.

And while on the one hand it is in effect charged with the gravest suppressio veri, on the other it is charged, equally in the name of the biographical view, with something more than suggestio falsi, with absolute fiction. M. Loisy does not merely dismiss the Barabbas story as unhistorical, offering no explanation of its strange presence: he comes critically to the conclusion that Jesus on the cross uttered no word, whether of despair, entreaty, or resignation. We need not ask what kind of credit M. Loisy can ask for a record which he thus so gravely discredits. The scientific question is, Upon what grounds can he demur to the extension of a myth-theory to which he thus contributes? If the record admittedly invented utterances for the Teacher on the cross, why should not the whole be an invention? In particular, why should not the trial before Pilate and the inscription on the cross be inventions?

The inscription on the cross, we see, is for the great anthropologist of the school impossible save as part of a simulated ritual. M. Loisy, supporting the same general thesis, declares that “to say Jesus was not condemned to death as king of the Jews, that is to say, as Messiah, on his own avowal, amounts to saying [autant vaut soutenir] that he never existed.”77 It is even so; and [52]the supporter of the myth-theory is thus doubly justified. The loyal induction is, not that in any rite of human sacrifice exactly such a label was affixed to the gibbet, but that probably some label was, and that the gospel framers (or one of them) “invented” a label which stated their claim for Jesus as Messiah. It was a fairly skilful thing to do, representing the label as a Roman mockery, and thereby making it an appeal to every Jew.78 It is indeed conceivable that Roman soldiers taking part, once in a way, in the rite of Jesus Barabbas, may have turned that to a purpose of contempt by labelling the poor mock-king as the king of the Jews. But such an episode would not be the enactment of the scene described in the record. It would merely be a hint for it, the acceptance of which was but an additional item of fiction.

That the Crucifixion, as described, is a normal act of ritual human sacrifice, is even more true than it is shown to be by the parallels of the Sacæa and the Saturnalia. The scourging, the royal robe, the mock crown, were all parts of those rituals, which thus conform in parody to the ritual of the mythic sacrifice of Ieoud, son of Kronos, probably parodied in the ritual for the victim sacrificed to Kronos at Rhodes. But so are the drink of wine and myrrh, the leg-breaking, and the piercing with the spear. The crown is a feature of all ancient sacrifice, in all parts of the world. Crowns of flowers were normal in the case of human victims, in India, in Mexico, in Greece, and among the North-American Indians, as in ordinary animal sacrifice among the Greeks, Romans, and Semites. But even the crown of thorns had a special religious vogue in Egypt, procured as such crowns were [53]from thorn-trees near Abydos whose branches curled into garland-form. Prometheus the Saviour, too, receives from Zeus a crown of osiers; and his worshippers wore crowns in his honour.79 Either some such special motive or the common practice in the popular rite will account for the record.

And these items of the mock-king ritual exclude the argument which might possibly be brought from the fact that in the ancient world, as among primitives in general, all executions, as such, tend to assume the sacrificial form. The condemned criminal is “devoted,” sacer, taboo, even as is the simply sacrificed victim, becoming the appanage of the God as is the God’s representative who is sacrificed to the God.80 It might therefore be argued that a man condemned on purely political grounds could be treated as a sacrificial victim. But there is no instance of the criminal executed as such being treated as the mock-king. A criminal might be turned to that account, but that would be by special arrangement: executed simply as a criminal, he would not be crowned and royally robed. These details were features of specific sacrifices: executions were only generically sacrificial, and were of course in no way honorary. In the gospel story, the two thieves are neither mocked, robed, nor crowned. They are not “Sons of the Father,” or deputies of the King.

The question here arises, however, whether the triple execution was a customary rite. All executions being, as aforesaid, quasi-sacrificial, an ordinary execution [54]might conceivably be combined with a specific sacrifice. It is to be observed that no mention of the triple execution occurs outside of the gospels: the Acts and the Epistles have no allusion to it. It is thus conceivably, as was hinted by Strauss, a late addition to the myth, motived by the verse now omitted as spurious from Mark (xv, 28), but preserved in Luke (xxii, 37): “And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, And he was reckoned with transgressors.” But we are bound to consider the possibility that the triple execution was ritually primordial.

The story of such an execution in the “Acts of Saint Hitzibouzit,” martyred at some time in Persia, is evidently doubtful evidence for the practice, as Sir J. G. Frazer observes. The record runs that the saint was “offered up as a sacrifice between two malefactors on a hill top opposite the sun and before all the multitude,”81 suggesting that the sacrifice was a solar one. This is possible; but martyrology is dubious testimony. On the other hand Mr. W. R. Paton has suggested that the triple execution was a Persian practice, and was made to a triple God.82 There is the notable support of the statement in a fragment of Ctesias (36) that the Egyptian usurper Inarus was crucified by Artaxerxes the First between two thieves. In addition to the cases of Greek sacrifices of three victims may be noted one among the Dravidians of Jeypore;83 and the practice among the Khonds of placing the victim between two shrubs. In the Jeypore case one victim was sacrificed at the east, one at the west, and one at the centre of a village; and in another case two victims were sacrificed every third year. A triple execution might be a special event, in which two [55]victims were both actually and ritually criminals, in order to enhance the divinity of the third. And we know that triple sacrifices did occur. The throwing of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into the fiery furnace was ostensibly a triple sacrifice: it will hardly be claimed as a historical episode in its subsisting form.

On a careful balance, however, the presumption seems rather against a triple rite. What is quite clear is that for the early Jesuists the “prophecy” in 53rd Isaiah possessed the highest importance. For us, that lyric chapter is still somewhat enigmatic. Gunkel, who is here followed by Professor Drews,84 takes the view that the suffering figure described is really that of the typical victim of the human sacrifice; and it certainly fits that conception at points where it does not easily compose with that of the figure of oppressed Israel.85 The victim was “wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities”; and conceptually “with his stripes we are healed.” On the other hand, who were “we” for “Isaiah” if not Israel itself? The only interpretation seems to be that the past generations had suffered for the present; and this does not yield an intellectually satisfying figure. But still more improbable, on the whole, is the suggestion that the Hebrew prophet or quasi-prophetic lyrist—whatever date we may assign to the chapter—has really perceived and figured the tragic vision of the sacrificial victim as he is here supposed to have done. It would be a psychological feat extremely remarkable even for that highly gifted writer;86 and moreover it would finally compose still less with the general [56]idea of the context than does the supposed presentment of the suffering People. It is difficult to reach any satisfying notion of Isaiah’s general meaning on the view of Gunkel and Drews.

We are thus far held, then, to the inference that, as Isaiah’s chapter was certainly taken by the early Christists87 who had adopted the Messianic idea to be a prophecy of their Messiah, the Christ myth was shaped in accordance with it. There are three main strands in the Christ myth, the Jesuist, the Christist or Messianic, and that of the Teaching God. The “suffering” motive serves to bind the three together; and the concrete item, “he was numbered with the transgressors,” bracketed as it is with “he poured out his soul unto death,” gives a very definite ground for the item of the forced companionship of the malefactors in the Crucifixion scene. It is, in short, apparently one of the specifically Judaic motives in the myth construction. Earlier in the narrative the Messiah is frequently grouped with “publicans and sinners”: he comes “eating and drinking,” in contrast with the ascetic figure of the Baptist. That feature is probably part of the atmosphere of the myth-motive of the sacrificial victim, with the leper-host and the anointing by the “sinner.” But the “two thieves” are inferribly supplied from another side.

In the first two gospels, the character of the unnamed anointress is tacitly suggested by the very reticence of the description, “a woman.” In Jewry and in the East [57]generally, the woman who went freely into men’s houses was declassed; and the “sinner” of Luke was only a specification of the already hinted. But the story in Luke of the homage of the good thief is clearly new myth, coming of the widened ethic of the “gospel of the Gentiles.” Matthew and Mark have no thought of anything but the association of the Messiah with typical transgressors in death: for them the two thieves are hostile. The “Gentile” gospel improves the occasion by converting one of the transgressors. No critical inquirer, presumably, now fails to see doctrinal myth at the second stage. It is only the atmosphere of presupposition that can keep it imperceptible in the first. In the making of the gospels, ritual myth, doctrinal myth, and traditional myth are co-factors; and it may be that even where doctrinal myth is quite clearly at work, as in the staging of the Messianic death “with transgressors,” an actual ritual is also commemorated.

In the later myth the robbers, as it happens, are made to embody certain features of sacrificial ritual. We are told in the fourth gospel that the Jews “asked of Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away,”—“that the bodies should not remain on the cross upon the sabbath, for the day of that sabbath was a high day.” Accordingly the soldiers break the legs of the two thieves, “but when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs.” The implication is that the men’s legs were to be broken by way of killing them—a patently untrue suggestion.88 [58]The spear-thrust which “howbeit” was given to Jesus would have been the way of killing the others if they were alive: breaking the legs was a brutality which would not ensure death.

The explanation is that both leg-breaking and spearing were features of sacrificial rites. It may have been by way of purposive contrast to the former procedure that in the priestly ritual89 of the passover it is enacted that no bone of the (unspecified) victim shall be broken. The breaking of the leg-bones in human sacrifice was one of the horrible expedients of the primitive world for securing the apparent willingness of the victim: it is to be found alike in Dravidian and in African sacrifice.90 An alternative method, which tended to supersede the other, was that of drugging or intoxication, of which we find still more widespread evidence. In ancient Jerusalem, we find the practice transferred to ordinary execution on the cross, the humane women making a practice of giving a narcotic potion of wine and incense to the victim.91 Thus associated with the deaths of ordinary criminals, it suggested to some of the Jesuist myth-makers a ground for specializing the record.

In the first two gospels, a drink is offered to Jesus on the cross—wine92 mingled with gall, in Matthew; wine mingled with myrrh in Mark—“but he received it not”; this, in Matthew, after tasting. The Marcan form is probably the first, as it describes the customary narcotic: the idea is to indicate that in the case of the divine victim no artifice was needed to secure an apparent acquiescence: he was a voluntary sufferer. “Gall,” in Matthew, may [59]have reference to pagan mysteries in which a drink of gall figured.93 In Luke, vinegar is ostensibly offered as part of the derision. In John, no drink is mentioned till the end, when the dying victim says, “I thirst.” Having partaken of “a sponge full of the vinegar upon hyssop,” he says, “It is finished,” and dies. In Matthew, this act of compassion takes a simpler form, the sponge of vinegar being given on the utterance of the despairing cry, while other bystanders jeer: in Mark, the giver of the sponge also jeers.

It is needless to debate long over the priorities of such details: as regards the drink of vinegar, all alike have regard to Psalm lxix, 21: “They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” For that reason, the wine-and-myrrh item is probably primordial: it tells of the sacrificial rite; and the drink of vinegar is a doctrinal addition; even as the rejection of the narcotic is doctrinal. For the variations which distinguish each narrative from the others, there is no reasonable explanation on the biographical view: if devoted onlookers could not preserve the truth at such a point, where could they be trusted? The mythical interpretation alone makes all intelligible.

The fourth gospel, with its tale of the leg-breaking, supplies the strongest ground for surmising the occasional occurrence of a triple rite, in which the lesser victims were treated as sacrificed slaves normally have been in African and other human sacrifice, while the central victim was put on another footing. The express enactment in regard to the mysterious paschal sacrifice suggests that bone-breaking took place in others. In all likelihood, the original paschal sacrifice was that of a human victim of specially high grade: the substitution of the lamb [60]was part of the process of civilization indicated in the myth of Abraham and Isaac. And if the knowledge of the death-rite of Jesus Barabbas could subsist in the first century or later, knowledge of an early triple rite could subsist also. But this remains open to doubt, though at several points the fourth gospel specially emphasizes the historical derivation of the cult from a sacrament of blood sacrifice.

Nowhere else is the literal basis of the symbol of “body and blood” so insisted upon. Its writers had present to their minds an actual ritual in which the eating of the body of a Sacrificed God, first actually, then symbolically, was of cardinal importance. The later myth puts new stress on the conception, as if it had been felt that the earlier was not sufficiently explicit; and it makes the Jewish high-priest lay down the doctrine of human sacrifice from the Judaic side.94 It is in this atmosphere of sacrificial ideas that we get the item of the piercing of the divine victim with a spear. The detail is turned specially to the account of the Johannine doctrine of resurrection by putting what passed in popular physiology for a certain proof of death—the issuing of “blood and water.”95 But here again we find both a Hebrew motive96 and a pagan motive for the detail. In the sacrifice of the sacred slave of the Moon-Goddess among the primitive Albanians, the victim was allowed the customary year of luxury and licence, and was finally anointed and slain by being pierced to the heart with a sacred lance through the side. And there are other eastern analogues.97

It is the fourth gospel, finally, that introduces the “garment without seam,” combining a Hebraic with a [61]pagan motive. In order to fulfil a “prophecy” held to be Messianic,98 the synoptics make the soldiers cast lots for the garments of Jesus. The fourth gospel specifies a simple allotment of the garments in general, as if they could have been numerous enough to go round the soldiery, but limits the act of “casting lots” to the chiton, the under garment. Thus the soldiers both “divide the raiment” and cast lots for the “vesture.” The making of this “without seam” is at once an assimilation of Jesus to the high-priest and an assimilation of the Slain God to the Sun-God and other deities.99 A special chiton was woven for Apollo in Sparta; as a peplos or shawl was woven for Hêrê at Elis. And this in turn had for the pre-Christian pagans mystic meanings as symbolizing the indivisible solar robe of universal light, ascribed to Osiris; the partless robe of Ahura Mazda; Pan’s coat of many colours, and yet other notions. Always the story is itemized in terms of myth, of ritual, of symbol, of doctrine, never in terms of real biography.

It is not at all certain, and it is not probable, that in the earlier stages of the myth the cross as such was prominent. Early crucifixion was not always a nailing of outstretched hands in the cross form, but often a hanging of the victim by the arms, tied together at the wrists, with or without a support to the body at the thighs.100 The stauros was not necessarily a cross: it might be a simple pile or stake. In the Book of Acts (v, 30) Peter and the Apostles are made to speak of Jesus “whom ye slew, hanging him on a tree.” This [62]was in itself a common sacrificial mode; and all sacrificial traditions are more or less represented in the New Testament compilation.

But there was an irresistible compulsion to a divinizing of the cross as of the victim. Ages before the Christian era the symbol had been mystic and sacrosanct for Semites, for Egyptians, for Greeks, for Hindus; and the Sacred Tree of the cults of Attis, Dionysos, and Osiris lent itself alike to many symbolic significances.101 The cross had reference to the equinox, when the sacred tree was cut down; to the victim bound to it; to the four points of the compass; to the zodiacal sign Aries, thus connected with the sacrificial lamb;102 and to the universe as symbolized in the “orb” of the emperor, with the cross-lines drawn on it. The final Christian significance of the cross is a composite of ideas associated with it everywhere, from Mexico to the Gold Coast, in both of which regions it was or is a symbol of the Rain-God.103 The Dravidian victim, the deified sacrifice, was as-it-were crucified;104 as was a victim in a Batak sacrifice, where, as on the Gold Coast, the St. Andrew’s-cross form is enacted.105 The commonness of some such procedure in African sacrificial practice points to its general antiquity.

It would appear, too, that in the mysteries of the Saviour Gods not only a crucified aspect of the God but a simulation of that on the part of the devotees was customary. Osiris was actually represented in crucifix form;106 and in the ritual the worshipper became “one with Osiris,” apparently by being “joined unto the [63]sycamore tree.”107 When, then, in the Epistle to the Galatians108 we find “Paul” addressing the converts as “those before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly set forth (προεγράφη) crucified,” and declaring of himself:109 “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus,” we are at once pointed to the Syrian practice of stigmata, which appears to connect with both Osirian and Christian usage. In his remarkable account of the life of the sacred city of Hierapolis—a microcosm of eastern paganism—Lucian, after telling how children are sacrificed with the votive pretence that they are oxen, records that it is the universal practice to make punctures in the neck or in the hands, and that “all” Syrians bear such stigmata.110 One of the principal cults of the place was that of Attis, the castrated God of Vegetation, in whose mysteries the image of a youth was bound to a tree,111 with a ritual of suffering, mourning, resurrection and rejoicing. As Dionysos was also “he of the tree,” it is not improbable that he, who also died to rise again, may have been similarly adored. On the other hand, the representation of the Saviour Prometheus suffering in a crucified posture tells of an immemorial concept.112

For the Jews, finally, the cross symbol was already mystically potent, being a mark of salvation in connection with the massacre-sacrifice of the Passover, and by consequence salvatory in times of similar danger.113 When with this was combined the mystic significance of the sign in Platonic lore as pointing to the Logos,114 the mythic foundation for Christism was of the broadest. The crucifix is late in Christian art; but the wayside cross is as old as the cult of Hermes, God of boundaries.115 [64]

By way of accounting for the Jewish refusal to see in Jesus the promised Messiah, orthodox exegesis has spread widely the belief that it was no part of the Messianic idea that the Anointed One should die an ignominious death; and some of us began by accepting that account of the case. Clearly it was not the traditional or generally prevailing Jewish expectation. Yet in the Acts we find Peter and Paul alike (iii, 18; xvii, 3; xxvi, 23) made to affirm that the prophets in general predicted that Christ should suffer; and in Luke (xxiv, 26–27, 44–46) the same assertion is put in the mouth of Jesus. Either then the exegetes regard these assertions as unfounded or they admit that one school of interpretation in Jewry found a number of “prophetical” passages which foretold the Messiah’s exemplary death. And the A. V. margin refers us to Ps. xxii; Isa. l, 6; liii, 5, etc.; Dan. ix, 26.

Now, these are adequate though not numerous documentary grounds for the doctrine, on Jewish principles of interpretation. Jewish, indeed, the Messianic idea is not in origin: it is Perso-Babylonian;116 and the idea of a suffering or re-arising Messiah may well have come in from that side. But equally that may have found some Jewish acceptance. We can see very well that in Daniel “the Anointed One”—that is, “the Messiah” and “the Christ”—refers to the Maccabean hero; but that as well as the other passages, on Jewish principles, could apply to the Messiah of any period; and the Septuagint reading of Psalm xxii, 16: “They pierced my hands and my feet,” was a specification of crucifixion. It is not impossible that that reading was the result of the actual crucifixion of Cyrus, who had been specified as a “Christ” [65]in Isaiah. We have nothing to do here with rational interpretation: the whole conception of prophecy is irrational; but the construing of old texts as prophecies was a Jewish specialty.

When then a theistic rationalist of the last generation wrote of the gospel Jesus:—

he was far astray. Anything might be predicated of a Jewish Messiah. Not only had the Messianic Cyrus been crucified: the anointed and triumphant Judas Maccabæus, under whose auspices the Messianic belief had revived in Israel in the second century B.C., had finally fallen in battle; and his brother Simon, who was actually regarded as the Messiah, was murdered by his son-in-law.118

It is not here argued that the Messianic idea had been originally connected with the Jesus cult; on the contrary that cult is presented as a non-national one, surviving in parts of Palestine in connection with belief in an ancient deity and the practice of an ancient rite, in a different religious atmosphere from that of Messianism. The solution to which we shall find ourselves led is that at a certain stage the Messianic idea was grafted on the cultus; and this stage is likely to have begun after the fall of Jerusalem, when for most Jews the hope of a Maccabean recovery was buried. Then it was that the [66]idea of a Messiah “from above,”119 supernaturally empowered to make an end of the earthly scene, became the only plausible one; and here the conception of a Slain God who, like all slain Gods, rose again, invited the development. Jesuists could now make a new appeal to Jews in general upon recognizably Jewish lines. They were of course resisted, even as Sadducees were resisted by Pharisees, and vice versa. The statement in the Messiah article in the Encyclopædia Biblica that it is highly improbable that “the Jews” at the time of Christ believed in a suffering and atoning Messiah is nugatory. No one ever put such a proposition. But “the Jews” had in course of time added much to their creed, and might have added this, were it not that the Jesus cult became identified with Gentile and anti-Judaic propaganda.

In any case the idea arose among Jews, and quite intelligibly. The picture drawn by Isaiah was a standing incitement to the rise of a cult whose Hero-God had been slain. It was the one kind of Messianic cult which the Romans would leave unmolested. At the same time it committed the devotees to the position that the Messiah must come again, “in the clouds, in great glory”; and the Christian Church was actually established on that conception, which sufficed to sustain it till the earthly Providence of the State came to the rescue. Some of its modern adherents have not hesitated to boast that the common expectation of the speedy end of the world gave the infant Church a footing not otherwise obtainable. It was certainly a conditio sine qua non for Christianity in its infancy.

As for the item of “the carpenter,” we have seen120 not [67]only that that is mythic, but that the myth-theory alone can account for it.

In the first gospel (xxvii, 57 sq.) we have a comparatively simple version of the story of Joseph of Arimathea, a rich disciple of Jesus, who gets the dead body of the crucified, wraps it in clean linen, and lays it “in his own new tomb, which he had hewed out in the rock.” In Mark and Luke we have visibly elaborated accounts, in which, however, while the rock tomb is specified, it is not described as Joseph’s “own,” though it is represented as hitherto unused. Such a narrative points very directly to the Mithraic rite in which the stone image of the dead God, after being ritually mourned over, is laid in a tomb, which, Mithra being “the God out of the rock,” would naturally be of stone—a simple matter in a cult whose chief rites were always enacted in a cave.121 Details thus thrown into special prominence, while in themselves historically insignificant, can be understood only as mythically motived. So noticeable is the Mithraic parallel that the Christian Father who angrily records it exclaims, Habet ergo diabolus Christos suos—“the devil thus has his Christs.” In Mithraism the rock tomb, which is an item in a ritual of death and resurrection, is mythically motived throughout: in the gospel story, historically considered, the item is meaningless.

Obvious as is the mythological inference, it is met by the assertion that round Jerusalem “soil was so scarce that every one was buried in a rock tomb.”122 Such a criticism at once defeats itself. If every one was buried in a rock tomb, what was the point of the emphasised [68]detail in the gospels, which are so devoid of details of a really biographical character? Obviously, rock tombs were the specialty of the rich; and Joseph of Arimathea is described in all the synoptics as a man of social standing. Is the motive of the story nothing better than the desire to record that Jesus was richly buried?

“Scores of such tombs remain,” cries the critic: “were they all Mithraic?” The argument thus evaded is that there was no real tomb. If there was one thing which the early Jesuists, on the biographical theory, might be supposed to keep hold of, it was the place of their Lord’s sepulchre; yet nothing subsists but an admittedly false tradition. At Jerusalem, as one has put it, there are shown “two Zions, two Temple areas, two Bethanys, two Gethsemanes, two or more Calvarys, three Holy Sepulchres, several Bethesdas.”123 It is all myth. “There is not a single existing site in the Holy City that is mentioned in connection with Christian history before the year 326 A.D., when Constantine’s mother adored the two footprints of Christ on Olivet.”124 She was shown nothing else.125 “The position of the traditional sites of Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre, in the middle of the north quarter of Jerusalem, seems to have given rise to suspicions very early.”126 It well might. I have known a modern traveller who, on seeing the juxtaposed sites, at once realized that he was on the scene, if of anything, of an ancient ritual, not of events such as are narrated in the gospels. The traditional Golgotha is only fifty or sixty yards away from the Sepulchre;127 and near by is “Mount Moriah,” upon [69]which Abraham is recorded to have sought to sacrifice Isaac.

Colonel Conder, who accepts without misgiving all four gospel narratives, and attempts to combine them, avows that the “Garden Tomb” chosen by General Gordon, in the latterly selected Calvary, is impossible, being probably a work of the twelfth century;128 and for his own part, while inclined to stand by the new Golgotha, avows that “we must still say of our Lord as was said of Moses, ‘No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’”129 Placidly he concludes that “it is well that we should not know.”130 But what does the biographical theory make of such a conclusion? Its fundamental assumption is that of Renan, that the personality of Jesus was so commanding as to make his disciples imagine his resurrection. In elaborate and contradictory detail we have the legends of that; and yet we find that all trace of knowledge alike of place of crucifixion and tomb had vanished from the Christian community which is alleged to have arisen immediately after his ascension. The theory collapses at a touch, here as at every other point. There is no more a real Sepulchre of Jesus than there is a real Sepulchre of Mithra; and the bluster which offers the solution that at Jerusalem every one was buried in a rock tomb is a mere closing of the eyes to the monumental fact of the myth.

The critic is all the while himself committed to the denial that there was any tomb. Professing to follow the suggestion131 of M. Loisy that Jesus was thrown into “some common foss,” which in his hands becomes “the common pit reserved for crucified malefactors,” he affirms132 [70]that “the words ascribed in Acts xiii, 29, to Paul certainly favour the Abbé’s view.” They certainly do not. The text in question runs:

The Greek word is μνημεῖον—that used in the gospel story. There is thus no support whatever either for the suggestion of “a common foss” or for the allegation about “the common pit reserved for crucified malefactors”—a wholly unwarranted figment. The second “they” of the sentence is indefinite: it may mean either the Jews of the previous sentence or another “they”: but either way it expressly posits a tomb. Yet after this deliberate perversion of the document, which of course he does not quote, the critic proceeds (p. 302) to aver that “the genuine tradition of Jesus having been cast by his enemies into the common pit reserved for malefactors ... survived among the Jews”; and that the tomb story was invented as “the most effective way of meeting” the imagined statement. Such an amateur inventor of myth is naturally resentful of mythological tests!

If a suffering Messiah was arguable for the Jews, his resurrection after death was a matter of course. The biographical theory, that the greatness of the Founder’s personality led his followers to believe that he must rise again, is historically as unwarrantable as any part of the biographical case. The death and resurrection of the Saviour-God was an outstanding feature of all the most popular cults of the near East; Osiris, Herakles, Dionysos, Attis, Adonis, Mithra, all died to rise again; and a ritual [71]of burial, mourning, resurrection, and rejoicing was common to several. On any view such rituals were established in other contemporary cults; and it is this fact that makes it worth while in this inquiry to glance at a myth which is now abandoned by all save the traditionally orthodox.

On the uncritical assumption that nothing but pure Judaism could exist in Jewry in the age of the Herods, the notion of a dying and re-arising Hero-God was impossible among Jews save as a result of a stroke of new constructive faith. That simple negative position ignores not only the commonness of the belief in immortality among Jews (the Pharisees all held it) before the Christian era, but the special Jewish beliefs in the “translation” of Moses and Elijah, and the story of Saul, the witch of Endor, and the spirit of Samuel. The very belief that the risen Elias was to be the forerunner of the Messiah was a lead to the belief that the Messiah himself might come after a resurrection.

But it is practically certain that a liturgical resurrection was or had been practised in contemporary cults which had at one time enacted an annual sacrifice of the representative of the God, abstracted in myth as the death of the God himself. And in our own time the survival of an analogous practice has been noted in India. At the installation of the Rajahs of Keonjhur it was anciently the practice for the Rajah to slay a victim: latterly there is a mock-slaying, whereupon the mock-victim disappears. “He must not be seen for three days; then he presents himself to the Rajah as miraculously restored to life.”133 [72]

It does not follow from the proved existence of mystery-dramas in pagan cults in the Roman empire in the first century, C.E., that the Jesuists had a similar usage; but when we find in the New Testament an express reference to such parallelism, and in the early Fathers a knowledge that such parallels were drawn, we are entitled to ask whether there is not further evidence. When “Paul”1 tells his adherents: “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of daimons:2 ye cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of daimons,” he is complaining that some converts are wont to partake indifferently of the pagan and Christian sacraments. Few students now, probably, will assent to the view that the “tables of daimons,” with their similar rites, were sudden imitations of the Christian sacraments. They were of old standing. But the Jesuist rite also was in all likelihood much older, in some form, than the Christian era.

If there is any principle of comparative mythology that might fairly have been claimed as generally accepted by [73]experts a generation ago, it is that “the ritual is older than the myth: the myth derives from the ritual, not the ritual from the myth.”3 This principle, expressly posited by himself as by others before him, Sir James Frazer resolutely puts aside when he comes to deal with the Christian mythus. Disinterested science cannot assent to such a course.

That there were “tables” in the cults of many Gods is quite certain: temple-meals for devotees seem to have been normal in Greek religion;4 and in the cults of the Saviour-Gods there were special collocations of sacramental meals with “mysteries.” In particular, apart from the famous Eleusinian mysteries there were customary dramatic representations of the sufferings and death of the God in the cults of Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Dionysos: in addition to a scenic representation of the death of Herakles; and a special system of symbolic presentation of the life of the God in the rites of initiation of the worship of Mithra.5 It is not to be supposed that these religious representations amounted to anything like a complete drama, such as those of the great Attic theatre. Rather they represented early stages in the evolution which ended in Greek drama as we know it. Nearer analogues are to be found in the religious plays of various savage races in our own time.6 What the mystery-plays in general seem to have amounted to was a simple representation of the life and death of the God, with a sacramental meal.

The common objection to the hypothesis even of an elementary mystery-play in the pre-gospel stages of [74]Jesuism is that Hebrew literature shows no dramatic element, the Jews being averse from this as from other artistic developments of religious instinct. To this we reply, first, that the mystery-play, as distinguished from the primary sacrament, may or may not have been definitely Jewish at the outset; and that the drama as seen developed in the supplement to the gospels is certainly manipulated by Gentile hands. But the objection is in any case invalid, overlooking as it does:

1. The essentially dramatic character of the Song of Solomon.

2. The partly dramatic character of the Book of Job.

3. The dramatic form of the celebration of Purim.

4. The existence in the Hellenistic period of theatres at Damascus, Cæsarea, Gadara, Jericho and Scythopolis, the first two being, as we learn from Josephus, built by Herod the Great.

5. The chronic pressure of Hellenistic culture influence upon Jewish culture for centuries.

6. The prevalence of Greek culture influence at the city of Samaria, Damascus, Gaza, Scythopolis, Gadara, Panias (Cæsarea Philippi).

7. The “half-heathen” character of the districts of Trachonitis, Batanea, and Auranitis, east of the Lake of Gennesareth.7 Galilee, be it remembered, was late conquered “heathen” territory.

8. The long and deeply hostile sunderance, after the [75]Return, between the priestly and rabbinical classes and the common people of the provinces.8

9. The “resuscitation of obsolete mysteries” among the Jews, and the known survival of private sacraments and symbolic sacrifices of atonement.9

10. The actual production of dramatic Greek poetry on Biblical subjects by the Jewish poet Ezechiel (2nd c. B.C.).10

The eighth item needs to be specially insisted upon. It is frequently asserted that nothing in the nature of a heteroclite cult could subsist continuously in Jewry; that there were no religious ideas in the Jewish world save those of the Sacred Books of the Rabbis.11 This is a historical delusion. The historical and prophetic books of the Old Testament affirm a constant resort to pagan rites and Gods before the Exile. There is official record of bitter strife and sunderance between those of the Return and the people they found on the soil. Malachi sounds the note of strife, lamenting popular lukewarmness, sacrilege and unbelief. The simple fact that after the Exile Hebrew was no longer the common language, and that the people spoke Aramaic or “Chaldee,” tells of a highly artificial relation between hierarchy and populace. Never can even Judæa have been long homogeneous. “Neither in Galilee nor Peræa must we conceive of the Jewish element as pure and unmixed. In the shifting course of history Jews and Gentiles had been here so often, and in such a variety of ways, thrown together, that the attainment of exclusive predominance by the Jewish element must be counted among the impossibilities. It was only in Judæa that this was at least approximately arrived at [76]by the energetic agency of the scribes during the course of a century.”12

The assumption commonly made is that all Jews and “naturalized” Jews were of one theistic way of thinking, like orthodox Christians, and, like these, could not imagine any other point of view. If for that entirely one-sided conception the inquirer will even substitute one in terms of the mixed realities of life in Christendom he will be much nearer the truth. Over and above the hatreds between sects and factions holding by the same formulas and Sacred Books, there were in Jewry the innovators, then as now: the minds which varied from the documentary norm in all directions, analogues of the devotees of “Christian Science,” Bâbists, British Buddhists, Swedenborgians, Shakers, Second Adventists, Mormons, and so on, who from a more or less common basis radiated to all the points of the compass of creed. What faces us in the rise of Christianity is the development of one of those variants, on lines of adaptation to popular need, with an organization on lines already tested in the experience of Judaism.

Among the common cravings of the age was the need for a near God,13 one ostensibly more in touch with human sorrows and sufferings than the remote Supreme God. For the earlier Hebrews, Yahweh was a tribal God like Moloch or Chemosh, fighting for his people (when they deserved it) like other tribal Gods; a magnified man who talked familiarly with Abraham and Sarah, and wrestled with Jacob.14 Even then, the attractions of other cults set up constant resort to them by many Yahwists, unless [77]the historical Sacred Books are as illusory upon this as upon other topics. To say nothing of the continual charges against Jewish kings, from Solomon downwards, of setting up alien worships, and the express assertion of Jeremiah15 that in Judah there were as many Gods as cities, and in Jerusalem as many Baal altars as streets, we have the equally explicit assertion in Ezekiel16 that “women weeping for Tammuz” were to be seen in or at the Temple itself. Now, Tammuz was a Semitic deity, borrowed, it would seem, from the Akkadians,17 an original or variant of Adonis, the very type of the Saviour-God we are now tracing. Tammuz, like Jesus, was “the only-begotten son.” If it be argued that the worship of Tammuz must have disappeared during or after the Exile, since it would not be tolerated in the Second Temple, the answer is that Saint Jerome expressly declares that in his day the pagans celebrated the worship of Tammuz at the very cave in which Jesus was said to have been born at Bethlehem18—a detail of some significance in our inquiry. Tammuz = Adonis = “the Lord.” That worship, indeed, might conceivably be a revival occurring after the fall of Jerusalem; but to say that there can have been no folklore about Tammuz in Jewry or Galilee or Samaria between the time of Ezekiel and that of Jerome would be to make an utterly unwarranted assertion. The belief may even have survived under another God-name.

Even if we assume the earlier Jewish cult of Tammuz to have been swept away in the Captivity, the new conditions would tend to stimulate similar popular cults. When, after the Exile, the conception of Yahweh began under Perso-Babylonian influences to alter in the direction of a universalist theism, the common tendency to seek a nearer God was bound to come into play. There is no more universal feature in religious history than the recession of the High Gods.24 The more “supreme” a deity becomes, in popular religion, the more generally does popular devotion tend to elicit Son-Gods or Goddesses who seem more likely to be “hearers and answerers of prayer.” Sacred Books certainly tend to check such a reversion; and in Islam the check has been successful in virtue of the very fact that Allah, like the early Yahweh, is in effect conceived as a racial God, or God of a single cult. But the tendency is seen at work all over the earth.

The vogue of Apollo, of Dionysos, of Herakles, of Tammuz-Adonis, of Krishna, of Buddha, of Balder, of Athênê, of the Virgin Mary, of the countless deities propitiated by savage peoples who ignore their Supreme Gods, are all [81]testimonies to the natural craving of religious ignorance for a near God. The same craving certainly subsisted among the Hebrews in so far as it was not completely laid by organized legalism. And seeing that the redactors of the Sacred Books had actually reduced many early deities—Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Daoud = David, Moses, Joshua, and Samson—to the status of patriarchs and heroes,25 the craving would among some be relatively strengthened. Jews who in time of trouble chronically reverted to alien Gods and alien rites, even as did the Greeks and Romans, could not conceivably fail altogether to adopt or cherish cults analogous to those of Dionysos, Adonis, Osiris, so popular among the neighbouring peoples.

The hypothesis forced upon us by the whole history, then, is that there had subsisted in Jewry, in original connection with a sacrificial rite of Jesus the Son of the Father, a Sacrament of a Hero-God Jesus, whose Name was strong to save. If it took the form of a Sacrament of Twelve, with the ritual-representative of the God, it would be closely analogous to the traditional Sacrament of Twelve in which Aaron [the Anointed One = Messiah] and the [twelve] elders of Israel “ate bread with Moses’ father-in-law before God.”26 Behind that narrative lies a ritual practice. A sacrament of bread and wine is further indicated in the mention of the mythic Melchisedek, “King of Peace” and priest of “El Elyon,”27 “without father and without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days or end of life, but made like unto the Son of God,” who thus became for Christists a type of Jesus.28 A sacramental banquet of twelve seems to have [82]been involved in the sacrificial ritual of the Temple itself, where a presiding priest and twelve others daily officiated.29

That Galilean or other Jews or semi-Jews, always in a partly hostile relation to priests, scribes, and Pharisees, should in an age of chronic war, disaster and revolution, maintain an old private sacrament, with a subordinate worship of a Hero-God Jesus whose body and blood had once literally and now symbolically brought salvation, is not an unlikely but a likely hypothesis. The gospels themselves indicate an attitude of demotic hostility alike to the king, the priests, the scribes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees. It is not pretended that before and apart from Jesus there was no such hostility, and that he generated it by his teaching. In a united community such hostility could not be so generated. It was there to start with. If then cults of Dionysos and Attis and Adonis, the annually dying and suffering demigods, could openly subsist in the Hellenistic world alongside of the State cults of Zeus and the other chief Gods, a secret cult of a Hero-God Jesus could subsist in some part of Jewry, with its survivals of rural paganism and its many contacts and mixtures with Samaritan schism and Hellenistic culture. Yet further, if the popular needs of the Hellenistic world could elicit and maintain a multitude of private religious associations, each with its own sacramental meal,30 the same needs could elicit and maintain them elsewhere.

To this thesis it is objected that we have no mention of the existence of a Jesus cult of any kind in the Hebrew books. But that is a necessity of the case. The Sacred Books would naturally exclude all mention of a cult which in effect meant the continued deification of Joshua,31 who had long been reduced to the status of a mere hero in [83]the history. That Joshua is a non-historical personage has long been established by modern criticism.32 That he did not do what he is said in the Book of Joshua to have done is agreed by all the “higher” critics. Who or what then was Joshua? He is in many respects the myth-duplicate of Moses, whose work he repeats, passing the Jordan as did Moses the Red Sea, appointing his twelve, “renewing” the rite of circumcision, and writing the law upon stones. But he notably excels Moses in that he causes the sun and moon to stand still by his word;33 and as this is cited from “Jasher,” he is possibly the older figure of the two.

And for the Jews he retained a special status. In his Book he is made (with a “thus saith the Lord”) to give a list of the conquests effected by him against “the Amorite, and the Perizzite, and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Girgashite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite.” In Exodus xx, this very list of conquests, barring “the Girgashite,” is promised, with this prelude:—

The Angel who possesses or embodies the secret or magical name34 is to do what Joshua in the historical myth says has been done under his leadership:35 both passages stand. Further, the Angel of the passage in Exodus is in the Talmud identified with the mystic Metatron,36 who corresponds generally with the Logos of Philo Judæus, [84]the Sophia or Power of the Gnostics, and the Nous of Plotinus. The eminent Talmudic scholar, Emmanuel Deutsch, surmised that the Metatron is “most probably nothing but Mithra,” the Persian Sun-God; and as the promised Divine One in the Septuagint version of Isaiah, ix, 6, bears the Mithraic titles of “Angel of Great Counsel” and Judge, there is perhaps ground for some such surmise. It may have been, indeed, that the redactors of the sacred books originally meant to substitute the Angel for Joshua in the esteem of the people, giving the former the credit for the exploits of the latter; but such a manipulation would be in itself a confession of Joshua’s renown. And in the Samaritan Targums “the Angel of God” commonly stood for the divine names Jehovah and Elohim.37

However that may be, the pseudo-historical Joshua could not have been elevated by the Talmudists to a divine status in other regards had he been a historical personage; and when we find him specially honoured in Samaria38 we [85]can draw no inference save that he was once a Palestinian deity. The fact that the name means “Saviour”39 is of capital importance. In Jewish tradition and in his Book he is specially associated with the choosing of the Paschal lamb, the rite of the Passover, and the rite of circumcision.40 Here then is the presumptive God for the early rite of Jesus the Son of the Father. As we shall see later, “the Angel of the Lord” is found to equate with “the Word of the Lord”—another cue for the gospel-makers. And in the Jewish New Year liturgy, to this day, Joshua-Jesus figures as the “Prince of the Presence,” which again is supposed to identify him with Metatron as = μετα θρόνου, “behind the throne.” Only as a Palestinian deity thus subordinated to Yahweh is he explicable. And as the “Angel of the Presence” again occurs in Isaiah, lxiii, 9, figuring as Saviour and Redeemer, it is fairly clear that there was some Jewish doctrine which made of Joshua a Saviour deity.

A high authority41 pronounces that the “Angel of the Presence” is “probably Michael, who was the guardian angel of Israel.” But Michael is a wholly post-exilic figure: was there no Hebrew prototype? However that may be, the ritual connection of the name Jesus (Joshua) with the title of Prince of the Presence has survived the intervention of Babylonian angelology, and remains to testify to a status for Joshua which can be explained only as a result of his original Godhood.42 [86]

Finally, we have seen that a rite of “Jesus the Son,” otherwise known as the “Week of the Son,” was actually specified by the Talmudists of the period of the fall of the Temple. Taken with the item of the name Jesus Barabbas, “Jesus the Son of the Father,” and the five-days’ duration of the ritual of the sacrificed Mock-King, it completes a body of Jewish evidence for the pre-Christian currency of the name Jesus as a cult-name of some kind. It is now possible to see at once the force of the primary thesis of Professor W. B. Smith47 that the phrase τὰ περὶ τοῦ Ἰησοῦ, “the things concerning the Jesus,” in the Gospels and the Acts,48 tells of a body of Jesus-lore of some kind prior to the gospel story; and also the significance of the fact that the narrative of the Acts represents the new apostle as finding Jesus-worshippers, albeit in small numbers, wherever he went. [89]

To suppose that this could mean a far-reaching and successful propaganda by “the Twelve” in the short period represented to have elapsed between the Crucifixion and the advent of Paul is not merely to take as history, or summary of history, the miracle of Pentecost, but to ignore the rest of the narrative. First we are told (viii, 1) that after the martyrdom of Stephen the Christists “were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judæa and Samaria, except the apostles.” It is only to Samaria that Philip goes at that stage, and his doings are on the face of them mythical. Yet Saul on his conversion finds the “disciple” Ananias at Damascus. Then Peter “went throughout all parts” (ix, 32), reaching Lydda, where he finds “saints”; and then it is that “the apostles and the brethren that were in Judæa heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God” (xi, 1). It is after this that “they that were scattered abroad upon the tribulation that arose about Stephen travelled as far as Phœnicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to none save only to Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who when they were come to Antioch spake unto the Greeks [or Grecian Jews] also, preaching the Lord Jesus” (xi, 19). Already there is an ecclesia at Antioch (xiii, 1) with nothing to account for its existence.

At this stage it is represented that Saul and Barnabas customarily preach Jesuism in the Jewish synagogues; and that only after “contradiction” from jealous Jews at Antioch of Pisidia do they “turn to the Gentiles” (xiii, 46), continuing, however, to visit synagogues, till the Jewish hostility becomes overwhelming. At Jerusalem, meanwhile, after all the gospel invective against the Pharisees, there are found “certain of the sect of the Pharisees who believed,” and who stand firm for circumcision. [90]Ere long we find at Ephesus the Alexandrian Jew Apollos, who “taught carefully the things concerning Jesus, knowing only the baptism of John,” having been “orally instructed in the way of the Lord” (xviii, 25), but had to be taught “more carefully” by Priscilla and Aquila. Then he passes on to Corinth. Paul in turn (xix) shows at Ephesus, where he finds other early Jesuists, that they of the baptism of John, though by implication they held that “Jesus was the Christ,” had not received “the Holy Ghost,” which went only with the baptism of Jesus—the baptism which only the fourth gospel alleges (with contradictions), the synoptics knowing nothing of any baptism by Jesus or the disciples; and only Matthew and Mark even alleging that after resurrection he prescribed it. In all this the hypnotized believer sees no untruth. To the eye of reason there is revealed a process of primitive cult-building.

In whatever direction we turn, we thus find in the Jesuist documents themselves the traces of a “pre-Christian” Jesuism and Christism. At Ephesus, the believers “were in all about twelve men”—the number required for the primitive rite. The subsequent statement (xix, 9–10) that after Paul had debated daily for two years at Ephesus “all they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks,” is typical of the method of the pseudo-history. Either the whole narrative is baseless fiction or there were prior developments of the Jesus-cult.

It may be argued, indeed, that such a work of manipulation as the Acts is no evidence for anything, and that its accounts indicating a prior spread of Jesuism are no more to be believed than its miracle stories. But however fictitious be its accounts of any one person, it is certain that there was a cult; and all critics are now [91]agreed that the book is a redaction of previous matter—probably of Acts of Paul, Acts of Peter, Acts of the Apostles, and so on. And whereas the most advantageous fiction from the point of view of the growing “catholic” church would be an account of the apostles as everywhere making converts, stories of their finding them must be held to have been imposed on the redactor by his material. There also it must be held to stand for some reality in the history of the cult, for the same reason, that there was nothing to be gained by inventing such a detail.

Still we are met by the objection that whatever the Acts may say the gospels give no indication of any previous Jesus-cult. But that is a position untenable for the biographical school save by a temporary resort to the theory of myth-making. As Professor W. B. Smith has pointed out, the gospels expressly represent that the disciples healed the sick in the name of Jesus in places where Jesus had never been. For the supernaturalists, that is only one more set of miracles. But the biographical school, though it is much inclined to credit Jesus with occult “healing powers,” can hardly affirm such healing by means of a magic name, and has no resource but to dismiss all such matter.49 Yet why should the evangelists have framed such a narrative save on the knowledge that the name of Jesus was a thing to conjure with in Palestinian villages?

It is true that the story is fully told only of the mission of the Seventy. In Matthew the Twelve are “sent” [92]out but neither go nor return, for the narrative continues with them present. In Mark and Luke, the Twelve go and return without reporting anything, though Mark tells that they preached repentance, cast out many devils, and healed many sick by anointing them with oil. Evidently the mission was a heedless addition to the older gospel or gospels: the third attempts to give it some completeness. It is only the Seventy who make a report; and it is only of them (Lk. x, 1) that we are told they were to go to places “whither he himself was about to come.” As the episode of the Seventy is in effect given up as myth even by many supernaturalists (who feel that, if historical, the episode could not have been overlooked in Matthew and Mark), the biographical school are so far entitled to say that for them the record does not posit a previously current Jesus-Name. But what idea then do they connect with the sending-out of the Twelve, if not the kind of idea that is associated with the sending-out of the Seventy?

M. Loisy feels “authorized to believe” (1) that Jesus in some fashion chose twelve disciples and sent them out to preach the simple “evangel” that “the Kingdom of God was at hand”—that is, merely the evangel of John the Baptist over again; and (2) that “it seems” that they went two by two in the Galilean villages, and were “well received: their warning was listened to: sick persons were presented to them to heal, and there were cures.” To say this is to say, if anything, that for the first Christians the Name of Jesus was held to have healing power before his deification, and that it was a known name.

But we have stronger documentary grounds than these. The Apocalypse is now by advanced critics in general recognized to have been primarily a Judaic, not [93]a Christian document.50 The critics apparently do not realize that this verdict carries in it the pronouncement that Jesus was probably a divine name for some section of the Jews before the rise of the Christian cult. The twelve apostles enter only in an interpolation:51 in the main document we have the “four and twenty elders” of an older cult,52 answering to the twenty-four Counsellor Gods of Babylonia. Even if we assign the book to a “Christian” writer of the earliest years, at the very beginning of the Pauline mission,53 we are committed to connecting the cult at that stage with the doctrine of the Logos,54 with the Alpha and Omega, and with the Mithraic or Babylonian lore of the Seven Spirits. Of the gospel story there is no trace beyond the mention of slaying: on the other hand the Child-God of the dragon-story is wholly non-Christian, and derives from Babylon.

The entire book, in short, raises the question whether the Jesus-cult may not have come in originally (as so much of Judaism did), or been reinforced, from the side of Babylon, down even to the name of Nazareth, since there was a Babylonian Nasrah. As Samaria, the seat of the special celebration of Joshua, is historically known to have been colonised from Assyria and Babylon, the possibilities are wide. Suffice it that the Apocalypse indicates a strong Babylonian element in some of the earliest real documentary matter we have in connection with the Jesuist cult in the New Testament; and at the same time makes certain the pre-Gospel currency of a Jesus-cult among professed Jews.

Yet another clue obtrudes itself in the Epistle of Jude—or, as it ought to be named, Judas—a document notably Jewish in literary colour. Mr. Whittaker55 was [94]the first of the myth-theorists to lay proper stress on the fact that the reading “Jesus” (= Joshua) in verse 5,56 alone makes the passage intelligible:—

The reference is certainly to Joshua, who is here quasi-deified. Plainly, as Mr. Whittaker observes, “the binding of erring angels can only be attributed to a supernatural being, and not to a mere national hero.”

And, as Mr. Whittaker also notes, we have yet another clear indication from the Jewish-Christian side that Joshua in Jewish theology had a heavenly status. In the “Sibylline Oracles” there occurs the passage:—

“The identification of Christ with Joshua,” remarks the orthodox translator cited, “is a mixture of Jewish and Christian legend (sic) which is unique. It is no question of symbolism here, as Joshua in Christian writings is treated as a type of Christ, but rather the confusion is such as might be made by an ignorant [95]person reading, Heb. iv, 8, ‘if Jesus had given them rest,’ and concluding that Jesus Christ led the Jews into Canaan. The author, indeed, identifies himself with the Jews, as where he prays (vers. 327 ff.): ‘Spare Judea, Almighty Father, that we may see thy judgments’; and were it credible that the whole book was the work of one author, we should regard his religion as syncretic, and in full accord neither with law nor gospel. But the book ... is of composite character. One writer may have been a Christian; another filches occasionally from Christian sources, but has no lively faith in Christ: like many of his countrymen at this time, he suspends his judgment, and instead of making a decision expends his energies in denunciation of the hated power of Rome, and in speculations concerning the future.”

It matters not whether the writer was or was not a confident Christian: Judaic by upbringing or tuition he certainly was; and his identification of Jesus the Christ with Joshua is one more of the proofs that for many Jews Joshua had a quasi-divine status, as was fitting for a personage who “made the sun stand still.” Taken collectively, the proofs cannot be overridden or explained away. Joshua was for the Jews of the Hellenistic period the actual founder of the rite of circumcision:59 that is to say, mythologically, he was the God of the rite. But still more weighty is the evidence that his name lived on as that of the God-victim of a kindred rite; and it is on that basis that there was founded the rite which is for Christianity what circumcision had been for Judaism. Circumcision is a rite of redemption, the giving of a symbolic part of the body to “redeem” the whole—a surrogate for the Passover sacrifice of the first-born, developed into a racial theocratic rite. It is [96]significant that the Saviour-God of this rite becomes the Saviour-God of the rite offered in place of that of the Passover, whereby the primordial human sacrifice is re-typified in that of the deity who once for all dies for all. It is upon such roots of pre-historic religion that the world-religions grow.

That there was an actual mystery-drama behind the gospel tragedy is revealed by the document itself, which is demonstrably not primarily a narrative at all, but a drama transcribed, with a minimum of necessary elucidation. Only the habit of reading with uncritical reverence can conceal from a student the dramatic bareness and brevity of the record in the synoptics—a record which in the fourth gospel is grafted, without any real development, on a protracted discourse that only artificially suggests circumstantial reality. Chapter xiii is as it were inserted in the middle of that discourse; and chapter xiv proceeds as from the end of chapter xii. The original document cannot have had the story of the tragedy in this form. At the close of chapter xiv the “Arise, let us go hence,” is a slight artifice to suggest action where there is none. Only at chapter xviii is the action resumed; and it is as bare and formal as in the synoptics. Broadly speaking, the action is something superadded. A long discourse has been wrapped round the first section, but without altering its compressed character. The synoptics know nothing of the Johannine discourses: the Johannine document knows no more of a historic episode than do the synoptics: it can only invent monologues.

Reading the synoptic account, we find a series of [97]separate scenes, with the barest possible explanatory connection and introduction. The treason of Judas, in itself a myth,60 is announced beforehand in three sentences, with no sign of reflection on the meaninglessness of the situation posited. A mystico-mythical episode of a message from the Master to one who is to prepare the passover meal comes next. In Matthew the message is to “such a man”—undescribed: in Mark, a man carrying a pitcher of water is to be seen and followed, and “wheresoever he shall enter in” the message is to be delivered to “the goodman of the house,” and the room will be shown ready. To read biography in this, or to ascribe a “primitive” trustworthiness to the Marcan story, is to cast out criticism.

But the Supper itself is presented with the same ceremonial effect; the whole content being the mention of the betrayal and the dogmatic meaning of the ritual. In Mark, the whole episode of the Supper occupies eight sentences: in Matthew, where Judas puts his question and gets his answer, ten. After the singing of a hymn, the scene changes instantly to the Mount of Olives. No reason is assigned for the going out into the night: it is taken for granted that the Divine One is going to his death, of his own will and prevision. Either we believe this, making him a God, or we recognize a myth. Biography it cannot be. And drama it clearly is.

On the Mount, there is another brief dialogue, committing Peter and the other disciples—a wholly hostile presentment. Again the scene changes to Gethsemane, where the three selected disciples with whom Jesus withdraws actually sleep while he utters the prayer set down. There was thus no one to hear it. Any biographical theory which is concerned to respect verisimilitude [98]must here recognize something else than narrative, and will presumably posit invention. But why should invention take this peculiar form? If the object was to impeach the disciples—and they certainly are impeached—is it not an impossibly crude device to tell of their sleeping throughout the prayer and its repetition, leaving open the retort: “You report the words of the prayer: from whom did you get them if not from those disciples, who must have heard them?” But if we suppose the scene first presented dramatically, no perplexity or counter-sense is involved. The impeachment is effectual; the episode is seen; and no one is concerned, in presence of a drama, to ask how certain words came to be known to have been spoken by any personage. It is the reduction to narrative form that betrays the dramatic source. And when we find in both Matthew and Mark, which clearly embody the same original document, this sequence:

the documentary crux, which the biographical school makes vainly violent attempts to solve, is at once solved when we realize that in the transcription two speeches have accidentally been combined. The drama must have gone thus:—

[99]

The transcriber, missing an exit and an enter, has simply run two speeches together; and the gospel copyists have faithfully followed their copy, putting “they wist not what to answer him” in the wrong place. In an original narrative the combination could not happen. In the transcription of the copy of a play it could easily happen. We find instances in the printing of the plays of Shakespeare and other early dramatists.

Where is the difficulty? It is precisely in drama, and in drama alone, that the impossible narrative can pass as possible. Action on the stage is always telescoped: time is always more or less ignored, because the selected action must go on continuously. Again and again in Shakespeare (or rather in pseudo-Shakespeare) we find irrelevant and futile scenes interposed to create the semblance of a time interval; but in Othello and Measure for Measure, to name no other plays, the action is impossibly telescoped. The explanation is that in the psychology of the theatre time is disregarded, save by the most critical. The simple-minded audience of devotees which witnessed the Christist mystery-play would never ask “How did they hunt up those witnesses in Jerusalem at midnight?” Solvitur ambulando, so to speak: they saw the trial. It is when the play is transmuted to dead narrative, wherein a number of questions and answers are reduced to a few bald statements, that the impossibility obtrudes itself.

Our critic defies us to explain how such a trial came to be put in a drama. It is hard to see why he is puzzled. The general object of the whole tragedy is to show Jesus as the victim, first, of the priests, elders, and scribes—the Jewish ecclesiastical order, whose hostility to Jesus is a constant datum of the gospels. At this stage the mystery-play has become a Gentile-Christian performance, in which even the Jewish disciples play a poor part, while the official class are the mainspring of the tragedy. How could the priests be more effectively impeached than by exhibiting them as producing plainly suborned [101]evidence to convict Jesus? Lord Tennyson, in our time, put a bad freethinker in a bad play to discredit freethinking. And he had non-canonical as well as canonical precedents. The apocryphal “Acts of Pilate” appears to follow a drama in which a great many gospel episodes were dramatized as well as the trial.62

As for the critic’s assertion that a midnight search for witnesses is not posited in the narrative, it is again impossible to follow his reasoning. If the ἐζήτουν ... μαρτυρίαν of Mark means “sifted evidence,” the ἐζήτουν ψευδομαρτυρίαν of Matthew means “sifted false evidence.” The theory of “sifting” is impossible. I have had the curiosity to examine ten translations—Latin, German, modern Greek, Italian, French, and English, without finding that one translator has ever dreamt of it. All agree with the current English rendering, which means sought [false] testimony, because no other rendering is possible. The record goes on, in Mark:—

According to the new theory, the prosecution “sifted evidence” which “stood up,” as did the high priest.

Defending his thesis, the exegete argues63 that the “evidence” was not written but oral; that is to say, the authorities had collected witnesses during the day and had then kept them till midnight or later without ascertaining what evidence they were able to give. The narratives neither say nor hint anything of the kind; whereas if such had been supposed to be the fact it would have been the natural thing to say so.

But the thing alleged is unnatural. On the one hand we are asked to believe that the authorities had before sunset collected a number of witnesses, when they could not have any certainty of making the arrest; on the other [102]hand we are to believe that with all this extraordinary fore-planning they had not taken the normal precaution of ascertaining what the witnesses could say. In the transcribed drama as it stands, the authorities are represented as knaves; in the interpretation before us, framed to save the credit of the narrative, they are represented as childishly foolish. The narrative as we have it defies its vindicators. It tells that witnesses were sent for; and only in a drama, in which time-conditions are ignored, could such a fiction have been resorted to.] #/

The story is equally dramatic to the close. Everything is scenic, detached, episodic: it is left to Luke (who elaborates the Supper scene; gives a positive command of Jesus for the future celebration where the previous documents merely show the rite as it was practised; puts the denial of Peter before the trial; and drops the whole procedure of the witnesses) to interpose the episode of the daughters of Jerusalem between the Roman trial and the crucifixion; and even that is parenthetic and dramatic, as are the burial and the seeking; whereafter, in Mark, the gospel abruptly ends. The rest is supplementary documentation. How much of that may have been dramatized, it is impossible to say. That there had been evolution in the mystery-play is involved in our conception of it. It began with the simple Sacrament, at a remote period, the Sacrament itself being evolved from a primitive and savage to a symbolic form, the God being probably first represented, as in kindred rites,64 by his sacrificial priest; and later by the victim.65 It is after the primitive and localized cult seeks the status of a world-religion that the ritual developes into a quasi-history; and we can see conflicting influences in that. One writer causes Jesus to be buffeted and mocked at [103]the Jewish trial, as if to counterbalance the derision in the Roman trial; even as Luke interposes a third trial before Herod, to make sure that the guilt should ultimately lie with the Jewish government. In the action as in the doctrine, the Gentile influence finally predominates.

The important point to note in the documentary evolution is that the mystery-play remained a secret representation for some time after written gospels were current. To begin with, all the mystery-plays of the age were on the same footing of secrecy. What takes place finally in the Jesuist cult is a simple adding-on of the mystery-play to the gospels. It was not for nothing that the school of B. Weiss, seeking to expiscate a “Primitive Gospel” from the synoptics, made it end before the Tragedy. This was what they were bound to do by their documentary tests; and the common objection that such an ending is very improbable—a difficulty avowed by Weiss and weakly sought to be solved by some of the school—is seen in the light of the myth-theory to be a difficulty only for those who assume not merely the historicity of a Jesus but the historicity of the whole tragedy story down to the resurrection. Once it is realized that that story is a dramatic development of an originally simple myth of sacrificial death, the documentary difficulty disappears.

Some account, indeed, the Jesuists must have given of the death of their God or Son-God when they reached the stage of systematic propaganda; and this was in all likelihood a bare statement such as we have in the Epistles, that he was put to a humiliating death and rose again. It is very likely that accounts of the manner of the death varied in the first written accounts, as they certainly would in the traditions or rituals current at various points; and we may grant to the documentary critics that various versions may have attached to early forms or sources of Mark and Matthew. A general statement that Jesus was the “Son of the Father,” and that he had been put to death with ignominy, would elicit, as has been above argued, the objection that “Jesus Barabbas” was certainly no divine personage. The Barabbas story, then, explaining away that objection, is a comparatively late development, of which, accordingly, we find not a single trace in the Acts or the Epistles. But similarly the Supper is not described in the Acts or the Epistles apart from the plainly interpolated account in First Corinthians. And at the outset the Supper would be emphatically secret matter, not to be written down.

Whatever conclusion, then, was given to the earlier gospel or gospels, it did not include that. As little would it give the Agony, or the trials before the Sanhedrim and before Pilate, throwing the guilt of the [105]tragedy on the Jews, or the episodes disparaging the apostles. Judas is in all likelihood primarily a figure of a Gentile form of the play, being just Judaios, a Jew,66 created by Gentile or Samaritan animus. What inferribly happened was a dramatic development, by Gentile hands, of a primarily simple mystery drama, consisting of the Supper, the death, and the resurrection, into the play as it now stands transcribed in the synoptics, with the Betrayal, the Agony, the Denial, the Trials, and the dramatic touches in the crucifixion scene.

The school of Weiss, then, on our theory, reached by comparatively consistent methods of documentary criticism a relatively sound conclusion. The earlier forms of the gospel certainly had not the present conclusion; and whatever simple conclusions they had were bound to be superseded when the complete mystery play was transcribed—the very transcription being a reason for their disappearance. At some point, probably by reason of the Christian reaction against all pagan procedure, the play, which in its present form must always have been special to a town or towns, was dropped, and though the tendency was to keep the Eucharist an advanced rite for initiates, and withhold it from catechumens,67 the reduction of the Tragedy to narrative form became a necessity for purposes of propaganda. Without it, the gospels were inadequate to their purposes; and it supplied the needed confutation of the charge that Jesus was simply a victim in the Barabbas rite. [106]

This said, we have still to face the main problem of the evolution of the Jesus-cult into a world-religion in which the God Sacrificed to the God becomes also the Messiah of the Jews and the Teacher of those who believe in him. And the tracing of that evolution must obviously be difficult. The process of extracting true out of false history is always so; and where the concocted history and its contingent literature are the main documents, we can in the nature of things reach only general conceptions. But general conceptions are attainable; and we must frame them as scientifically as we can. [107]

Professor W. B. Smith, whose brilliant, independent, and powerful advocacy of the myth-theory has brought conviction to readers not otherwise attracted by it, has stressed two propositions in regard to the evolution of the Jesus-cult. One is that the movement was “multifocal,” starting from a number of points;1 the other that the essential and inspiring motive was the monotheistic conception, as against all forms of polytheism; Jesus being conceived as “the One God.”2 That the first proposition is sound and highly important, I am convinced. But after weighing the second with a full sense of the acumen that guides all Professor Smith’s constructive speculation, I remain of the opinion that it needs considerable modification.3 In clearing up these two issues, we shall go a long way towards establishing a clear theory of the whole historical process.

In the first place, a “multifocal” movement, a growth from many points, is involved in all our knowledge of the highly important matters of the history of the early Christian sects, and the non-canonical Christian documents. Perhaps the proposition is even more widely true than [108]Professor Smith indicates. To begin with, we find at an early stage the sects of (1) Ebionites and (2) Nazarenes or Nazareans, in addition to (3 and 4) the Judaizing and Gentilizing movements associated with “the Twelve” and Paul respectively; and yet further (5) the movement associated with the name of Apollos. Further we have to note (6) the Jesuism of the Apocalypse, partly extra-Judaic in its derivation; and (7) that of the ninth section of the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, which emerges as a quasi-Ebionitic addition to a purely Judaic document—not yet interpolated by the seventh section. Yet further, we have (8) the factors accruing to the religious epithet “Chrēstos”4 (= good, gracious), which specially attached to the underworld Gods of the Samothracian mysteries; also to Hermes, Osiris, and Isis; and (9 and 10) the Christist cult-movements connected with the non-Jesuine Pastor of Hermas and the sect of the Eleesaites.5 And this is not an exhaustive list.

(11) That there was a general Jewish ferment of Messianism on foot in the first century is part of the case of the biographical school. That there actually arose in the first and second centuries various Jewish “Christs” is also a historical datum. But the biographical school are not wont in this connection to avow the inference that alone can properly be drawn from the phrase of Suetonius as to a movement of Jewish revolt at Rome occurring in the reign of Claudius impulsore Chresto, “(one) Chrestus instigating.”6 This is not an allusion to the Greek epithet Chrēstos before referred to: it is either a specification of an individual otherwise unknown or the reduction to vague historic status of the source [109]of a general ferment of Jewish insurrection in Rome, founding on the expectation of the Christos, the Messiah. In the reign of Claudius, such a movement could not have been made by “Christians” on any view of the history. As the words were pronounced alike they were interchangeably written, Chrestos (preserved in the French chrétien) being used even among the Fathers. Giving to the phrase of Suetonius the only plausible import we can assign to it, we get the datum that among the Jews outside Palestine there was a generalized movement of quasi-revolutionary Christism which cannot well have been without its special literature.

(12) In this connection may be noted the appearance of a quasi-impersonal Messianism and Christism on the border-land of Jewish and early Christian literature. Of this, a main source is the Book of Enoch, of which the Messianic sections are now by general consent assigned to the first and second centuries B.C. There the Messiah is called the Just or Righteous One;7 the Chosen One;8 Son of Man;9 the Anointed;10 and once “Son of the Woman.”11 Here already we have the imagined Divine One more or less concretely represented. He is premundane, and so supernatural, yet not equal with God, being simply God’s deputy.12 When then we find in the so-called Odes of Solomon, recently recovered from an Ethiopic version, a Messianic psalmody in which, apparently in the first Christian century, “the name of the gospel is not found, nor the name of Jesus;” and “not a single saying of Jesus is directly quoted,”13 it is critically inadmissible to pronounce the Odes Christian, especially when a number are admitted to have no Christian characteristics.14 [110]When, too, the writer admittedly appears to be speaking ex ore Christi, a new doubt is cast on all logia so-called. Such literature, whether or not it be pronounced Gnostic, points to the Gnostic Christism in which the personal Jesus disappears15 in a series of abstract speculations that exclude all semblance of human personality. All the evidence points for its origination to abstract or general conceptions, not to any actual life or teaching. It spins its doctrinal web from within.

(13) And it is not merely on the Jewish side that we have evidence of elements in the early Jesuist movement which derive from sources alien to the gospel record. M. Loisy16 admits that the hymn of the Naassenes, given by Hippolytus,17 in which Jesus appeals to the Father to let him descend to earth and reveal the mysteries to men, “has an extraordinary resemblance to the dialogue between the God Ea and his son Marduk in certain Babylonian incantations.”18 He disposes of the problem by claiming that before it can weigh with us “it must be proved that the hymn of the Ophites is anterior to all connection of their sect with Christianity.” The implication is that Gnostic syncretism could add Babylonian traits to the Jewish Jesus. But when we find signal marks of a Babylonian connection for the name Jesus in the Apocalypse we cannot thus discount, without further evidence, the Babylonian connection set up by the Naassene hymn. Nor can the defenders of a record which they themselves admit to contain a mass of unhistorical [111]matter claim to have a ground upon which they can dismiss as a copyist’s blunder the formula in which in an old magic papyrus Jesus, as Healer, is adjured as “The God of the Hebrews.”19 The very gospel records present the name of Jesus as one of magical power in places where he has not appeared. A strict criticism is bound to admit that the whole question of the pre-Christian vogue of the name Jesus presents an unsolved problem.

There are further two quasi-historical Jesuses, one (14) given in the Old Testament, the other (15) in the Talmud, concerning which we can neither affirm nor deny that they were connected with a Jesuine movement before the Christian era. One is the Jesus of Zechariah (iii, 1–8; vi, 11–15); the other is the Jesus Ben Pandira, otherwise Jesus Ben Satda or Stada, of the Talmud. The former, Jesus the High Priest, plays a quasi-Messianic part, being described as “The Branch” and doubly crowned as priest and king. The word for “branch” in Zechariah is tsemach, but this was by the pre-Christian Jews identified with the netzer of Isaiah xi, 1; which for some the early Jesuists would seem to have constituted the explanation of Jesus’ cognomen of “Nazarite” or “Nazaræan.”20 The historic significance of the allusions in Zechariah appears to have been wholly lost; and that very circumstance suggests some pre-Christian connection between the name Jesus and a Messianic movement, which the Jewish teachers would be disposed to let slip from history, and the Christists who might know of it would not wish to recall. But the matter remains an enigma.

Equally unsolved, thus far, is the problem of the Talmudic Jesus. Ostensibly, there are two; and yet both seem to have been connected, in the Jewish mind, with [112]the Jesus of the gospels. One, Jesus son of Pandira, is recorded to have been stoned to death and then hanged on a tree, for blasphemy or other religious crime, on the eve of a Passover in the reign of Alexander Jannæus (B.C. 106–79).21 But in the Babylonian Gemara he is identified with a Jesus Ben Sotada or Stada or Sadta or Sidta, who by one rather doubtful clue is put in the period of Rabbi Akiba in the second century C.E. He too is said to have been stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover, but at Lydda, whereas Ben Pandira is said to have been executed at Jerusalem. Some scholars take the unlikely view that two different Jesuses were thus stoned and hanged on the eve of a Passover: others infer one, whose date has been confused.22 As Ben Pandira entered into the Jewish anti-Christian tradition, and is posited by the Jew of Celsus in the second century, the presumption is in favour of his date. His mother is in one place named Mariam Magdala = “Mary the nurse” or “hair-dresser”—a quasi-mythical detail. But even supposing him to have been a real personage, whose name may have been connected with a Messianic movement (he is said to have had five disciples), it is impossible to say what share his name may have had in the Jesuine tradition. Our only practicable clues, then, are those of the sects and movements enumerated.

It soon becomes clear from a survey of these sects and movements (1) that a cult of a non-divine Jesus, represented by the Hebraic Ebionites, subsisted for a time alongside of one which, also among Jews, made Jesus a supernatural being. Only on the basis of an original rite can such divergences be explained. The Ebionites come before us, in the account of Epiphanius, as using a form of the Gospel of Matthew which lacked the first two [113]chapters (an addition of the second or third century), denying the divinity of Jesus, and rejecting the apostleship of Paul.23 It is implied that they accepted the story of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. Here then were Jewish believers in a Hero-Jesus, the Servant of God (as in the Teaching), not a Son of God in any supernatural sense. Ebionism had rigidly restricted the cult to a subordinate form.

On the other hand, we have in the Nazarean sect or fraternity a movement which added both directly and indirectly to the Jesuist evolution. In the so-called Primitive Gospel, as expiscated by the school of B. Weiss from the synoptics, there is no mention of Nazareth, and neither the epithet “Nazarene” nor “Nazarite” for Jesus. All three names are wholly absent from the Epistles, as from the Apocalypse: Jesus never has a cognomen after we pass the Acts. The inference is irresistible that first the epithet “Nazarean,” and later the story about Nazareth, were additions to a primary cult in which Jesus had no birth-location, any more than he had human parents.

I have suggested24 that the term may have come in from the Hebrew “Netzer” = “the branch,” which would have a Messianic meaning for Jews. Professor Smith, who makes a searching study of Hebrew word-elements, has developed a highly important thesis to the effect that the word Nazaraios, “Nazarean,” which gives the residual name for the Jesuist sect in the Acts and the predominant name for Jesus in the gospels (apart from Mark, which gives Nazarenos),25 is not only pre-Christian but old Semitic; that the fundamental meaning of the name (Nosri) is “guard” or “watcher” (= Saviour?), and that the appellation is thus cognate with “Jesus,” [114]which signifies Saviour.26 On the negative side, as against the conventional derivations from Nazareth, the case is very strong. More than fifty years ago, the freethinker Owen Meredith insisted on the lack of evidence that a Galilean village named Nazareth existed before the Christian era. To-day; professional scholarship has acquiesced, to such an extent that Dr. Cheyne27 and Wellhausen have agreed in deriving the name from the regional name Gennesareth, thus making Nazareth = Galilee; while Professor Burkitt, finding “the ordinary view of Nazareth wholly unproved and unsatisfactory,” offers “a desperate conjecture” to the effect that “the city of Joseph and Mary, the πατρίς of Jesus, was Chorazin.”28 In the face of this general surrender, we are doubly entitled to deny that either the appellation for Jesus or the sect-name had anything to do with the place-name Nazareth.29

That there was a Jewish sect of “Nazaræans” before the Christian era, Professor Smith has clearly shown, may be taken as put beyond doubt by the testimony of Epiphanius, which he exhaustively analyzes.30 Primitively orthodox, like the Samaritans, and recognizing ostensibly no Bible personages later than Joshua, they appear to have merged in some way with the “Christians,” who adopted their name, perhaps turning “Nazaræan” into “Nazorean.” My original theory was that the “Nazaræans” were just the “Nazarites” of the Old Testament—men “separated” and “under a vow”;31 and that the two movements somehow coalesced, the place-name “Nazareth” being finally adopted to conceal the facts. [115]But Professor Smith is convinced, from the evidence of Epiphanius, that between “Nazarites” and “Nazaræans” there was no connection;32 and for this there is the strong support of the fact that the Jews cursed the Jesuist “Nazoræans” while apparently continuing to recognize the Nazirs or Nazarites. That Professor Smith’s derivation of the name may be the correct one, I am well prepared to believe.

But it is difficult to connect such a derivation of an important section of the early Jesuist movement with the thesis that Jesuism at its historic outset was essentially a monotheistic crusade. On this side we seem to face an old sect for whom, as for the adherents of the early sacrament, Jesus was a secondary or subordinate divine personage. Standing at an early Hebraic standpoint, the Nazaræans would have no part in the monotheistic universalism of the later prophets. The early Hebrews had believed in a Hebrew God, recognizing that other peoples also had theirs. How or when had the Nazaræans transcended that standpoint?

In the absence of any elucidation, the very ably argued thesis of Professor Smith as to the name “Nazaræan” seems broadly out of keeping with the thesis that a monotheistic fervour was a main and primary element in the development of the Christian cult; and that Jesus was conceived by his Jewish devotees in general as “the One God.” This would have meant the simple dethroning of Yahweh, a kind of procedure seen only in such myths as that of Zeus and Saturn, where one racial cult superseded another. But the main form of Christianity was always Yahwistic, even when Paul in the Acts is made to proclaim to the Athenians an “unknown God”—an idea really derived from Athens. Only for [116]a few, and these non-Jews, can “the Jesus” originally have been the One God; unless in so far as the use of the name “the Lord” may for some unlettered Jews have identified Jesus with Yahweh, who was so styled. The Ebionites denied his divinity all along. The later Nazareans were Messianists who did not any more than the Jews seem to conceive that the Messiah was Yahweh.

The whole doctrine of “the Son” was in conflict with any purely monotheistic idea. Nowhere in the synoptics or the Epistles is the Christ doctrine so stated as really to serve monotheism: the “I and the Father are one” of the fourth gospel is late; and the opening verses of that gospel show tampering, telling of a vacillation as to whether the Logos was God or “with God”—or rather “next to God,” in the strict meaning of πρὸς. Here we have a reflex of Alexandrian philosophy,33 not the evangel of the popular cult. Formally monotheistic the cult always was, even when it had become actually Trinitarian; and all along, doubtless, the particularist monotheism of the Jews was at work against all other God-names in particular and polytheism in general; but that cannot well have been the moving force in a cult which was professedly beginning by establishing an ostensibly new deity, and was ere long to make a trinity.

So far as anything can be clearly gathered from the scattered polemic in the Talmud against “the Minim,” the standing title for Jewish heretics, including Christians as such,34 they at least appear not as maintaining the oneness of God but rather as affirming a second Deity,35 [117]and this as early as the beginning of the second century. That the Jewish Rabbis took this view of their doctrine is explained in terms of the actual theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews. If there was any new doctrine of monotheism bound up with Jesuism, it must have been outside of the Jewish sphere, where the unity of God was the very ground on which Jesuism was resisted. As such, the Jewish Christians did not even repudiate the Jewish law, being expressly aspersed by the Rabbis as secret traitors who professed to be Jews but held alien heresies.36

I have said that “the Jesus” can have been “the one God” only for non-Jews. Conceivably he may have been so for some Samaritans. There is reason to believe that in the age of the Herods only a minority of the Samaritan people held by Judaism;37 and there is Christian testimony that in the second century a multitude of them worshipped as the One God Sem or Semo, the Semitic Sun-God whose name is embodied in that of Samson. Justin Martyr, himself a Samaritan, expressly alleges that “almost all the Samaritans, and a few even of other nations” worship and acknowledge as “the first God” Simon, whom he describes as a native of Gitta or Gitton, emerging in the reign of Claudius Cæsar.38 Justin’s gross blunder in identifying a Samaritan of the first century with the Sabine deity Semo Sancus, whose statue he had seen in Rome,39 is proof that he could believe in the deification of an alien as Supreme God, in his lifetime, in a nation with ancient cults. The thing being impossible, we are left to the datum that Sem or Semo or Sem-on = [118]Great Sem was widely worshipped in Samaria, as elsewhere in the near East.40

Returning to the subject of “the magician Simon” in his Dialogue with Trypho,41 Justin there repeats that the Samaritans call him “God above all power, and authority, and might.” Remembering that the Jewish Shema, “the Name,” is the ordinary appellative for Yahweh, we note possibilities of syncretism as to which we can only speculate. The fact that the Jews actually called their God in general by a word meaning “Name” and also equating with the commonest Semitic name for the Sun-God, while in their sacred books they professedly transmuted the sacred name (altering the consonants) to Adonai = Lord (“plural of majesty”), the name of the Syrian God Adonis, is a circumstance that has never been much considered by hierologists. It suggests that the Samaritan Sem also may have been “known” by other names; and the certain fact of the special commemoration of Joshua among the Samaritan Judaists gives another ground for speculation. The words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman in the fourth gospel, “Ye worship ye know not what,” seem to signify that from the Alexandrian-Jewish standpoint Samaritans worshipped a name only.

What does emerge clearly is that Samaria played a considerable part in the beginnings of Christism. In a curious passage of the fourth gospel (viii, 48) the Jews say to Jesus, “Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a daimon?”: and he answers with a denial that he has a daimon, but makes no answer on the other charge. The fact that Matthew makes the Founder expressly forbid his disciples to enter any city of the [119]Samaritans, while an interpolator of Luke42 introduces the story of the good Samaritan to counteract the doctrine, tells that there was a sunderance between Samaritan and Judaizing Christists just as there was between the Judaizers and the Gentilizers in general. From Samaria, then, came part of the impulse to the whole Gentilizing movement; and the Samaritan Justin shows the anti-Judaic animus clearly enough.

That Samaritan Jesuism, then, may early have outgone the Pauline in making Jesus “the One God,” in rivalry to the Jewish Yahweh, is a recognizable possibility. But still we do not reach the conception of a zealously monotheistic cult, relying specially on a polemic of monotheism. Justin fights for monotheism as against paganism, but on the ordinary Judaic-Christian basis. This is a later polemic stage. Nor does the thesis of a new monotheism seem at all essential to the rest of Professor Smith’s conception of the emergence of Jesuism. He agrees that it exfoliated from a scattered cult of secret mysteries: the notion, then, that it was at the time of its open emergence primarily a gospel of One God, and that God Jesus, is ostensibly in excess of the first hypothesis. It is also somewhat incongruous with the acceptance of the historic fact that it spread as a popular religion, in a world which desired Saviour Gods.43 Saviour Gods abounded in polytheism; the very conception is primarily polytheistic; and all we know of the cast and calibre of the early converts in general is incompatible with the [120]notion of them as zealous for an abstract and philosophical conception of deity. Whether we take the epistles to the Corinthians as genuine or as pseudepigraphic, they are clearly addressed to a simple-minded community, not given to monotheistic idealism, and indeed incapable of it.

In positing, further, a rapid “triumph” of Christism in virtue of its monotheism, Professor Smith seems to me to outgo somewhat the historical facts. There is really no evidence for any rapid triumph. Renan, after accepting as history the pentecostal dithyramb of the Acts, came to see that no such quasi-miraculous spread of the faith ever took place; and that the Pauline epistles all presuppose not great churches but “little Bethels,” or rather private conventicles, scattered through the Eastern Empire.44 He justifiably doubted whether Paul’s converts, all told, amounted to over a thousand persons. At a much later period, sixty years after Constantine’s adoption of the faith, the then ancient church of Antioch, the city where first the Jesuists “were called Christians,” numbered only about a fifth part of the population.45 “At the end of the second century, probably not a hundredth part even of the central provinces of the Roman Empire was Christianized, while the outlying provinces were practically unaffected.”

Rather we seem bound to infer that Christianity made headway by assimilating pagan ideas and usages on a basis of Judaic organization. It is ultimately organization that conserves cults; and the vital factor in the Christian case is the adaptation of the model set by the Jewish synagogues and their central supervision. Of course even organization cannot avert brute conquest; and the organized pagan cults in the towns of the Empire went down ultimately before Christian violence as the [121]Christian went down before violence in Persia in the age of the Sassanides. But Christian organization, improving upon Jewish, with no adequate rivalry on the pagan side, developed the situation in which Constantine saw fit to imperialize the cultus, as the one best fitted to become that of the State.

How then did the organization begin and grow? The data point insistently to a special group in Jerusalem; and behind the myth of the gospels we have historical and documentary ground for a hypothesis which can account for that as for the other myth-elements.

When we are considering the possibilities of underlying historical elements in the gospel story, it may be well to note on the one hand the entirely negative aspect of the works of Josephus to that story, and on the other hand the emergence in his writings of personages bearing the name Jesus. If the defenders of the historicity of the gospel Jesus would really stand by Josephus as a historian of Jewry in the first Christian century, they would have to admit that he is the most destructive of all the witnesses against them. It is not merely that the famous interpolated passage46 is flagrantly spurious in every aspect—in its impossible context; its impossible language of semi-worship; its “He was (the) Christ”; its assertion of the resurrection; and its allusion to “ten thousand other wonderful things” of which the historian gives no other hint—but that the flagrant interpolation brings into deadly relief the absence of all mention of the crucified Jesus and his sect where mention must have been made by the historian if they had existed. If, to say nothing [122]of “ten thousand wonderful things,” there was any movement of a Jesus of Nazareth with twelve disciples in the period of Pilate, how came the historian to ignore it utterly? If, to say nothing of the resurrection story, Jesus had been crucified by Pilate, how came it that there is no hint of such an episode in connection with Josephus’ account of the Samaritan tumult in the next chapter? And if a belief in Jesus as a slain and returning Messiah had been long on foot before the fall of the Temple, how comes it that Josephus says nothing of it in connection with his full account of the expectation of a coming Messiah at that point?

By every test of loyal historiography, we are not merely forced to reject the spurious passage as the most obvious interpolation in all literature: we are bound to confess that the “Silence of Josephus,” as is insisted by Professor Smith,47 is an insurmountable negation of the gospel story. For that silence, no tenable reason can be given, on the assumption of the general historicity of the gospels and Acts. Josephus declares himself48 to be in his fifty-sixth year in the thirteenth year of Domitian. Then he was born about the year 38. By his own account,49 he began at the age of sixteen to “make trial of the several sects that were among us”—the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes—and in particular he spent three years with a hermit of the desert named Banos, who wore no clothing save what grew on trees, used none save wild food, and bathed himself daily and nightly for purity’s sake. Thereafter he returned to Jerusalem, and conformed to the sect of the Pharisees. In the Antiquities,50 after describing in detail the three sects before named, he gives an account of a fourth “sect of Jewish philosophy,” [123]founded by Judas the Galilean, whose adherents in general agree with the Pharisees, but are specially devoted to liberty and declare God to be their only ruler, facing torture and death rather than call any man lord.

A careful criticism will recognize a difficulty as to this section. In § 2, as in the Life, “three sects” are specified; and the concluding section has the air of a late addition. Seeing, however, that the sect of Judas is stated to have begun to give trouble in the procuratorship of Gessius Florus, when Josephus was in his twenties, it is quite intelligible that he should say nothing of it when naming the sects who existed in his boyhood, and that he should treat it in a subsidiary way in his fuller account of them in the Antiquities. It is not so clear why he should in the first section of that chapter call Judas “a Gaulanite, of a city whose name was Gamala,” and in the final section call him “Judas the Galilean.” There was a Gamala in Gaulanitis and another in Galilee. But the discrepancy is soluble on the view that the sixth section was added some time after the composition of the book. There seems no adequate ground for counting it spurious.

On what theory, then, are we to explain the total silence of Josephus as to the existence of the sect of Jesus of Nazareth, if there be any historical truth in the gospel story? It is of no avail to suggest that he would ignore it by reason of his Judaic hostility to Christism. He is hostile to the sect of Judas the Galilean. There is nothing in all his work to suggest that he would have omitted to name any noticeable sect with a definite and outstanding doctrine because he disliked it. He seems much more likely, in that case, to have described and disparaged or denounced it.

And here emerges the hypothesis that he did disparage or denounce the Christian sect in some passage which has been deleted by Christian copyists, perhaps in the very [124]place now filled by the spurious paragraph, where an account of Jesuism as a calamity to Judaism would have been relevant in the context. This suggestion is nearly as plausible as that of Chwolson, who would reckon the existing paragraph a description of a Jewish calamity, is absurd. And it is the possibility of this hypothesis that alone averts an absolute verdict of non-historicity against the gospel story in terms of the silence of Josephus. The biographical school may take refuge, at this point, in the claim that the Christian forger, whose passage was clearly unknown to Origen, perhaps eliminated by his fraud a historic testimony to the historicity of Jesus, and also an account of the sect of Nazaræans.

But that is all that can be claimed. The fact remains that in the Life, telling of his youthful search for a satisfactory sect, Josephus says not a word of the existence of that of the crucified Jesus; that he nowhere breathes a word concerning the twelve apostles, or any of them, or of Paul; and that there is no hint in any of the Fathers of even a hostile account of Jesus by him in any of his works, though Origen makes much of the allusion to James the Just,51—also dismissible as an interpolation, like another to the same effect cited by Origen, but not now extant.52 There is therefore a strong negative presumption to be set against even the forlorn hypothesis that the passage forged in Josephus by a Christian scribe ousted one which gave a hostile testimony.

Over a generation ago, Mr. George Solomon of Kingston, Jamaica, noting the general incompatibility of Josephus with the gospel story and the unhistorical aspect of the latter, constructed an interesting theory,53 of which I [125]have seen no discussion, but which merits notice here. It may be summarized thus:—

1. Banos is probably the historical original of the gospel figure of John the Baptist.

2. Josephus names and describes two Jesuses, who are blended in the figure of the gospel Jesus: (a) the Jesus (Wars, VI, v, 3) who predicts “woe to Jerusalem”; is flogged till his bones show, but never utters a cry; makes no reply when challenged; returns neither thanks for kindness nor railing for railing; and is finally killed by a stone projectile in the siege; and (b) Jesus the Galilean (Life, §§ 12, 27), son of Sapphias, who opposes Josephus, is associated with Simon and John, and has a following of “sailors and poor people,” one of whom betrays him (§ 22), whereupon he is captured by a stratagem, his immediate followers forsaking him and flying.54 Before this point, Josephus has taken seventy of the Galileans with him (§ 14) as hostages, and, making them his friends and companions on his journey, sets them “to judge causes.” This is the hint for Luke’s story of the seventy disciples.

3. The “historical Jesus” of the siege, who is “meek” and venerated as a prophet and martyr, being combined with the “Mosaic Jesus” of Galilee, a disciple of Judas of Galilee, who resisted the Roman rule and helped to precipitate the war, the memory of the “sect” of Judas the Gaulanite or Galilean, who began the anti-Roman trouble, is also transmuted into a myth of a sect of Jesus of Galilee, who has fishermen for disciples, is followed by poor Galileans, is betrayed by one companion and deserted [126]by the rest, and is represented finally as dying under Pontius Pilate, though at that time there had been no Jesuine movement.

4. The Christian movement, thus mythically grounded, grows up after the fall of the Temple. Paul’s “the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost” (1 Thess. ii, 16) tells of the destruction of the Temple, as does Hebrews xii, 24–28; xiii, 12–14.

This theory of the construction of the myth out of historical elements in Josephus is obviously speculative in a high degree; and as the construction fails to account for either the central rite or the central myth of the crucifixion it must be pronounced inadequate to the data. On the other hand, the author developes the negative case from the silence of Josephus as to the gospel Jesus with an irresistible force; and though none of his solutions is founded-on in the constructive theory now elaborated, it may be that some of them are partly valid. The fact that he confuses Jesus the robber captain who was betrayed, and whose companions deserted him, with Jesus the “Mosaic” magistrate of Tiberias, who was followed by sailors and poor people, and was “an innovator beyond everybody else,” does not exclude the argument that traits of one or the other, or of the Jesus of the siege, may have entered into the gospel mosaic.

All careful investigators have been perplexed by the manner of the introduction of “the Twelve” in the gospels; and they would have been still more so if they had realized the total absence of any reason in the texts for the creation of disciples or apostles at all. Disciples to learn—what? Apostles to teach—what? The choosing [127]is as plainly mythical as the function. In Mark (i, 16) and Matthew (iv, 18), Jesus calls upon the brothers Simon and Andrew to leave their fishing and “become fishers of men.” They come at the word; and immediately afterwards the brothers James and John do the same. There is no pretence of previous teaching: it is the act of the God.55 In Matthew, at the calling of the apostle Matthew (ix, 9), who in Mark (ii, 14) becomes Levi the son of Alphæus, the procedure is the same: “Follow me.”

Then, with no connective development whatever, we proceed at one stroke to the full number.56 Matthew actually makes the mission of the twelve the point of choosing, saying simply (x, 1): “And he called unto him his twelve disciples,” adding their names. In Mark (iii, 13) we have constructive myth:—

And the lists converge. Levi has now disappeared from Mark’s record, and we have instead “James the son of Alphæus,” but with Matthew in also. The lists of the first two synoptics have been harmonized. In Luke, where only three are at first called, after a miracle (v, 1–11), the twelve are also summarily chosen on a mountain; and here the list varies: Levi, who has been separately called (v, 27) as in Mark, disappears here also in favour of “James of Alphæus”; but there is no Thaddæus, and [128]there are two Judases, one being “of James,” which may mean either son or brother. And this Judas remains on the list in the Acts. Candid criticism cannot affirm that we have here the semblance of veridical biography. The calling of the twelve has been imposed upon an earlier narrative, with an arbitrary list, which is later varied. The calling of the fishermen, to begin with, is a symbolical act, as is the calling of a tax-gatherer. The calling of the twelve is a more complicated matter.

In searching for the roots of a pre-Christian Jesus-cult in Palestine, we have noted the probability that it centred in a rite of twelve participants, with the “Anointed One,” the representative of the God, and anciently the actual victim, as celebrating priest. The Anointed One is “the Christ”; and the Christ, on the hypothesis, is Jesus Son of the Father. The twelve, as in the case of the early Jesus-cult at Ephesus, form as it were “the Church.” A body of twelve, then, who might term themselves “Brethren of the Lord,” may well have been one of the starting-points of Jewish Jesuism.

But the first two synoptics, clearly, started with a group of only four disciples, to which a fifth was added; and in John (i, 35–49) the five are made up at once, in a still more supernatural manner than in the synoptics, two being taken from the following of John the Baptist. Then, still more abruptly than in the synoptics, we have the completion (vi, 70):—“Did not I choose you the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” It would be idle to say merely that the twelve are suddenly imposed on the narrative, leaving a biographical five: the five are just as evidently given unhistorically, for some special reason, mythical or other.

Now, though fives and fours and threes are all quasi-sacred numbers in the Old Testament, it is noteworthy [129]that in one of the Talmudic allusions to Jesus Ben-Stada he is declared to have had five disciples—Matthai, Nakai or Neqai, Nezer or Netzer, Boni or Buni, and also Thoda, all of whom are ostensibly though not explicitly described as having been put to death.57 As this passage points to the Jesus who is otherwise indicated as post-Christian, it cannot critically be taken as other than a reference to a current Christian list of five, though it may conceivably have been a miscarrying reference to the Jesus of the reign of Alexander Jannæus. In any case, it is aimed at a set of five; and there is never any Talmudic mention of a twelve. If, then, the Talmudic passage was framed by way of a stroke against the Christians it must have been made at a time when the list of twelve had not been imposed on the gospels. Further, it is to be noted that it provides for a Matthew, and perhaps for a “Mark,” the name “Nakai” being put next to Matthew’s; while in Boni and Netzer we have ostensible founders for the Ebionites and Nazaræans. Finally, Thoda looks like the native form of Thaddæus; though it might perhaps stand for the Theudas of Acts v, 36. Seeing how names are juggled with in the official list and in the MS. variants (“Lebbæus whose surname was Thaddæus” stood in the Authorised Version, on the strength of the Codex Bezae), it cannot be argued that the Gemara list is not possibly an early form or basis of that in the synoptics; though on the other hand the names Boni and Netzer suggest a mythopœic origin for Ebionites and Nazarenes. Leaving this issue aside as part of the unsolved problem of the Talmudic Jesus, we are again driven to note the unhistoric apparition of the twelve.

Following the documents, we find the later traces [130]equally unveridical. Matthew is introduced in the Acts as being chosen to make up the number of the twelve, on the death of Judas; but never again is such a process mentioned; and Matthew plays no part in the further narrative. And of course the cult was interdicted from further maintenance of the number as soon as it was settled that the twelve were to sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, which had apparently been done in an early Judaic form of the Apocalypse before it was intimated in the gospels. Even in the Epistles, however, there is no real trace of an active group of twelve. The number is mentioned only in a passage (1 Cor. xv, 5) where there is interpolation upon interpolation, for after the statement that the risen Jesus appeared “then to the twelve” there shortly follows “then to all the apostles,” that is, on the traditionist assumption, to the twelve again—the exclusion of Judas not being recognized. The first-cited clause could be interpolated in order to insert the number; the second could not have been inserted if the other were already there.

That is the sole allusion. We find none where we might above all expect it, in the pseudo-biographical epistle to the Galatians, though there is mention in the opening chapter of “them which were apostles before me,” “the apostles,” “James the brother of the Lord” (never mentioned as an apostle in the gospels unless he be James the son of Alphæus or James the son of Zebedee: that is, not a brother of Jesus but simply a group-brother), and “James and Cephas and John, who were [or are] reputed to be pillars.” The language used in verse 6 excludes the notion that the writer believed “the apostles” to have had personal intercourse with the Founder. Thus even in a pseudepigraphic work, composed after Paul’s time, there is no suggestion that he had to deal [131]with the twelve posited by the gospels and the Acts. And all the while “apostles” without number continue to figure in the documents. They were in fact a numerous class in the early Church. It is not surprising that the late Professor Cheyne not only rejected the story of the Betrayal but declared that “The ‘Twelve Apostles,’ too, are to me as unhistorical as the seventy disciples.”58

On the other hand, we have a decisive reason for the invention of the Twelve story in the latterly recovered Teaching of the Twelve Apostles59 (commonly cited as the Didachê), a document long current in the early church. Of that book, the first six chapters, forming nearly half of the matter, are purely ethical and monotheistic, developing the old formula of the “Two Ways” of life and death; and saying nothing of Jesus or Christ or the Son, or of baptism or sacrament. Then comes a palpably late interpolation, giving a formula for baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Even in the ninth section, dealing with the Eucharist, we have only “the holy vine of David thy Servant, which thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy Servant.”60 The tenth, which is evidently later, and is written as a conclusion, retains that formula. After that come warnings against false apostles and prophets; and only in the twelfth section does the word “Christian” occur. Still later there is specified “the Lord’s-day (κυριακὴν) of the Lord.” Then comes a prescription for the election of bishops; and the document ends with a chapter preparing for the expected “last days.”

Here then we have an originally Jewish document, [132]bearing the title Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, adopted and gradually added to by early Jesuists who did not deify Jesus, though like the early Christians in general they expected the speedy end of the world. Though their Jesus is not deified, he has no cognomen. He is neither “of Nazareth,” nor “the Nazarite;” and he is an ostensibly mythical figure, not a teacher but a rite-founder, for his adherents. They do not belong to an organized Church; and the baptismal section, with its Trinitarian formula, is quite certainly one of the latest of all. The eighth, which connects quite naturally with the sixth, and which contains the “Lord’s Prayer,” raises the question whether it belonged to the pre-Christian document, and has been merely interpolated with the phrase as to “the Lord ... his gospel.” There are strong reasons for regarding the Lord’s Prayer as a pre-Christian Jewish composition,61 founded on very ancient Semitic prayers. Seeing that “the Lord” has in all the previous sections of the treatise clearly meant “God” and not “Christ,” the passage about the gospel is probably Jesuist; but it does not at all follow that the Prayer is.

Mr. Cassels, in the section on the Teaching added by him in the one-volume reprint of his great work, points62 to the fact that in the recovered fragment of a Latin translation of an early version of “The Two Ways,” there do not occur the passages connecting with the Sermon on the Mount which are found in the Teaching; and as the same holds of the Two Ways section of the Epistle of Barnabas, it may fairly be argued that it was a Christian hand that added them here. But when we note that at the points at which the passages in the Teaching vary from the gospel—as “Gentiles” for [133]“tax-gatherers,”63—the term in the former is perfectly natural for Jewish teachers addressing Jews in Gentile countries, and that in the latter rather strained in an exhortation to Jews in their own country, it becomes very conceivable that this is the original, or a prior form, of the gospel passage. The Sermon on the Mount is certainly a compilation. This then may have been one of the sources. And it is quite conceivable that the Jewish Apostles should teach their people not to pray “as do the hypocrites,” an expression which Mr. Cassels takes to be directed by Jesuists against Jews in general.

Seeing that even conservative critics have admitted the probable priority of the Teaching to Barnabas, it is no straining of the probabilities to suggest that the Two Ways section of Barnabas is either a variant, inspired by the Teaching, on what was clearly a very popular line of homily,64 or an annexation of another Jewish homily of that kind. That in the Teaching is distinctly the better piece of work, as we should expect the official manual of the Apostles of the High Priest to be. It is inexact to say, as does Dr. M. R. James,65 that the section “reappears” in Barnabas. There are many differences, as well as many identities. The other is not a mere copy, but an exercise on the same standard theme, with “light and darkness” for the stronger “life and death.” It is a mistake to suppose that there was a definite “original” of “The Two Ways”: it is a standing ethical theme, evidently handled by many.66 If, then, the Teaching preceded Barnabas, it may already have contained, in its purely Jewish form, the Lord’s Prayer, which is so thoroughly Jewish, and items [134]of the Sermon on the Mount, which is certainly a Jewish compilation. And the justified critical presumption is that it did contain them. The onus of disproof lies on the Christian side.

We now reach our solution. The original document was in any case a manual of teaching used among the scattered Jews and proselytes of the Dispersion by the actual and historical Twelve Apostles either of the High Priest before or of the Patriarch after the fall of Jerusalem. The historic existence of that body before and after the catastrophe is undisputed;67 and the nature of its teaching functions can be confidently inferred from the known currency of a Judaic ethical teaching in the early Christian period. The demonstration of that is supplied by an expert of the biographical school who considers the Teaching to have been “known to Jesus and the Baptist.”68 Such a document cannot rationally be supposed to be a compilation made by or for Christists using the gospels: such a compilation would have given the gospel view of Jesus.69 The primary Teaching, including as it probably does the Lord’s Prayer, is the earlier thing: the gospels use it. It is in fact one of the first documents of “Christianity,” if not the first. And its titular “twelve apostles” are Jewish and not Christian.

Given, then, such a document in the hands of the early Jesuist organization—or one of the organizations—twelve apostles had to be provided in the legend to take the credit for the Teaching.70 The new cult, once it [135]was shaped to the end of superseding the old, had to provide itself to that extent, by myth, with the same machinery. No step in the myth-theory is better established than this; and no non-miraculous item in the legend is more recalcitrant than the twelve story to the assumptions of the biographical school. The gospel list of the twelve is one of the most unmanageable things in the record. In a narrative destitute of detail where detail is most called for, we get a list of names, most of which count for nothing in the later history, to give a semblance of actuality to an invented institution. We have clearly unhistorical detail as to five, no detail whatever as to further accessions, and then a body of twelve suddenly constituted. For some of us, the discovery of the Teaching was a definite point of departure in the progression toward the myth-theory; and it supplies us with the firmest starting-point for our theoretic construction of the process by which the organized Christian Church took shape.

On the view here taken, there was at Jerusalem, at some time in the first century, a small group of Jesuist “apostles” among whom the chief may have been named James, John, and Cephas. They may have been members of a ritual group of twelve, who may have styled themselves Brothers of the Lord; but that group in no way answered to the Twelve of the gospels. Of the apostle class the number was indefinite. Besides the apostles, further, there would seem to have been an indefinite number of “prophets,” indicative of a cult of somewhat long standing. The adherents believed in a non-historic Jesus, the “Servant” of the Jewish God, somehow evolved out of the remote Jesus-God who is reduced [136]to human status in the Old Testament as Joshua. And their central secret rite consisted in a symbolic sacrament, evolved out of an ancient sacrament of human sacrifice, in which the victim had been the representative of the God, sacrificed to the God, in the fashion of a hundred primitive cults. This rite had within living memory, if not still at the time from which we start, been accompanied by an annual popular rite in which a selected person—probably a criminal released for the purpose—was treated as a temporary king, then derided, and then either in mock show or in actual fact executed, under the name of Jesus Barabbas, “the Son of the Father.”

Of this ancient cult there were inferribly many scattered centres outside of Judea, including probably some in Samaria, the special region of the celebration of the Hero-God Joshua. There was one such group in Ephesus; and probably another at Alexandria, and another at Antioch; Jews of the Dispersion having possibly taken the cult with them. But the cult outside Jewry may have had non-Jewish roots, though it merged with Jewish elements. So long as the Temple at Jerusalem lasted, the small cult counted for very little; and it was probably after the fall of Jerusalem71 that its leaders added to their machinery the rite of baptism, which the synoptic gospels treat as a specialty of the movement of John the Baptist. Him they represent as a “forerunner” of the Christ, who under divine inspiration recognizes the Messianic claims of Jesus. All this is plainly unhistorical, even on the assumption of the historicity of Jesus.72 Whatever may be the historic facts as to John [137]the Baptist, who is a very dubious figure,73 the marked divergence between the synoptics and the fourth gospel on the subject of baptism74 show that that rite was not originally Jesuist, but was adopted by the Jesuists as a means of popular appeal.

The recognition of this fact is a test of the critical good faith of those who profess to found on the synoptics for a history of the beginnings of the Jesuist cult. Canon Robinson75 treats as unquestionably historical one of the contradictory statements in John iv, 1–2, of which the first affirms that Jesus baptized abundantly, while the second, an evidently interpolated parenthesis, asserts that only the disciples baptized, not Jesus. Though this interpolation hinges on the first dictum, the Canon accepts it to the exclusion of that, its basis. But the original writer could not have put the proposition thus had he believed it. What he affirmed was abundant baptizing by Jesus. Of this, however, the synoptics have no more hint than they have of baptizing by the disciples. On any possible view of the composition of the synoptics, it is inconceivable that they should omit all mention of baptizing by Jesus or the disciples if such a practice was affirmed in the early tradition. For them baptism is the institution of the Forerunner, who is mythically represented as hailing in Jesus his successor or supersessor, with no suggestion of a continuance of the rite. If there is to be any critical consistency in the biographical argument, it must at least recognize that baptism is non-Jesuine.

The embodiment of the rite of baptism on the basis of the Baptist’s alleged acclamation of Jesus as the Messiah, [138]either carried with it or followed upon the claim that Jesus, hitherto regarded as a simple Saviour-God, was a Messiah. After the fall of Jerusalem, the old dream of an earthly Messiah who should restore the Kingdom of Judah or Israel76 was shattered for the vast majority of Jews. Even in the Assumption of Moses, in the main the work of a Quietist Pharisee, written in Hebrew probably between 7 and 29 of the first century,77 there is a virtual abandonment of Messianism, the task of overthrowing the Gentiles being assigned to “the Most High.”78 In the composite Apocalypse of Baruch, written in Hebrew, mainly by Pharisaic Jews, in the latter half of the first century, probably as an implicit polemic against early Jesuism,79 we see the effect of the catastrophe. In the sections written before the fall of Jerusalem, the hope of a Messianic Kingdom is proclaimed; in those written later there is either at most a hope of a Messianic Kingdom without a Messiah or a complete abandonment of mundane expectations.80 What the Jesuist movement did was to develop, outside of Jewry,81 the earlier notion of a Messiah “concealed,” pre-appointed, and coming from heaven to effect the consummation of all things earthly.82

Such Messianism may have either preceded or proceeded-on an adoption of the rite of baptism. Given a resort to Messianism by the Jesuists after the fall of Jerusalem, the alleged testimony of the Baptist to Jesus as the Appointed One might be the first step; and the resort to the baptismal rite would follow on the myth [139]that Jesus had been actually baptized by John. In Acts, i, 5, Jesus is in effect made to represent John’s baptism with water as superseded by a baptism in the Holy Ghost.83 In the Pauline epistles we have trace of a conflict over this as over other Judaic practices, Paul being made to declare (1 Cor. i, 17) that “Christ sent me not to baptize but to preach the gospel,” though he admits having baptized a few.84 All that is clear is that the Jesuists were not primarily baptizers; that they began to baptize “in the name of Jesus Christ,”85 with a formula of the Holy Ghost and fire, but really in the traditional manner with water; and that long afterwards they feigned that the Founder had prescribed baptism with a trinitarian formula.86

Thus far, the local movement was not only Jewish but Judaic. It may or may not have been before the fall of Jerusalem that a Jesuist “apostle” named Paul conceived the idea of creating by propaganda a new Judæo-Jesuist movement appealing to Gentiles. Such an idea is not the invention of Paul or any other Jesuist; the idea of a Messianic Kingdom in which the Gentiles should be saved is found in the Jewish Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written in Hebrew by a Pharisee between the years 109 and 106 B.C.87 But, thus made current, it might well be adopted by Jesuists. The reason for supposing this to have begun before the year 70 is not merely the tradition to that effect but the fact that in none of the epistles do we have any trace of that “gospel of the Kingdom” which in the synoptics [140]is posited as the evangel of Jesus. That evangel, which is a simple duplication of the alleged evangel of the Baptist, and which we have seen to be wholly mythical, being devoid of possible historic content,88 is part of the apparatus of the retrospective Messianic claim. But the Pauline Epistles, even as they show no knowledge of the name Nazareth, or Nazaræan, or Nazarene, or of any gospel teaching, also show no concern over a “gospel of the Kingdom.” Whether or not, then, they are wholly pseudepigraphic, they suggest that a Paulinism of some kind was an early feature in the Jesuist evolution.

According to the Acts, Paul’s name was originally Saul, though no such avowal is ever made in the epistles. The purpose of the statement seems to be to strengthen the case as to his Jewish nationality, which is affirmed in the epistles, as is the item that he had been a murderous persecutor of the early Jesuists. All this suggests a late manipulation of the traditions of an early strife. To claim that the Gentilizing apostle had been a Jew born and bred would be as natural on the Gentilizing side as to allege that the typically Judaic Peter had denied his Lord; while the charge of persecuting the infant church would be a not less natural invention of the Judaic Christians who accepted the tradition that Paul had been a Pharisee and a pupil of Gamaliel. In point of fact we find the Ebionites, the typical Judaic Jesuists, knowing him simply as “Paul of Tarsus” in their version of the Acts or in a previous document upon which that founded.89 And many Jewish scholars have declared that they cannot conceive the Pauline epistles to have been written by a Rabbinically trained Jew.90 This does not preclude [141]the possibility that the original Paul, of whose “few very short epistles” personally penned91 we have probably nothing left that is identifiable,92 may have been such a Jew, but the presumption is to the contrary.

On the face of the case, nothing was more natural than that the Jesuist movement should appeal to civilized Gentiles. Judaism itself did so, striving much after proselytes. The question was whether the Jesuist proselytes should be made on a strictly Judaic basis. Now, even if the fall of Jerusalem had not given the impetus to a severance of the cult from the dominating religion, the sacred domicile being gone, it is obvious that an abandonment of such a Jewish bar as circumcision would give the developing cult a great advantage over the other in propaganda among Gentiles. Circumcision must have been a highly repellent detail for Hellenistic Gentiles in general; and a gospel which dispensed with it would have a new chance of making headway. And such a severance certainly took place, though we can put no reliance on the chronology of the Acts.93 Paul94 remains a doubtfully dated figure, because the chronology of the whole cult is problematic.

But we can broadly distinguish between a “Petrine” and a “Pauline” Christism. In the Acts (ii, 22–40), which clearly embodies earlier lore, prior to that of the gospels, the Jesus Christ preached by Peter is not represented as a saving sacrifice. As little is he a Teacher, though he is a doer of “mighty works and wonders and signs.” If we were to apply the biographical method, [142]the presentment might be held to indicate the Talmudic Jesus. Only after his resurrection “God hath made him both Lord and Christ”—that is, Messiah; and the Jewish hearers are invited to “repent” and be “baptized ... in the name of Jesus Christ unto the remission of your sins.” Peter’s Jesus, like him of the Teaching, is the “Servant” of God, not his Son. And there is no mention of a sacrament, though there is noted a “breaking of bread at home” (42, 46) recalling the “broken” (bread) of the Didachê. The sacrament, then, was apparently a secret rite for the Jewish group.

The speeches, of course, are quite unhistorical: we can but take them as embodying a traditional “Petrine” teaching with later matter. Thus we have baptism figuring as a Jesuist rite, whereas in the synoptics, as we have seen, there had been no such thing. The story of Peter being brought to the pro-Gentile view is pure ecclesiastical myth, probably posterior to the Pauline epistles, which are ignored but counteracted in so far as they posit strife between Pauline and Petrine propaganda. Peter and Paul alike are made to teach that “it behoved the Christ to suffer” (iii, 18; xvii, 3), even as they duplicate their miracles, their escapes, and their sufferings. But while Peter is pretended to have accepted Gentilism, it is Paul who acts on the principle; and he it is who is first represented as fighting pagan polytheism, notably at Ephesus (xix, 26). At Athens, in a plainly fictitious speech, he is made to expound the “unknown God” of an Athenian agnostic cult in terms of Jewish opposition to image-worship, indicating Jesus merely as “a man” raised by God from the dead to judge the world at the judgment day. It is after this episode that he is made to tell the Jews of Corinth he will “henceforth go unto the Gentiles.” Nevertheless he is made to go on preaching [143]to the Jews. The narrative as a whole is plainly factitious: all we can hope to do is to detect some of its historic data.

Two things must be kept clearly and constantly in view: first, that what we understand by a literary and a historical conscience simply did not exist in the early Christian environment; second, that in all probability the Acts, which to start with would be a blend of tradition and fiction, is much manipulated during a long period. We are not entitled to assume that an “original” writer duplicated the careers of Peter and Paul for purposes of edification. One or more may have wrought one narrative, and a later hand or hands may have systematically interpolated the other.95 We are to remember further that it was an age in which most Christians, assimilating the eschatology of the Persians and the Jews—the spontaneous dream of crushed peoples—expected the speedy end of the world, and did their thinking on that basis. In such a state of mind, critical thought could not exist save as a small element in religious polemic.

Let us then see what we reach on the hypothesis that early Jesuism even in the first century, and possibly even before the fall of Jerusalem, was running in two different channels—one movement adhering to Jewish usage, making Jesus the Servant of God, and conceiving him as a God-gifted Healer whose death raised him to the status of the Messiah, the promised Christ or Anointed One who should either close the earthly scene or bring about a new God-ruled era for the Jews. For the holders of this view, the Kingdom of God was coming. Jesus was ere long to come in the clouds in great glory and inaugurate the new life. To ask for clear conceptions on such a [144]matter from such minds would be idle. There were none. The one idea connected with the mythical evangel was that Jews should repent and prepare for the new life. To that elusive minimum the latest biographical analysis, assuming the historicity, reduces the “ministry” of the gospel Jesus.96 The rest is all post-apostolic accretion. On the other hand, the Petrine Jesus has proved his mission for his devotees, first and last, by miracles, and by his resurrection—things which the biographical school rejects as imaginary.

Upon this movement there enters an innovator, Paul of Tarsus. Round him, as round Peter, there are clouds of myth. That he was originally Saul, a Pharisee, a pupil of Gamaliel; that he began as a bitter persecutor of the Jesuists; and that he was converted by a supernatural vision, become common data for the church. That the charge of persecution was a Judaic figment, on the other hand, is perhaps as likely as that the story of Peter’s denial of his Master was a Gentile figment. We are in a world of purposive fiction. But the broad divergence of doctrine seems to underlie all the fables. Saul, on the later view, changes his Jewish name to the Grecian Paul when he plans to make the Jesus-cult non-Jewish, using the tactic of monotheism against pagan polytheism in general, in the very act of adding a Son-God to the Jewish Father-God, as so many Son-Gods had been added to Father-Gods throughout religious history. To the early Jewish Jesuists, the notion of the Son had been given by the old cult of sacrifice, with its Jesus the Son—an idea obscurely but certainly present, as we have seen, in the lore of the Talmudists.

Clearly it was the Pauline movement that made of Christism a “viable” world religion. As an unorganized [145]Saviour-cult it would have died out like others. As a phase of Judaism, it could have had no Jewish permanence, simply because its Messianism was a matter of looking daily for an “end of the world” that did not come. After two centuries of waiting, the Jews would have had as clear a right to pronounce Jesus a “false Messiah” as they had in the case of Barcochab or any other before or since. The mere belief in a future life, at one time excluded from their Sacred Books, had become the common faith, only the aristocratic Sadducees (probably not all of them) rejecting it. On that side, Jesuism gave them nothing. Well might Paul “turn to the Gentiles”—albeit not under the circumstances theologically imagined for him in the book of Acts.

Even for the Gentiles, Jesuism was but one of many competing cults, offering similar attractions. In the religions of Adonis, Attis, Isis and Osiris, Dionysos, Mithra, and the Syrian Marnas (“the Lord, a variant of Adonis = Adonai, one of the Jews’ exoteric names for Yahweh”), a resplendent ever-youthful God who had died to rise again was sacramentally adored, mourned for, and rejoiced over, by devotees just as absorbed in their faith as were the Jesuists. With vague pretences of biographical knowledge, to which nobody now attaches any credence, they were as sure of the historicity of their Vegetation-Gods and Sun-Gods as the Christists were of the actuality of theirs. Had a Frazer of the second century told them that their Adonis and Attis were but abstractions of the annual sacrificial victim of old time, they would have told him, in the manner of Festus (not yet obsolete), that much learning had made him mad. They “knew” that their Redeemer had lived, died, and risen again. The unbelief of philosophers, or of scoffers like Lucian, affected them no more than scientific and [146]critical unbelief to-day disturbs the majority of unthinking Christians. The busy sacrificial and devotional life of Hierapolis would be as little affected by Lucian’s tranquil exhibition of it as the life at Lourdes has been by Zola’s novel. On that side, we can very easily understand the past by the present.

So little psychic or intellectual difference was there between Jesuism and the other “isms” that Paul’s propaganda made no measurable sensation in the colluvies of the Roman empire. As Renan avows, even on the assumption of the genuineness of the Epistles, he was the missioner of a number of small conventicles, all convinced that they alone were the “true Church of God upon earth.” It is an error of perspective to ascribe extraordinary faculty to the missionary who either converted or “stablished” such believers; and it is plainly unnecessary to assume in his case any abnormal sincerity or persuasiveness. If we were to estimate him in terms of the records we should describe him either as a halluciné or as a fanatic who had shed Christian blood in his Judaic stage and never in the least learned humility on that score, his phrases of contrition being balanced by the fiercest asperities towards all who withstood him in his Christian stage. But we have no right to draw a portrait of “Paul,” who is left to us a composite of literary figments testifying only to the previous activity of a propagandist so-named.

One conclusion, however, holds alike whether or not we accept any of the epistles as genuine: or rather, the more we lean on the epistles the more it holds: Paul had no concern about the life, teachings, or “personality” of his Jesus.97 His Jesus, be it said once more, is a speechless abstraction. One of the strangest fallacies [147]in the procedure of the biographical school is the assumption that the acceptance of the epistles as genuine involves the admission of the historicity of the Founder. In actual fact, it was a belief in the substantial genuineness of the main epistles that first strengthened the present writer in his first surmises of the non-historicity of the entire gospel record; just as a perception of the historical situation broadly set forth in Judges confirms doubt as to the historicity of the record of the Hexateuch. The two will not consist. On the other hand, Van Manen, who had previously been troubled about the historicity of Jesus, was positively set at rest on that score when he reached the conclusion that all the Paulines were supposititious. This happened simply because he had scientifically covered the field only on the Pauline side: had he applied equivalent tests to the gospels, he would have reached there too a verdict of fabrication. There is strictly no absolute sequitur in such a case. The myth-theory is neither made nor marred by the rejection of the Paulines.

Even those who cannot realize the indifference of “Paul” to all personal records of his Jesus—or, recognizing it, are content to explain it away by formulas—must see on consideration that belief in a Saviour God no more needed biographical basis in the case of Paul than in the case of the priests of Mithra, who, it may be noted, had a strong centre at Tarsus.98 There is a certain plausibility in the argument that only a great personality could have made possible the belief in the Resurrection story—though that too is fallacy—but there is no plausibility in inferring that a conception of a personality he had never personally known was needed to impel Paul to his evangel, which is simply one of future salvation by divine sacrifice for all who believe. That is the [148]substitution made by Gentile Christism for the miscarrying Messianism of the Petrine doctrine. It was probably the normal doctrine of many pagan cults—Mithraism for one, which for three hundred years, by common consent, was the outstanding rival of Christianity in the Roman empire.99 It was, then, no specialty of dogma that ultimately determined the success of the one and the disappearance of the other. It was a concatenation of real or “external” causes, not a peculiarity of mere belief.

The more we study comparatively the fortunes of the Christian and the rival cults, the more difficult it is to conceive that it made headway in virtue of sheer monotheism. If we assume that Judaism had made its proselytes in the pagan world by reason of the appeal made by its monotheism to the more thoughtful minds, we are bound to infer that Christism was on that side rather at a disadvantage, inasmuch as it was really adding a new deity, with a “Holy Spirit” superadded, to the God of the Jews.

But the ordinary argument as to the vogue of “pure monotheism” at any time is in the main a series of traditional assumptions. For the more thoughtful of the ancients, polytheism was always tending to pass into monotheism. We see the process going on in the Vedas, in Brahmanism, in the Egyptian system, in the Babylonian—to say nothing of the Greek.100 It proceeded partly by way of henotheism—the tendency to exalt any particular deity as the deity: partly by way of the compelled surmise that all the deities of the popular [149]creeds were but aspects or names of one all-controlling Power. Wherever creeds met, the more thoughtful were driven to ask themselves whether the heavens could be a mere reflex of the earth, with every nation represented by its special God; and to fuse the national Gods into one was but a step to fusing the Gods of the various natural forces into one. Since religions became organized, there must always have been monotheists, as there must always have been unbelievers.

Nevertheless, polytheism is just as surely popular as monotheism is inevitable to the more thoughtful who remain “religious” in the natural sense of the term. One of the great delusions maintained by the acceptance of the falsified history of Judaism and the conventional religion of the Bible is the notion that the Jews were a specially monotheistic people. They were not.101 They were originally tribalists like their neighbours, holding by a tribal God and a hierarchy of inferior Gods. To this day we are seriously told that Abraham made a new departure as a monotheist. Abraham is a mythical patriarch, himself once a deity; and the deity represented to have been believed in by Abraham is a tribal God. And not even the tribal God was monotheistically worshipped. The Sacred Books are one long chain of complaints against the Israelites for their perpetual resort to “strange Gods”—and Goddesses.102

Two brilliant French scholars have advanced the thesis that this alleged polytheism is imaginary;103 and that the Israelites in the mass always worshipped only the One God Yahweh.104 But this position, which is grounded [150]on the inference that the mass of the historical and prophetic literature is post-exilic, outgoes its own grounds. Even if we assume, with the theorists, that Jewish monotheism was universalist from the moment it took shape as monotheism in literature,105 we get rid neither of the question of pre-exilic polytheism nor of that of popular survival. To say that the post-exilic Jews are “the only Jews known to history,” and that the apparently old lore in Genesis is “perhaps really the most modern,” being invented for purposes of parable, is only a screening of the fact that the Hebrews evolved religiously like other peoples. A resort to alien Gods is seen to be universal in the religious history of the ancient world. Every conquered race was suspected to have secret power in respect of “the God of the land106”; and wherever races mixed, cults mixed. It is only on a provision of special Sacred Books, themselves treated as fetishes, that the attractions of alien cults can be repelled; and not even Sacred Books can make real monotheists of an uncultured majority. Even later Judaism, with its angels, its Metatron, its Satan, was never truly monotheistic.107 Islam is not. The universalism which in later Judaism still commonly passes for a specialty of the Hebrew mind was really an assimilation and development of Perso-Babylonian ideas;108 and Satan made a dualism of the Jewish creed even as Ahriman did of the Persian. [151]

In the Romanized world, Judaism had never a really great success of proselytism, just because the more cultured had their own monotheism, and had in Greek literature something more satisfactory than the Hebraic, with its barbaric basis of racialism and its apparatus of circumcision, synagogues and Sabbaths. The proselytes were made in general among the less cultured—not the populace, but the serious men of religious predilections, who were the more impressed by the Sacred Books as rendered in the Septuagint because they were not at home in the higher literature of Greece. And if Judaism could not sweep the Roman empire in virtue of monotheism, Christism could not, especially while it lacked sacred books of its own.

Professor Smith’s thesis of a rapid monotheistic triumph is partly founded on his own vivid interpretation of many of the gospel stories of cast-out demons and diseases as a symbolism for successes against polytheism. And his symbolistic interpretation, which is at first sight apt to seem arbitrary, is really important at many points, accounting as it does convincingly for a number of gospel stories. But if we are to assume that all the gospel stories of casting out devils, curing lepers, healing the lame, and giving sight to the blind, were composed with a symbolic intent, we shall still be left asking on what grounds the Name of Jesus made any popular appeal before and after the symbolizing gospels were compiled.

Professor Smith draws a powerful picture of the relief given by monotheism to polytheists. In his eloquent words, the “tyranny of demons” had “trodden down humanity in dust and mire since the first syllable of recorded time”; and the new proclamation “roused a world, dissolved the fetters of the tyrannizing demons, set free the prisoners of superstition, poured light upon [152]the eyes of the blind, and called a universe to life.”109 But let us be clear as to the facts. If by “demons” we understand the Gods of the heathen, there was really no more “bondage” under polytheism than under monotheism. Spiritual bondage can be and is set up by the fear of One God who is supposed to meddle actively with all life;110 and the Jewish law was in itself notoriously an intellectual and social bondage. It is expressly represented as such in the Pauline epistles. If again we have regard to the fear of “evil spirits,” there was really no difference between Jew and Gentile, for the “superstition” of the Jew in those matters was unbounded.111 Nor is there any ground for thinking that the Jew had more confidence than other people in divine protection from the spirits of evil.

In what respect, then, are we to suppose Jesuist monotheism to have been an innovation? The argument seems to require that Jesuism delivered the polytheist from belief in the existence either of his daimon Gods or of his evil spirits. But obviously it negated neither of these. Daimons of all sorts are constantly presupposed in Jesuist polemic. The “freedom in Christ” proffered to Jews and Gentiles by the Pauline evangel is, in the terms of the case, not a freedom from the terrors of polytheism as such. It was certainly not regarded as a freedom, from “demons,” for exorcism against demons was a standing function in the early church for centuries; and the fear of a demon or demons is implicit in the “Lord’s Prayer.” What is proffered is primarily a freedom from the Jewish ceremonial law, and secondarily a freedom from fear in respect of the judgment-day and the future [153]life, the divine sacrifice having taken away all sin. We are told by eloquent missionaries in our own day112 that the Christian doctrine gives a new sense of freedom and security to negroes, in particular to the women; though we also learn on the other hand that where the two religions can compete freely Islam makes the stronger claim in respect of its exclusion of the race bar which Christianity always sets up in the rear of its evangel. But here, if the fear of evil spirits is really cast out, it is by a modern doctrine of their non-existence, not found in the New Testament, but generated by modern science.

Whatever preaching of monotheism, then, entered into early Jesuism, it gave no deliverance from belief in evil spirits: rather it added to their number by turning good daimons into bad. What is more, there enters into Christian polemic at a fairly early stage a use of the terms “God” and “Gods” for the “saints” which is on all fours with the common language of Paganism;113 and this is a much more common note than the “high” monotheism of the Apology of Aristides, which has hardly any Christian characteristics. His monotheism is rather Pagan than Christian. The broad fact remains that so far as we can know the early Jesuist polemic from the gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, the Apocalypse, or the patristic literature, it was not a wide and successful assault on polytheism as such by an appeal to monotheistic instinct, but just a proffer to Jews and Gentiles of a kind of creed common enough in the pagan world, its inconsistent monotheism appealing only to a minority of the recipients.114 The very miracle-stories which [154]Professor Smith interprets as allegories of monotheistic propaganda became part of the popular appeal as soon as they were made current in documents; and they appealed (he will admit) as miracle-stories, not as allegories. Peter and Paul in their turn are represented as working miracles of healing. It was all finally part of the appeal to primary religious credulity.

Of two positions, then, we must choose one. Either the miracle-stories of the gospels, and by consequence those of the Acts, were as such otiose inventions for an audience which, on the view under discussion, would have been much more responsive to an explicit claim of triumph over polytheistic beliefs, the thing they are said to have been most deeply concerned about, or the miracle stories in general were meant as miracle-stories, only some later symbolists seeking to impose a symbolic sense on the records along with the Gnostic conception that the Christ had spoken in allegories which the people were not meant to understand. This later manipulation undoubtedly did take place. The parable of the Rich One, as Professor Smith convincingly shows, is an allegory of Jew and Gentile—the Rich One being Israel. But it is not by such manipulation that cults are made popular, congregations collected, and revenue secured. And it was on these practical lines that Christianity was “stablished.”

The factors which made this one Eastern cult gradually gain ground, and finally hold its ground, as against the many rival cults, were—

1. The system of ecclesiæ, modelled at once on the Jewish synagogue and the pagan collegia.

2. The practice of mutual help, making the churches Friendly Societies—again an assimilation of common pagan practice. [155]

3. The colligation of the churches, primarily by means of a new sacred literature of gospels and epistles, and secondarily by a system of centralized government, partly modelled on the imperial system.

4. The backing of the new Christian Sacred Books by the Jewish Sacred Books, giving an ancient Eastern background and basis for the faith in a world in which Eastern religious elements were progressively overriding the Western, which had in comparison no documentary basis.

5. The giving to the whole process a relatively democratic character, again after the model of the Jewish system, wherein the people had their main recognition as human beings with rights. Thus Christianity was at once a “secret society” under an autocracy, as were so many Hellenistic religious groups, drawing members as such societies always do in autocratically governed States,115 and a popular movement as contrasted with Mithraism, which always remained a mere secret society, whence its easy ultimate suppression by the Christianized government.

6. It was the wide ramification and popular importance of the Christian system that at length made it worth the while of the emperor to cease persecuting it as a partly anti-imperial organization and to turn it into an imperial instrument by making it the religion of the State.

To explain the process as the morally deserved success of a religion superior from the start, in virtue of the superiority of its nominal Founder, would be to adhere to pre-scientific conceptions of causation, akin to the geocentric assumption in astronomy. Hierology ultimately merges in sociology, as mythology and anthropology (in the English limitation of the term) merge in hierology; and sociology is a study of the reaction of environments as [156]well as of the action of institutions and doctrines. The Christian success was finally achieved by the assimilation of all manner of pagan modes of attraction on the side of creed, and the absolute ultimate subordination of the specialties of early Christian ethic to the business of political adaptation.

And to all attempts to obscure the problem by figuring Christianity as a continuously beneficent and purifying force it is sufficient here to answer that it is in strict fact a religious variant which survived in a decaying civilization, a politically and socially decaying world; that it lent itself to that decay; and that it did less than nothing to avert it.

Where superior hostile power efficiently fought it, it was suppressed just as it suppressed the organized cults of paganism and some (not all) of its own heretical sects. Its further survival, which does not here properly concern us, was but a matter of the renewed “triumph” of an organized over unorganized religions, and of the adoption of that organization by the new barbaric States as before by the declining Roman empire. [157]

It is important to realize in some detail the operation of the economic factor in particular, and of organization in general, before we try to grasp synthetically the total process of documentary and doctrinal construction. The former is somewhat sedulously ignored in ordinary historiography, by reason of a general unwillingness even among rationalists to seem to connect mercenary motives with religious beginnings; and of the general assumption among religionists that “true” or “early” religion operates in spite of, in defiance or in independence of and not by aid of, economic motives. No one will dispute that the history of the Roman Catholic Church is one of economic as well as doctrinal action and reaction, or that Protestantism from the first was in large measure an economic processus. But it is commonly assumed, at least implicitly, that “primitive” religion, religion “in the making,” is not at all an affair of economic motive or reaction.

Those who have at all closely studied primitive religious life know that this is not so.1 The savage medicine-man is up to his lights as keenly concerned about his economic interest as were the priests of ancient Babylon and Egypt—to take instances that can hardly give modern offence.2 And to say this is not to say that the “religion” involved [158]is insincere, in the case of the savage or the pagan any more than in that of the modern ecclesiastic or missionary. It is merely to say that religion has always its economic side, and that faith may go with economic self-seeking as easily as with self-sacrifice. I at least am not prepared to say that when the Franciscans in general passed from the state of voluntary poverty to that of corporate wealth they ceased to be sincere believers; or that a bishop is necessarily less pious than a Local Preacher.

I have seen, in Egypt, the life of a Moslem “saint” in the making. He fasted much, certainly never eating more than one meal a day, and he was visibly emaciated and feeble as a result of his abstinences. Over his devout neighbours he had an immense influence. To his religious addresses they listened with rapt reverence; and when once in my presence he gave to a young man a religious charm to cure his sick sister, in the shape of a cigarette paper inscribed with a text from the Koran and rolled up to be swallowed, the youth’s face was transfigured with joyous faith, his eyes shining as if he had seen a glorious vision. I have not seen more radiant faith, in or out of “Israel.” And the saint, all the same, took unconcealed satisfaction in showing privately the heavy purse of gold he had recently collected from his faithful. To call him insincere would be puerile. I believe him to have been as sincere as Luther or Loyola. He simply happened, like so many Easterns and Westerns, to combine the love of pelf with the love of God.

If I am told there were no such men among the early Jesuists or Christian propagandists, I answer that if there had not been the cult would not have gone very far. Of course the records minimize the economic side. In the gospels we are told that Judas carried “the bag,” but never anything of what he got to put in it. But in [159]the Acts, the economic factor obtrudes itself even in myth. A picture is there drawn (ii, 44), for the edification of later Christians, of the first community as having “all things common”—a statement which we have no reason to believe true of any ancient Christian community whatever—unless in the “pre-apostolic” period.3 The picture never recurs, in the apostolic history or elsewhere. And the purpose of edification is unconsciously turned to the account of revelation. Of the faithful it is represented that they “sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all, according as any man had need.” The assertion is reiterated (iv, 34) to the extent of alleging that all who had houses or lands sold all, bringing the proceeds to the apostles for distribution “according as any one had need.” Among these having need would certainly be the “apostles.”

Soon one of the faithful, Joseph surnamed Barnabas, “a Levite, a man of Cyprus by race,” is held up to honour for that “having a field,” he “sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles’ feet.” Then comes the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who, or at least the former, have ever since supplied Christendom with its standing name for the fraudulent liar. The sin of Ananias consisted in his not having given the apostles the whole price of a possession he had voluntarily sold for behoof of the community. There could be no more striking instance of the power of ecclesiastical ethic to paralyse the general moral sense. Ananias in the legend was giving liberally, but not liberally enough to satisfy the apostle, who accordingly denounces him as sinning against the Holy Ghost,4 and [160]miraculously slays him for his crime. One might have supposed that no Christian reader, remembering that the ultra-righteous apostle, in the previous sacrosanct record, had just before been represented as basely denying his Lord, could fail to be struck with shame and horror by the savage recital. But of such shame and horror I cannot recall one Christian avowal. And we are to remember that the devout recipients of that recital are assumed to have been the ideal Christian converts.

Soon the twelve are made to explain (vi, 2–4) to the growing “multitude of the disciples” that “it is not fit that we should forsake the word of God, and serve tables. Look ye out ... seven men of good report, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business. But we will continue stedfastly in prayer, and in the ministry of the word.” From the date of that writing the apostle and his successors could claim to be worthy of their hire, though they had long to squabble for it. In the early Jesuist additions to the Teaching we see how the issue was raised. At first (xi) there is a succession of wandering apostles or “prophets.” Every apostle is to be received “as the Lord; but he shall not remain [except for?] one day; if however there be need, then the next [day]; but if he remain three days, he is a false prophet. But when the apostle departeth, let him take nothing except bread enough till he lodge [again]; but if he ask money, he is a false prophet.” That is the first stage, probably quite Judaic.

The next section (xii) still adheres broadly to the same view. Every entrant must work for his living. “If he will not act according to this, he is a Christmonger (χριστέμπορός).” Evidently there were already Christmongers. But in chapter xiii the primitive stage has been passed, and there is systematic enactment of [161]economic provision for the installed prophet or teacher as such:—

This economic development, too, may have been Jewish, as it was heathen.5 It is certainly also Christian. The “prophets” are represented in the Acts (xi, 27) as at work already in the days of Claudius; and they were an established class at the time of the writing of First Corinthians (xii, 28), standing next to “apostles” and above “teachers.” That passage is obviously post-Pauline, if we are to think of Paul as spending only a few years in his eastern propaganda. But the prophets are ostensibly numerous in the earliest days of the church,6 and seem to have subsisted alongside of “apostles” at the outset. All along they must have found some subsistence: in time they are “established.” The eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth sections of the Teaching, which are our best evidence of the progression, show a gradual triumph of the economic factor, registering itself in the additions. The fifteenth section divides in two parts, an economic and an ethical, the economic coming first:— [162]

It was for a community thus supporting various classes of teachers and preachers, first poorly and primitively, later in an organized fashion, that the gospels were built up and the epistles composed.

Organization, which in our days has become “a word to conjure with,” is no new factor in human life. It is the secret of survival for communities and institutions; and the survival of Christism in its competition with other cults must be traced mainly to the early process of adaptation. That, however, takes place in terms of three concurrent factors: (1) the appeal made by the cult which is the ground of association; (2) the practice of the community as regards the relations of members; (3) the administration, as regards propaganda, expansion and co-ordination of groups. And it is through primary adaptations in respect of the first and second, with a constant stimulus from the third, that the Christian Church can be seen to have succeeded in the struggle for existence. That is to say, it is in the element in which conscious organization is most prominent as distinct from usage or tradition that the determining influence chiefly lies.

The writer who in England was the first to take a comparatively scientific view of church organization from the ecclesiastical side, the late Dr. Edwin Hatch, puts in the forefront of his survey “the preliminary assumption that, as matter of historical research, the [163]facts of ecclesiastical history do not differ in kind from the facts of civil history.”7 For those who see in the religion itself a processus of natural social history, this assumption is a matter of course; but the ecclesiastical recognition of the fact is an important step; and the churchman’s analysis of the process is doubly serviceable in that he keeps the study avowedly separate from that of the evolution of doctrine. What he could not have supplied on scientific lines without falling into heresy, the rationalist can supply for himself.

As our historian recognizes, the Christian movement in the Eastern Empire had from the outset a strong basis in the democratic spirit which it derived alike from Jewish and from Hellenistic example. In the day of universal autocracy, social life lay more and more in the principles of voluntary association; and the first Christian churches were but instances of an impulse seen in operation on all sides. In the Jewish environment, the synagogue; in the Hellenistic the ecclesia or private association, were everywhere in evidence. Greek religious associations—thiasoi, eranoi, orgeones—were but types of the prevailing impetus to find in voluntary organized groups a substitute for the democratic life of the past.8 Whereas the older associations for the promotion of special worships were limited to male free citizens, the new admitted foreigners, slaves, and women. Besides religious associations there were a multitude of others which had the double aspect of clubs and friendly societies; trade guilds existed “among almost every kind of workmen in almost every town in the empire:”9 and burial clubs, dining clubs, financial societies, and friendly societies met other social needs. [164]

Almost every society, however, had its tutelary divinity, “in the same way as at the present day similar associations on the continent of Europe”—as in England before the Reformation—“invoke the name of a patron saint; and their meetings were sometimes called by a name which was afterwards consecrated to Christian uses—that of a ‘sacred synod.’”10 In many of them “religion was, beyond this, the basis and bond of union.... Then, as now, many men had two religions, that which they professed and that which they believed; for the former there were temples and State officials and public sacrifices; for the latter there were associations; and in these associations, as is shown from extant inscriptions, divinities whom the State ignored had their priests, their chapels, and their ritual.”11

The Christists, then, when they began to form groups, were doing what a swarm of other movements did. Their ecclesiæ were called by a pagan name, as were the Jewish synagogues. Two things it behoved them to do if they were collectively to gain ground and outlive or out-top the rest: they must multiply in membership, and they must co-ordinate their groups; and both things they did on lines of common action. Membership was from the first promoted by the simplest of all methods, systematic almsgiving to poor adherents; a practice long before initiated by the Jewish synagogues and to this day fixed among them. Given the basis of free association, the inculcated duty of almsgiving, the eastern belief in its saving virtue,12 and the special Christian belief in the speedy end of the world, the problem of membership was early solved. The poor, helped one day, would themselves [165]help the next, as is their human way in all ages; and in an age of general poverty, the result of an autocratic fiscal system in the Empire as afterwards in the Turkish Empire which in the East took its place, such mutual sympathy constituted a broad social basis of corporate existence.

For our ecclesiastical historian, the poverty is the main determinant on the side of early organization. With a note of profound pessimism, which alternates strangely with passages of professional eulogy of the Church, he notes that pauperism and philanthropy were going hand in hand already throughout the Empire before the advent of Christianity, rich men and municipalities proclaiming an “almost Christian sentiment” on the subject. “The instinct of benevolence was fairly roused. And yet to the mass of men life was hardly worth living. It tended to become a despair.”13 And he claims that the Christian practice of almsgiving—which he knows to have been warmly inculcated among the Jews, as it has always been in Eastern countries—was one of the conservative forces that “arrested decay. They have prevented the disintegration, and possibly the disintegration by a vast and ruinous convulsion, of the social fabric. Of those forces the primitive bishops and deacons were the channels and the ministers.... They bridged over the widening interval between class and class. They lessened to the individual soul the weight of that awful sadness of which, then as now, to the mass of men, life was the synonym and the sum.”14

The generalization as to the widening of the interval between classes is hardly borne out by the evidence; and the pessimism of the last sentence partly defeats the argument, by putting the life of the early Christian period [166]on the same general level with that of to-day and of all the time between. The true summary would be that in that age the springs of social life were lamed by the suppression of all national existence; that the rule of Rome tended to general impoverishment in respect of a vicious system of taxation; and that the subject peoples, deprived of the old impulses to collective energy, at once turned more and more to private association and became ready to believe in a coming “end of the world” which in some way was to mean a new life. And as the Church’s doctrine was pre-eminently one of salvation in that new life, it behoved it in every way to resort to propaganda while maintaining the eleemosynary system which gave it a broad basis of membership. Thus the organization which controlled the simple financial system must also have regard to the spread of doctrine. And for the means of spreading doctrine, again, as we have already noted, the cue was obviously given by Judaism, which stood out from all religious systems in the Roman world as a religion of Sacred Books. Sacred Books of its own the Jesuist movement must have if it was to hold its own against the prestige of the Jewish Bible. The production of Sacred Books, then, was a task which devolved upon the organizers of the Christian ecclesiæ throughout the Eastern Empire, equally with the task of co-ordination, of which, in fact, it was a main part. A common religious literature was the basis of Jewish cohesion. Only by means of a common religious literature could Christism cohere.

No literature, indeed, could avert schism. Schism and strife are among the first notes sounded in the epistles; and a religion which aimed at dogmatic teaching, as against the purely liturgical practice of the old pagan cults, was bound to multiply them. Judaism itself was divided into antagonistic groups of Pharisees, Sadducees, [167]and Scribes, to say nothing of the Zealots, the Essenes, and other diverging groups. But sects do not destroy a religion any more than parties destroy a State; and the way of success for Christism was a way which, while it involved a multiplication of schism so long as the voluntary basis remained, made a growing aggregate which was at least a unity as having a special creed, distinct from all competing with it.

Thus the Christian movement was doubly a copy and competitor of Judaism, upon whose books it primarily founded. As the dispersed Jewish synagogues were co-ordinated from Jerusalem by the High Priest, and later from Tiberias by the Patriarch, by means of Twelve Apostles and possibly by a subordinate grade of seventy-two collectors who brought in the contributions of the faithful scattered among the Gentiles, so the Jesuists, beginning with an organization centred in Jerusalem and likewise aiming at the collection of funds for which almsgiving in Jerusalem was the appealing pretext, were bound after the fall of the Temple to aim at a centralization or centralizations of their own. A literature became more and more necessary if the new faith was to extend. That was the way at once to glorify the new Hero-God and to multiply his devotees. And it would seem to have been from the starting-point of the Jewish Teaching of the Twelve Apostles that the new departure on one line was made.

To say who, or what class in the new organization, began the evolution, seems impossible in the present state of our knowledge. The point at which the Christist organization in course of time most noticeably diverges from the Jewish model is in the creation and aggrandisement of the episcopos, the bishop, a title and a function borrowed from the pagan societies. These had officials called epimelētai (superintendents) and episcopoi, whose function it was [168]to receive funds and dispense alms.15 The early Christists adopted the latter title, and constituted for each group a single official so named, who as president of the assembly received the offerings of donors and was personally responsible for their distribution. This is not the place to trace the effects of the institution in the general development of the churches. It must suffice to note that while in their presbyters these preserved the democratic element which they had derived from Judaism and which gave them their social foundation, their creation of a supreme administrator, whose interest it was always to increase the influence of his church by increasing his own, gave them a special source of strength in comparison with the Judaic system.16

For the dispersed Jews, held by a racial tie, association was a matter of course. Marked off by religion if not by aspect from Gentiles everywhere, they were a community within the Gentile community. For the first Jesuists, association was not thus a matter of course all round. For the slaves, seeking friendship, and the poor, seeking help, it may have been; but the more prosperous were for that very reason less spontaneously attracted. The fundamental tie was the so-called “Eucharist,” which at first, in varying forms, was probably only an annual rite: the agapae or love feasts were common to the multitude of pagan associations. Accordingly many adherents tended to “forsake the assembling of themselves together,”17 and it was plainly the function of the bishop to act upon these. Not only the Epistle to the Hebrews and that of Jude but those of Barnabas and Ignatius, and The Shepherd of Hermas, anxiously or sternly urge the duty of regular meeting. Addresses by bishops and “prophets” would be natural means of promoting the end.

Who then produced the literature? Once more, there [169]is no evidence. If any of the Epistles might at first sight seem “genuine,” they are those ascribed to James and Jude, essentially Judaic or Judaistic documents, especially the former, in which (ii, 1) the cumbrous formula “the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory” exhibits a Christian interpolation. It is essentially in the spirit of the Teaching, a counsel of right living, calling for works in opposition to the new doctrine that faith is the one thing needful, and sounding the Ebionitic note (v, 1): “Go to now, ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you.” But save for the interpolation and the naming of Jesus Christ in the sentence of preamble, there is no specific Jesuist or Christist teaching whatever. If this document was current among the Jesuists, it was borrowed from a Jewish author who had at most one special item of belief in common with them, that of “the coming [or presence] of the Lord” (v. 7, 8); and here there is no certainty that “the Lord” meant for the writer the Christ.

Once more, then, we turn for our first clue to the Judaic Teaching, which on its face exhibits the gradual accretion of Jesuist elements, beginning with an Ebionitic mention of the “Servant” Jesus, and proceeding step by step from a stage in which wandering “apostles” or “prophets” must subsist from hand to mouth and from day to day, to one in which settled prophets are supported by first fruits, and yet a further one in which bishops and deacons appear to administer while prophets and teachers continue to teach. And as the “prophets” constitute a class which in the third century has disappeared from the church, as if its work were done; and as they bear the name given to the chief producers of the sacred literature of Judaism, it would seem to be the natural surmise that they were the primary producers of special literature for the early Christian churches. [170]

Evidently the Teaching (Didachê) of the Twelve Apostles was humbly used by some of the early Jesuists as an authoritative Jewish manual which supplied them with their rule of conduct, they only later supplying (c. ix) their special rite of the “Eucharist” of wine and broken1 bread, and vaguely mentioning “the life and knowledge which thou hast made known to us by Jesus thy Servant.” There is no mention of crucifixion, no naming of Jesus as Messiah. We are confronted with a primary Judaic Jesuism which is not that of the gospels, nor that of the Paulines, nor that of the Acts, though it agrees with the latter in calling Jesus the Servant of the Lord. It is even of older type than Ebionism; for the Ebionites carried their cult of poverty and asceticism to the point of using water instead of wine in the Eucharist;2 whereas the Didachê specifies wine, the older practice. The cup of the Eucharist is “the holy wine of David thy servant, which thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy servant”; and the thanks which follow (c. 10) are to the holy Father “for thy holy name, which thou hast caused to dwell in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality which thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy servant.” [171]

It is quite clear that in this form of Jesuism, visibly early as compared with that set forth in the gospels and the Acts, we have something different from that in its derivation. The Eucharist, here so called ostensibly for the first time, is only inferribly derived from a sacrament of the body and blood of the sacrificed Jesus. Eucharistia means thanksgiving or thank-offering, and this ritual-meal is intelligibly so named. Applied, as by Justin Martyr and later Fathers, to the sacrificial sacrament of the gospels and the epistles, the name is a false description: yet the false description becomes canonical. The licit inference appears to be that the cult of a Jesus who outside of Judaism was a Sacrificed Saviour-God had here, under Judaic control, been presented as that of a Hero-Jesus, connected like Dionysos with the gift of the vine, and associated with a ritual meal of thanksgiving to Yahweh, whose “servant” he is.

Taking the Didachê as a stage in the Christian evolution, we further infer that the conception and name of a “Eucharist” was thence imposed on another and older species of ritual-meal, in which the Jesus is slain as a sacrifice and commemorated in a sacrificial sacrament. The more Judaic form of the cult absorbs an older and non-Judaic form, forced to the front by a death-story which gives to its sacrament a higher virtue for the devotee. It is a case of competition of cult forms for survival, the weaker being superseded. And as the sacrament, so the Jesus, is developed on other lines. He of the Didachê is neither Son of God nor Saviour, as he is not the Messiah, though he has somehow conveyed “knowledge and faith and immortality.” What the Didachê does is to begin the process of a doctrinal and ethical teaching which coalesces with that of evolving the God.

In the eighth section, the “Lord’s Prayer” is introduced [172]with the formula “Nor pray ye like the hypocrites, but as the Lord commanded in his gospel.” Now “the Lord” has in every previous mention clearly meant, not Jesus, who is mentioned solely in the “servant” passages, but “God,” “the Father,” the Jewish deity. Either, then, “the Lord ... in his gospel” refers to some “gospel” of Yahweh or, as is highly probable, the whole clause is a late interpolation. This is the more likely because the seventh section, prescribing baptism in the name of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” is flagrantly interpolated. That being so, the provision at the end of c. 9, that no one shall partake of the Eucharist except those baptized in the name of the Lord, must be held to be also a late interpolation. Thus the document has been manipulated to some extent even in its early portions. The only other mentions of the gospel are in chapters 11 and 15, which follow after the “Amen” of the tenth, and represent the progressive provisions for the apostles and prophets of the growing church. The introduction of Jesuism in chapters 9 and 10 is pre-gospel.

This will be disputed only by those who, like the first American and German editors, cannot see that the first five or six sections are purely Judaic. After Dr. Charles Taylor and other English editors did so, coinciding with an early suggestion of M. Massebieau,3 the rest have mostly come into line; and even the American editors at the outset saw that the Epistle of Barnabas, which has so much of the matter of the Teaching, is the later and not the earlier document. Thus the Lord’s Prayer takes its place as originally a Jewish and not a Christian document; and the passages in the early chapters which [173]coincide with the Sermon on the Mount are equally Jewish.4

We can now understand the tradition that Matthew, of which the present opening chapters are so plainly late, was the first of the gospels, and was primarily a collection of logia. But the logia were in the terms of the case not logia Iesou at all, being but a compilation of Jewish dicta on the lines of the Teaching, and, as regards the form of beatitude, probably an imitation of other Jewish literature as exampled in the “Slavonic Enoch.”5

It must be repeated, however, that the ninth and tenth sections of the Teaching are not to be taken as giving us “the” original Jesus of the Jesuist movement. We have posited, with Professor Smith, a “multifocal” movement; and concerning the Jesus here given we can only say that the document tells of the primary connection of the Jesus-Name with a non-sacrificial Eucharist. Whether the name stood historically for Joshua or for the Jesus of Zechariah, or for yet another, it is impossible to pronounce. What is clear is that it does not point to the Jesus of the gospels. When the Jesus-sections of the Teaching were penned, the gospels were yet to come; and the crucified Saviour-God of Paul was not preached, though his myth was certainly current somewhere.

The “Revelation of John the Theologian” is also, in respect of much of its matter, pre-gospel, and even in its later elements independent of the gospels. It is noteworthy that the latest professional criticism has [174]after infinite fumbling come (without acknowledging him) to the view of Dupuis that the episode of the woman and the child and the dragon belong to sun-myth;6 and the exegetes would probably save themselves a good deal of further guessing by contemplating Dupuis’s solution that the special details are simply derived from an ancient planisphere or fuller zodiac, in which the woman and the dragon and the hydra are prominent figures.7 It is in any case particularly important to realize that this palpably mythical conception of a Jesus Christ, figured as “the Lamb,” evidently with a zodiacal reference, is found in one of the earliest documents of the cult, outside of the gospels.

In these, as we have seen, the original God-Man is progressively humanized from the hieratic figure of the opening chapters of Mark, through Matthew and Luke, till in the fourth, which declares him Logos and premundane, he has close personal friends and (ostensibly) weeps for the death of one. But not even the thoughtless criticism which professes to find a recognizable human figure in Mark can pretend to find one in Revelation. There, admittedly on Jewish bases, there is limned an unearthly figure, who has been “pierced,” we are not told where; who has the keys of death and Hades, and carries on his right hand seven stars; and has eyes like a flame of fire and feet like unto burnished brass. With this pre-Christian apparatus, which on the astrological side goes back to Persia and Babylon, there is carried on a fierce polemic against certain of the “seven [175]churches,” the sect of the Nicolaitans, and “them which say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.” The churches named are not those of the Acts and the Pauline epistles: Jerusalem and Antioch are not named, though Ephesus is. Jewish and pre-Jewish myth and doctrine overlay the Jesuist, which at many points is visibly a mere verbal interpolation; so that the question arises whether even the seven churches are primarily Christian or Jewish.

If “Babylon” stands for Rome, it is but an adaptation of an older polemic; for Babylon is declared to have actually fallen, before it is announced that she “shall be cast down.”8 The eleventh chapter dilates on the Jewish temple; again and again we listen to a purely Jewish declamation over Jewish woes; the four-and-twenty elders and the Lamb “as though it had been slain, having seven horns, and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God,” are of Babylonian and Persian derivation; and the “second death” is Egyptian. In the new Jerusalem, “coming down out of heaven,” twelve angels are at the gates, which bear the names of the twelve tribes; and the “twelve apostles of the Lamb” are represented only by “twelve basement courses” of the wall.

How much such a document stood for in the early building-up of the cult it is impossible to gather from the records, which indicate that it was long regarded askance by the gospel-reading and epistle-reading churches. But it gives a definite proof that the cult had roots wholly unlike those indicated in the “catholic” tradition, and wholly incompatible with the beginnings set out in the gospels and the Acts. [176]

The outstanding problem in regard to the Epistles in the mass is that while criticism is more and more pressing them out of the “apostolic” period into the second century, they show practically no knowledge of the gospels. As little do they show any trace of the “personality” of the Founder, which is posited by the biographical school as the ground for the resurrection myth. Of Jesus as a remarkable personality there is no glimpse in the whole literature; and it must be a relief for the defenders of his historicity to be invited to pronounce both James and Jude pseudepigraphic documents, the former written with direct polemic reference to the Pauline doctrine of faith.9 The puzzle is to conceive how, on that view, the document can still remain so destitute of Jesuist colouring.

Save for the two namings of Jesus (i, 1; ii, 1) at the beginnings of chapters, there is no trace of Jesuine doctrine; the epistle is addressed to “the twelve tribes of the Dispersion”; and there is a reference (ii, 2) to “your synagogue,” not to “your ecclesia.” When therefore we note the extremely suspicious character of the second naming of Jesus, “our Lord Jesus Christ of glory,” we are doubly entitled to diagnose interpolation; and the first naming at once comes under suspicion. It is not surprising therefore that such a critic as Spitta pronounces the epistle a Jewish document.10 Even if it were true, then, that the eschatological matter has a gospel colouring, that would carry us no further than a surmise that the Jewish document had been slightly developed for Jesuine purposes. And this may be the [177]solution as to the anti-Pauline element. An originally Jewish document may have been used by a Judæo-Christian to carry an attack on a doctrine of Gentilizing Christism. The residual fact is that a section of the Jesuist movement in the second century was satisfied with a quasi-apostolic document which has no hint of the teaching of a historical Jesus. Naturally it soon passed into “catholic” disfavour.

But the remaining epistles differ historically from this only in respect of their asseveration of a crucified Christ, by faith in whom men are saved. They too are devoid of biographical data. Neither parable nor miracle, doctrine nor deed, family history nor birthplace, of the Founder is ever mentioned in the epistolary literature, any more than in the Apocalypse or the Didachê. And yet the mass of the epistles are being, as aforesaid, more and more pressed upon by criticism as pseudepigraphic. Second Peter was always in dispute; and First Peter has few save traditionalist supporters. If First John is to be bracketed with the fourth gospel, it is dismissed with that as outside the synoptic tradition: and the second and third epistles are simply dropped as spurious. Hebrews is anonymous, though our Revisers saw fit to retain its false title; and that epistle too is utterly devoid of testimony to a historical Jesus. It tells simply of a human sacrifice, in which the victim “suffered without the gate,” in accordance with the regular sacrificial practice. Late or early, then, the epistles give no support to the gospels—or, at least, to the biographical theory founded on these.

It is thus quite unnecessary to argue here the interesting question of the genuineness of any of the Pauline epistles. Long ago, nine were given up by the Tübingen school, and four only claimed to be genuine. Remembering [178]the datum of Eusebius that Paul personally penned “only a few very short” epistles, though specially gifted in the matter of style, we are not unprepared to find even these called in question. And latterly the Dutch school whose work culminated in Van Manen has built up an impressive case11 for the rejection of the whole mass, the supreme “four” included; and the defence so far made by the traditionalists is the reverse of impressive.12 The ablest counter-criticism comes from other men of the left wing, as Schmiedel, who makes havoc of the Acts.

From the point of view of the historical as distinguished from the documentary critic, all that need here be said on the issue is that the negative case may have to be restated if there is faced the hypothesis that the Jesuine movement was of comparatively old standing, and of some degree of development, when Paul came on the scene. Van Manen assumes the substantial historicity not only of Jesus but of the Jesuine movement as set forth in the Gospels; and whereas he found it hard to make that assumption on the view that any of the Paulines was genuine, he had no difficulty about it when he relegated them all to the second century. It should be asked, then, whether the view that the Jesus-cult is “pre-Christian” might not re-open the case for some of the Paulines.

Having put that caveat, the historical critic has simply to consider the question of the historicity of [179]Jesus in relation to the Paulines from both points of view, asking what evidence they can be supposed to yield either on the view of the genuineness of some or on that of the spuriousness of all. And the outcome is that on neither view do they tell of a historical Jesus. If “the four” are genuine, Paul, declared to be so near the influence of the “personality” of Jesus, not only shows no trace of impression from it but expressly puts aside the question. In the Epistle to the Galatians he declares that he had not learned his gospel from the other apostles but received it by special revelation, actually avoiding intercourse with the other apostles apart from Peter—a proposition certainly savouring strongly of post-Pauline dialectic, as does the text (2 Cor. v, 16): “Even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know [him so] no more.” Instead then of the Paulines, on the view of their genuineness, confirming the conception of a remarkable personality which had profoundly impressed those who came in contact with it, they radically and unmanageably conflict with that conception. So far Van Manen is justified.

If on the other hand we accept the strongly supported thesis that they are all pseudepigraphic, the historicity of the gospels is in no way accredited. We reach the view that early in the second century, when such early gospels as the Matthew and Mark of Papias may be supposed to have been current, even the devotees who wrote in Paul’s name took no interest in the human personality of Jesus, but were concerned simply about the religious significance of his death. The passages in First Corinthians (xi, 23 sq.; xv, 3 sq.) which deal with the Supper and the Resurrection expressly repudiate knowledge of the gospels; the first claiming to have “received of the Lord” the facts retailed, and the [180]second, after a similar formula, proffering data not given in any gospel. And both passages have been demonstrably interpolated, even if we do not pronounce them, as we are entitled to do, interpolations as wholes. The first breaks the continuity of an exhortation as to the proper way of eating the Lord’s Supper; the second is introduced (xv, 1) with a strange profession to “make known unto you the gospel which I preached unto you.” And even the second passage, with its mention of “the twelve,” excludes knowledge of the story of Judas; while the first, at the point at which our revisers translate “was betrayed,” really says only “delivered up” (παρεδίδοτο), which may or may not imply betrayal.

How Van Manen could find in all this any support for the gospel story in general he never explained; and obviously no support is given. Historically considered, the epistles undermine the biographical theory whether we reckon them early or late, genuine or pseudepigraphic. If early, they discredit completely the notion of a historical Jesus of impressive personality. If as late as Van Manen makes them (120–140) they tell not only of indifference to the personality of Jesus but of ignorance of the gospel story as we have it, strongly suggesting that the complete story of the tragedy was yet unknown, and that only in still later interpolations, made before the Judas story was current, was it to be indicated.

What is more, the Paulines, like other Epistles, tell of vital unbelief as to the reality of Jesus. Paul is made to protest that “some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead” (1 Cor. xv, 12). These Jesuists, then, held at most only a faith in future salvation by virtue of the sacrament. So in First John it is implied (iv, 2–3) that some of the adherents confess not that Jesus is come in the flesh, which is declared to be the [181]doctrine of “the antichrist,” a type of which “many” (ii, 18) have arisen.

We are critically forced, then, to the conclusion that for a century after the alleged death of the Founder the Jesuist movement had either no literature whatever save one of primarily Jewish documents such as the Didachê or problematic short Pauline epistles which have either disappeared or been absorbed in much longer documents of later date, which in turn still tell of no Jesuine Sacred Books. All alike exclude the conception of a historical Jesus of remarkable personality. In the doctrinal quarrels which have already driven deep furrows in the faith, the personality of Jesus counts for nothing. In that connection no one cites any teaching of the Master. He is simply an abstract sacrifice; and even in that aspect he is not clearly present in the Jewish-Christian Didachê. Of his earthly parentage, domicile, or career, there is not a word. Everything goes to confirm our hypothesis that the cult is of ancient origin, rooted in a sacrament which evolved out of a rite of human sacrifice and connected with non-Jewish as well as Jewish myths which from the first tended to the deification of the Slain One.

It remains, then, to consider the gospels anew as compilations made in the second century of (1) previously current Jewish lore, written and unwritten; (2) doctrinal elements indicated by the sectarian disputes already active; (3) pseudo-historic elements justifying Messianic doctrine and practice; and (4) the Mystery-Drama, now developed under Gentile hands. Upon all this followed (5) the new theology and new pseudo-biography of the fourth gospel, which was but another stage in the general process of myth-making. [182]

According to the tradition preserved through Papias (d. circa 165), from “John the presbyter,” who is not pretended to have been John the Apostle, the first gospels were those of Mark, the “interpreter” of Peter, who set down in no chronological order the “sayings and doings” of the Lord as he had gathered them from Peter; and of Matthew, who wrote the logia or sayings “in the Hebrew dialect”1—presumably Aramaic. This, the earliest written tradition concerning the matter embodied in the gospels, is preserved to us from Papias’ lost “Exposition of the Dominical2 Oracles” (Λογίων κυριακῶν) by Eusebius. For his own part, Papias professed to set more store by what he received from Aristion and the Presbyter John and other disciples of the Lord than by anything “out of books.” And it chances that he gave out as a Dominical Oracle3 thus certificated a crude picture of millennial marvels which is actually taken from either the Apocalypse of Baruch, which here imitated the Book of Enoch, or from an older source.4 Concerning this utterance of the Lord, further, Papias narrated a conversation between Jesus [183]and Judas, in which the latter figures as a freethinker, expressing disbelief in the prediction.

Eusebius, scandalized by such testimony, pronounced Papias a man of small understanding. But he is the first Christian authority as to the history of the gospels; and the very fact that he set less store by them than by oral tradition is evidence that he had no reason for thinking them more authoritative than the matter that reached him by word of mouth. It may be that he knew only Greek, and that he could not read for himself the Aramaic logia, concerning which he says that “every one interpreted them for himself as he was able.” From the logia and the proto-Mark to the first two synoptics the evolution can only be guessed. No one now claims that we possess the original documents even in translation. Matthew as it stands is admittedly not a translation; and Dr. Conybeare, who idly alleges that I pay no heed to the order of priority of the gospels, and insists chronically on the general priority of Mark, avows that “Mark, the main source of the first and third evangelists, is himself no original writer, but a compiler, who pieces together and edits earlier documents in which his predecessors had written down popular traditions of the miracles and passion of Jesus.”5 And he predicates in one part “four stages of documentary development.”6 How in this state of things the existing Mark can be proved to be the main source of Matthew and Luke is not and cannot be explained. Mark too is admittedly not a translation from Aramaic; but some of his sources may have been.

Concerning Matthew, again, the tradition runs that according to Papias he told a story of a woman accused of many sins before the Lord; and Eusebius adds, [184]apparently on his own part, that this is contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. If this was the story (now bracketed in R.V.) found only in late copies of the fourth gospel, the “Hebrew” gospel contained matter notably special to itself; and such is the conclusion established by a collation of all the 33 fragments preserved. “We arrive ... at a Gospel (a) in great part independent of the extant text of our gospels, and (b) showing no signs of relationship to Mark or John, but (c) bearing a very marked affinity to Matthew, and (d) a less constant but still obvious affinity to Luke.”7 The hypothesis of Nicholson is “that Matthew wrote at different times the canonical gospel and the gospel according to the Hebrews, or at least that large part of the latter which runs parallel to the former.”8

On this view, “Matthew” in one of his versions deliberately omitted (1) the remarkable story of the woman taken in adultery; (2) the remarkable story that “the mother of the Lord and his brethren” proposed to him that they should all go and be baptized by John, whereupon he asked “Wherein have I sinned?” but added: “except perchance this very thing that I have said in ignorance,” and went accordingly; (3) the statement that at baptism Jesus saw the dove “entering into him”; (4) the further item that “the entire fountain of the Holy Spirit descended and rested upon him,” addressing him as “My son”; and (5) Jesus’ use of the phrase, “My mother, the Holy Spirit.” Such a hypothesis, if accepted, deprives of all meaning the notion of an “author” of a document. The only fair inference is that a Greek translation of the Hebrew gospel was one of the sources of the present Matthew, and that either [185](a) many of its details have been rejected, or (b) that many of the preserved fragments were additions to the original.

On either view, we must pronounce that the Hebrew gospel, as exhibited in the fragments, has none of the marks of a real biographical record. The items of narrative are wholly supernaturalist; the items of teaching belong to the more advanced Jewish ethic which we find progressively developed from Matthew to Luke. Once more, the critical inference is either (a) that the ethically-minded among the Jesuist “prophets” set out by putting approved doctrines in the mouth of the legendary Saviour-God, whereafter doctrinary episodes were invented for cult purposes, or (b) that the miraculous life was first pieced out in terms of Old Testament prophecies held for Messianic. Having regard to the ethical nullity of the primary evangel posited in the synoptics, the presumption is wholly against any primary manufacture of new logia. If we take the Sermon on the Mount as typical, the matter is all pre-Christian.9 If we pronounce the method of the first canonical gospel to be secondary in relation to that of Mark, the ethical element enters only after the cult has gone a long way, and is then Jewish matter subsumed, as in the Didachê.

On bases so laid, there accrue a multitude of expletions, stones added to the cairn, as: episodes favouring this or that view of the proper Messianic heredity; of the Messiah’s ascetic or non-ascetic character; of his attitude for or against Samaritans; of his thaumaturgic principles; of the universality or selectness of the salvation he brings; of his attitude towards the Roman power, towards divorce, towards the Scribes and Pharisees, and so on. Up to the point of the establishment of something [186]like a Canon, the longer the cult lasted, the greater would be the variety of the teaching. Different views of the descent and character of the Messiah, put forward by Davidists and non-Davidists, Nazarites and non-Nazarites, Jews and Samaritans, would all tend to find currency, and all would tend to find a place in the scroll of some group, whence they could ill be ousted by any “Catholic” movement. Still later, definitely anti-Jewish matter is grafted piecemeal by Gentile adherents: the “good Samaritan” is an impeachment of Jewish character; and the legendary apostles are progressively belittled—notably so in the mystery play which finally supersedes the earlier accounts of the Tragedy.

That such a general process actually took place is of necessity admitted by the biographical school, their problem consisting in delimiting the amount of tradition which they can plausibly claim as genuine. From the point of that delimitation they posit a process of doctrinal and other myth-making. The decision now claimed is that there is no point of scientific delimitation, and that the process which they carry forward from an arbitrarily fixed point must logically be carried backwards.

No more general or more far-reaching result can be reached by a mere collation and analysis of the synoptics on purely documentary lines—a process which has gone on for a century without even a documentary decision. The conclusion forced upon Schmiedel, even on the assumption of the historicity of Jesus, that none of the current theories of gospel-composition can meet the problem,10 becomes part of the case of the myth-theory. The assumption that a “source,” once established, gives a historic foundation, is no more tenable in this than in any other case of a challenged myth; and the current [187]methods of establishing sources, rooted as they are in the assumption of historicity, are often quite arbitrary even when they profess to follow documentary tests. Nevertheless, the normal pressure of criticism is seen driving champions of the priority of Mark to the confession that Mark not only contains late additions but is in itself a secondary or tertiary document, pointing to an earlier Mark, an Ur-Markus. The primary flaw in the process is the habit of looking to an author rather than at a compilation; and this habit roots in the assumption of historicity. At no point can we be sure whether we are reading a transcript of oral lore or a redaction.

Granting that Mark has pervading peculiarities of diction which suggest one hand, we are still not entitled to say that such peculiarities would not be adopted by a redactor. Again, as against the relative terseness or simplicity of a number of passages which suggest an earlier form, we have many which by their relative diffuseness admittedly suggest deliberate elaboration.11 And if we are to ask ourselves what was likely to be the method of an early evangelist, how shall we reconcile the “in the stern, asleep on the cushion” (iv, 38) with the absolute traditionalism and supernaturalism of the first chapter? John, “clothed with camel’s hair,” is simply a duplicate of Elijah.12 Is one realistic detail to pass for personal knowledge when the other is sheer typology? In the opening chapter, Jesus comes as the promised “Lord,” is prophesied of by John as the Coming One, is hailed by God from heaven as his beloved son, sees the heavens rent asunder and the Spirit descending as a dove, fasts forty days in the wilderness, [188]is ministered to by angels, calls on men to follow him at his first word, proceeds to give marvellous teaching of which not a word is preserved, is hailed by a demoniac as the Holy One of God, expels a devil, cures a fever instantaneously, heals a multitude, casts out many devils, who know him, goes through the synagogues of Galilee, casting out devils and preaching, cures a leper instantaneously, commands secrecy, is disobeyed, and is then flocked-to by more multitudes. And we are invited to believe that we are reading the biography of a real man, who always speaks to Jews as one Jew to another, and is “not too bright and good for human nature’s daily food.” And the confident champion of this biographical theory assures us that we “need not doubt” that Jesus was a “successful exorcist.”

Either the first chapter of Mark is primordial gospel-writing or it is not. If it is, the biographical theory is as idle as those ridiculed by Socrates in the Phædrus. If it is not, upon what does the biographical theory found? The details of “mending their nets” and “in the boat with the hired servants”? Professor Schmiedel, conscious of the unreality of such narrative, falls back upon nine selected texts, seven of them in Mark, which he claims as “pillars” of a real biography of Jesus,13 on the score that they present him as (a) flouted in his pretensions or (b) himself disclaiming deity, or (c) declining to work wonders, or (d) apparently denying a miracle story, or (e) crying out to God on the cross that he is forsaken. Now, of all such texts, only b and e types can have any [189]such evidential force as Schmiedel ascribes to them.14 Type a counts for nothing: not only the suffering Saviour-Gods but Apollo and Arês, to say nothing of Hephaistos, Hêrê, and Aphroditê, are flouted in the pagan literature which treats them as Gods. If to quote “he is beside himself” is to prove historicity, why not quote the taunts to Jesus in the fourth gospel, nay, the crucifixion itself?

In his able and interesting work on The Johannine Writings, Schmiedel carefully developes the thesis that the Johannine Jesus is an invented figure, conceived from the first as supernatural; and he puts among other things the notable proposition that when Jesus weeps it is implied by the evangelist that he does so not out of human sympathy, but “simply because they [the kinsfolk of Lazarus] did not believe in his power to work miracles.”15 Assuming for the argument’s sake that this is a true interpretation, we are driven to ask how the thesis consists with that of the “pillar texts.” The Johannine writer starts with a supernatural Jesus, yet not only represents his attached personal friends as not believing in his power to work miracles but describes Jesus as weeping because of their unbelief. Nothing in Mark is for moderns more incongruous with a supernaturalist view of Jesus, yet Schmiedel sees no difficulty in believing that the Johannine writer could deliberately frame the incongruity. Why then should even an original author of Mark be held to regard Jesus as mortal because in Mark he is flouted, or declines to work wonders, or is unable to do so at Nazareth? [190]If one writer can represent the Eternal Logos as weeping from chagrin, why should not the other think him God even when he cries out that God has forsaken him? And if, finally, the cry is held to cite Psalm xxii, 1, and to imply the triumphant conclusion of that psalm, what value has the passage for the critic’s purpose?

An unbiassed criticism will of course recognize that the “Jesus wept” may be an interpolation, for it is admitted that the Greek words rendered “groaned in the spirit” may mean “was moved with indignation in the spirit”; and, yet again, Martha is represented (xi, 22) as avowing the belief that “even now” Jesus can raise Lazarus by the power of God. Nay, the whole story may be an addition, not from the pen of the writer who makes Jesus God. But equally the incongruities in Mark may come of interpolation. A fair inference from the characteristics of that document is that parts of it, notably the first dozen paragraphs, represent a condensation of previously current matter, while others are as plainly expansive; and even if these diversely motived sections be from the same hand, interpolations might be made in either.

In reply to my argument16 that texts in which Jesus figures as a natural man would at most represent only Ebionitic views, Professor Schmiedel puts the perplexing challenge, concerning the Ebionites:—“Were they not also worshippers of Jesus as well? Were they really men of such wickedness that they sought to bring the true humanity of Jesus into acceptance by falsifying the Gospels? And if they were, was it in their power to effect this falsification with so great success?”17 I cannot think that Dr. Schmiedel, who is invariably [191]candid, has thought out the positions here taken up. The point that the Ebionites were “worshippers” of Jesus is surely fatal to his own thesis. “Worshippers” could in their case go on worshipping while maintaining that the worshipped one was a mortal. Then to assert that he avowed himself a mortal was not inconsistent with “worship.” But the challenge obscures the issue; and it is still more obscured when the Professor goes on to ask: “Had they [the Ebionites] no predecessors in this view of his person? Must we not suppose that precisely the earliest Christians, the actual companions of Jesus—supposing Him really to have lived—were their predecessors?” This argument, the Professor must see, has small bearing on my position.

Three questions are involved, from the mythological point of view: first, whether actual believers in an alleged divinity could represent him as flouted, humiliated, or temporarily powerless; second, whether the Ebionitic view of Jesus can be accounted for otherwise than as the persistence of a proto-Christian view, arising among the immediate adherents of a man Jesus; third, whether in the second century Jesuists of Ebionitic views could invent, and insert in the gospels, sayings of or concerning Jesus which were meant to countervail the belief in his divinity.

On the first head, the answer is, as aforesaid, that throughout all ancient religion we find derogatory views of deity constantly entertained, at different stages of culture, without any clear consciousness of incongruity. Yahweh in the Old Testament “repents” that he made man; wrangles with Sarah; and is unable to overcome worshippers of other Gods who have “chariots of iron.” Always he is a “jealous” God; and at a later stage he is alleged to be consciously thwarted by the Israelites when they insist on having a king. These are all priest-made [192]stories. Among the early Greeks, the Gods are still less godlike. In Homer, Athênê is almost the only deity who is treated with habitual reverence: the others are so constantly satirized, humanized, thwarted, or humiliated, that it is difficult to associate reverence, in our sense, with the portrayal at all. The statement of Arno Neumann that “it is impossible (here every historian will agree) for one who worships a hero to think and speak in such a way as to contradict or essentially modify his own worship”18 is an astonishingly uncritical pronouncement, which simply ignores the main mass of ancient religious literature.

As regards the Demigods in particular it belongs to the very nature of the case that they should be at times specially thwarted and reviled by mortals, since it is their fate to die, albeit to rise again. If, then, sayings were once invented which fastened human limitations upon the Divine One for the Jesuists, there was nothing in the psychology of worshippers on their intellectual plane that should make them pronounce such sayings forgeries. As we have seen, even in the fourth gospel, which puts the Divine One higher than ever, he is made, on Professor Schmiedel’s own view, to weep for sheer chagrin.

More complex is the second question, as to how the Ebionite view of Jesus emerged. But the answer has already been indicated in terms of the myth-theory. And the question really cannot be answered on the biographical view, for the canonical documents give no hint19 of a persistence of a “human” view among the [193]early Christists as against a “divine” one. The Judaizers are represented equally with the Paulinists as making Jesus “Lord”; and it is on the Paulinist side that we hear of adherents who do not believe in the resurrection. That is really a divergence from the Judaistic view, for Jews in general accepted immortality. The moment, however, we put the hypothesis of a primitive cult of a Saviour-God whose sacrifice in some way benefits men, and whose Sacrament is the machinery of that benefit, we account for all the varieties of Jesuism known to us. The cult was primordially Semitic, a thing on the outskirts of later Judaism, which would be Judaized in so far as it came under Jewish influence, and then theologically re-cast for Gentilism by Gentilizing Jews. Thus there would be Judaistic Ebionites, and Jesuists such as those taught by the Didachê, who would insist on connecting Jesus only with the Eucharist, making him a subordinate figure, upon whose legend were slowly grafted moral teachings.

On the other hand there would be non-Jewish Jesuists who valued the Sacrament as they and others valued those of Paganism, counting on magical benefits from it (as “Catholics” in general did for many centuries), but making light of the Jewish future life. The one thing in common was the primordial sacrament, at once Jewish and non-Jewish. For Jews it would easily connect with the belief in immortality, already much connected with Messianism; for Gentiles who accepted the former belief, it would be still more easily connected with a doctrine of future individual salvation. All is broadly intelligible on the myth-theory. On the biographical theory, the Jesuists of the Didachê are as inexplicable as the Gentile Jesuists who denied a future life, or the Docetists who denied that Jesus had come in the flesh. [194]

Given such Jewish Jesuists, and given Docetism, the invention of sayings and episodes in which Jesus is thwarted or flouted, or disavows Godhood, is perfectly simple. Why Professor Schmiedel should raise the question of “wickedness” in this connection I cannot divine. On his own showing, the invention of sayings and episodes was normal among the Christists in general; and it affected all of the synoptics. Does he impute “wickedness” to the author of the fourth gospel, whom he represents as inventing discourses and episodes systematically? The Ebionites and Docetists had as much right to invent as any one else; and once their inventions were current, they stood a fair chance of being embodied in a gospel or gospels by reason of the general incapacity of the Christists for critical reflection.

From the biographical standpoint, the Ebionites and their counterparts the Nazaræans are indeed enigmatic. It is important to have a clear view of what is known as to both sects.20 Origen, noting that the Hebrew name of the former means “the poor,” angrily implies that it was given to them as describing their poverty of mind,21 but leaves open the rational inference that the name originally described their chosen social status, which connected with a belief in the speedy end of the world. In his book Against Celsus,22 he tells that they include believers in the Virgin Birth and deniers of it. Here arises the surmise that the former were the socii Ebionitarum mentioned by Jerome, who diverged from Judaic views, and may have been of the general cast of the Nazaræans.23 These bodies constituted the mass of the [195]Christians in Judæa in the second century. According to the ecclesiastical tradition, the church of Jerusalem had withdrawn during the siege to Pella and the neighbouring region beyond the Jordan. In the reign of Hadrian, after the revolt and destruction of the Messiah Bar-Cochab, who had attempted to rebuild the temple, the new Roman city of Ælia Capitolina was built on the ruins of Jerusalem; and in that no Jews were permitted to dwell. Only those Christians who renounced Judaic usages, then, could enter; and a number of such Christians, Jew and Gentile, did so. Others, probably including both Ebionites and Nazaræans, remained at Pella, and these appear to have furnished the types of heresy discussed by Irenæus, Origen, Jerome, and Epiphanius under the head of Ebionism. Those who set up in Jerusalem were in the way of substituting for “voluntary poverty” a propaganda and organization which meant comfort. Those who stayed behind would represent the primitive type.

Now, neither Ebionism nor Nazaræanism offers any semblance of support for the biographical view. Some Ebionites denied the Virgin Birth; some, presumably the Nazaræans in particular, accepted it, the latter being described as accepting the canonical Matthew (or a Hebrew gospel nearly equivalent) with the present opening chapters, while the Ebionites had a Matthew without them. Of the two views, neither testified to any impression made by a “personality.” The Virgin Birth myth is a reversion to universal folk-lore by way of enlarging the supernaturalist claim: the Ebionite denial is either a rejection of all purely human claim for Jesus or only supernaturalism with a difference, inasmuch as it inferribly posits a divinization of the Founder either at the moment of his baptism or at his anointing. His [196]“personality” is the one thing never heard of in the discussion, so far as we can trace it. In one account, “the” Ebionites are said to have alleged that Christ became so because he perfectly fulfilled the law, and that they individually might become Christs if they fulfilled it as perfectly.24 Ebionites and Nazaræans between them, on the biographical view, let slip all knowledge of the Sacred Places, of Golgotha, of the place of the Sepulchre.

If it be asked how, on the biographical view, there came to be Jewish Jesuists of the Ebionite type, men such as those described by Justin Martyr and his Jewish antagonist Trypho, believing in a Jesus “anointed by election” who thus became Christ, but adhering otherwise to Judaic practices,25 what is the answer? What idea, what teaching, had Jesus left them? The notion which seems to have mainly differentiated Ebionites from Jews was simply that Jesus had been the Messiah, and that his Second Coming would mean the end of the world. Expectation of the Second Coming would at once promote and be promoted by poverty, which would thus have a special religious significance. Nazaræans, on the other hand, were latterly marked by a general opposition to the Pharisees.26 But this could perfectly well be a simple development of sectarianism. If it be claimed as a result of the teaching of Jesus, what becomes of the other teaching as to the love of enemies? Which species of teaching is supposed to have represented the “personality”?

Given a general hostility between Nazaræans and Pharisees, the ascription of anti-Pharisaic teachings to the Master would have been in the ordinary way of [197]all Jewish doctrinal propaganda. In so far as they acclaimed sincerity and denounced formalism, they are intelligible as part of a general revolt against Judaic legalism. Nazaræans would invent anti-Pharisaic teachings just as they or “Catholics” would invent pro-Samaritan teachings. And in so far as the Ebionites resisted the assimilation of fresh supernaturalist folk-lore they would tend to put appropriate sayings in the mouth of the Master just as did the others. They are expressly charged not only with inventing a saying27 in denunciation of sacrifices, by way of sanctifying their vegetarianism, which was presumably an aspect of their poverty, but of tampering in various ways with their texts.28 This is precisely what the gospel-makers in general did; and to impeach the Ebionites in particular is merely to ignore the general procedure. When, then, we say that Ebionites might well invent a saying in which the Master was made to repudiate Godhood, and that such a saying might find its way into many manuscripts, as did other passages from their Hebrew gospel, it is quite irrelevant to raise questions of “wickedness” and of “worship.”

But it is important here to note the point, insisted on by Professor W. B. Smith, that most of Professor Schmiedel’s “pillar” texts could be framed with no thought of lowering the status of Jesus, while some, on the contrary, betray the motive of discrediting the Jews. The story of Jesus’ people (οἱ παρ’ αὐτοῦ, not “friends” as in our versions) saying “He is beside himself” (Mk. iii, 21), is simply a Gentile intimation that even among his own kin or associates he was treated as a madman. The idea is exactly the same as that of the story in the fourth gospel, that “the Jews” said he [198]“had a devil” and was a Samaritan. Similarly “tendential” is the avowal (Mk. vi, 5) that at Nazareth the wonder-worker “could do no mighty work ... and he marvelled because of their unbelief.” Healing in other texts is declared to depend on faith; and to call the people of Nazareth unbelievers was either to explain why Jesus of Nazareth there had no following or to emphasize the point that the Jews had rejected the Lord. Such a doctrine, again, as that of Mt. xii, 31, that blasphemy against the Son of Man was pardonable, was perfectly natural at a stage at which the cult was seeking eagerly for converts. Had not Peter, in the legend, denied his Lord with curses, and Paul persecuted the Church to the death?

In other cases, the bearing of Professor Schmiedel’s texts is so much a matter of arbitrary interpretation that the debate is otiose; and in yet others there are insoluble questions of text corruption. The thesis that any text “could not have been invented,” and must infer the existence of a teacher regarded as mortal, is so infirm in logic that it is not surprising to find it regarded with bitter dislike by the orthodox, transparently honest as is Professor Schmiedel’s use of it.

There is really more force in his argument29 that the predictions of the immediate re-appearance of the Christ after “the tribulation of those days” could not have been invented long after the fall of Jerusalem, the apparent impulse being rather to minimize them. They may perfectly well have been predictions made at the approach of danger by professed prophets. But it does not in the least follow that they were made by one answering to the description of the gospel Jesus, predicting his own Second Coming, though some one may [199]have so prophesied. Any Messiah would be “the Lord”; and the gospel predictions as to false Christs tell of “many” Messiahs, every one of whom would speak as “the Lord.” Such utterances, after a little while, could no more be discriminated by the Christists than the certainly pre-Christian sayings put by their propagandists in the mouth of Jesus. And, once a prediction had been written down, it lived by the tenure of uncertainty that attached to all prediction among blind believers. When one “tribulation” had apparently passed without a Second Coming, there was nothing for it but to look forward to the next.

After generations of expectation, the early eschatology of the Church became a burden to its conductors, inasmuch as expectation of the end of the world made for disorder, and neglect of industry; and Second Thessalonians was written to explain away previous predictions of imminent ending. After the whole mass of such prediction had been falsified by ages of continuance, there was still no critical reaction, simply because religious belief excludes the practice of radical criticism. To this day, orthodoxy has no rational account to give of the pervading doctrine of the New Testament as to the speedy end of the world. The biographical school finds in it a measure of support for its belief in a real Jesus, who shared the delusions of his age. But as that explanation equally applies to all men in the period, it gives the biographical view no standing as against the myth-theory. Christian prophets spoke for “the Lord” just as Jewish prophets did before them.

In this connection, finally, it has to be noted that Professor Schmiedel finds an à priori authenticity in a prediction in which Jesus claims supernatural status, though the ostensibly unhistorical character of such [200]claims was his avowed ground for positing the “pillar-texts” which alone defied all skepticism. And the formula in both cases is the same—“it could not have been invented.”30 The major premiss involved is: “No passage could be invented which would stultify the position of the believers.” But do none of the admitted inventions31 in the gospels stultify the position of the believers? The two genealogies do; the anti-Davidic passages stultify these; the pro-Samaritan teaching stultifies the anti-Samaritan; and so on through twenty cases of contradiction. M. Loisy, indeed, claims the pro-Samaritan passage as genuine: does he then admit the anti-Samaritan to be spurious?

The biographical school cannot have it both ways. The very fact that they have to oust so many passages on the score of incompatibility is the complete answer to the plea of “genuine because unsuitable to the purposes of the propaganda.” The fact that a multitude of contradictions are left standing proves simply that when once an awkward passage was installed it was nearly impossible to get rid of it; because some copies were always left which retained it; and in the stage of increasing respect for the written word it was generally restored. The “Jesus” before Barabbas was at last ejected only because everybody recoiled from it. Predictions were not so easily dropped.

On the page on which he claims that Jesus’ prediction of his Second Coming could not have been invented, Professor Schmiedel avows that various passages in [201]Mt. xxiv really belong to “a small composition, perhaps Jewish, on the signs of the end of the world, written shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70.” If the one set of passages are borrowed, why not the other? Was it unlikely that Jewish eschatologists should predict the coming of the Son of Man at the near end of the world, and that Jesuists should put the prediction in the mouth of their Lord and make him say it of himself? The à priori negative is quite untenable.

While, then, the argument from unsuitableness is logically barred for the biographical school by their own frequent rejection of passages on the score of incompatibility, no aspect or portion of the New Testament supplies a conclusive argument against the mythological view. The whole constitutes an intelligible set of growths from the point of view of the myth-theory; and from no other is the medley explicable. A biographical theory, having posited a Messiah whose Messianic claim is a mystery, a Teacher whose alleged teachings are a mass of conflicting tendencies, and whose disciples admittedly have no Messianic gospel till after his inexplicable execution, following on an impossible trial, may make the assumption that by way of popular myth he was then fortuitously deified by Messianist Jews, and later transformed by other Jews into a Saviour for Gentiles; but the biographical theory cannot even pretend to account for the Apocalypse and the Didachê; and it has to renounce its own ground principle of “personality” in order to assimilate the Epistles. On critical principles, assent must go to the theory which explains things, reducing the otherwise inexplicable to a natural evolution on the known lines and bases of hierology. [202]

We may now bring together in one outline the series of inductive hypotheses by which we seek to recover the natural evolution of the historic cult.

1. A primitive Semitic sacramental cult, whose sacrament centres in a slain Saviour-God, a Jesus, who has assimilated to an abstraction of the victim annually sacrificed to him—as in the case of the cults of Adonis and Attis, both also Asiatic. Of the sacrificial rite, which in the historic cult is embodied in the Last Supper and the dramatized story of the Passion, the memory was preserved in particular by a Jewish rite of Jesus Barabbas, Jesus the Son of the Father, in which a victim goes through a mock coronation, ending latterly, perhaps, in a mock-execution, where once there had been an actual human sacrifice.

2. This cult, with its sacrament, existed sporadically in various parts of Asia Minor, whence it spread to Greece and Egypt. Its forms would vary, and under Jewish control the sacrificial sacrament tended to be reduced to a Eucharist or thankoffering in which the “body and blood” are only vaguely, if at all, reminiscent of the Divine One’s death. As a God can always be developed indefinitely out of a God-Name, and personal Gods are historically but conceptual aggregates shaped round names or functions, the adherents of this could proselytize like others. When the Temple of Jerusalem fell in the year 70, the adherents of the cult there had a new opportunity and motive, which some of them actively embraced, to cut loose from the Judaic basis and proclaim a religion of universal scope, freed from Judaic trammels and claims. Economic motives played a considerable part in the process.

3. The first tendency of the new Jewish promoters had [203]been to develop the Saviour-God of the sacramental rite (which they may at this stage have adopted in its “pagan” form, now taken as canonical) into a Messiah who was to “come again,” introducing the Jewish “kingdom of heaven.” At a later stage they adopted the rite of baptism, traditionally associated with John, whom they represented as a Forerunner of the Messiah who had met, baptized, and acclaimed him, playing the part assigned by Jewish prophecy to Elias.

4. As time passed on, such a cult would of necessity die out among Jews, in default of the promised “Second Coming.” The connection of the idea of salvation with a future life for all believers, Jew or Gentile, gave it a new and larger lease of life throughout the Roman Empire, in every part of which there were Asiatics. But the Jewish doctrine of the Second Coming remained part of the developed teaching.

5. Further machinery was accordingly necessary to spread and sustain the cult; and this was spontaneously provided by (a) developments of the early and simple propagandist organization, and (b) provision for the needs of the poor, who among the Gentiles as among the Jews were the natural adherents of a faith promising the speedy closing of the earthly scene. Richer sympathizers won esteem by giving their aid; but the poor, as always, helped each other. The propaganda included the services of travelling “prophets,” and “apostles” who would be the natural compilers and inventors of Jesuine lore. The administrative organization, framed on Hellenistic lines, put more and more power in the hands of the bishop, whose interest it was to develop his diocese. At first the “prophets” and “apostles” were strictly peripatetic, being called upon to avoid the appearance of mercenariness. In course of time they were enabled to settle down, being systematically provided for. [204]

6. Under the hands of this organization grew up the Christian Sacred Books, which gave the cult its footing as against, or rather alongside of, the Jewish, which in the circumstances had an irresistible and indispensable prestige. Thus on the literary side the Jewish influence overlaid the non-Jewish, assimilating the outside elements of scattered Jesuism. The earliest literature is Jewish, as in the case of the Didachê, or a Jewish-Jesuist manipulation of outside Semitic matter, as in the Apocalypse. On these foundations are laid “Christian” strata.

7. The Didachê (“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles of the Lord”) was primarily a brief manual of monotheistic and moral instruction used by the Twelve Apostles of the Jewish High Priest. To this, Jesuist matter was gradually added. The result was that “Twelve Apostles” became part of the Christian tradition; and they had ultimately to be imposed on the gospel record, which obviously had not originally that item.

8. The Epistles represent a polemic development, perhaps on the basis of a few short Paulines. That of James, which has no specific “Christian” colour, represents Judaic resistance, in the Ebionite temper of “voluntary poverty,” to the Gentilizing movement. The Paulines carry on doctrinal debate and construction against the Judaistic influence. The synoptic gospels, which in their present forms were developing about the same time, reflect those struggles primarily in anti-Samaritan and pro-Samaritan pronouncements, both ascribed to Jesus. Primarily the gospels are Judaic, and the Gentilizing movement had naturally not employed them. Paul is made in effect to disclaim their aid. In time they are adopted and partly turned to anti-Judaic ends.

9. The chief Gentile achievement in the matter is the development of the primitive sacrament-motive and [205]ritual (fundamentally dramatic) into the mystery-play which is transcribed in the closing chapters of Matthew and Mark. Previous accounts of the foundation of the Sacrament and the death of the Lord are now superseded by a vivid though dramatically brief narrative in which the Jewish people are collectively saddled with the guilt of his death and the Roman government is crudely and impossibly exonerated. The apostles in general are made to play a poor part; one plays an impossible rôle of betrayer; and the legendary Judaizing apostle is made to deny his Master. The whole story is thoroughly unhistorical, from the triumphal Entry to the quasi-regal crucifixion; but it embodied the main ritual features of the traditional human sacrifice, and, there being simply no biographical record to compete with it, it held its ground. The mystery-play in its complete form was inferribly developed and played in a Gentile city; and its transcription probably coincided with its cessation as a drama. But the Sacrament was long a quasi-secret rite.

10. The picture drawn in the Acts, in which Peter and Paul alike “turn to the Gentiles”—Peter taking the initiative—is the work of a late and discreet redactor, bent on reconciling Jewish and Gentile factors. It is a highly factitious account of early Christism; but it preserves traces of the early state of things, in which no Jesuine teaching was pretended to be current, and the cult is seen to exist in a scattered form independently of the central propaganda. It evidently had a footing in Samaria. The synoptics themselves reveal the absence of baptism from the early procedure of the cult. Only in the latest of the four canonical gospels is it pretended that either Jesus or his disciples had baptized.

11. The fourth gospel is only one more systematic step in the process of myth-making. The biographical [206]school, in giving this up as unhistorical, in effect admits that the “personality” of the alleged Teacher had been so ineffectual as to admit of a successful interposition of a new and thoroughly mythical figure, entirely supernatural in theory, but more “impressive” as a speaking and quasi-human personage. The “Logos” of John is again an adaptation of a Jewish adaptation of a pagan conception, the doctrine of the Logos set forth by the Alexandrian Jew Philo having come through Greek and Eastern channels.32 There was no critical faculty in the early Church that could secure its rejection, though it was somewhat slow of acceptance. The doctrine of the Trinity is again an assimilation from paganism, proximately Egyptian.33

Such, in outline, is our working hypothesis. As explained at the outset, it is not supposed that so complex a problem can in so brief a space and time be conclusively solved; and criticism will doubtless involve modification when criticism is scientifically applied. To such scientific criticism the production of a complete outline may be an aid; previous debate, even when rational in temper, having been spent on some of the “trees” without regard to the “wood” in general. All that is claimed for the complete hypothesis is that it is at all points inductively reached, and that for that reason it squares better with the whole facts than any form of the biographical theory—including the highly attenuated “eschatological” form in which Jesus is conceived solely as a proclaimer of “the last things.” That thesis, indeed, reduces the biographical theory to complete nullity by leaving the mass of the record without any explanation save the mythical one, which suffices equally to account for eschatology. [207]

It is significant that the later myth-making of the synoptics is partly by way of reversion to the folk-lore in which the myth had risen, partly by way of meeting non-Jewish Messianic requirements, partly by way of Gentilism, partly by way of concessions to the Gnosticism or occultism whose pretensions in the second century exercised so strong a pressure on the Church. As Professor Smith points out, the story in Mark (xiv, 51–52) of the youth who at the betrayal fled naked, leaving his linen cloth in the hands of the captors,1 is a crude provision for the Docetic theory that the real Christ did not suffer. Cerinthus taught that “at last Christ departed from Jesus, and that then Jesus suffered and rose again, while Christ remained impassible, inasmuch as he was a spiritual being.”2

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 [208]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, argues3 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 [209]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

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 [210]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 [211]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 Miriam12 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 [212]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 [213]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.

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 [214]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 [215]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 [216]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 [217]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.

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 [218]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 Peter29 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 [219]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.

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 [220]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 [221]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 [222]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. [223]