Chapter I HISTORICAL METHOD

Orthodox obscurantism the parent of Sciolism In Myth, Magic, and Morals (Chapter IX) I have remarked that the Church, by refusing to apply in the field of so-called sacred history the canons by which in other fields truth is discerned from falsehood, by beatifying credulous ignorance and anathematizing scholarship and common sense, has surrounded the figure of Jesus with such a nimbus of improbability that it seems not absurd to some critics of to-day to deny that he ever lived. The circumstance that both in England and in Germany the books of certain of these critics—in particular, Dr. Arthur Drews, Professor W. Benjamin Smith, and Mr. J. M. Robertson—are widely read, and welcomed by many as works of learning and authority, requires that I should criticize them rather more in detail than I deemed it necessary to do in that publication.

B. Croce on nature of History Benedetto Croce well remarks in his Logica (p. 195) that history in no way differs from the physical sciences, insofar as it cannot be constructed by pure reasoning, but rests upon sight or vision of the fact that has happened, the fact so perceived being the only source of history. In a methodical historical treatise the sources are usually divided into monuments and narratives; by the former being understood whatever is left to us as a trace of the accomplished fact—e.g., a contract, a letter, or a triumphal arch; [2]while narratives consist of such accounts of it as have been transmitted to us by those who were more or less eye-witnesses thereof, or by those who have repeated the notices or traditions furnished by eye-witnesses.

Relative paucity of evangelic tradition Now it may be granted that we have not in the New Testament the same full and direct information about Jesus as we can derive from ancient Latin literature about Julius C?sar or Cicero. We have no monuments of him, such as are the commentaries of the one or the letters and speeches of the other. It is barely credible that a single one of the New Testament writers, except perhaps St. Paul, ever set eyes on him or heard his voice. It is more than doubtful whether a single one of his utterances, as recorded in the Gospels, retains either its original form or the idiom in which it was clothed. A mass of teaching, a number of aphorisms and precepts, are attributed to him; but we know little of how they were transmitted to those who repeat them to us, and it is unlikely that we possess any one of them as it left his lips.

and presence of miracles in it, And that is not all. In the four Gospels all sorts of incredible stories are told about him, such as that he was born of a virgin mother, unassisted by a human father; that he walked on the surface of the water; that he could foresee the future; that he stilled a storm by upbraiding it; that he raised the dead; that he himself rose in the flesh from the dead and left his tomb empty; that his apostles beheld him so risen; and that finally he disappeared behind a cloud up into the heavens.

explains and excuses the extreme negative school It is natural, therefore—and there is much excuse for him—that an uneducated man or a child, bidden [3]unceremoniously in the name of religion to accept these tales, should revolt, and hastily make up his mind that the figure of Jesus is through and through fictitious, and that he never lived at all. One thing only is certain—namely, that insofar as the orthodox blindly accept these tales—nay, maintain with St. Athanasius that the man Jesus was God incarnate, a pre-existent ?on, Word of God, Creator of all things, masked in human flesh, but retaining, so far as he chose, all his exalted prerogatives and cosmic attributes in this disguise—they put themselves out of court, and deprive themselves of any faculty of reply to the extreme negative school of critics. The latter may be very absurd, and may betray an excess of credulity in the solutions they offer of the problem of Christian origins; but they can hardly go further along the path of absurdity and credulity than the adherents of the creeds. If their arguments are to be met, if any satisfactory proof is to be advanced of the historicity of Jesus, it must come, not from those who, as Mommsen remarked, “reason in chains,” but from free thinkers.

Yet Jesus is better attested than most ancients Those, however, who have much acquaintance with antiquity must perceive at the outset that, if the thesis that Jesus never existed is to be admitted, then quite a number of other celebrities, less well evidenced than he, must disappear from the page of history, and be ranged with Jesus in the realm of myth.

Age of the earliest Christian literature Many characteristically Christian documents, such as the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Teaching of the Apostles, are admitted by Drews to have been written before A.D. 100.1 Not [4]only the canonical Gospels, he tells us,2 were still current in the first half of the second century, but several never accepted by the Church—e.g., spurious gospels ascribed to Matthew, Thomas, Bartholomew, Peter, the Twelve Apostles. These have not reached us, though we have recovered a large fragment of the so-called Peter Gospel, and find that it at least pre-supposes canonical Mark. The phrase, “Still current in the first half of the second century,” indicates that, in Dr. Drews’s opinion, these derivative gospels were at least as old as year 100; in that case our canonical Gospels would fall well within the first. I will not press this point; but, anyhow, we note the admission that within about seventy years of the supposed date of Jesus’s death Christians were reading that mass of written tradition about him which we call the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They were also reading a mass of less accredited biographies—less trustworthy, no doubt, but, nevertheless, the work of authors who entertained no doubt that Jesus had really lived, and who wished to embellish his story.

If Jesus never lived, neither did Solon, If, then, armed with such early records, we are yet so exacting of evidence as to deny that Jesus, their central figure, ever lived, what shall we say of other ancient worthies—of Solon, for example, the ancient Athenian legislator? For his life our chief sources, as Grote remarks (History of Greece, Pt. II, ch. 11), are Plutarch and Diogenes, writers who lived seven and eight hundred years after him. Moreover, the stories of Plutarch about him are, as Grote says, “contradictory as well as apocryphal.” It is true [5]that Herodotus repeats to us the story of Solon’s travels, and of the conversations he held with Cr?sus, King of Lydia; but these conversations are obviously mere romance. Herodotus, too, lived not seventy, but nearly one hundred and fifty years later than Solon, so that contemporary evidence of him we have none. Plutarch preserves, no doubt, various laws and metrical aphorisms which were in his day attributed to Solon, just as the Christians attributed an extensive body of teaching to Jesus. If we deny all authenticity to Jesus’s teaching, what of Solon’s traditional lore? Obviously Jesus has a far larger chance to have really existed than Solon.

or Epimenides, And the same is true of Epimenides of Crete, who was said to be the son of the nymph Balte; to have been mysteriously fed by the nymphs, since he was never seen to eat, and so forth. He was known as the Purifier, and in that r?le healed the Athenians of plagues physical and spiritual. A poet and prophet he lived, according to some, for one hundred and fifty-four years; according to his own countrymen, for three hundred. If he lived to the latter age, then Plato, who is the first to mention him in his Laws, was his contemporary, not otherwise.

or Pythagoras, Pythagoras, again, can obviously never have lived at all, if we adopt the purist canons of Drews. For he was reputed, as Grote (Pt. II, ch. 37) reminds us, to have been inspired by the gods to reveal to men a new way of life, and found an order or brotherhood. He is barely mentioned by any writer before Plato, who flourished one hundred and fifty years later than he. In the matter of miracles, prophecy, pre-existence, mystic observances, and asceticism, Pythagoras equalled, if he did not excel, Jesus. [6]

or Apollonius of Tyana Apollonius of Tyana is another example. We have practically no record of him till one hundred and twenty years after his death, when the Sophist Philostratus took in hand to write his life, by his own account, with the aid of memorials left by Damis, a disciple of the sage. Apollonius, like Jesus and Pythagoras, was an incarnation of an earlier being; he, too, worked miracles, and appeared after death to an incredulous follower, and ascended into heaven bodily. The stories of his miracles of healing, of his expulsions of demons, and raising of the dead, read exactly like chapters out of the Gospels. He, like Jesus and Pythagoras, had a god Proteus for his father, and was born of a virgin. His birth was marked in the heavens by meteoric portents. His history bristles with tales closely akin to those which were soon told of Jesus; yet all sound scholars are agreed that his biographer did not imitate the Gospels, but wrote independently of them. If, then, Jesus never lived, much less can Apollonius have done so. Except for a passing reference in Lucian, Philostratus is our earliest authority for his reality; the life written of him by Moeragenes is lost, and we do not know when it was written. On the whole, the historicity of Jesus is much better attested and documented than that of Apollonius, whose story is equally full of miracles with Christ’s.

Miracles do not wholly invalidate a document The above examples suffice. But, with the aid of a good dictionary of antiquity, hundreds of others could be adduced of individuals for whose reality we have not a tithe of the evidence which we have for that of Jesus; yet no one in his senses disputes their ever having lived. We take it for certain that hundreds—nay, thousands—of people who figure on the pages [7]of ancient and medieval history were real, and that, roughly speaking, they performed the actions attributed to them—this although the earliest notices of them are only met with in Plutarch, or Suidas, or William of Tyre, or other writers who wrote one hundred, two hundred, perhaps six hundred years after them. Nor are we deterred from believing that they really existed by the fact that, along with some things credible, other things wholly incredible are related of them. Throughout ancient history we must learn to pick and choose. The thesis, therefore, that Jesus never lived, but was from first to last a myth, presents itself at the outset as a paradox. Still, as it is seriously advanced, it must be seriously considered and that I now proceed to do.

Proof of the unhistoricity of Jesus, how attainable It can obviously not pass muster, unless its authors furnish us with a satisfactory explanation of every single notice, direct or indirect, simple or constructive, which ancient writers have transmitted to us. Each notice must be separately examined, and if an evidential document be composite, every part of it. Each statement in its prima facie sense must be shown to be irreconcilable with what we know of the age and circumstances to which it pretends to relate. And in every case the new interpretation must be more cogent and more probable than the old one. Jesus, the real man, must be driven line by line, verse by verse, out of the whole of the New Testament, and after that out of other early sources which directly or by implication attest his historicity. There is no other way of proving so sweeping a negative as that of the three authors I have named.

How to approach ancient documents For every statement of fact in an ancient author is a problem, and has to be accounted for. If it accords [8]with the context, and the entire body of statement agrees with the best scheme we can form in our mind’s eye of the epoch, we accept it, just as we would the statement of a witness standing before us in a law court. If, on the other hand, the statement does not agree with our scheme, we ask why the author made it. If he obviously believed it, then how did his error arise? If he should seem to have made it without himself believing it, then we ask, Why did he wish to deceive his reader? Sometimes the only solution we can give of the matter is, that our author himself never penned the statement, but that someone covertly inserted it in his text, so that it might appear to have contained it. In such cases we must explain why and in whose interest the text was interpolated. In all history, of course, we never get a direct observation, or intuition, or hearing of what took place, for the photographic camera and phonograph did not exist in antiquity. We must rest content with the convictions and feelings of authors, as they put them down in books. To one circumstance, however, amid so much dubiety, we shall attach supreme importance; and that is to an affirmation of the same fact by two or more independent witnesses. One man may well be in error, and report to us what never occurred; but it is in the last degree improbable that two or more Value of several independent witnesses in case of Jesusindependent witnesses will join forces in testifying to what never was. Let us, then, apply this principle to the problem before us. Jesus, our authors affirm, was not a real man, but an astral myth. Now we can conceive of one ancient writer mistaking such a myth for a real man; but what if another and another witness, what if half a dozen or more come along, and, meeting us quite [9]apart from one another and by different routes, often by pure accident, conspire in error. If we found ourselves in such case, would we not think we were bewitched, and take to our heels?

The oldest sources about Jesus Well, I do not intend to take to my heels. I mean to stand up to the chimeras of Messrs. Drews, Robertson, and Benjamin Smith. And the best courage is to take one by one the ancient sources which bear witness to the man Jesus, examine and compare them, and weigh their evidence. If they are independent, if they agree, not too much—that would excite a legitimate suspicion—but only more or less and in a general way, then, I believe, any rational inquirer would allow them weight, even if none were strictly contemporaries of his and eye-witnesses of his life. In the Gospel of Mark we have the earliest narrative document of the New Testament. This is evident from the circumstance that the three other evangelists used it in the composition of their Gospels. Drews, indeed, admits it to be one of the “safest” results of modern discussion of the life of Jesus that this Gospel is the oldest of the surviving four. He is aware, of course, that this conclusion has been questioned; but no one will doubt it who has confronted The Gospel of Mark used in Matthew and LukeMark in parallel columns with Luke and Matthew, and noted how these other evangelists not only derive from it the order of the events of the life of Jesus, but copy it out verse after verse, each with occasional modifications of his own. Drews, however, while aware of this phenomenon, has yet not grasped the fact that it and nothing else has moved scholars to regard Mark as the most ancient of the three Synoptics; quite erroneously, as if he had never read any work of modern textual [10]criticism, he imagines that they are led to their conclusion, firstly by the superior freshness and vividness of Mark, by a picturesqueness which argues him to have been an eye-witness; and, secondly, by the evidence of Papias, who, it is said, declared Mark to have been the interpreter of the Apostle Peter. In point of fact, the modern critical theologians, for whom Drews has so much contempt, attach no decisive weight in this connection either to the tradition preserved by Papias or to the graphic qualities of Mark’s narratives. They rest their case mainly on the internal evidence of the texts before them.

Contents of Mark What, then, do we find in Mark’s narrative?

Inasmuch as my readers can buy the book for a penny and study it for themselves, I may content myself with a very brief résumé of its contents.

It begins with an account of one John who preached round about Jud?a, but especially on the Jordan, that the Jews must repent of their sins in order to their remission; in token whereof he directed them to take a ritual bath in the sacred waters of the Jordan, just as a modern Hindoo washes away his sins by means of a ritual bath in the River Jumna. An old document generally called Q. (Quelle), because Luke and Matthew used it in common to supplement Mark’s rather meagre story, adds the reason why the Jews were to repent; and it was this, that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. Drews’s account of MessianismDrews, in his first chapter of The Christ Myth, traces out the idea of this Kingdom of God, which he finds so prominent in the Jewish Apocalyptics of the last century before and the first century after Christ, and attributes it to Persian and Mithraic influence. Mithras, he says, was to descend upon the earth, and in a last fierce struggle overwhelm [11]Angromainyu or Ahriman and his hosts, and cast them down into the nether world. He would then raise the dead in bodily shape, and after a general judgment of the whole world, in which the wicked should be condemned to the punishments of hell and the good raised to heavenly glory, establish the “millennial kingdom.” These ideas, he continues, penetrated Jewish thought, and brought about a complete transformation of the former belief in a messiah, a Hebrew term meaning the anointed—in Greek Christos. For, to begin with, the Christ was merely the Jewish king who represented Jahwe before the people, and the people before Jahwe. He was “Son of Jahwe,” or “Son of God” par excellence; later on the name came to symbolize the ideal king to come—this when the Israelites lost their independence, and were humiliated by falling under a foreign yoke. This ideal longed-for king was to win Jahwe’s favour; and by his heroic deeds, transcending those of Moses and Joshua of old, to re-establish the glory of Israel, renovate the face of the earth, and even make Israel Lord over all nations. But so far the Messiah was only a human being, a new David or descendant of David, a theocratic king, a divinely favoured prince of peace, a just ruler over the people he liberated; and in this sense Cyrus, who delivered the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, the rescuer and overlord of Israel, had been acclaimed Messiah.

At last and gradually—still under Persian influence, according to Drews—this figure assumed divine attributes, yet without forfeiting human ones. Secret and supernatural as was his nature, so should the birth of the Messiah be; though a divine child, he was to be born in lowly state. Nay, the personality of the [12]Messiah eventually mingled with that of Jahwe himself, whose son he was. Such, according to Drews, were the alternations of the Messiah between a human and a divine nature in Jewish apocalypses of the period B.C. 100 to A.D. 100. They obviously do not preclude the possibility of the Jews in that epoch acclaiming a man as their Messiah—indeed, there is no reason why they should not have attached the dignity to several; and from sources which Drews does not dispute we learn that they actually did so.

John and Jesus began as messengers of the divine kingdom on earth Let us return to Mark’s narrative. Among the Jews who came to John to confess and repent of their sins, and wash them away in the Jordan, was one named Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee; and he, as soon as John was imprisoned and murdered by Herod, caught up the lamp, if I may use a metaphor, which had fallen from the hands of the stricken saint, and hurried on with it to the same goal. We read that he went to Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye, and believe in the gospel or good tidings.”

The rest of Mark is a narrative of what happened to Jesus on this self-appointed errand. We learn that he soon made many recruits, from among whom he chose a dozen as his particular missionaries or apostles. These, after no long time, he despatched on peculiar beats of their own. Jesus’s anticipations of its speedy adventHe was certain that the kingdom was not to be long delayed, and on occasions assured his audience that it would come in their time. When he was sending out his missionary disciples, he even expressed to them his doubts as to whether it would not come even before they had [13]had time to go round the cities of Israel. He confined the promises to JewsIt was not, however, this consideration, but the instinct of exclusiveness, which he shared with most of his race, that led him to warn them against carrying the good tidings of the impending salvation of Israel to Samaritans or Gentiles; the promises were not for schismatics and heathens, but only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Some of these details are derived not from Mark, but from the document out of which, as I remarked above, the first and second evangelists supplemented Mark.

Was rejected by his own kindred Like Luther, Loyola, Dunstan, St. Anthony, and many other famous saints and sinners, Jesus, on the threshold of his career, encountered Satan, and overthrew him. A characteristically oriental fast of forty days in the wilderness equipped him for this feat. Thenceforth he displayed, like Apollonius of Tyana and not a few contemporary rabbis, considerable familiarity with the demons of disease and madness. The sick flocked to him to be healed, and it was only in districts where people disbelieved in him and his message that his therapeutic energy met with a check. Among those who particularly flouted his pretensions were his mother and brethren, who on one occasion at least followed him in order to arrest him and put him under restraint as being beside himself or exalté. His Parables all turn on the coming KingdomA good many parables are attributed to him in this Gospel, and yet more in Matthew and Luke, of which the burden usually is the near approach of the dissolution of this world and of the last Judgment, which are to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. We learn that the parable was his favourite mode of instruction, as it always has been and still is the chosen vehicle of Semitic moral teaching. No hint in the earliest sources of the miraculous birth of JesusOf the [14]later legend of his supernatural birth, and of the visits before his birth of angels to Mary, his mother, and to Joseph, his putative father, of the portents subsequently related in connection with his birth at Bethlehem, there is not a word either in Mark or in the other early document out of which Matthew and Luke supplemented Mark. In these earliest documents Jesus is presented quite naturally as the son of Joseph and his wife Mary, and we learn quite incidentally the names of his brothers and sisters.

Late recognition of Jesus as himself the MessiahTowards the middle of his career Jesus seems to have been recognized by Peter as the Son of God or Messiah. Whether he put himself forward for that r?le we cannot be sure; but so certain were his Apostles of the matter that two of them are represented as having asked him in the naivest way to grant them seats of honour on his left and right hand, when he should come in glory to judge the world. The Twelve expected to sit on thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel, and this idea meets us afresh in the Apocalypse, a document which in the form we have it belongs to the years 92–93.

His hopes shattered at approach of deathBut the simple faith of the Apostles in their teacher and leader was to receive a rude shock. They accompany him for the Passover to Jerusalem. An insignificant triumphal demonstration is organized for him as he enters the sacred city on an ass; he beards the priests in the temple, and scatters the money-changers who sat there to change strange coins for pilgrims. The priests, who, like many others of their kind, were much too comfortable to sigh for the end of the world, and regarded enthusiasts as nuisances, took offence, denounced him to Pilate as a rebel and a danger to the Roman government of [15]Jud?a. He is arrested, condemned to be crucified, and as he hangs on the cross in a last moment of disillusionment utters that most pathetic of cries: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” He had expected to witness the descent of the kingdom on earth, but instead thereof he is himself handed over helpless into the hands of the Gentiles.

Such in outline is the story Mark has to tell. The rival and supplementary document of which I have spoken, and which admits of some reconstruction from the text of Matthew and Luke, consisted mainly of parables and precepts which Jesus was supposed to have delivered. It need not engage our attention here.

The mythical theory of JesusNow the three writers I have named—Messrs. Drews, Robertson, and W. B. Smith—enjoy the singular good fortune to be the first to have discovered what the above narratives really mean, and of how they originated; and they are urgent that we should sell all we have, and purchase their pearl of wisdom. They assure us that in the Gospels we have not got any “tradition of a personality.” Jesus, the central figure, never existed at all, but was a purely mythical personage. The mythical character of the Gospels, so Drews assures us, has, in the hands of Mr. J. M. Robertson, led the way, and made a considerable advance in England; he regrets that so far official learning in Germany has not taken up a serious position regarding the mythic symbolical interpretation of the latter.3 Let us then ask, What [16]is the gist of the new system of interpretation. It is as follows:—

Jesus = Joshua, a Sun-god, object of a secret cultJesus, or Joshua, was the name under which the expected Messiah was honoured in a certain Jewish secret society which had its headquarters in Jerusalem about the beginning of our era. In view of its secret character Drews warns us not to be too curious, nor to question either his information or that of Messrs. Smith and Robertson. This recalls to me an incident in my own experience. I was once, together with a little girl, being taken for a sail by an old sailor who had many yarns. One of the most circumstantial of them was about a ship which went down in mid ocean with all hands aboard; and it wound up with the remark: “And nobody never knew nothing about it.” Little girl: “Then how did you come to hear all about it?” Like our brave old sailor, Dr. Drews warns us (p. 22) not to be too inquisitive. We must not “forget that we are dealing with a secret cult, the existence of which we can decide upon only by indirect means.” His hypothesis, he tells us, “can only be rejected without more ado by such as seek the traces of the pre-Christian cult of Jesus in well-worn places, and will only allow that to be ‘proved’ which they have established by direct original documentary evidence before their eyes.” In other words, we are to set aside our copious and almost (in Paul’s case) contemporary evidence that Jesus was a real person in favour of a hypothesis which from the first and as such lacks all direct and documentary evidence, and is not amenable to any of the methods of proof recognized by sober historians. We must take Dr. Drews’s word for it, and forego all evidence.

But let our authors continue with their new revelation. [17]By Joshua, or Jesus, we are not to understand the personage concerning whose exploits the Book of Joshua was composed, but a Sun-god. The Gospels are a veiled account of the sufferings and exploits of this Sun-god. “Joshua is apparently [why this qualification?] an ancient Ephraimitic god of the Sun and Fruitfulness, who stood in close relation to the Feast of the Pasch and to the custom of circumcision.”4

Emptiness of the Sun-god Joshua hypothesisNow no one nowadays accepts the Book of Joshua offhand as sound history. It is a compilation of older sources, which have already been sifted a good deal, and will undergo yet more sifting in the future. The question before us does not concern its historicity, but is this: Does the Book of Joshua, whether history or not, support the hypothesis that Joshua was ever regarded as God of the Sun and of Fruitfulness? Was ever such a god known of or worshipped in the tribe of Ephraim or in Israel at large? In this old Hebrew epic or saga Joshua is a man of flesh and blood. How did these gentlemen get it into their heads that he was a Sun-god? For this statement there is not a shadow of evidence. They have invented it. As he took the Israelites dryshod over the Jordan, why have they not made a River-god of him? And as, according to Drews, he was so interested in fruitfulness and foreskins, why not suppose he was a Priapic god? They are much too modest. We should at least expect “the composite myth” to include this element, inasmuch as his mystic votaries at Jerusalem [18]were far from seeing eye to eye with Paul in the matter of circumcision.

The Sun-myth stage of comparative mythologyThere was years ago a stage in the Comparative History of Religions when the Sun-myth hypothesis was invoked to explain almost everything. The shirt of Nessus, for example, in which Heracles perished, was a parable of the sun setting amidst a wrack of scattered clouds. The Sun-myth was the key which fitted every lock, and was employed unsparingly by pioneers of comparative mythology like F. Max Müller and Sir George Cox. It was taken for granted that early man must have begun by deifying the great cosmic powers, by venerating Sun and Moon, the Heavens, the Mountains, the Sea, as holy and divine beings, because they, rather than humble and homelier objects, impress us moderns by their sublimity and overwhelming force. Man was supposed from the first to have felt his transitoriness, his frailty and weakness, and to have contrasted therewith the infinities of space and time, the majesty of the starry hosts of heaven, the majestic and uniform march of sun and moon, the mighty rumble of the thunder. Max Müller thought that religion began when the cowering savage was crushed by awe of nature and of her stupendous forces, by the infinite lapses of time, by the yawning abysses of space. As a matter of fact, savages do not entertain these sentiments of the dignity and majesty of nature. On the contrary, a primitive man thinks that he can impose his paltry will on the elements; that he knows how to unchain the wind, to oblige the rain to fall; that he can, like the ancient witches of Thessaly, control sun and moon and stars by all sorts of petty magical rites, incantations, and gestures, as Joshua [19]made the sun stand still till his band of brigands had won the battle. It is to the imagination of us moderns alone that the grandeur of the universe appeals, and it was relatively late in the history of religion—so far as it can be reconstructed from the scanty data in our possession—that the higher nature cults were developed. The gods and sacred beings of an Australian or North American native are the humble vegetables and animals which surround him, objects with which he is on a footing of equality. His totems are a duck, a hare, a kangaroo, an emu, a lizard, a grub, or a frog. In the same way, the sacred being of an early Semite’s devotion was just as likely to be a pig or a hare as the sun in heaven; the cult of an early Egyptian was centred upon a crocodile, or a cat, or a dog.5 In view of these considerations, our suspicion is aroused at the outset by finding Messrs. Drews and Robertson to be in this discarded and obsolete Sun-myth stage of speculation. They are a back number. Let us, however, examine their mythic symbolic theory a little further, and see what sort of arguments they invoke in favour of it, and what their “indirect” proofs amount to.

Examples of the Sun-god theory of Jesus. The Rock-TombWhy was Jesus buried in a rock-tomb? asks Mr. Robertson. Answer: Because he was Mithras, the rock-born Sun-god. We would like to know what other sort of burial was possible round Jerusalem, where soil was so scarce that everyone was buried in a rock-tomb. Scores of such tombs remain. Are they all Mithraic? Surely a score of other considerations would equally well explain the choice of a rock-tomb for him in Christian tradition. [20]

The date of birthdayWhy was Jesus born at the winter-solstice? Answer: Because he was a Sun-god.

Our author forgets that the choice of December 25 for the feast of the physical birth of Jesus was made by the Church as late as 354 A.D. What could the cryptic Messianists of the first half of the first century know about a festival which was never heard of in Rome until the year 354, nor accepted in Jerusalem before the year 440? Time is evidently no element in the calculations of these authors; and they commit themselves to the most amazing anachronisms with the utmost insouciance, or, shall we not rather say, ignorance; unless, indeed, they imagine that the mystic worshippers of the God Joshua knew all about the date, but kept it dark in order to mystify all succeeding generations.

The twelve disciples Why did Jesus surround himself with twelve disciples? Answer: Because they were the twelve signs of the Zodiac and he a Sun-god. We naturally ask, Were the twelve tribes of Israel equally representative of the Zodiac? In any case, may not Christian story have fixed the number of Apostles at twelve in view of the tribes being twelve? It is superfluous to go as far as the Zodiac for an explanation.

The Sermon on the Mount Why did Jesus preach his sermon on the Mount? Answer: Because as Sun-god he had to take his stand on the “pillar of the world.” In the same way, Moses, another Sun-god, gave his law from the Mount.

I always have heard that Moses got his tables of the law up top of a mountain, and brought them down to a people that were forbidden to approach it. He did not stand up top, and shout out his laws to them, as Mr. Robertson suggests. In any case, we merely read in Matthew v that Jesus went up into a [21]mountain or upland region, and when he had sat down his disciples came to him, and he then opened his mouth and taught them. In a country like Galilee, where you can barely walk a mile in any direction without climbing a hill, what could be more natural than for a narrator to frame such a setting for the teacher’s discourse? It is the first rule of criticism to practise some economy of hypothesis, and not go roaming after fanciful and extravagant interpretations of quite commonplace and every-day occurrences.

The last Judgment Why was it believed that Jesus was to judge men after death? Answer: Because he was a Sun-god, and pro tanto identical with Osiris.

Surely the more natural interpretation is that, so soon as Jesus was identified in the minds of his followers with the Messiah or Christ, the task of judging Israel was passed on to him as part of the r?le. Thus in the Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish apocryph of about B.C. 50, we read that the Messiah will “in the assemblies judge the peoples, the tribes of the sanctified” (xvii, 48). Such references could be multiplied; are they all Osirian? If Mr. Robertson had paid a little more attention to the later apocrypha of Judaism, and made himself a little better acquainted with the social and religious medium which gave birth to Christianity, he would have realized how unnecessary are these Sun-mythic hypotheses, and we should have been spared his books.

The Lamb and Fish symbolism Why is Jesus represented in art and lore by the Lamb and the Fishes? Answer: As a Sun-god passing through the Zodiac.

This is amazing. We know the reason why Jesus was figured as a Lamb by the early Christians. It [22]was because they regarded the paschal lamb as a type of him. Does Mr. Robertson claim to know the reasons of their symbolism better than they did themselves?

And where did he discover that Jesus was represented as Fishes in Art and Lore? He was symbolized as one fish, not as several; and Tertullian has told us why. It was because, according to the popular zoology of the day, fishes were supposed to be born and to originate in the water, without carnal connection between their parents. For this reason the fish was taken as a symbol of Jesus, who was born again in the waters of the Jordan. A later generation explained the appellation of ?χθυ? (ichthus), or Fish, as an acrostic. The letters of the Greek word are the initials of the words: Iesous Christos Theou uios soter—i.e., Jesus Christ of God Son, Saviour; but this later explanation came into vogue in an age when it was already heretical to say that Jesus was reborn in baptism; nor does it explain why the multitude of the baptized were symbolized as little fishes in contrast with the Big Fish, Christ.

The two asses Why did Jesus ride into Jerusalem before his death on two asses? Answer: Because Dionysus also rides on an ass and a foal in one of the Greek signs of Cancer (the turning point in the sun’s course). “Bacchus (p. 287) crossed a marsh on two asses.”

Mr. Robertson does not attempt to prove that the earliest Christians, who were Jews, must have been familiar with the rare legend of Bacchus crossing a marsh on two asses; still less with the rare representation of the zodiacal sign Cancer as an ass and its foal. It is next to impossible; and, even if they were, what induced them to transform the myth into [23]the legend of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on two donkeys at once? If they had so excellent a legend of Bacchus on his asses crossing a marsh, why not be content with it? And the same question may be asked in regard to all the other transformations by which these “mystic sectaries,” who formed the early Church, changed myths culled from all times and all religions and races into a connected story of Jesus, as it lies before us in the Synoptic Gospels.

Mr. Robertson disdains any critical and comparative study of the Gospels, and insists on regarding them as coeval and independent documents. Everything inside the covers of the New Testament is for him, as for the Sunday-school teacher, on one dead level of importance. All textual criticism has passed over his head. He has never learned to look in Mark for the original form of a statement which Luke or Matthew copied out, and in transferring them to their Gospels scrupled not to alter or modify. Accordingly, to suit the exigencies of his theory that the Gospels are an allegory of a Sun-god’s exploits, he here claims to find the original text not in Mark, but in Matthew; as if a transcript and paraphrase could possibly be prior to, and more authoritative than, the text transcribed and brodé. Accordingly, he writes (p. 339) as follows: “In Mark xi and Luke xix, 30, the two asses become one?…. In the Fourth Gospel, again, we have simply the colt.” And yet by all rules of textual criticism and of common sense the underlying and original text is Mark xi, 1–7. In it the disciples merely bring a colt which they had found tied at a door. The author of the Gospel called of Matthew, eager to discern in every incident, no matter how commonplace, which [24]he found in Mark, a fulfilment of some prophecy, or another, drags in a tag of Zechariah: “Behold, the King cometh to thee, meek, and riding on an ass and upon a colt, the foal of an ass.” Then, to make the story told of Jesus run on all fours with the prophecy, he writes that the disciples “brought the ass and the colt, and put on them their garments, and he (Jesus) sat on them.” He was unacquainted with Hebrew idiom, and so not aware that the words, “a colt the foal of an ass,” are no more than a rhetorical reduplication6 of an ass. There was, then, but one animal in the original form of the story, and, as the French say, it saute aux yeux that the importation of two is due to the influence of the prophecy on the mind of the transcriber. Why, therefore, go out of the way to attribute the tale to the influence of a legend of Bacchus, so multiplying empty hypotheses? Mr. Robertson, with hopeless perversity, takes Dr. Percy Gardner to task for repeating what he calls “the fallacious explanation, that ‘an ass and the foal of [25]an ass’ represents a Greek misconception of the Hebrew way of saying ‘an ass,’ as if Hebrews in every-day life lay under a special spell of verbal absurdity.”7 Jewish abhorrence of Pagan mythsBut did Hebrews in every-day life mould their ideas of the promised Messiah on out-of-the-way legends of Bacchus? Were they likely to fashion a tale of a Messianic triumph out of Gentile myths? Do we not know from a hundred sources that the Jews of that age, and the Christians who were in this matter their pupils, abhorred everything that savoured of Paganism. They were the last people in the world to construct a life of the Messiah out of the myths of Bacchus, and Hermes, and Osiris, and Heracles, and the fifty other heathen gods and heroes whom Mr. Robertson rolls up into what he calls the “composite myth” of the Gospels. But let us return to his criticism of Dr. Gardner. Why, it may be asked, was it à priori more absurd of Matthew to turn one ass into two in deference to Hebrew prophecy, than for Hebrews to set their Messiah riding into the holy city on two asses in deference to a myth of Bacchus crossing a marsh on two of them? Is it not Mr. Robertson, rather than Robertson on Drs. Gardner and CarpenterDr. Gardner, who here lies under a special spell of absurdity? “A glance at the story of Bacchus,” writes Mr. Robertson, “crossing a marsh on two asses … would have shown him that he was dealing with a zodiacal myth.” The boot is on the other foot. Had Mr. Robertson chosen to glance at the Poeticon Astronomicon of Hyginus, a late and somewhat worthless Latin author, who is the authority for this particular tale of Bacchus, he would have read [26](ii, 23) how Liber (i.e., Dionysus) was on his way to get an oracle at Dodona which might restore his lost sanity: Sed cum venisset ad quandam paludem magnam, quam transire non posset, de quibusdam duobus asellis obviis factis dicitur unum deprehendisse eorum, et ita esse transvectus, ut omnino aquam non tetigerit.

In English: “But when he came to a certain spacious marsh, which he thought he could not get across, he is said to have met on the way two young asses, of which he caught one, and he was carried across on it so nicely that he never touched the water at all.”

Here there is no hint of Bacchus riding on two asses, and Mr. Robertson’s entire hypothesis falls to the ground like a house of cards. The astounding thing is that, although he insists on pages 287 and 4538 that Bacchus rode on two asses, and that here is the true Babylonian explanation of Jesus also riding on two, he gets the Greek, or rather Latin, myth right on p. 339, and recognizes that Dionysus was only mounted on one of the asses when he passed the morass or river on his way to Dodona. Thus, by Mr. Robertson’s own admission, Bacchus never rode on two asses at all.

The Pilate myth Why was Jesus crucified by Pilate? For an answer to this let us for a little quit “the very stimulating and informing works,” as Dr. Drews calls them, of Mr. Robertson, and turn to Dr. Drews’s own work on The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus.9 For there we find the true “astral myth interpretation” in all [27]its glory. The Pilate of Christian legend was, so we learn, not originally an historical person at all; the whole story of Christ is to be taken in an astral sense; and Pilate in particular represents the story of Orion, the javelin-man (Pilatus), with the Arrow or Lance constellation (Sagitta), which is supposed to be very long in the Greek myth, and reappears in the Christian legend under the name of Longinus?…. In the astral myth the Christ hanging on the cross or world-tree (i.e., the Milky Way) is killed by the lance of Pilatus?…. The Christian population of Rome told the legend of a javelin-man, a Pilatus, who was supposed to have been responsible for the death of the Saviour. Tacitus heard the myth repeated, and, like the fool he was, took it that Pilate the javelin-man was no other than Pilate the Roman procurator of Jud?a under Tiberius, who must have been known to him from the books of Josephus.10 Accordingly, Tacitus sat down and penned his account of the wholesale massacre and burning of Christians by Nero in the fifteenth book of his Annals.

We shall turn to the evidence of Tacitus later on. Meanwhile it is pertinent to ask where the myth of Pilatus, of which Drews here makes use, came from. The English text of Drews is somewhat confused; but presumedly Orion, with his girdle sword and lion’s skin, is no other than Pilatus; and his long lance, with which he kills Christ, further entitles him to the name of Longinus. Or is it Pilatus who stabs [28]Orion? It does not matter. Let us test this hypothesis in its essential parts.

The Longinus myth Firstly, then, Longinus was the name coined by Christian legend-mongers of the third or fourth century for the centurion who stabbed Jesus with a lance as he hung on the cross. How could so late a myth influence or form part of a tradition three centuries older than itself? The incident of the lance being plunged into the side of Jesus is related only in the Fourth Gospel, and is not found in the earlier ones. The author of that Gospel invented it in order to prove to his generation that Jesus had real blood in his body, and was not, as the Docetes maintained, a phantasm mimicking reality to the ears and eyes alone of those who saw and conversed with him. This Gospel, even according to the Christian tradition of its date, is barely earlier than A.D. 100, and the name Longinus was not heard of before A.D. 250 at the earliest. Yet Drews is ready to believe that it was on the lips of Christians in the reign of Nero, say in A.D. 64.

Secondly, what evidence is there that Pilatus could mean the “javelin-man” for the earliest generations of Roman Christians? The language current among them was Greek, not Latin, as the earliest Christian inscriptions in the catacombs of Rome testify. The language of Roman rites and popes remained Greek for three centuries. Why, then, should they have had their central myth of the crucifixion in a Latin form?

Thirdly, what evidence is there that Pilatus could mean a javelin-man even to a Latin? Many lexicographers interpret it in Virgil in the sense of packed together or dense, and in most authors it bears the sense of bald or despoiled. [29]

Inadequacy of the mythic theory But, letting that pass, we ask what evidence is there that Orion ever had the epithet Pilatus in this sense? What evidence that such a myth ever existed at all? There is none, absolutely none. It is not enough for these authors to ransack Lemprière and other dictionaries of mythology in behalf of their paradoxes; but when these collections fail them, they proceed to coin myths of their own, and pretend that they are ancient, that the early Christians believed in them, and that Tacitus fell into the trap; as if these Christians, whom they acknowledge to have been either Jews or the converts of Jews, had not been constitutionally opposed to all pagan myths and cults alike; as if a good half of the earliest Christian literature did not consist of polemics against the pagan myths, which were regarded with the bitterest scorn and abhorrence; as if it were not notorious that it was their repugnance to and ridicule of pagan gods and heroes and religious myths that earned for the Christians, as for the Jews, their teachers, the hatred and loathing of the pagan populations in whose midst they lived. And yet we are asked to believe that the Christian Church, almost before it was separated from the Jewish matrix, fashioned for itself in the form of the Gospels an allegory of a Sun-god Joshua, who, though unknown to serious Semitic scholars, is yet so well known to Mr. Robertson and his friends that he identifies him with Adonis, and Osiris, and Dionysus, and Mithras, and Krishna, and Asclepius, and with any other god or demi-god that comes to hand in Lemprière’s dictionary. After hundreds of pages of such fanciful writing, Drews warns us in solemn language against the attempts “of historical theologians to reach the [30]nucleus of the Gospels by purely philological means.” The attempt, he declares, is “hopeless, and must remain hopeless, because the Gospel tradition floats in the air.” One would like to know in what medium his own hypotheses float. Joshua the Sun-god a pure invention of the mythic school Like Dr. Drews, Mr. Robertson adopts the Joshua myth as if it were beyond question. His faith in “the ancient Palestinian Saviour-Sun-God” is absolute. This otherwise unknown deity was the core of what is gracefully styled “the Jesuist myth.” On examination, however, the Joshua Sun-god turns out to be the most rickety of hypotheses. Because the chieftain who, in old tradition, led the Jews across the Jordan into the land of promise was named Joshua, certain critics, who are still in the sun-myth phase of comparative mythology—in particular, Stade and Winckler—have conjectured that the name Joshua conceals a solar hero worshipped locally by the tribe of Ephraim. Even if there ever existed such a cult, it had long vanished when the book of Joshua was compiled; for in this he is no longer represented as a solar hero, but has become in the popular tradition a human figure, a hero judge, and leader of the armies of Israel. Of a Joshua cult the book does not preserve any trace or memory; that it ever existed is an improbable and unverifiable hypothesis. We might just as well conjecture that Romulus, and Remus, and other half or wholly legendary figures of ancient history, were sun-gods and divine saviours. But it is particularly in Jewish history that this school is apt to revel. Moses, and Joseph, and David were all mythical beings brought down to earth; and the god David and the god Joshua, the god Moses, the god Joseph, form in the imagination of these gentlemen [31]a regular Hebrew prehistoric Pantheon. I say in their imagination, for it is certain that when the Pentateuch was compiled—at the latest in the fifth century B.C.—the Jews no longer revered David, and Joshua, and Joseph as sun-gods; while of what they worshipped even locally before that date we have little knowledge, and can form only conjectures. In any case, that they continued to worship a sun-god under the name of Joshua as late as the first century of our era must strike anyone who has the least knowledge of Hebrew religious development, who has ever read Philo or Josephus, or studied Jewish sapiential and apocalyptic literature of the period B.C. 200–A.D. 100, as a wildly improbable supposition. Supposed secrecy of early Christian cult a literary trick Sensible that their hypothesis conflicts with all we know about the Jews of these three centuries, these three authors—Messrs. Drews, Robertson, and W. B. Smith—insist on the esoterism and secrecy of the cryptic society which in Jerusalem harboured the cult. This commonest of literary tricks enables them to evade any awkward questions, and whenever they are challenged to produce some evidence of the existence of such a cult they can answer that, being secret and esoteric, it could leave little or no evidence of itself, and that we must take their ipse dixit and renounce all hope of direct and documentary evidence. They ask of us a greater credulity than any Pope of Rome ever demanded.

Joshua ben Jehozadak also a Sun-god The divine stage of Joshua, then, if it ever existed, was past and forgotten as early as 500 B.C. It has left no traces. Of the other Joshuas, who meet us in the pages of the Jewish scriptures, the most important one is Jeshua or Joshua ben Jehozadak, a high priest who, together with Zerubbabel, is often mentioned [32](according to the Encyclop?dia Biblica) in contemporary writings. Not only, then, have we contemporary evidence of this Joshua as of a mere man and a priest, but we know from it that he stooped to such mundane occupations as the rebuilding of the Temple. He also had human descendants, who are traced in Nehemiah xii, 10 fol. down to Jaddua. Of this epoch of Jewish history, in which the Temple was being rebuilt, we have among the Jewish and Aramaic papyri lately recovered at Elephantine documents that are autographs of personages with whom this Joshua may well have been in contact. His contemporaries are mentioned and even addressed in these documents, so that he and his circle are virtually as well evidenced for us as Frederick the Great and Voltaire. Is it credible in the face of such facts that the authors we are criticizing should turn this Joshua, too, into a solar god? Yet Drews turns with zest to the notice of this Joshua, the high priest in Zechariah iii, as “one of the many signs” which attest that “Joshua or Jesus was the name under which the expected Messiah was honoured in certain Jewish sects.” Unless he regards this later Joshua also as a divine figure, and no mere man of flesh and blood, why does he thus drag him into his argument?

The suspicion that the compilers of the Old Testament burked evidence favourable to the Sun-myth hypothesis But, after all, Messrs. Drews and Robertson are uneasy about the book of Joshua, and not altogether capable of the breezy optimism of their instructor, Mr. W. B. Smith, who, in Ecce Deus (p. 74), commits himself to the naive declaration that, “even if we had no evidence whatever of a pre-Christian Jesus cult, we should be compelled to affirm its existence with undiminished decision.” Accordingly, they both go out of their way to hint that the ancient Jews [33]suppressed the facts of the Joshua or Jesus Sun-God-Saviour cult. Thus Mr. Robertson (Christianity and Mythology, p. 99, note 1), after urging us to accept a late and worthless tradition about Joshua, the Son of Nave, remarks that “the Jewish books would naturally drop the subject.” How ill-natured, to be sure, of the authors of the old Hebrew scriptures to suppress evidence that would have come in so handy for Mr. Robertson’s speculations. Dr. Drews takes another line, and in a note draws our attention to the fact that the Samaritans possessed an apocryphal book of the same name as the canonical book of Joshua. This book, he informs us, is based upon an old work composed in the third century B.C., containing stories which in part do not appear in our Book of Joshua.

He here suggests that something was omitted in canonical Joshua by its authors which would have helped out his hypothesis of a Joshua Sun-god cult. He will not, however, find the Samaritan book encouraging, for it gives no hint of such a cult; of that anyone who does not mind being bored by a perusal of it can satisfy himself. Drews’s statement that it is based on an old work composed in the third century B.C. is founded on pure ignorance, and the Encyclop?dia Biblica declares it to be a medieval production of no value to anyone except the student of the Samaritan sect under Moslem rule.

The evidence of El Tabari about Joshua Mr. Robertson thinks he has got on a better trail in the shape of a tradition as to Joshua which he is quite sure the old Jewish scripture writers suppressed. Let us examine it, for it affords a capital example of his ideas of what constitutes historical evidence. “Eastern tradition,” he writes, “preserves a variety [34]of myths that the Bible-makers for obvious reasons suppressed or transformed.” In one of those traditions “Joshua is the son of the mythical Miriam; that is to say, there was probably an ancient Palestinian Saviour-Sun-God, Jesus, the son of Mary.” So on p. 285 we learn that the cult of Jesus of Nazareth was “the Survival of an ancient solar or other worship of a Babe Joshua, son of Miriam.” And he continually alludes to this ancient form of devotion, not as a mere hypothesis, but as a well-ascertained and demonstrable fact.11

Let us then explore this remarkable tradition by which “we are led to surmise that the elucidation of the Christ myth is not yet complete.” For such is the grandiose language in which he heralds his discovery. And what does it amount to? An Arab, El Tabari, who died in Bagdad about the year 925, compiled a Chronicle, of which some centuries later an unknown native of Persia made an abridgement in his own tongue, and inserted in it as a gloss “the remarkable Arab tradition,” as it is called in the Pagan Christs (p. 157) of Mr. Robertson, albeit he acknowledges in a footnote that it is “not in the Arabic original.” He asks us accordingly, on the faith of an unknown Persian glossator of the late Middle Ages, to believe that the canonical Book of Joshua originally contained this absurd tradition, and why? Because it would help out his hypothesis that [35]Jesus was an ancient Palestinian Saviour-Sun-God, worshipped by a cryptic society of Hebrews in Jerusalem, both before and after the beginning of the Christian era; and this is the man who writes about “the psychological resistance to evidence” of learned men, and sets it down to “malice and impercipience” that anyone should challenge his conclusions. As usual, Dr. Drews, who sets Mr. Robertson on a level with the author of the Golden Bough12 as a “leading exponent of his new mythico-symbolical method,” plunges into the pit which Mr. Robertson has dug for him, and writes that, “according to an ancient Arabian tradition, the mother of Joshua was called Mirzam (Mariam, Maria, as the mother of Jesus was).”

W. B. Smith’s hypothesis of a God Joshua The source from which Messrs. Drews and Robertson have drawn this particular inspiration is Dr. W. B. Smith’s work, The Pre-Christian Jesus (Der Vorchristliche Jesus). This book, we are told, “first systematically set forth the case for the thesis of its title.” Let us, therefore, consider its main argument. We have the following passages in Acts xviii, 24:—

    Now a certain Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrian by race, a learned man, came to Ephesus; and he was mighty in the Scriptures. This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and, being fervent in spirit, he spake and taught carefully the things concerning Jesus, knowing only the baptism of John: and he began to speak boldly in the synagogue. But [36]when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God more carefully. And when he was minded to pass over into Achaia, the brethren encouraged him, and wrote to the disciples to receive him: and when he was come, he helped them much which had believed through grace: for he powerfully confuted the Jews, publicly, showing by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.

Availing ourselves of the canons of interpretation laid down by Drews and Robertson, we may paraphrase the above somewhat as follows by way of getting at its true meaning:—

“A certain sun-myth hero, as his name Apollos signifies, came to Ephesus, which, being the centre of Astarte or Aphrodite worship, was obviously the right place for such a hero to pilgrimage unto. He was mighty in the Jewish Scriptures, and had been instructed in the way of the Lord Joshua, the Sun-God-Saviour of ancient Ephraim. He spake and taught carefully the things concerning this Joshua (or Adonis, or Osiris, or Dionysus, or Vegetation-god, or Horus—for you can take your choice among these and many more). But he knew only of the prehistoric ritual of baptism of Cadmus or of Oannes-Ea, the ancient culture-god of the Babylonians, who appeared in the form of a Fish-man, teaching men by day and at night going down into the sea—in his capacity of Sun-god.” This Cadmus or Oannes was worshipped at Jerusalem in the cryptic sect of the Christists or Jesuists under the name of John. His friend Apollos, the solar demi-god, began to speak boldly in the synagogue. Priscilla (presumably Cybele, mother of the gods), and Aquila, the Eagle-God, or Jupiter, heard him; she took him forthwith and [37]expounded to him the way of Jahve, who also was identical with Joshua, the Sun-god, with Osiris, etc.

His forced and far-fetched interpretations of common phrases Professor W. B. Smith is a little more modest and less thorough-going in his application of mythico-symbolic methods. He only asks us to believe that the trite and hackneyed phrase, “the things concerning Jesus,” refers not, as the context requires, to the history and passion of Jesus of Galilee, but to the mysteries of a prehistoric Saviour-God of the same name. We advisedly say prehistoric, for he was never mentioned by anyone before Professor Smith discovered him. The name Jesus, according to him, means what the word Essene also meant, a Healer.13 Note, in passing, that this etymology is wholly false, and rests on the authority of a writer so late, ignorant, and superstitious as Epiphanius. Now, why cannot the words, “the things about Jesus,” in this context mean the tradition of the ministry of Jesus as it had shaped itself at that time, beginning with the Baptism and ending with the Ascension, as we read in Acts i, 22? Apollos and the Baptism of JohnIt cannot, argues Professor Smith, because Apollos only knew the baptism of John. The reference to John’s baptism may be obscure, as much in early Christianity is bound to be obscure, except to Professor Smith and his imitators. Yet this much is clear, that it here means, what it means in the sequel, the baptism of mere repentance as opposed to the baptism of the Spirit, which was by laying on of hands, and conferred [38]the charismatic gifts of the Holy Ghost. The Marcionites, and after them the Manichean and Cathar sects, retained the latter rite, and termed it Spiritual or Pneumatic Baptism; while they dropped as superfluous the Johannine baptism with water. It would appear, then, that Apollos was perfectly acquainted with the personal history of Jesus, and understood the purport of the baptism of repentance as a sacrament preparing followers of Jesus for the kingdom of Heaven, soon to be inaugurated on earth. Perhaps we get a glimpse in this passage of an age when the mission of Jesus in his primitive r?le as herald of the Messianic kingdom and a mere continuer of John’s mission was familiar to many who yet did not recognize him as the Messiah. For, after instruction by Priscilla and Aquila, Apollos set himself to confute the Jews who denied Jesus to have been Messiah, which, as a mere herald of the approaching kingdom of God, he was not. We know that Paul regarded him as having attained that dignity only through, and by, the fact of the Spirit having raised him from the dead; and did not regard him as having received it through the descent of the Spirit on him in the Jordan, as the oriental Christians presently believed. Still less did Paul know of the later teaching of the orthodox churches—viz., that the Annunciation was the critical moment in which Christ became Jesus. In any case, we must not interpret the words, “the things about Jesus,” in this passage in a forced and unnatural sense wholly alien to the writer of Acts. This writer again and again recapitulates the leading facts of the life and ministry of Jesus, and the phrase, “the things concerning Jesus,” cannot in any work of his bear any [39]other sense. Moreover, the same author uses the very same phrase elsewhere (Luke xxiv, 19) in the same sense. Here Cleopas asks Jesus (whom he had failed to recognize), and says:—

    Dost thou alone sojourn in Jerusalem, and not know the things which are come to pass there in these days? And he said unto him, What things? And they said unto him, the things concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people: and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him.

Such, then, were “the things about Jesus,” and to find in them, as Professor W. B. Smith does, an allusion to a pre-Christian myth of a God Joshua is to find a gigantic mare’s-nest, and fly in the face of all the evidence. He verges on actual absurdity when he sees the same allusion in Mark v, 26, where a sick woman, having heard “the things concerning Jesus,” went behind him, touched his garment, and was healed. Her disease was of a hysterical description, and in the annals of faith-healing such cures are common. What she had heard of was obviously not his fame as a Sun-god, but his power to heal sick persons like herself. Magical papyrus of Wessely Professor Smith tries to find support for his hardy conjecture in a chance phrase in a magical papyrus of Paris, No. 3,009, edited first by Wessely, and later by Dieterich in his Abraxas, p. 138. It is a form of exorcism to be inscribed on a tin plate and hung round the neck of a person possessed by a devil, or repeated over him by an exorcist. In this rigmarole the giants, of course, are dragged in, and the Tower of Babel and King Solomon; and the name of Jesus, the God of the Hebrews, is also invoked in the following terms: “I [40]adjure thee by Jesus the God of the Hebrews, Iabaiae Abraoth aia thoth ele, el?,” etc. The age of this papyrus is unknown; but Wessely puts it in the third century after Christ, while Dieterich shows that it can in no case be older than the second century B.C. It is clearly the composition of some exorcist who clung on to the skirts of late Judaism, for he is at pains to inform us in its last line that it is a Hebrew composition and preserved among pure men. In that age, as in after ones, not a few exorcists, trading on the fears and sufferings of superstitious people, affected to be pure and holy; and the mention of Jesus indicates some such charlatan, who was more or less cognisant of Christianity and of the practice of Christian exorcists. He was also aware of the Jewish antecedents of Christianity, and did not distinguish clearly between the mother religion and its daughter. That is why he describes Jesus as a Hebrew God. We know from other sources that even in the earliest Christian age Gentiles used the name of Jesus in exorcisms. The author of the document styles Jesus God, just as Pliny informs us that the Christians sang hymns “to Christ as to God”—Christo quasi deo. How Professor Smith can imagine that this papyrus lends any colour to his thesis of a pre-Christian Jesus it is difficult to imagine.

Jesus a Nazor?an in what sense Still less does his thesis really profit by the text of Matthew ii, 23, in which a prophecy is adduced to the effect that the Messiah should be called a Nazor?an, and this prophecy is declared to have been fulfilled in so far as Jesus was taken by his parents to live at Nazareth in Galilee.

What prophecy the evangelist had in mind is not [41]known. But Professor W. B. Smith jumps to the conclusion that the Christians were identical with the sect of Nazor?i mentioned in Epiphanius as going back to an age before Christ; and he appeals in confirmation of this quite gratuitous hypothesis14 to Acts xxiv, 5, where the following of Jesus is described as that of the Nazor?i. It in no way helps the thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus, even if he and his followers were members of this obscure sect; it would rather prove the opposite. Drews, following W. B. Smith, pretends in the teeth of the texts that the name is applied to Jesus only as Guardian of the World, Protector and Deliverer of men from the power of sins and d?mons, and that it has no reference to an obscure and entirely unknown village named Nazareth. He also opines that Jesus was called a Nazarene, because he was the promised Netzer or Zemah who makes all things new, and so forth. Such talk is all in the air. Why these writers boggle so much at the name Nazor?an is not [42]easy to divine; still less to understand what Professor Smith is driving at when he writes of those whom he calls “historicists,” that “They have rightly felt that the fall of Nazareth is the fall of historicism itself.” Professor Burkitt has suggested that Nazareth is Chorazin spelt backwards. Wellhausen explains Nazor?an from Nesar in the name Gennessaret. In any case, as we have no first-century gazetteer or ordnance survey of Galilee, it is rash to suppose that there could have been no town there of the name. True the Talmuds and the Old Testament do not name it; but they do not profess to give a catalogue of all the places in Galilee, so their silence counts for little.15 All we know for certain is that for the evangelist Nazor?an meant a dweller in Nazareth, and that he gave the word that sense when he met with it in an anonymous prophecy.

Mr. Robertson on myths I feel that I ought almost to apologize to my readers for investigating at such length the hypothesis of a pre-Christian Jesus, son of a mythical Mary, and for exhibiting over so many pages its fantastic, baseless, and absurd character. But Mr. Robertson himself warns us of the necessity of showing no mercy to myths when they assume the garb of fact. For he adduces (p. 126) the William Tell myth by way of illustrating once for all “the fashion in which a fiction can even in a historical [43]period find general acceptance.” Even so it is with his own fictions. We see them making their way with such startling rapidity over England and Germany as almost to make one despair of this age of popular enlightenment. It is not his fault, and I exonerate him from blame. His methods those of old-fashioned orthodoxyFor centuries orthodox theologians have been trying to get out of the Gospels supernaturalist conclusions which were never in them, nor could with any colour be derived from them except by deliberately ignoring the canons of evidence and the historical methods freely employed in the study of all other ancient monuments and narratives. They have set the example of treating the early writings of Christianity as no other ancient books would be treated. Mr. Robertson is humbly following in their steps, but à rebours, or in an inverse sense. They insist on getting more out of the New Testament than any historical testimony could ever furnish; he on getting less. In other respects also he imitates their methods. Thus they insist on regarding the New Testament, and in particular the four Gospels, as a homogeneous block, and will not hear of the criticism which discerns in them literary development, which detects earlier and later couches of tradition and narrative. This is what I call the Sunday-school attitude, and it lacks all perspective and orientation. Mr. Robertson imbibed it in childhood, and has never been able to throw it off. For him there is no before and after in the formation of these books, no earlier and later in the emergence of beliefs about Jesus, no stratification of documents or of ideas. If he sometimes admits it, he withdraws the admission on the next page, as militating against his cardinal hypothesis. He seems never to have submitted himself [44]to systematic training in the methods of historical research—never, as we say, to have gone through the mill; and accordingly in the handling of documents he shows himself a mere wilful child.

Thus he insists on the priority in Christian tradition of the Virgin Birth legend His treatment of the legend of the Virgin Birth is an example of this mental attitude, which might be described as orthodoxy turned upside down and inside out. The Gospel of Mark is demonstrably older than those of the other two synoptists who merely copied it out with such variations, additions, omissions, and modifications as a growing reverence for Jesus the Messiah imposed. It contains, no more than the Pauline Epistles and the Johannine Gospel, any hint of the supernatural birth of Jesus. It regards him quite simply and naturally as the son of Joseph and Mary. In it the neighbours of Jesus enumerate by way of contumely the names of his brothers and sisters. I have shown also in my Myth, Magic, and Morals that this naturalist tradition of his birth dominates no less the whole of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke apart from the first two chapters of each, and that even in the first chapter of Matthew the pedigree in early texts ended with the words “Joseph begat Jesus.” I have shown furthermore that the belief in the paternity of Joseph was the characteristic belief of the Palestinian Christians for over two centuries, that it prevailed in Syria to the extent of regarding Jesus and Thomas as twin brothers. I have pointed out that the Jewish interlocutor Trypho in Justin Martyr’s dialogue (c. 150) maintains that Jesus was born a man of men and rejects the Virgin Birth legend as a novelty unworthy of monotheists, and that he extorts from his Christian antagonist the admission that the great majority [45]of Christians still believed in the paternity of Joseph.

His exceptional treatment of Christian tradition Now Mr. Robertson evidently reads a good deal, and must at one time or another have come across all these facts. Why, then, does he go out of his way to ignore them, and, in common with Professors Drews and W. B. Smith, insist that the miraculous tradition of Jesus’s birth was coeval with the earliest Christianity and prior to the tradition of a natural birth? Yet the texts stare him in the face and confute him. Why does he shut his eyes to them, and gibe perpetually at the critical students who attach weight to them? The works of all the three writers are tirades against the critical method which tries to disengage in the traditions of Jesus the true from the false, fact from myth, and to show how, in the pagan society which, as it were, lifted Jesus up out of his Jewish cradle, these myths inevitably gathered round his figure, as mists at midday thicken around a mountain crest.

In secular history he uses other canons and methods, Their insistence that in the case of Christian origins the miraculous and the non-miraculous form a solid block of impenetrable myth is all the more remarkable, because in secular history they are prepared, nay anxious, for the separation of truth from falsehood, of history from myth, and continually urge not only its possibility, but its necessity. Mr. Robertson in particular prides himself on meting out to Apollonius of Tyana a measure which he refuses to Jesus the Messiah. e.g., in criticizing the story of Apollonius“The simple purport,” he writes in the Literary Guide, May 1, 1913, “of my chapter on Apollonius was to acknowledge his historicity, despite the accretions of myth and more or less palpable fiction to his biography.” And yet [46]there are ten testimonies to the historicity of Jesus where there is one to that of Apollonius; yet Apollonius was reputed to have been born miraculously, and his birth accompanied by the portent of a meteor from heaven, as that of Jesus by a star from the east. Like Jesus, he controlled the devils of madness and disease, and by the power of his exorcisms dismissed them to be tortured in hell. Like Peter, he miraculously freed himself from his bonds; like Jesus, he revealed himself after death to a sceptical disciple and viva voce convinced him of his ascent to heaven; like him, he ascended in his body up to heaven amid the hymns of maiden worshippers. In life he spent seven days in the bowels of the earth, and gathered a band of disciples around him who acclaimed him as a divine being; long after his death temples were raised to him as to a demigod, miracles wrought by his relics, and prayer and sacrifice offered to his genius. So considerable was the parallelism between his story and that of Jesus that the pagan enemies of the Christians began about the year 300 to run his cult against theirs, and it was only yesterday that the orthodox began to give up the old view that the Life of Apollonius was a blasphemous réchauffé of the Gospels. “There is no great reason to doubt that India was visited by Apollonius of Tyana,” writes Mr. Robertson (Christianity and Mythology, p. 273); and yet his visit in the only relation we have of it is a tissue of marvels and prodigies, his Indian itinerary is impossible, and full of contradictions not only of what we know of Indian geography to-day, but of what was already known in that day. Yet about his pilgrimage thither, declares Mr. Robertson, there is no more uncertainty than about the embassies [47]sent by Porus to Augustus, and by the king of “Taprobane” to Claudius. “There is much myth,” he writes again, p. 280, “in the life of Apollonius of Tyana, who appears to be at the bottom a real historical personage.” In the Gospels we have the story of Jairus’s daughter being raised to life from apparent death. “A closely similar story is found in Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the girl in each case being spoken of in such a way as to leave open the question of her having been dead or a cataleptic.” So writes Mr. Robertson, p. 334, who thinks that “the simple form preserved in Matthew suggests the derivation from the story in Philostratus,” overlooking here, as elsewhere, the chronological difficulties. We can forgive him for that; but why, we must ask, does the presence of such stories in the Gospel irrevocably condemn Jesus to non-historicity, while their presence in the Life of Apollonius leaves his historical reality intact and unchallenged? Is it not that the application of his canons of interpretation to Apollonius would have deprived him of one of the sources from which the mythicity of Jesus by his anachronistic methods could be deduced?

The early passion play of the Sun-god Joshua Mr. Robertson endeavours in a halting manner to justify his partiality for Apollonius. “We have,” he writes (Pagan Christs, p. 283, § 16), “no reason for doubting that there was an Apollonius of Tyana?…. The reasons for not doubting are (1) that there was no cause to be served by a sheer fabrication; and (2) that it was a much easier matter to take a known name as a nucleus for a mass of marvels and theosophic teachings than to build it up, as the phrase goes about the canon, ‘round a hole.’ The [48]difference between such a case and those of Jesuism and Buddhism is obvious. In those cases there was a cultus and an organization to be accounted for, and a biography of the founder had to be forthcoming. In the case of Apollonius, despite the string of marvels attached to his name, there was no cultus.”

Let us examine the above argument. In the case of “Jesuism” (Mr. Robertson’s argot for early Christianity) there had to be fabricated a biography of Jesus, because there existed an organized sect that worshipped Jesus.

The organized sect consisted, according to Mr. Robertson, of “Christists” or “Jesuists,” and the chief incident for which they were organized was an annual play in which the God Jesus was betrayed, arrested, condemned, was crucified, died, was buried, and rose again. Ober Ammergau has supplied him with his main conception, and his annually recurring “Gospel mystery play,” as he imagines it to have been acted by the “Jesuists,” who were immediate ancestors of the Christians, is a faithful copy of the modern Passion Play. He supposes it to have been acted annually because the hypothetical Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, whose mythical sufferings and death it commemorated, was an analogue of Osiris, whose sufferings and death were similarly represented in Egypt each recurring spring; also of Adonis, of Dionysus, of Mithras, and of sundry vegetation gods, annually slain to revive vegetation and secure the life of the initiate in the next world. Be it remarked also that the annually slain God of the Jesuists was not only an analogue of these other gods, but a “composite myth” made up of their myths. As we have seen, Mr. Robertson is ready to exhibit to us in [49]one or another of their mythologies the original of every single incident and actor in the Jesuist play.

Such was the cultus and organization which, according to Mr. Robertson and his imitator Dr. Drews, lies behind the Christian religion. The latter began to be when the “Jesuist” cult, having broken away from Judaism, was also concerned to break away from the paganism in contact with which the play would first arise.

The Gospels a transcript of this play A biography of the Founder of the cult was now called for, by the Founder oddly enough being meant the God himself, and not the hierophant who instituted the play. The Christian Gospels are the biography in question. They are a transcript of the annually performed ritual drama, just as Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare are transcripts of Shakespeare’s plays.

The first performances of the play, we learn, probably took place in Egypt. It ceased to be acted when “it was reduced to writing as part of the gospel.” How far away from Jerusalem it was that the momentous decision was taken by the sect to give up play acting and be content with the transcript Mr. Robertson “can hardly divine.” He hints, however, that some of the latest representations took place in the temples built by Herod at Damascus and Jericho and in the theatres of the Greek town of Gadara. “The reduction of the play to narrative form put all the Churches on a level, and would remove a stumbling block from the way of the ascetic Christists who objected to all dramatic shows as such.”

But where did the play come from? What inspired it? Mr. Robertson makes a tour round the Mediterranean, [50]and collects in Part II, Ch. I, of his Pagan Christs a lot of scrappy information about mock sacrifices and mystery dramas, all of them “cases and modes of modification” of actual human sacrifices that were “once normal in the Semitic world.” He assumes without a tittle of proof, and against all probability, that the annual sacrifice of a king or of a king’s son, whether in real or mimic, held its ground among Jews as a religious ceremony right down into our era, and was “reduced among them to ritual form, like the leading worships of the surrounding Gentile world.” He fashions a new hypothesis in accordance with these earlier ones as follows:—

Joshua or Jesus slain once a year “If in any Jewish community, or in the Jewish quarter of any Eastern city, the central figure in this rite (i.e., of a mock sacrifice annually recurring of a man got up to represent a god) were customarily called Jesus Barabbas, ‘Jesus the Son of the Father’—whether or not in virtue of an old cultus of a God Jesus who had died annually like Attis and Tammuz—we should have a basis for the tradition so long preserved in many MSS. of the first gospel, and at the same time a basis for the whole gospel myth of the crucifixion.”

Here we have a whole string of hypotheses piled one on the other. Let us see which have any ground in fact, or cohere with what we know of the past, which are improbable and unproven.

Hypothesis of human sacrifice among Jews That human sacrifice was once in vogue among the Jews is probable enough, and the story of the frustrated sacrifice of Isaac was no doubt both a memory and a condemnation of the old rite of sacrificing first-born children with which we are familiar in ancient Ph?nicia and her colony of [51]Carthage. That such rites in Jud?a and in Israel did not survive the Assyrian conquest of Jerusalem is certain. The latest allusion to them is in Isaiah xxx, 27–33. This passage is post-exilic indeed; but, as Dr. Cheyne remarks (Encycl. Biblica, art. Molech, col. 3,187): “The tone of the allusion is rather that of a writer remote from these atrocities than of a prophet in the midst of the struggle against them.”

We may then assume (1) that the custom of human sacrifice disappeared among Jews centuries before our era; (2) that in the epoch 100 B.C. to 100 A.D. every Jew, no matter where he lived, would view such rites and reminiscences with horror. As a matter of fact, Philo dwells in eloquent language on the horror and abomination of them as they were still in his day sporadically celebrated, not among Jews, but among pagans.

This being so, is it likely that any Jewish community would keep up even the simulacrum of such rites? In Josephus and Philo, who are our most important witnesses to the Judaism that just preceded or was contemporary with early Christianity, there is no hint of such rites as might constitute a memory and mimicry of human victims, whether identified with a god or not. No serious pagan writer of that age ever accused the Jews of keeping up such rites openly or in secret among themselves. Evidence of Apion accepted by Mr. RobertsonApion alone had a cock-and-bull story of how Antiochus Epiphanes, when he took Jerusalem (c. 170 B.C.), found a Greek being fattened up by the Jews in the adytum of the temple about to be slain and eaten in honour of their god. Of course Mr. Robertson catches at this, and writes (Pagan Christs, p. 161) that, “in view of all the clues, we cannot pronounce that story incredible.” [52]What clues has he? The undoubted survival of ritual murder among the pagans of Ph?nicia in that age is no clue, though it explains the genesis of Apion’s tale. And Mr. Robertson has one other treasure trove—to wit, the obscure reading “Jesus Barabbas” in certain MSS. of Matthew xxvii, 17: “Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye that I release unto you? (Jesus) Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ?”

The sacrificing of the mock king It has been plausibly suggested that the addition Jesus is due to a scribe’s reduplication, such as is common in Greek manuscripts, of the last syllable of the word humin = unto you. The in in uncials is a regular compendium for Iesun Jesus. In this way the name Jesus may have crept in before Barabbas. The entire story of Barabbas being released has an apocryphal air, for Pilate would not have let off a rebel against the Roman rule to please the Jewish mob; and the episode presupposes that it was the Sanhedrin which had condemned Jesus to death, which is equally improbable. What is probable, however, is that the Syrian soldiery to whom Pilate committed Jesus for crucifixion were accustomed to the Sac?a festival of Babylonian origin, and perhaps to the analogous Roman feast of the Saturnalia. In such celebrations a mock king was chosen, and vested with the costume, pomp, and privileges of kingship perhaps for as long as three days. Then the mimicry of slaying him was gone through, and sometimes the mock king was really put to death. Among Syrians the name Barabbas may—it is a mere hypothesis—have been the conventional appellation of the victim slain actually or in mock show on such occasions; and the soldiers of Pilate may have treated [53]him en Barabbas. Loisy suggests in his Commentary on the Synoptics that this was the genesis of the Barabbas story. That a pagan soldiery treated Jesus as a mock king, when they dressed him in purple and set a crown of thorns on his head, and, kneeling before him, cried “Hail King of the Jews,” is quite possible; and serious scholars like Paul Wendland (Hermes, Vol. XXXIII (1898), fol. 175) and Mr. W. R. Paton long ago discerned the probability.

But it was one thing for Syrians and pagans to envisage the crucifixion of Jesus under the aspect of a sacrifice to Molech, quite another thing for Jews—whether as his enemies or as his partisans—to do so; nor does the Gospel narrative suggest that any Jews took part in the ceremony. Perhaps it was out of respect for Jewish susceptibilities—and they were not likely to favour any mockery of their Messianic aspirations—that Pilate caused Jesus to be divested of the purple insignia of royalty and clad in his usual garb before he was led out of the guardroom and through the streets of Jerusalem on his way to Golgotha.

Evidence of Philo We read in Philo (In Flaccum, vi) of a very similar scene enacted in the streets of Alexandria within ten years of the crucifixion. The young Agrippa, elevated by Caligula to the throne of Jud?a, had landed in that city, where feeling ran high between Jews and pagans. The latter, by way of ridiculing the pretensions of the Jews to have a king of their own, seized on a poor lunatic named Carabas who loitered night and day naked about the streets, ran him as far as the Gymnasium, and there stood him on a stool, so that all could see him, having first set a mock diadem of byblus on his head and thrown [54]a rug over his shoulders as a cloak of honour. In his hand they set a papyrus stem by way of sceptre. Having thus arrayed him, as in a mime of the theatre, with the insignia of mock royalty, the young men shouldering sticks, as if they were a bodyguard, encircled him, while others advanced, saluted his mock majesty, and pretended that he was their judge and king sitting on his throne to direct the commonwealth. Meanwhile a shout went up from the crowd around of Marin, which in the Syrian language signified Lord.

This passage of Philo goes far to prove that the mockery of Jesus in the Gospels was no more than a public ridiculing of the Jewish expectations of a national leader or Messiah who should revive the splendours of the old Davidic kingdom. In any case, the mockery is conducted at Jerusalem by Pilate’s soldiers (who were not Jews, but a pagan garrison put there to overawe the Jews), at Alexandria by such Greeks as Apion penned his calumnies to gratify. Mr. Robertson’s suggestion that the mock ceremony of the crucifixion was performed by Jews or Christians is thus as absurd as it is gratuitous. It was held in bitter despite of Jews and Christians, it was a mockery and reviling of their most cherished hopes and ideals; and yet he does not scruple to argue that it is “a basis for the whole gospel myth of the crucifixion.”

Evidence of the Khonds Thus he is left with the single calumny of Apion, which deserves about as much credence as the similar tales circulated to-day against the Jews of Bessarabia. That is the single item of evidence he has to prove what is the very hinge of his theory—the supposition, namely, that the Jews of Alexandria first, and afterwards [55]the Jews of Jerusalem, celebrated in secret once a year ritual dramas representing the ceremonial slaying of a Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, Son of the Father and of the Virgin Miriam. It is a far cry to the horrible rites of the Khonds of modern India; but Mr. Robertson, for whom wide differences of age and place matter nothing when he is explaining Christian origins, has discovered in them a key to the narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus. He runs all round the world and collects rites of ritual murder and cannibal sacraments of all ages, mixes them up, lumps them down before us, and exclaims triumphantly, There is my “psychological clue” to Christianity. The most superficial resemblances satisfy him that an incident in Jerusalem early in our era is an essential reproduction of a Khond ritual murder in honour of the goddess Tari. Was there ever an author so hopelessly uncritical in his methods?

Origin of the Gospels The Gospels, then, are a transcript of a mock murder of the Sun-god Joshua annually performed in secret by the Jews of Jerusalem, for it had got there before it was written down and discontinued. One asks oneself why, if the Jews had tolerated so long a pagan survival among themselves, they could not keep it up a little longer; and why the “Christists” should be so anxious “to break away from paganism” at exactly the same hour. Moreover, their breach with paganism did not amount to much, since they kept the transcript of a ritual drama framed on pagan lines and inspired throughout by pagan ideas and myths; not only kept it, but elevated it into Holy Scripture. At the same time they retained the Old Testament, which as Jews they had immemorially [56]venerated as Holy Scripture; and for generations they went on worshipping in the Jewish temple, kept the Jewish feasts and fasts, and were zealous for circumcision. What a hotchpotch of a sect!

How could a Sun-god slain annually be slain by Pontius Pilate? It occurs to me to ask Mr. Robertson a few questions about this transcript. It was the annual mystery play reduced to writing. The central event of the play was the annual death and resurrection of a solar or vegetation god, whose attributes and career were borrowed from the cults of Osiris, Adonis, Dionysus, and Co. All these gods died once a year; and, I suppose, had you asked one of the votaries when his god died, he would have answered, Every spring. Now all the Gospels (in common with all Christian tradition) are unanimous that Jesus only died once, about the time of the Passover, when Pilate was Roman Governor of Jud?a, when Annas and Caiaphas were high-priests and King Herod about. This surely is an extraordinary record for a Sun-god who died once a year. And it was not in the transcript only that all these fixities of date crept in, for Mr. Robertson insists most vehemently that Pilate was an actor in the play. “Even the episode,” he writes (Pagan Christs, p. 193), “of the appeal of the priests and Pharisees to Pilate to keep a guard on the tomb, though it might be a later interpolation, could quite well have been a dramatic scene.” In Mark and Matthew, as containing “the earlier version” of the drama, he detects everywhere a “concrete theatricality.” Thus he commits himself to the astonishing paralogism that Pilate and Herod, Annas and Caiaphas, and all the other personages of the closing chapters of the Gospels, were features in an annually recurring passion play of the Sun-god Joshua; and [57]this play was not a novelty introduced after the crucifixion, for there never was a real crucifixion. On the contrary, it was a secret survival among paganized Jews, a bit of Jewish pagan mummery that had been going on long ages before the actors represented in it ever lived or were heard of. Such is the reductio ad absurdum of the thesis which peeps out everywhere in Mr. Robertson’s pages. And now we have found what we were in search of—namely, the cultus and organization to account for which a biography of Jesus had to be fabricated. The Life of Apollonius, argues Mr. Robertson, cannot have been built up round a hole, and as there was no organized cult of him (this is utterly false), there must have been a real figure to fit the biography. In the other case the organized and pre-existing cult was the nucleus around which the Gospels grew up like fairy rings around a primal fungus. It is not obvious why a cult should exclude a real founder, or, rather, a real person, in honour of whom the cult was kept up. In the worship of the Augustus or of the ancient Pharaoh, who impersonated and was Osiris, we have both. Why not have both in the case of Jesus, to whose real life and subsequent deification the Augusti and the Pharaohs offer a remarkable parallel? But there never was any pre-Christian cult and organization in Mr. Robertson’s sense. It is a monstrous outgrowth of his own imagination.

Historicity of Plato falls by the canons of the mythicists And as in the case of Apollonius, so in the case of other ancients, he is careful not to apply those methods of interpretation which he yet cannot pardon scholars for not applying to Jesus. Let us take another example. Of the life of Plato we know next to nothing. In the dialogues attributed to him his [58]name is only mentioned twice; and in both cases its mention could, if we adopt Mr. Robertson’s canons of interpretation, be with the utmost ease explained away as an interpolation. The only life we have of him was penned by Diogenes Laertius 600 years after he lived. The details of his life supplied by Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, are obviously false. The only notices preserved of him that can be claimed to be contemporary are the few derived from his nephew Speusippus. Now what had Speusippus to tell? Why, a story of the birth of Plato which, as Mr. Robertson (p. 293) writes, scarcely differs from the story of Matthew i, 18–25:

“In the special machinery of the Joseph and Mary myth—the warning in a dream and the abstention of the husband—we have a simple duplication of the relations of the father and mother of Plato, the former being warned in a dream by Apollo, so that the child was virgin-born.”

Again, just as the Christians chose a “solar date” for the birthday of Jesus, so the Platonists, according to Mr. Robertson, p. 308, “placed the master’s birthday on that of Apollo—that is, either at Christmas or at the vernal equinox.”

Now in the case of Jesus such legends and events as the above suffice to convince Mr. Robertson that the history of Jesus as told in the Gospels is a mere survival of “ancient solar or other worship of a babe Joshua, son of Miriam,” of which ancient worship nothing is known except that it looms large in the imagination of himself, of Dr. Drews, and of Professor W. B. Smith. On the other hand, we do know that a cult of Apollo existed, and that it is no fiction of these modern writers. Surely, then, it is time we [59]changed our opinion about the historicity of Plato. Is it not as clear as daylight that he was the survival of a pre-Platonic Apollo myth? We know the r?le assigned to Apollo of revealer of philosophic truth. Well, here were the dialogues and letters of Plato, calling for an explanation of their origin; a sect of Platonists who cherished these writings and kept the feast of their master on a solar date. On all the principles of the new mythico-symbolic system Plato, as a man, had no right to exist. “Without Jesus,” writes Drews, “the rise of Christianity can be quite well understood.” Yes, and, by the same logic, no less the rise of Platonism without Plato, or of the cult of Apollonius without Apollonius. What is sauce for the goose is surely sauce for the gander. With a mere change of names we could write of Plato what on p. 282 Mr. Robertson writes of Jesus. Let us do it: “The gospel Jesus (read dialogist Plato) is as enigmatic from a humanist as from a supernaturalist point of view. Miraculously born, to the knowledge of many (read of his nephew Speusippus, of Clearchus whose testimony ‘belongs to Plato’s generation,’ of Anaxilides the historian and others), he reappears as a natural man even in the opinion of his parents (read of nephew Speusippus and the rest); the myth will not cohere. Rationally considered, he (Plato) is an unintelligible portent; a Galilean (read Athenian) of the common people, critically untraceable till his full manhood, when he suddenly appears as a cult-founder.”

The Virgin Birth no part of the earliest Gospel tradition Why does Mr. Robertson so incessantly labour the point that the belief in the supernatural birth of Jesus came first in time, and was anterior to the belief that he was born a man of men? This he [60]implies in the words just cited: “Miraculously born, to the knowledge of many, he reappears as a natural man.” A story almost identical with that of the Massacre of the Innocents by Herod was, Mr. Robertson tells us (p. 184), told of the Emperor Augustus in his lifetime, and appears in Suetonius “as accepted history.” And elsewhere (p. 395) he writes: “It was after these precedents (i.e., of Antiochus and Ptolemy) that Augustus, besides having himself given out, like Alexander, as begotten of a God, caused himself to be proclaimed in the East … as being born under Providence a Saviour and a God and the beginning of an Evangel of peace to mankind.” Like Plato’s story, then, so the official and contemporary legends of Augustus closely resembled the later ones of Jesus. Yet Mr. Robertson complacently accepts the historicity of Plato and Augustus, merely brushing aside the miraculous stories and supernatural r?le. Nowhere in his works does he manifest the faintest desire to apply in the domain of profane history the canons which he so rigidly enforces in ecclesiastical.

Yet there are passages in Mr. Robertson’s works where he seems, to use his own phrase, to “glimpse” the truth. Thus, on p. 124 of Christianity and Mythology he writes: “Jesus is said to be born of a Virgin; but not in the original version of the first gospel; and not in the second; and not in the fourth; and not in any writing or by any mouth known to or credited by the writers of the Pauline Epistles. Here we see how a myth may be superimposed on a cult.”

Does not this mean that a cult of Jesus already existed before this myth was added, and that the myth is absent in the earliest documents of the cult? Again, on p. 274, he writes that “the Christian [61]Virgin-myth and Virgin-and-child worship are certainly of pre-Christian origin, and of comparatively late Christian acceptance.” Yet, when I drew attention in the Literary Guide of December 1, 1912, to the inconsistency with this passage of the later one above cited, which asserts that, “Miraculously born, to the knowledge of many, he reappears as a natural man,” he replied (January 1, 1913) that “a reader of ordinary candour would understand that ‘acceptance’ applied to the official action of the Church.” It appears, therefore, that in the cryptic secret society of the Joshua Sun-God-Saviour, which held its séances at Jerusalem at the beginning of our era, there was an official circle which lagged behind the unofficial multitude. The latter knew from the first that their solar myth was miraculously born; but the official and controlling inner circle ignored the miracle until late in the development of the cult, and then at last issued a number of documents from which it was excluded. One wonders why. Why trouble to utter these documents in which Jesus “reappears as a natural man,” long after the sect as a whole were committed to the miraculous birth? What is the meaning of these wheels within wheels, that hardly hunt together? We await an explanation. Meanwhile let us probe the new mythico-symbolism a little further.

The cleansing of the temple Why did the solar God Joshua-Jesus scourge the money-changers out of the temple? Answer: Because it is told of Apollonius of Tyana, “that he expelled from the cities of the left bank of the Hellespont some sorcerers who were extorting money for a great propitiatory sacrifice to prevent earthquakes.” [62]

The connection is beautifully obvious like the rest of our author’s rapprochements; but we must accept it, or we shall lay ourselves open to the reproach of “psychological resistance to evidence.” Nor must we ask how the memoirs of Damis, that lay in a corner till Philostratus got hold of them in the year 215, enjoyed so much vogue among the “Christists” of Jerusalem long years before they can conceivably have been written.

Why on the occasion in question did Jesus make a scourge of cords with which to drive the sheep and oxen out of the Temple? Answer: “Because in the Assyrian and Egyptian systems a scourge-bearing god is a very common figure on the monuments … it is specially associated with Osiris, the Saviour, Judge, and Avenger. A figure of Osiris, reverenced as ‘Chrestos’ the benign God, would suffice to set up among Christists as erewhile among pagans the demand for an explanation.”

Here we get a precious insight into the why and wherefore of the Gospels. They were intended by the “Christists” to explain the meaning of Osiris statues. Why could they not have asked one of the priests of Osiris, who as a rule might be found in the neighbourhood of his statues, what the emblem meant? And, after all, were statues of Osiris so plentiful in Jerusalem, where the sight even of a Roman eagle aroused a riot?

Janus-Peter the bifrons Who was Peter? Answer: An understudy of Mithras, who in the monuments bears two keys; or of Janus, who bears the keys and the rod, and as opener of the year (hence the name January) stands at the head of the twelve months.

Why did Peter deny Jesus? Answer: Because [63]Janus was called bifrons. The epithet puzzled the “Christists” or “Jesuists” of Jerusalem, who, instead of asking the first Roman soldier they met what it meant, proceeded to render the word bifrons in the sense of “double-faced,” quite a proper epithet they thought for Peter, who thenceforth had to be held guilty of an act of double-dealing. For we must not forget that it was the epithet which suggested to the Christists the invention of the story, and not the story that of the epithet. But even Mr. Robertson is not quite sure of this; and it does not matter, where there is such a wealth of alternatives. For Peter is also an understudy of “the fickle Proteus.” Janus’s double head was anyhow common on coins, and with that highly relevant observation he essays to protect his theories of Janus-Peter from any possible criticisms. Indeed, we are forbidden to call in question the above conclusions. They are quite certain, because the “Christists” were intellectually “about the business of forming myths in explanation of old ritual and old statuary” (p. 350). Wonderful people these early “Christists,” who, although they were, as Mr. Robertson informs us (p. 348), “apostles of a Judaic cult preaching circumcision,” and therefore by instinct inimical to all plastic art, nevertheless rivalled the modern arch?ologist in their desire to explain old statuary. They seem to have been the prototypes of the Jews of Wardour Street. No less wonderful were they as philologists, in that, being Hebrews and presumably speaking Aramaic, they took such a healthy interest in the meaning of Latin words, and discovered in bifrons a sense which it never bore in any Latin author who ever used it! [64]

The keys of Peter It appears to have escaped the notice of Professor Franz Cumont that Mithras carries in his monuments two keys. The two keys were an attribute of the Mithraic Kronos, in old Persian Zervan, whom relatively late the Latins confused with Janus, who also had two heads and carried keys. That late Christian images of Peter were imitated from statues of these gods no one need doubt, and Fr. Cumont (Monuments de Mithras, i, 85) does not reject such an idea. It is quite another thing to assume dogmatically that the text Matthew xvi, 19 was suggested by a statue of Janus or of Zervan. To explain it you need not leave Jewish ground, but merely glance at Isaiah xxii, 22, where the Lord is made to say of Eliakim: “And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; and he shall open and none shall shut; and he shall shut and none shall open.” The same imagery meets us in Revelation iii, 7 (copied from Isaiah), Luke xi, 52, and elsewhere. A. Sulzbach (in Ztschr. f.d. Neutest. Wissenschaft, 1903, p. 190) points out that every Jew, up to A.D. 70, would understand such imagery, for he saw every evening the temple keys ceremoniously taken from a hole under the temple floor, where they were kept under a slab of stone. The Levite watcher locked up the temple and replaced the keys under the slab, upon which he then laid his bed for the night. In connection with the magic power of binding and loosing the keys had, of course, a further and magical significance, not in Jud?a alone, but all over the world, and the Evangelists did not need to examine statues of Janus or Zervan in order to come by this bit of everyday symbolism.

N.B.—No connection of Janus-Peter of the Gospels [65]with Peter of the Pauline Epistles! The one was a mythical companion of the Sun-god, the other a man of flesh and blood, according to Mr. Robertson.

Joseph and his ass Who was Joseph? Answer: Forasmuch as “the Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage” (p. 305), and “Christism was only neo-Paganism grafted on Judaism” (p. 338), Joseph must be regarded as “a partial revival of the ancient adoration of the God Joseph as well as of that of the God Daoud” (p. 303). He was also, seeing that he took Mary and her child on an ass into Egypt, a reminiscence; or, shall we not say, an explanation of “the feeble old man leading an ass in the sacred procession of Isis, as described by Apuleius in his Metamorphoses.”

There is no mention of Joseph’s ass in the Gospels, but that does not matter. Dr. Drews is better informed, and would have us recognize in Joseph an understudy of Kinyras, the father of Adonis, who “is said to have been some kind of artisan, a smith, or carpenter. That is to say, he is supposed to have invented the hammer,” etc. Might I suggest the addition of the god Thor to the collection of gospel aliases? The gods Joseph and Daoud are purely modern fictions; no ancient Jew ever heard of either.

Why was Jesus crucified?

The Crucifixion “The story of the Crucifixion may rest on the remote datum of an actual crucifixion of Jesus Ben Pandira, the possible Jesus of Paul, dead long before, and represented by no preserved biography or teachings whatever.”

The Christists were clearly pastmasters in the art of explaining ignotum per ignotius. For on the next page we learn that it is not known whether this [66]worthy “ever lived or was crucified.” In Pagan Christs he is acknowledged to be a “mere name.” However this be, “it was the mythic significance of crucifixion that made the early fortune of the cult, with the aid of the mythic significance of the name Jeschu = Joshua, the ancient Sun-god.”

The meaning of this oracular pronouncement is too profound for me to attempt to fathom it. Let us pass on to another point in the new elucidation of the Gospels.

W. B. Smith on exorcisms of devils What were the exorcisms of evil spirits ascribed to the ancient Sun-god Joshua, under his alias of Jesus of Nazareth?

In his Pagan Christs, as in his Christianity and Mythology, Mr. Robertson unkindly leaves us in the lurch about this matter, although we would dearly like to know what were the particular arch?ological researches of the “Christists” and “Jesuists” that led them to coin these myths of exorcisms performed, and of devils cast out of the mad or sick by their solar myth. Nor does Dr. Drews help us much. Never mind. Professor W. B. Smith nobly stands in the breach, so we will let him take up the parable; the more so because, in handling this problem, he may be said to have excelled himself. On p. 57, then, of Ecce Deus, he premises, in approaching this delicate topic, that “in the activity of the Jesus and the apostles, as delineated in the Gospels, the one all-important moment is the casting-out of demons.”

With this all will agree; but what follows is barely consonant with the thesis of his friends. He cites in effect Mark iii, 14, 15, and the parallel passages in which Jesus is related to have sent forth the twelve disciples to preach and to have authority to cast [67]out the demons. Now, according to the mythico-symbolical theory, the career of Jesus and his disciples lay not on earth, but in that happy region where mythological personages live and move and have their being. As Dr. Drews says (The Christ Myth, p. 117): “In reality the whole of the family and home life of the Messiah, Jesus, took place in heaven among the gods.”

Accordingly, Dr. W. B. Smith finds it “amazing that anyone should hesitate an instant over the sense” of the demonological episodes in the Gospels, and he continues: “When we recall the fact that the early Christians uniformly understood the heathen gods to be demons, and uniformly represented the mission of Jesus to be the overthrow of these demon gods, it seems as clear as the sun at noon that this fall of Satan from heaven16 can be nothing less (and how could it possibly be anything more?) than the headlong ruin of polytheism—the complete triumph of the One Eternal God. It seems superfluous to insist on anything so palpable?…. Can any rational man for a moment believe that the Saviour sent forth his apostles and disciples with such awful solemnity to heal the few lunatics that languished in Galilee? Is that the way the sublimist of teachers would found the new and true religion?”

In the last sentence our author nods and lapses into the historical mood; for how can one talk of a mythical Joshua being a teacher and founding a new religion—of his sending forth the apostles and disciples? These things are done on earth, and not up in heaven “among the gods,” as Drews says. It [68]is, perhaps, impertinent, for the rest, to criticize so exalted an argument as Professor Smith’s; yet the question suggests itself, why, if the real object of the mystic sectaries who worshipped in secret the “Proto-Christian God, the Jesus,” was to acquaint the faithful with the triumph of the heavenly Jesus over the demon-gods of paganism—why, in that case, did they wrap it up in purely demonological language? All around them exorcists, Jewish and pagan, were driving out demons of madness and disease at every street corner—dumb devils, rheumatic devils, blind devils, devils of every sort and kind. Was it entirely appropriate for these mystic devotees to encourage the use of demonological terminology, when they meant something quite else? “These early propagandists,” he tells us, p. 143, “were great men, were very great men; they conceived noble and beautiful and attractive ideas, which they defended with curious learning and logic, and recommended with captivating rhetoric and persuasive oratory and consuming zeal.”

Surely it was within the competence of such egregious teachers to say without disguise what they really meant, instead of beating about the bush and penning stories which so nearly reproduced the grovelling superstitions of the common herd around them? They might at least have issued a Delphin edition of their gospels, with a paraphrase in the margin to explain the text and to save the faithful from taking these stories literally—for so they took them as far back as we can trace the documents; and, what is more, in all those derivative churches all over the world which continued the inner life of Professor Smith’s mystic sectaries, we hear from the earliest age of the appointing of vulgar exorcists, whose duty [69]was to expel from the faithful the demons of madness and of all forms of sickness.

But worse than this. We know from Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews that the same Proto-Christian Joshua-God, who was waging war in heaven on the pagan gods and goddesses, was himself a composite myth made up of memories of Krishna, ?sculapius, Osiris, Apollo, Dionysus, Apollonius, and a hundred other fiends. Mr. Robertson attests this, p. 305, in these words: “As we have seen and shall see throughout this investigation, the Christian system is a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage.”

Is it quite appropriate that the pre-Christian Jesus or Joshua should turn and rend his pagan congeners in the manner described by Professor W. B. Smith? His mythical antecedents, as ascertained by Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews, are grotesquely incompatible with the r?le of monotheistic founder assigned him by Professor W. B. Smith. Are we to suppose that the learned and eloquent propagandists of his cult were aware of this incompatibility, and for that reason chose to veil their monotheistic propaganda in the decent obscurity of everyday demonological language?

Mary and her homonyms Who was Mary, the mother of Jesus?

Let Dr. Drews speak first:—

    Now if Joseph, as we have already seen, was originally a god, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a goddess. Under the name of Maya, she is the mother of Agni—i.e., the principle of motherhood and creation simply, as which she is in the Rigveda at one time represented by the fire-producing wood, the soft pith, in which the fire-stick was whirled; at another as the earth, with which the sky has mated. She appears under the [70]same name as the mother of Buddha as well as of the Greek Hermes. She is identical with Maira (Maera) as, according to Pausanias, viii, 12, 48, the pleiad Maia, wife of Hephaistos was called. She appears among the Persians as the “virgin” mother of Mithras. As Myrrha she is the mother of the Syrian Adonis; as Semiramis, mother of the Babylonian Ninus (Marduk). In the Arabic legend she appears under the name of Mirzam as mother of the mythical saviour Joshua; while the Old Testament gives this name to the virgin sister of that Joshua who was so closely related to Moses; and, according to Eusebius, Merris was the name of the Egyptian princess who found Moses in a basket and became his foster mother.

The above purpureus pannus is borrowed by Dr. Drews in the second edition of his work from Mr. Robertson’s book, p. 297. Here is the original:—

    It is not possible from the existing data to connect historically such a cult with its congeners; but the mere analogy of names and epithets goes far. The mother of Adonis, the slain “Lord” of the great Syrian cult, is Myrrha; and Myrrha in one of her myths is the weeping tree from which the babe Adonis is born. Again, Hermes, the Greek Logos, has for mother Maia, whose name has further connections with Mary. In one myth Maia is the daughter of Atlas, thus doubling with Maira, who has the same father, and who, having “died a virgin,” was seen by Odysseus in Hades. Mythologically, Maira is identified with the Dog-Star, which is the star of Isis. Yet again, the name appears in the East as Maya, the virgin-mother of Buddha; and it is remarkable that, according to a Jewish legend, the name of the Egyptian princess who found the babe Moses was Merris. The plot is still further thickened by the fact that, as we learn from the monuments, one of the daughters of Ramses II was named Meri. And as Meri meant “beloved,” and the name was at times given to men, besides being used in the phrase “beloved of the gods,” the field of mythic speculation is wide.

[71]

And we feel that it is, indeed, wide, when, on p. 301, the three Marias mentioned by Mark are equated with the three Moirai or Fates!

In another passage we meet afresh with one of these equations, p. 306. It runs thus: “On the hypothesis that the mythical Joshua, son of Miriam, was an early Hebrew deity, it may be that one form of the Tammuz cult in pre-Christian times was a worship of a mother and child—Mary and Adonis; that, in short, Maria = Myrrha, and that Jesus was a name of Adonis.”

Pre-philological arguments From such deliverances we gather that in Mr. Robertson and his disciples we have survivals of a stage of culture which may be called prephilological. A hundred years ago or more the most superficial resemblance of sound was held to be enough of a ground for connecting words and names together, and Oxford divines were busy deriving all other tongues from the Hebrew spoken in the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve. Mr. Robertson sets himself (p. 139) to ridicule these old-fashioned writers, and regales us with not a few examples of that over-facile identification of cult names that have no real mutual affinity which was then in vogue. Thus Krishna was held to be a corruption of Christ by certain oriental missionaries, just as, inversely, within my memory, certain English Rationalists argued the name Christ to be a disguise of Krishna. So Brahma was identified with Abraham, and Napoleon with the Apollyon of Revelation. One had hoped that this phase of culture was past and done with; but Messrs. Robertson and Drews revive it in their books, and seem anxious to perpetuate it. As with names, so with myths. On their every page we encounter—to use the apt phrase [72]of M. émile Durkheim17—ces rapprochements tumultueux et sommaires qui ont discredité la méthode comparative auprès d’un certain nombre de bons esprits.

Right use of comparative method The one condition of advancing knowledge and clearing men’s minds of superstition and cant by application of the comparative method in religion, is that we should apply it, as did Robertson Smith and his great predecessor, Dr. John Spencer,18 cautiously, and in a spirit of scientific scholarship. It does not do to argue from superficial resemblances of sound that Maria is the same name as the Greek Moira, or that the name Maia has “connections with Mary”; or, again, that “the name (Maria) appears in the East as Maya.” The least acquaintance with Hebrew would have satisfied Mr. Robertson that the original form of the name he thus conjures with is not Maria, but Miriam, which does not lend itself to his hardy equations. I suspect he is carried away by the parti pris which leaks out in the following passage of his henchman and imitator, Dr. Drews19: “The romantic cult of Jesus must be combated at all costs?…. This cannot be done more effectually than by taking its basis in the theory of the historical Jesus from beneath its feet.”

If “at all costs” means at the cost of common sense and scholarship, I cannot agree. I am not disposed, at the invitation of any self-constituted high priest of Rationalism, to derive old Hebrew names from Egyptian, Greek, and Buddhist appellations that [73]happen to show an initial and one or two other letters in common. I will not believe that a “Christist” of Alexandria or Jerusalem, in the streets of which the Latin language was seldom or never heard, took the epithet bifrons in a wrong sense, and straightway invented the story of a Peter who had denied Jesus. I cannot admit that the cults of Osiris, Dionysus, Apollo, or any other ancient Sun-god, are echoed in a single incident narrated in the primitive evangelical tradition that lies before us in Mark and the non-Marcan document used by the authors of the first and third Gospels; I do not believe that any really educated man or woman would for a moment entertain any of the equations propounded by Mr. Robertson, and of which I have given a few select examples.

Marett on method Mr. Marett, in his essay entitled The Birth of Humility, by way of criticizing certain modern abuses of the comparative method in the field of the investigation of the origin of moral ideas and religious beliefs, has justly remarked that “No isolated fragment of custom or belief can be worth much for the purposes of comparative science. In order to be understood, it must first be viewed in the light of the whole culture, the whole corporate soul-life, of the particular ethnic group concerned. Hence the new way is to emphasize concrete differences, whereas the old way was to amass resemblances heedlessly abstracted from their social context. Which way is the better is a question that well-nigh answers itself.”

Apply the above rule to nascent Christianity. In the Synoptic Gospels Jesus ever speaks as a Jew to Jews. Jewish monotheism is presupposed by the authors of them to have been no less the heritage of Jesus than of his audiences. The rare exceptions are [74]carefully noticed by them. This consideration has so impressed Professor W. B. Smith that he urges the thesis that the Christian religion originated as a monotheist propaganda. That is no doubt an exaggeration, for it was at first a Messianic movement or impulse among Jews, and therefore did not need to set the claims of monotheism in the foreground, and, accordingly, in the Synoptic Gospels they are nowhere urged. In spite of this exaggeration, however, Mr. Smith’s book occupies a higher plane than the works of Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson, insofar as he shows some slight insight into the original nature of the religion, whereas they show none at all. They merely, in Mr. Marett’s phrase, “amass resemblances [would they were even such!] heedlessly abstracted from their context,” and resolve a cult which, as it appears on the stage of history, is Jewish to its core, of which the Holy Scripture was no other than the Law and the Prophets, and of which the earliest documents, as Mr. Selwyn has shown, are saturated with the Jewish Septuagint—they try to resolve this cult into a tagrag and bobtail of Greek and Roman paganism, of Buddhism, of Brahmanism, of Mithraism (hardly yet born), of Egyptian, African, Assyrian, old Persian,20 and any other religions with which these writers have a second-hand and superficial acquaintance. Never once do they pause and ask themselves the simple questions: firstly, how the early Christians came to be imbued with so intimate [75]a knowledge of idolatrous cults far and near, new and old; secondly, why they set so much store by them as the mythico-symbolic hypothesis presupposes that they did; and, thirdly, why, if they valued them so much, they were at pains to translate them into the utterly different and antagonistic form which they wear in the Gospels. In a word, why should such connoisseurs of paganism have disguised themselves as monotheistic and messianic Jews? Mr. Robertson tries to save his hypothesis by injecting a little dose of Judaism into his “Christists” and “Jesuists”; but anyone who has read Philo or Josephus or the Bible, not to mention the Apostolic Fathers and Justin Martyr, will see at a glance that there is no room in history for such a hybrid.

Methods of Robertson and Lorinser That Mr. Robertson should put his name to such works as Dr. Drews imitates and singles out for special praise is the more remarkable, because, in urging the independence of certain Hindoo cults against Christian missionaries who want to see in them mere reflections of Christianity, he shows himself both critical and wide-minded. These characteristics he displays in his refutation of the opinion of a certain Dr. Lorinser that the dialogue between Krishna and the warrior Arjuna, known as the Bhagavat G?ta and embodied in the old Hindoo Epic of the Mahabharata, “is a patchwork of Christian teaching.” Dr. Lorinser had adduced a chain of passages from this document which to his mind are echoes of the New Testament. Though many of these exhibit a striking conformity with aphorisms of the Gospels, we are nevertheless constrained to agree with Mr. Robertson’s criticism, which is as follows (p. 262):— [76]

    The first comment that must occur to every instructed reader on perusing these and the other “parallels” advanced by Dr. Lorinser is, that on the one hand the parallels are very frequently such as could be made by the dozen between bodies of literature which have unquestionably never been brought in contact, so strained and far-fetched are they; and that, on the other hand, they are discounted by quite as striking parallels between New Testament texts and pre-Christian pagan writings.

Mr. Robertson then adduces a number of striking parallelisms between the New Testament and old Greek and Roman writers, and continues thus: “Such parallels as these, I repeat, could be multiplied to any extent from the Greek and Latin classics alone?…. But is it worth while to heap up the disproof of a thesis so manifestly idle?”

Dionysus and Jesus It occurs to ask whether it was not worth the while of Mr. Robertson to inquire whether the Evangelist could “unquestionably have been brought in contact” with the Dionysiac group of myths before he assumed so dogmatically, against students of such weight as Professor Percy Gardner and Dr. Estlin Carpenter, that the myth of Bacchus meeting with a couple of asses on his way to Dodona was the “Christist’s” model for the story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on an ass? Might he not have reflected that then, as now, there was no other way of entering Jerusalem unless you went on foot? And what has Jerusalem to do with Dodona? What has Bacchus’s choice of one ass to ride on in common with Matthew’s literary deformation, according to which Jesus rode on two asses at once? Lastly, what had Bacchus to do with Jesus? Has the Latin wine-god a single trait in common with the Christian founder? Is it not [77]rather the case that any conscious or even unconscious assimilation of Bacchus myths conflicts with what Mr. Marett would call “the whole culture, the whole corporate soul-life” of the early Christian community, as the surviving documents picture it, and other evidence we have not? Yet Mr. Robertson deduces from such paltry “parallels” as the above the conclusion that Jesus, on whose real personality a score of early and independent literary sources converge, never existed at all, and that he was a “composite myth.” There is no other example of an eclectic myth arbitrarily composed by connoisseurs out of a religious art and story not their own; still less of such a myth being humanized and accepted by the next generation as a Jewish Messiah.

In the same context (p. 264) Mr. Robertson remarks sensibly enough that “No great research or reflection is needed to make it clear that certain commonplaces of ethics as well as of theology are equally inevitable conclusions in all religious systems that rise above savagery. Four hundred years before Jesus, Plato declared that it was very difficult for the rich to be good; does anyone believe that any thoughtful Jew needed Plato’s help to reach the same notion?”

I would ask, does anyone believe that a thoughtful Jew needed the stimulus of a statuette of Osiris in order that he should record, or, maybe, invent, the story of Jesus clearing the money-changers out of the temple with a scourge? Even admitting—what I am as little as anyone inclined to admit—that the Peter of the early Gospels is, as regards his personality and his actions, a fable, a mere invention of a Jewish storyteller, need we suppose that the storyteller in [78]question depended for his inspiration on Janus? You might as well suppose that the authors of the Arabian Nights founded their stories on the myths of Greek and Roman gods. Again, the Jews were traditionally distributed into twelve tribes or clans. Let us grant only for argument’s sake that the life of Jesus the Messiah as narrated in the first three Gospels is a romance, we yet must ask, Which is more probable, that the author of the romance assigned twelve apostles to Jesus because there were twelve tribes to whom the message of the impending Kingdom of God had to be carried, or because there are twelve signs in the Zodiac? He agrees (p. 347) that Luke’s story of the choice of the seventy disciples “visibly connects with the Jewish idea that there were seventy nations in the world.” Why, then, reject the view that Jesus chose twelve apostles because there were twelve tribes? Not at all. Having decided that Jesus was the Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, a pure figment of his brain, Mr. Robertson is ready to violate the canons of evidence he appeals to on p. 347, and will have it that in the Gospels the apostles are Zodiacal signs, and that their leader is Janus, the opener of the year. “The Zodiacal sign gives the clue” (p. 339), in his opinion, to this as to much else.

Dr. Lorinser Let us return to the case of Dr. Lorinser. “We are asked to believe that Brahmans expounding a highly-developed Pantheism went assiduously to the (unattainable) New Testament for the wording of a number of their propositions, pantheistic and other, while assimilating absolutely nothing of distinctively Christian doctrine?…. Such a position is possible only to a mesmerized believer.” Surely one may exclaim of Mr. Robertson, De te fabula narratur, and rewrite [79]the above as follows: “We are asked to believe that ‘Christists,’ who were so far Jewish as to practise circumcision, to use the Hebrew Scriptures, to live in Jerusalem under the presidency and patronage of the Jewish High-priest, to foster and propagate Jewish monotheism, went assiduously to the (unattainable) rites, statuary, art, and beliefs of pagan India, Egypt, Ancient Babylon, Persia, etc., for all ‘the narrative myths’ (p. 263) of the story in which they narrated the history of their putative founder Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, while assimilating absolutely nothing of distinctively pagan doctrine.”

Dr. Lorinser, for urging a thesis infinitely less absurd, is denounced as “a mesmerized believer”; and on the next page Dr. Weber, who agrees with him, is rebuked for his “judicial blindness.” Yet in the same context we are told that “a crude and na?f system, like the Christism of the second gospel and the earlier form of the first, borrows inevitably from the more highly evolved systems with which it comes socially in contact, absorbing myth and mystery and dogma till it becomes as sophisticated as they.”

It is quite true, as Gibbon observed, that the na?f figure of Jesus, as presented in the Synoptic Gospels, was soon overlaid with that of the logos, and all sorts of Christological cobwebs were within a few generations spun around his head to the effacement both of the teacher and of what he taught. But in the earliest body of the evangelical tradition, as we can construct it from the first three Gospels, there is little or nothing that is not essentially Jewish and racy of the soil of Jud?a. The borrowings of Christianity from pagan neighbours began with the flocking into the new Messianic society of Gentile converts. The [80]earlier borrowings with which Messrs. Robertson and Drews fill their volumes are one and all “resemblances heedlessly abstracted from their context,” and are as far-fetched and as fanciful as the dreams of the adherents of the Banner of Israel, or as the cypher of the Bacon-Shakesperians, over which Mr. Robertson is prone to make merry. “Is it,” to use his own words, “worth while to heap up the disproof of a thesis so manifestly idle?” [81]

1 Page 20 of The Christ Myth, from a note added in the third edition. ↑

2 Op. cit. p. 214. ↑

3 The Christ Myth, p. 9. (Zu Robertson hat sie meines Wissens noch keiner Weise ernsthaft Stellung genommen, p. vii of German edition.) ↑

4 Christ Myth, p. 57. In the German text (first ed. 1909, p. 21) Mr. Robertson is the authority for this statement (so hat Robertson es sehr wahrscheinlich gemacht). ↑

5 Cp. Emile Durkheim, La Vie Religieuse, Paris, 1912, p. 121, to whom I owe much in the text. ↑

6 Such reduplications are common in Semitic languages, and in John xix, 23, 24, we have an exact analogy with this passage of Matthew. In Psalm xxii, 18, we read: “They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots.” Here one and the same incident is contemplated in both halves of the verse, and it is but a single garment that is divided. Now see what John makes out of this verse, regarded as a prophecy of Jesus. He pretends that the soldiers took Jesus’s garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part, so fulfilling the words: “They parted my garments among them.” Next they took the coat without seam, and said to one another: “Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be.” The parallel with Matthew is exact. In each case what is mere rhetorical reduplication is interpreted of two distinct objects, and on this misinterpretation is based a fulfilment of prophecy, and out of it generated a new form of a story or a fresh story altogether. In defiance of the opinion of competent Hebraists, Mr. Robertson writes (p. 338) that “there is no other instance of such a peculiar tautology in the Old Testament.” On the contrary, the Old Testament teems with them. ↑

7 Christianity and Mythology, p. 286. ↑

8 Dr. Carpenter had objected that “It has first to be proved that Dionysos rode on two asses, as well as that Jesus is the Sun-God.” Mr. Robertson complacently answers (p. 453): “My references perfectly prove the currency of the myth in question”! ↑

9 The Witnesses, p. 55 (p. 75 of German edition). ↑

10 Why necessarily from Josephus? Were not other sources of recent Roman history available for Tacitus? Here peeps out Dr. Drews’s conviction that the whole of ancient literature lies before him, and that even Tacitus could have no other sources of information than Dr. Drews. ↑

11 On p. 299, Mary, mother of Joshua, does duty for Mary Magdalen. We there read as follows: “The friendship (of Jesus) with a ‘Mary’ points towards some old myth in which a Palestinian God, perhaps named Yeschu or Joshua, figures in the changing relations of lover and son towards a mythic Mary, a natural fluctuation in early theosophy.” Very “natural” indeed among the Jews, who punished even adultery with death! ↑

12 Needless to say, Dr. Frazer, as any scholar must, rejects the thesis of the unhistoricity of Jesus with derision. Mr. Robertson, in turn, imputes his rejection of it to timidity. “He (Frazer) has had some experience in arousing conservative resistance,” he writes in Christianity and Mythology, p. 111. He cannot realize that any learned man should differ from himself, except to curry favour with the orthodox, or from fear of them. ↑

13 I could have given Professor Smith a better tip. Philo composed a glossary of Biblical and other names with their meanings, which, though lost in Greek, survives in an old Armenian version. In this Essene is equated with “silence.” What a magnificent aid to Professor Smith’s faith! For if Essene meant “a silent one,” then the pre-Christian Nazarenes must surely have been an esoteric and secret sect. ↑

14 Of course, it is possible that Jesus, before he comes on the scene, at about the age of thirty, as a follower of John the Baptist, had been a member of the Essene sect, as the learned writer of the article on Jesus in the Jewish Encyclop?dia supposes. If such a sect of Nazor?i, as Epiphanius describes, ever really existed—and Epiphanius is an unreliable author—then Jesus may have been a member of it. But it is a long way from a may to a must. Even if it could be proved that Matthew had such a tradition when he wrote, the proof would not diminish one whit the absurdity of Professor Smith’s contention that he was a myth and a mere symbol of a God Joshua worshipped by pre-Christian Nazor?i. The Nazor?i of Epiphanius were a Christian sect, akin to, if not identical with, the Ebionites; and the hypothesis that they kept up among themselves a secret cult of a God Joshua is as senseless as it is baseless, and opposed to all we know of them. In what sense Matthew, that is to say the anonymous compiler of the first Gospel, understood nazor?us is clear to anyone who will take the trouble to read Matthew ii, 23. He understood by it “a man who lived in the village called Nazareth,” and that is the sense which Nazarene (used interchangeably with it) also bears in the Gospel. Mr. Smith scents enigmas everywhere. ↑

15 How treacherous the argumentum a silentio may be I can exemplify. My name and address were recently omitted for two years running from the Oxford directory, yet my house is not one of the smallest in the city. If any future publicist should pry into my life with the aid of this publication, he will certainly infer that I was not living in Oxford during those two years. And yet the Argument from Silence is only valid where we have a directory or gazetteer or carefully compiled list of names and addresses. ↑

16 See Luke x, 17–20. ↑

17 La Vie Religieuse, p. 134. ↑

18 In his De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus libri tres, printed at the Hague in 1686, but largely written twenty years earlier. ↑

19 The Christ Myth, 2nd ed., p. 18. ↑

20 It is possible, of course, that Jewish Messianic and apocalyptic lore in the first century B.C. had been more or less evolved through contact with the religion of Zoroaster; but this lore, as we meet with it in the Gospels, derives exclusively from Jewish sources, and was part of the common stock of popular Jewish aspirations. ↑