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                          THE HISTORICAL JESUS
                         A SURVEY OF POSITIONS


                                   BY
                           JOHN M. ROBERTSON


        [ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]

                                London:
                              WATTS & CO.,
                 17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
                                  1916







CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

Preamble                                                              xi

Chapter I.--THE SNARE OF PRESUPPOSITION

    Presupposition in science. The Copernican theory. The reception of
    Galileo, Harvey, and Darwin. Blinding effects of scholarship. The
    theological record. Mutations of Christian opinion. Defence
    of the belief in witchcraft. Leibnitz and Newton. Criticism
    of the Pentateuch. Parvish, Astruc, Voltaire, Colenso, and the
    professional scholars                                              1

Chapter II.--MODES OF CONSERVATIVE FALLACY

    Persistence of the theological temper. Each abandoned position
    first defended with the same fierceness. Saner forms of
    conservatism. Persistence in presupposition. Canon Inge on Jesus
    and Paul. The logical hiatus. Mill's precedent. His dithyrambic
    mood and critical inadequacy. Disregard of the documentary
    evidence. Need to face the real problem. The sociological
    process. Mill's dictum contrasted with those of Newman and
    Baur                                                               6

Chapter III.--ILLUSIONS AS TO GOSPEL ETHIC

    Mill's method and mind non-historical. "The historic
    sense." Dr. J. E. Carpenter's. The concept of "sublimity." God
    portraiture. Its limitations. The Gospel ethic. Significance of the
    contradictions. The parable of the Good Samaritan. Incompetent
    verdicts of theologians. The story of Lycurgus and
    Alcander. Plutarch on forgiveness of enemies. Fanaticism of
    Christian estimates of antiquity                                  18

Chapter IV.--THE METHOD OF BLUSTER

    The historic problem. Its treatment by a Unitarian cleric. The
    method of bluster. The real and the pretended character of the
    Gospel according to Mark. Wellhausen's estimate. Actual features
    of primitive and popular myth-lore. Biography in Plutarch. Mr.
    McCabe on the Marcan residuum. The gospel figure. Doctrinal
    determinants                                                      30

Chapter V.--SCHMIEDEL AND DEROGATORY MYTH

    Collapse of the thesis of "human characteristics." The myth
    and the historicity of Herakles. The more considerate thesis
    of Schmiedel: argument from "derogatory" episodes. Kalthoff on
    the human characteristics in Ruth and Jonah. Confusion of the new
    argument. Jesus introduced in Mark with divine characteristics. The
    Unitarian blunder as to "conventional" and "unconventional"
    hero-worship. Jewish and Pagan heroes and Gods alike put in
    "derogatory" positions. Herakles, Dionysos, and Apollo. Need to
    apply anthropological, mythological, and hierological as well as
    N. T. scholarship. Grounds for a Christian myth of the Founder
    as opposed by his family                                          44

Chapter VI.--THE VISIONARY EVANGEL

    B. Weiss's "Primitive Gospel." Its characteristics common to
    Mark. The enigma of the evangel of the Twelve. That problem never
    rightly realized by the exegetes. The allegorical explanations
    to be withheld from the people. Complete deficit of historical
    matter. The evangel of the Twelve a myth. Real origin in a rite,
    not in an evangel. The last hypothesis: a political evangel that
    could not be later avowed. Incompatibility of this view with the
    Gospels. Composition of the record. Why the Primitive Gospel lacked
    the Tragedy. Breakdown of the traditionary explanation. Orthodox
    avowals of anomaly                                                51

Chapter VII.--THE ALLEGED CONSENSUS OF SCHOLARS

    Resort to the myth-theory forced by the data. Unitarian attitude to
    that. Appeal for acceptance of the "consensus of scholars." No such
    consensus ever attained. Dalman on his fellow-specialists. His own
    presuppositions. Pretensions to solve historical problems through
    philology. Distinction between pedantry and science. Candour of
    Schmiedel. Inadequacy of his method. Resistance of scholarship
    to scientific thought. Colenso and the Zulu and the orthodox
    resistance. Attack on the New Testament scholars by Professor
    Blass                                                              62

Chapter VIII.--CONSERVATIVE POSITIONS

    Modifications of conservative attitude. Lack of good faith
    or of comprehension. Samples of misrepresentation. The
    Unitarian attitude. Treatment of myth-solutions: the Myth of
    the Temptation. Dr. Thorburn's orthodox solution. Mythology
    and psychology. Psychic determinants of resistance to new
    views. Attitude to "healing powers" ascribed to Jesus. Force of
    presupposition. Davidson's "must."                                74

Chapter IX.--BLASS AND FLINDERS PETRIE

    The attempt to find an "impersonal" test of the documentary
    basis. Dr. Flinders Petrie on The Growth of the Gospels. Theory
    of selection and compilation from logia. Acceptance of any
    item as early. The argument of Blass as to possibility of real
    predictions. Case of Savonarola. Nature of the problem. Political
    anticipation versus prophecy. Investigation of the Savonarola
    case. His earlier prophecies, conditional and absolute            82

Chapter X.--THE SAVONAROLA FALLACY

    Comparison between Savonarola's prediction of the Sack of Rome
    and the gospel prophecy of the Fall of Jerusalem. Normality
    of Savonarola's vaticinations. Historical blunder of the Blass
    school as to medieval warfare. Frequency of sacrilege in Christian
    war. The Christian sack of Constantinople                         93

Chapter XI.--THE "LOGIA" THEORY AND THE HISTORICAL TEST

    Blass on the gospel prophecy: analysis of the texts. Their
    arbitrary handling by Blass. The "Nucleus" theory of
    Dr. Petrie. Its arbitrary implications. Impersonal method
    of selection not followed by impersonal inference from the
    results. The logia theory much more compatible with the myth-theory
    than with the tradition. Test cases                              104

Chapter XII.--FAILURE OF THE "LOGIA" THEORY

    The scientific inference. Omission and invention of logia
    necessarily to be inferred as well as selection. Implicit
    abandonment of certain prophecies, and resulting incoherence
    of the argument. Reversion to the fundamental issue between
    supernaturalism and reason. Final futility of the attempt
    to vindicate the documents. Possibilities as to currency
    of written logia. Illustration from Islam. The mass of
    incompatibilities in the Gospel Teaching. Possibilities of genuine
    self-contradiction. Carlyle and Ruskin. Mohammed. The gospels not
    thus explicable. Damaging implications of the logia theory. Variety
    of "Christs." Papias. Baruch and Enoch                           113

Chapter XIII.--RESURGENCE OF THE HISTORIC PROBLEM

    The actually recovered logia of Oxyrhynchus. Their incompatibility
    with Dr. Petrie's assumption of historic genuineness for
    all. The real process of composition in Luke's gospel. Motives
    for invention. The myth of the Seventy Disciples a sample and
    test case. Inadequacy alike of the documentary theory and that
    of scattered logia                                               123

Chapter XIV.--ORTHODOXY AND THE "ORAL" HYPOTHESIS

    The "oral" hypothesis of the Rev. A. Wright. His approximations
    to the "liberal" chronology as against the Blass school. His
    candour. Hypothesis of fifty-two Lessons. Another "selection"
    theory--selection from oral traditions locally cherished. Wide
    departures of Mr. Wright from his theory. Unaccountableness of
    apostolic information. The tradition as to baptism. Problem of
    the duration of the Ministry, and of the one or four visits to
    Jerusalem. The oral hypothesis, like the others, more compatible
    with the myth-theory than with the tradition. Stand on the
    Resurrection                                                     129

Chapter XV.--THE METHOD OF M. LOISY

    M. Loisy and the "liberal" school. His attitude to the
    myth-theory. His certitudes. Disclaims biography, and
    produces one. His treatment of the legend. The problem of the
    multitude of healings. Collapse of the assumption in the case
    of Nazareth. Inconsistency of M. Loisy's method, and weakness
    of his solutions. His acceptance of the Joseph legend. "The
    carpenter." Difficulty set up by Origen. The myth solution. "The
    son of Mary." Dilemma set up by later passages. Problem of the
    Messianic declaration of Peter. Impossibility of the personality
    set up by Petrine and anti-Petrine records                       141

Chapter XVI.--THE TRIAL CRUX

    Lax treatment of the main problems by M. Loisy. Acceptance
    of the non-historical as historical. The Purification of the
    Temple. The Agony. Approximation to the true solution. The
    priestly Trial. Virtual abandonment of the narrative by
    M. Loisy. Illicit reconstruction. Successive retreats of the
    "liberal" school. Surrender of (1) the Trial before Herod, (2)
    the Johannine record, (3) the Trial before the priests. Stand on
    the Trial before Pilate. Untenableness of that. The Roman Trial
    admittedly a loose tradition. Impossible as recorded. A clear
    solution supplied by the myth theory. Irreconcilable character
    of the Triumphal entry and the unanimous hostility of the people
    before Pilate. The Barabbas story admittedly unhistorical. Its
    presence accounted for only by the myth-theory                   161

Chapter XVII.--THE JESUS-FIGURE OF M. LOISY

    The dilemma of the Evangel of the Twelve. M. Loisy on the
    Teaching of Jesus as preparative for the cult. Destructive
    effect of his admissions as to the teaching of Paul. His attitude
    towards the myth-theory. Demanding definiteness, he rests in the
    indefinite. His self-contradictions. His ascription of originality
    to quoted teachings. Incompatibility of his Teacher and his
    Messiah. The teaching as to divorce not that of one expecting
    a new order. Its prior currency. Bases of the gospel ethic. The
    Good Samaritan documentarily a late creation                     173

Chapter XVIII.--THE PAULINE PROBLEM

    M. Loisy on the testimony of Paul. His misconception as to
    its bearings on the myth-theory. Van Manen helped by his own
    thesis to accept the historicity of Jesus. The myth-theory quite
    independent of the dating of the Epistles. Importance of noting
    that, early or late, they are interpolated. M. Loisy's treatment
    of the documentary problem. Van Manen's strong case against the
    Epistles. Need to revise the details of the chronology. Also
    to orient the myth-theory aright. Inadequacy of the theories of
    Kalthoff and Kautsky                                             185

Chapter XIX.--THE HISTORY OF THE DISCUSSION

    Prospects of controversy. Slow advance of the "liberal"
    view. Identity of the final positions of Strauss and
    Loisy. Tentative beginnings of the myth-theory. Effects of
    persecution and of Strauss's final dialectic. Schweitzer on
    the evolution "from Reimarus to Wrede." Bruno Bauer. Claims
    for "the German temperament." Need for a truly scientific
    temper. Effects of Bauer's flaws of mood and method. Schweitzer's
    amenity and candour. Demonstrates the shortsightedness of German
    specialism. Schweitzer's ignorance concerning the myth-theory
    in its later developments. His laxities in research. His own
    thesis                                                           193

Chapter XX.--THE GROUND CLEARED FOR THE MYTH-THEORY

    The issue as between Schweitzer and Wrede. Each destroys one half
    of the "liberal" case for historicity. Schweitzer confutes Wrede,
    and then puts a still more untenable view. His acceptance of the
    triumphal entry into Jerusalem as historical. His Jesus hailed
    not as a Messiah but as Elias. Schweitzer's new view of the
    Betrayal. Judas a revealer of his Master's private claim to be
    Messiah. The multitude supposed to be thus cleared of the charge
    of fickleness. Schweitzer's fallacy as to Messianic claims being
    blasphemous. His service to criticism by clearing the ground. His
    final ethical and sociological confusion. The fortunes of the
    myth-theory in England. Early adumbrations. Difference in modern
    spirit and method, resulting from establishment of anthropology as
    a science. Lyell and Tylor. Schweitzer's scientific temper. The
    myth-theory. The battleground of the future. Positions of Sir
    J. G. Frazer. Countervailing declarations by supporters of the
    myth-theory. The question one of science, not sentiment          201

Conclusion                                                           211

Index                                                                217







PREAMBLE


The problem of the historicity of the Jesus of the Gospels has been
discussed by me in large sections of two bulky books, which in other
sections deal with matters only indirectly connected with this, while
even the sections directly devoted to the problem cover a good deal
of mythological and anthropological ground which not many readers may
care to master. The "myth theory" developed in them, therefore, may
not be readily grasped even by open-minded readers; and the champions
of tradition, of whatever school, have a happy hunting-ground for
desultory misrepresentation and mystification. It has been felt to be
expedient, therefore, by disinterested readers as well as by me, to
put the problem in a clearer form and in a more concise compass. The
process ought to involve some logical improvement, as the mythological
investigation made in Christianity and Mythology had been carried out
independently of the anthropological inquiry made in Pagan Christs,
and the theory evolved may well require unification. In particular,
the element of Jewish mythology calls for fuller development. And
the highly important developments of the myth theory by Professor
Drews and Professor W. B. Smith have to be considered with a view
to co-ordination.

To such a re-statement, however, certain preliminary steps are
necessary. The ground needs to be cleared (1) of à priori notions
as to the subject matter; (2) of mistaken opinions as to a supposed
"consensus of critics"; and (3) of uncritical assumptions as to the
character of the Gospel narratives.

Writers who have not gone very deeply into problems of normal history,
however they may have specialized in the Biblical, are still wont to
assert that the historicity of non-supernatural data in the Sacred
Books is on all fours with that of the subject matter of "profane"
history. Indeed it is still common to hear it claimed that the
Resurrection is as well "attested" as the assassination of Julius
Cæsar, or even better. In exactly the same tone and spirit did the
traditionalists of a previous generation assert that the stoppage of
the sun and moon in the interest of Joshua was better attested than any
equally ancient historical narrative. Those who have decided to abandon
the supernatural reduce the claim, of course, to the historicity of
the Trial and Crucifixion; but as to these they confidently repeat
the old formulas. Yet in point of fact they have made no such critical
scrutiny of even these items as historians have long been used to make,
with destructive results, into many episodes of ancient history--for
instance, the battle of Thermopylæ and the founding of the Spartan
constitution by Lycurgus. Men who affect to dismiss the myth theory
as an ungrounded speculation are all the while taking for granted
the historicity of a record which is a mere tissue of incredibilities.

It has been justly remarked that serious risk of error is set up even
by the long-current claim of naturalist critics to "treat the Bible
like any other book." Even in their meaning the phrase should have run:
"like any other Sacred Book of antiquity"; inasmuch as critical tests
and methods are called for in the scrutiny of such books which do not
apply in the case of others. But inasmuch, further, as the Christian
Sacred Books form a problem by themselves, a kind of scrutiny which
in the case of other books of cult-history might substantially reveal
all the facts may here easily fail to do so.

The unsuspecting student, coming to a narrative in which supernatural
details are mingled with "natural," decides simply to reject the
former and take as history what is left. It is the method of the
amateur mythologists of ancient Greece, derided by Socrates, and
chronically resuscitated in all ages by men seeking short cuts to
certitude where they have no right to any. If the narrative of the
Trial and Crucifixion, thus handled, is found to be still incredible
in point of time-arrangement, the adaptor meets the difficulty by
reducing the time-arrangement to probability and presenting the twice
redacted result as "incontestable" history. All this, as will be
shown in the following pages, is merely a begging of the question. A
scientific analysis points to a quite different solution, which the
naïf "historical" student has never considered.

He is still kept in countenance, it is true, by "specialists" of the
highest standing. The average "liberal" theologian still employs the
explanatory method of Toland; and anthropologists still offer him
support. Thus Sir James Frazer, by far the most learned collector
of mytho-anthropological lore in his age, positively refuses to
apply to the history of the Christian cult his own express rule of
mythology--formulated before him [1] but independently reiterated
by him--that "all peoples have invented myths to explain why they
observed certain customs," and that a graphic myth to explain a rite
is presumptively "a simple transcript of a ceremony"; which is the
equivalent of the doctrine of Robertson Smith, that "in almost every
case the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the
myth," and of the doctrine of K. O. Müller that "the mythus sprang from
the worship, and not the worship from the mythus." What justification
Sir James can give for his refusal to act on his own principles is of
course a matter for full and careful consideration. But at least the
fact that he has to justify the refusal to apply in a most important
case one of the best-established generalizations of comparative
mythology is not in this case a recommendation of the principle of
authority to scientific readers.

General phrases, then, as to how religions must have originated in
the personal impression made by a Founder are not only unscientific
presuppositions but are flatly contradictory, in this connection, of
a rule scientifically reached in the disinterested study of ancient
hierology in general.

It is a delusion, again, to suppose, as do some scholarly men,
that there is such a consensus of view among New Testament scholars
as to put out of court any theory that cancels the traditionalist
assumption of historicity which is the one position that most of
them have in common. As we shall see, the latest expert scholarship,
professionally recognized as such, makes a clean sweep of their whole
work; but they themselves, by their insoluble divisions, had already
discredited it. Any careful collection of their views will show that
the innumerable and vital divergences of principle and method of the
various schools, and their constant and emphatic disparagement of
each other's conclusions, point rather to the need for a radically
different theory and method. A theory, therefore, which cancels their
conflicts by showing that all the data are reducible to order only when
their primary assumption is abandoned, is entitled to the open-minded
attention of men who profess loyalty to the spirit of science.

There is need, thirdly, to bring home even to many readers who profess
such loyalty, the need for a really critical study of the Gospels. I
have been blamed by some critics because, having found that sixty
years' work on the documents by New Testament scholars yielded no clear
light on the problem of origins, I chose to approach that by way (1)
of mythology, (2) of extra-evangelical literature and sect-history,
and (3) of anthropology. The question of the order and composition
of the Gospels, in the view of these critics, should be the first
stage in the inquiry.

Now, for the main purposes of the myth-theory, the results reached
by such an investigator as Professor Schmiedel were quite sufficient;
and though at many points textual questions had to be considered, it
seemed really not worth while to discuss in detail the quasi-historical
results claimed by the exegetes. But it has become apparent that a
number of readers who claim to be "emancipated" have let themselves
be put off with descriptions of the Gospel-history when they ought to
have read it attentively for themselves. A confident traditionalist,
dealt with hereinafter, writes of the "pretentious futilities into
which we so readily drop when we talk about them [the Gospels] instead
of reading them." The justice of the observation is unconsciously
but abundantly illustrated by himself; and he certainly proves the
need for inducing professed students to read with their eyes open.

Early in 1914 there was published a work on The Historical Christ,
by Dr. F. C. Conybeare, in which, as against the myth hypothesis,
which he vituperatively assailed, a simple perusal of the Gospel of
Mark (procurable, as he pointed out, for one penny) was confidently
prescribed as the decisive antidote to all doubts of the historicity
of the central figure. The positions put were the conventional ones
of the "liberal" school. No note was taken of the later professional
criticism which, without accepting the myth-theory, shatters the
whole fabric of current historicity doctrine. But that is relatively
a small matter. In the course of his treatise, Dr. Conybeare asserted
three times over, with further embellishments, that in the Gospel of
Mark 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." Dr. Conybeare's printers' proofs, he stated, had been
read for him by Professor A. C. Clark. I saw, I think, fully twenty
newspaper notices of the book; and in not a single one was there any
recognition of the gross and thrice-repeated blunder above italicized,
to modify the chorus of uncritical assent. A professed Rationalist
repeated and endorsed Dr. Conybeare's assertion. Needless to say,
not only did Dr. Conybeare not mention that Joseph is never named in
Mark, he never once alluded to the fact that in the same Gospel Mary
is presented as not the mother of Jesus; and the brothers and sisters,
by implication, as not his brothers and sisters.

When aggressive scholars and confident reviewers thus alike reveal
that they have not read the Gospels with the amount of attention
supposed to be bestowed on them by an intelligent Sunday-school
teacher, it is evidently inadvisable to take for granted any general
critical preparation even among rationalistic readers. Before men
can realize the need for a new theoretic interpretation of the whole,
they must be invited to note the vital incongruities (as apart from
miracle stories) in each Gospel singly, as the lay Freethinkers of
an earlier generation did without pretending to be scholars.

Those Rationalists are ill-advised who suppose that, in virtue of
having listened to latter-day publicists who profess to extract a
non-supernatural "religion" from the supernaturalisms of the past, they
have reached a higher and truer standpoint than that of the men who
made sheer truth their standard and their ideal. Really scholarly and
scrupulous advocates of theism are as zealous to expose the historical
truth as the men who put that first and foremost; it is the ethical
sentimentalists who put the question of historic truth on one side. The
fact that some men of scientific training in other fields join at times
in such complacent constructions does not alter the fact that they
are non-scientific. The personal equation even of a man of science
is not science. On these as on other sides of the intellectual life,
"opinion of store is cause of want," as Bacon has it.

Some of us who in our teens critically read the sacred books first and
foremost to clear our minds on the general question of supernaturalism,
and then proceeded to try, with the help of the documentary scholars,
to trace the history of religion as matter of anthropology and
sociology, had the experience of being told by Professor Huxley,
whose own work we had followed, that we were still at the standpoint
of Voltaire. Later we had the edification of seeing Huxley expatiate
upon topics which had long been stale for Secularist audiences,
and laboriously impugn the story of the Flood and the miracle of
the Gadarene swine in discursive debate with Gladstone, even making
scientific mistakes in the former connection.

In view of it all, it seems still a sound discipline to treat all
opinions as for ever open to revision, and at the same time to doubt
whether the acceptance of any popular formula will place us in a
position to disparage unreservedly all our critical predecessors. If we
find reason to dismiss as inadequate the conclusions of many scholars
of the past, orthodox and heterodox, we are not thereby entitled
to speak of the best of them otherwise than as powerful minds and
strenuous toilers, hampered by some of their erroneous assumptions
in the task of relieving their fellows of the burden of others.

It is precisely the habituation of the professional scholars to
working in a special groove that has so retarded the progress of New
Testament criticism. The re-discussion of the historicity question
that has followed upon the modern exposition of the myth-theory
has involved the reiteration by the historicity school of a set
of elementary claims from the long-discredited interpolation in
Josephus and the pagan "testimonies" of Suetonius and Tacitus; and
Professor W. B. Smith has had to meet these with a detailed rebuttal
such as used to be made--of course with less care and fullness--on
the ordinary English Secularist platform forty or even seventy years
ago. Less advanced scholars once more begin to recognize the nullity
of the argument from the famous passage in the Annals of Tacitus,
[2] which was clear to so many unpretending freethinkers in the
past; and to other Gelehrten vom Fach it has to be again pointed out
that the impulsore Chresto of Suetonius, so far from testifying to
the presence of a Christian multitude at Rome under Nero--a thing
so incompatible with their own records--is rather a datum for the
myth-theory, inasmuch as it posits a cult of a Chrestos or Christos
out of all connection with the "Christian" movement.

The passage in Josephus was given up long ago by hundreds of orthodox
scholars as a palpable interpolation, proved as such by the total
silence in regard to it of early Fathers who would have rejoiced to
cite it if it had been in existence. The device of supposing it to
be a Christian modification of a different testimony by Josephus is
a resort of despair, which evades altogether the fact of the rupture
of context made by the passage--a feature only less salient in the
paragraph of Tacitus. But even if there were no reason to suspect
the latter item of being a late echo from Sulpicius Severus, who
is assumed to have copied it, nothing can be proved from it for the
historicity of the Gospel Jesus, inasmuch as it does but set forth from
a hostile standpoint the ordinary Christian account of the beginnings
of the cult. Those who at this time of day found upon such data are
further from an appreciation of the evidential problem than were
their orthodox predecessors who debated the issue with Freethinkers
half a century ago.

I have thought it well, then, to precede a restatement of the
"myth-theory" with a critical survey in which a number of preliminary
questions of scientific method and critical ethic are pressed upon
those who would deal with the main problem aright; and a certain
amount of controversy with other critical schools is indulged in
by way of making plain the radical weakness of all the conventional
positions. The negative criticism, certainly, will not establish in
advance the positive theory: that must meet the ordeal of criticism
like every other. But the preliminary discussion may at once serve to
free from waste polemic the constructive argument and guard readers
against bringing to that a delusive light from false assumptions.

A recent and more notorious exhibition of "critical method"
by Dr. Conybeare has satisfied me that it is needless to offer
any further systematic exposure of the nullity of his treatise,
with which I had dealt at some length in The Literary Guide. His
memorable attack upon the Foreign Secretary, and his still more
memorable retractation, may enable some of his laudatory reviewers
to realize the kind of temper and the kind of scrutiny he brings to
bear upon documents and theories that kindle his passions. All that
was relevant in his constructive process was really extracted, with
misconceptions and blunders and exaggerations, from the works of a
few scholars of standing who, however inconclusive their work might
be, set him a controversial example which he was unable to follow. In
dealing with them, I have the relief of no longer dealing with him. As
to the constructive argument from comparative mythology, anthropology,
and hierology, attacked by him and others with apparently no grasp of
the principles of any of these sciences, objections may be best dealt
with incidentally where they arise in the restatement of the case.

For the rest, I can conceive that some will say the second year of the
World War is no time for the discussion even of a great problem of
religious history. I answer that the War has actually been made the
pretext for endless religious discussions of the most futile kind,
ranging between medieval miracle-mongering and the lowest forms of
journalistic charlatanism, with chronic debates on theism and on
the military value of faith and prayer. The newspaper discussions on
theism, in particular, reveal a degree of philosophic naïveté on the
theistic side which seems to indicate that that view of the universe
has of late years been abandoned by most men capable of understanding
the logical problem. When dispute plays thus uselessly at the bidding
of emotion there must be some seniors, or others withheld from war
service, who in workless hours would as lief face soberly an inquiry
which digs towards the roots of the organized religion of Europe. If
the end of the search should be the conviction that that system took
shape as naturally as any other cult of the ancient world, and that the
sacrosanct records of its origin are but products of the mythopoeic
faculty of man, the time of war, with its soul-shaking challenge to
the sense of reality, may not be the most unfit for the experience.







THE HISTORICAL JESUS


CHAPTER I

THE SNARE OF PRESUPPOSITION


He who would approach with an alert mind such a question as that of
the historic actuality of the Gospel Jesus would do well to weigh
a preliminary warning. Though after four hundred years of chronic
scientific discovery all men are supposed to know the intellectual
danger of a confident and foregone rejection of new theories, it is
scarcely likely that the vogue of such error is at an end. After all,
apart from the special experience in question, and from the general
effect of the spread of "science," the average psychosis of men is not
profoundly different from what it was in the two centuries which passed
before the doctrines of Copernicus found general acceptance. Not many
modern novelties of thought can so reasonably be met with derision
as was the proposition that the earth moves round the sun.

Let the ingenuous reader try to make the supposition that he had
been brought up in ignorance of that truth, and without any training
in astronomy, and that in adolescence or mature years it had been
casually put to him as a non-authoritative suggestion. Would he have
been quick to surmise that the paradox might be truth? Let him next
try to imagine that he had been educated by an eccentric guardian in
the Ptolemaic creed, which accounted so plausibly for so many solar
and stellar phenomena, and that until middle life he had been kept
unaware of the Copernican heresy. Can he be sure that, meeting it
not as an accredited doctrine but as a novel hypothesis, he would
have been prompt to recognize that it was the better solution? If he
can readily say Yes, I know not whether his confidence is enviable
or otherwise. Reading in Sylvester's translation of the Divine
Weeks of Du Bartas, which had such vogue in the days of James VI,
the confident derision and "confutation" of the heliocentric theory,
I really cannot be sure that had I lived in those days I should have
gone right where Bacon went wrong.

To a mere historical student, not conscious of any original insight
into the problems of nature, there ought to be something chastening
in the recollection that every great advance in the human grasp
of them has been hotly or hilariously denounced and derided;
and that not merely by the average ignoramus, but by the mass of
the experts. It was not the peasants of Italy who refused to look
through Galileo's telescope--they were not invited to; it was the
academics, deep in Aristotle. It was not the laity who distinguished
themselves by rejecting Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the
blood; it was all the doctors above forty then living, if we can
believe a professional saying. And it was not merely the humdrum
Bible-readers who scouted geology for generations, or who laughed
consumedly for decades over the announcement that Darwin made out
men to be "descended from monkeys." That theory, as it happened,
had been unscientifically enough propounded long before Darwin; and,
albeit not grounded upon any such scientific research as served
to establish the Darwinian theory in a generation, yet happened
to be considerably nearer rationality than the Semitic myth which
figured for instructed Christendom as the absolute and divinely
revealed truth on the subject. A recollection of the hate and fury
with which geologists like Hugh Miller repelled the plain lesson of
their own science when it was shown to clash with the sacred myth,
and a memory of the roar of derision and disgust which met Darwin,
should set reasonable men on their guard when they find themselves
faced by propositions which can hardly seem more monstrous to this
generation than those others did to our fathers and grandfathers.

It is difficult, again, without suggesting contempt of that
scholarship which as concerning historical problems is the equivalent
of experimental research in science, to insist aright upon the
blinding tendency of pure scholarship in the face of a radically
innovating doctrine. Without scholarly survey no such doctrine can
maintain itself. Yet it is one of the commonest of experiences to
find the accredited scholars among the last to give an intelligent
hearing to a new truth. Only for a very few was skill in the Ptolemaic
astronomy a good preparation towards receiving the Copernican. The
errors of Copernicus--the inevitable errors of the pioneer--served
for generations to establish the Ptolemaists in theirs. And where
religious usage goes hand-in-hand with an error, not one man in a
thousand can escape the clutch of the double habit.

Hence the special blackness of the theological record in the history of
culture. In the present day the hideous memory of old crimes withholds
even the clerical class as a whole from the desire to employ active
persecution; but that abstention--forced in any case--cannot save
the class from the special snare of the belief in the possession of
fixed and absolute truth. Since the day when Tyndale was burned for
translating the Sacred Books, English Christians have passed through
a dozen phases of faith, from the crassest evangelicalism to the
haziest sentimentalism, and in all alike they have felt, mutatis
mutandis, the same spontaneous aversion to the new doctrine that
disturbs the old. Who will say that the stern Tyndale, had he ever
been in power, would not have made martyrs in his turn? The martyr
Latimer had applauded the martyrdom of Anabaptists. The martyred
Cranmer had assented to martyrdoms in his day, though a man forgiving
enough in respect of his own wrongs. And if the educated Christians
of to-day have reached a level at which they can recognize as old
delusions not only the beliefs in relics and images and exorcisms,
once all sacrosanct, but the "literal" acceptance of Semitic and
Christian myths and miracle-stories, to whom do they think they owe
the deliverance? To their accredited teachers? Not so.

No false belief from which men have been delivered since the day of
Copernicus has been dismissed without strenuous resistance from men
of learning, and even from men of vigorous capacity. The belief in
witchcraft was championed by Bodin, one of the most powerful minds
of his day; Glanvill, who sought to maintain it in England after the
Restoration, was a man of philosophical culture and a member of the
Royal Society; and he had the countenance of the Platonist Henry
More and the chemist Boyle. So great a man as Leibnitz repulsed
the cosmology of Newton on the score that it expelled God from
the universe. It was not professional theologians who invented the
"higher criticism" of the Pentateuch, any more than they introduced
geology. Samuel Parvish, the Guildford bookseller, who discovered in
the days of Walpole that Deuteronomy belonged to the seventh century
B.C., is not recorded to have made any clerical converts; and Astruc,
the Parisian physician who began the discrimination between the
Jehovistic and Elohistic sources in Genesis in 1753, made no school in
his country or his time. Voltaire, no Hebraist, demonstrated clearly
enough that the Pentateuchal tale of the tabernacle in the wilderness
was a fiction; but three toiling generations of German specialists
passed the demonstration by, till a Zulu convert set the good Bishop
Colenso upon applying to the legend the simple tests of his secular
arithmetic. Then the experts began slowly to see the point.







CHAPTER II

MODES OF CONSERVATIVE FALLACY


To all such reminders the present-day expert will reply, belike, that
he does not need them. He, profiting by the past, can commit no such
errors. And yet, however right the present members of the apostolic
succession of truth-monopolists may be, there is an astonishing
likeness in their tone and temper over the last heresy to that of their
predecessors, down to the twentieth generation. Anger and bluster,
boasting and scolding, snarl and sneer, come no less spontaneously
to the tongues of the professional defender of the present minimum of
creed than they did to those of the full-blooded breed of the ages of
the maximum, or of Calvin and Bonner. From the defence of the "real
presence" of the God to that of the bare personal existence of the
Man is a long descent; but there is a singular sameness in the manner
of the controversy. As their expert ancestors proved successively
the absolute truth of the corporal presence in the wafer, or the
humanity of the Son against those who dubbed him merely divine, or
his divinity against those who pronounced him merely human, or the
inerrancy of the Gospels against the blasphemers who pointed out
the contradictions, or the historic certainty of the miracles and
the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection and the Ascension against the
"materialists" who put such Christian myths on a level with Pagan,
so do the expert demonstrators of the bare historicity of the now
undeified God establish by vituperation and derision, declamation
and contempt, the supreme certainty of the minimum after all the
supernatural certainties are gone. Even as Swiss patriots undertook to
demonstrate "somebody" and "something" behind the legend of William
Tell when it had ceased to be possible to burn men at the stake for
exposing the apple-myth, so do the descendants of the demonstrators
of the real presence now go about to make clear the real existence.

I speak, of course, of the ruck of the vindicators, not of the
believers; and Professor Schmiedel and M. Loisy, I trust, will not
suspect me of classing them with men many of whom are as hostile to
them as to the thesis which those scholars seek by rational methods
to confute. Professor Schmiedel has even avowed that a proof of
the non-historicity of the Gospel Jesus would not affect his inner
religious opinions; and such high detachment has been attained to
by others. That civilized scholars credit, and might at a pinch
maintain in debate, the historicity of the Gospel Jesus as calmly as
they might the historicity of Lycurgus against its impugners, I am
well aware. And to such readers, if I have the honour to obtain any,
I address not a warning but an appeal. There is an attitude towards
the problem which incurs no reproach on the score of tone and temper,
and which will naturally recommend itself all the more to men of real
culture, but which yet, I think, only illustrates in another way the
immense difficulty of all-round intellectual vigilance. Let me give
an example in an extract from a rather noteworthy pronouncement upon
the question in hand:--


    Of Paul's divine Master no biography can ever be written. We have
    a vivid impression of an unique, effulgent personality. We have
    a considerable body of sayings which must be genuine because
    they are far too great to have been invented by His disciples,
    and, for the rest, whatever royal robes and tributes of devotion
    the Church of A.D. 70-100 thought most fitting for its king. The
    Gospels are the creation of faith and love: faith and love hold
    the key to their interpretation. (Canon Inge, art. "St. Paul"
    in Quarterly Review, Jan., 1914, p. 45.)


I am not here concerned to ask whether the closing words are the
expression of an orthodox belief; or what orthodoxy makes of the
further proposition that "With St. Paul it is quite different. He is a
saint without a luminous halo." The idea seems to be that concerning
the saint without a nimbus we can get at the historical truth,
while in the other case we cannot--a proposition worth orthodox
attention. But what concerns the open-minded investigator is the
logic of the words I have italicized. It is obvious that they proceed
(1) on the assumption that what non-miraculous biography the Gospels
give is in the main absolutely trustworthy--that is to say, that the
accounts of the disciples and the teaching are historical; and (2)
on the assumption that we are historically held to the traditional
view that the Gospel sayings originated with the alleged Founder as
they purport. It is necessary to point out that this is not a licit
historical induction. Even Canon Inge by implication admits that
not all the Gospel sayings have the quality which he regards as
certifying authenticity; and on no reasonable ground can he claim
that the others must have been "invented by the disciples." The
alternative is spurious. No one is in a position to deny that any
given saying may have been invented by non-disciples. In point
of fact, many professional theologians are agreed in tracing to
outside sources some tolerably fine passages, such as the address to
Jerusalem (Mt. xxiii, 37; Lk. xiii, 34). The critics in question do
not ascribe that deliverance to inventive disciples; they infer it
to have been a non-Christian document. Many other critics, again,
now pronounce the whole Sermon on the Mount--regarded by Baur as
signally genuine--a compilation from earlier Hebrew literature,
Biblical and other. Which then are the "great" sayings that could not
be thus accounted for? Without specification there can be no rational
discussion of the problem; and even the proposition about the exegetic
function of "faith and love" affects to be in itself rational.

The plain truth would seem to be that Canon Inge has formed for himself
no tenable critical position. He has merely reiterated the fallacy
of Mill, who in his Three Essays on Religion (pp. 253-54) wrote:--


    Whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism,
    Christ is still left; a unique figure, not more unlike all his
    precursors than all his followers, even those who had the direct
    benefit of his personal teaching. It is of no use to say that
    Christ as exhibited in the Gospels is not historical, and that
    we know not how much of what is admirable has been superadded
    by the tradition of his followers. The tradition of followers
    suffices to insert any number of marvels, and may have inserted
    all the miracles which he is reputed to have wrought. But who
    among his disciples or among their proselytes was capable of
    inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the
    life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not
    the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St. Paul, whose
    character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort;
    still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more
    evident than that the good which was in them was all derived,
    as they always professed that it was derived, from the higher
    source. What could be added and interpolated by a disciple we
    may see in the mystical parts of St. John, matter imported from
    Philo and the Alexandrian Platonists and put into the mouth of
    the Saviour in long speeches about himself such as the other
    Gospels contain not the slightest vestige of, though pretended
    to have been delivered on occasions of the deepest interest and
    when his principal followers were all present; most prominently
    at the last supper. The East was full of men who could have stolen
    (!) any quantity of this poor stuff, as the multitudinous Oriental
    sects of Gnostics afterwards did. But about the life and sayings
    of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality combined with
    profundity of insight which, if we abandon the idle expectation
    of finding scientific precision where something very different
    was aimed at, must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the
    estimation of those who have no belief in his inspiration,
    in the very first rank of men of sublime genius of whom our
    species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is combined
    with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer, and
    martyr to that mission, who ever existed on earth, religion [sic]
    cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man
    as the ideal representative and guide of humanity.... Add that,
    to the conception of the rational sceptic, it remains a possibility
    that Christ actually was what he supposed himself to be--not God,
    for he never made the smallest pretension to that character, and
    would probably have thought such a pretension as blasphemous as
    it seemed to the men who condemned him--but a man charged with a
    special, express, and unique commission from God to lead mankind
    to truth and virtue....


Ein historischer Kopf hatte er nicht, is a German economist's criticism
of Mill which I fear will have to stand in other fields than that
of economics. The man who wrote this unmeasured dithyramb can never
have read the Gospels and the Hebrew books with critical attention;
and can never have reflected critically upon his own words in this
connection. The assumption that "the fishermen of Galilee" could not
have attained to thoughts which are expressly alleged to have been
put forth by an untaught carpenter of Galilee is on the face of it a
flight of thoughtless declamation. Had Mill ever critically read the
Old Testament and the Apocrypha, he must have been aware that the main
precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, which are presumably among the
unspecified objects of his panegyric, were all there beforehand. Had
he taken the trouble to investigate before writing, he could have
found in Hennell's Inquiry (1838), which popularized the old research
of Schoettgen; in Nork's Rabbinische Quellen und Parallelen (1839);
and in Les Origines du Sermon de la Montagne by Hippolyte Rodrigues
(1868), a copious demonstration of the Jewish currency of every moral
idea in the Christian document, often in saner forms. And he ought
to have known from his own reading that the doctrine of forgiveness
for injuries, which appears to be the main ground for the customary
panegyric of the Sermon, was common to Greeks and Romans before the
Gospels were compiled. From the duty of giving alms freely--which
is repeatedly laid down in the Old Testament--to that of the sin
of concupiscence and the wrongness of divorce for trivial causes,
every moral idea in the Sermon had been formulated alike by Jews and
Gentiles beforehand. [3] And if it be argued that the compilation
of such a set of precepts with a number of religious dicta (equally
current in non-Christian Jewry) is evidence of a special ethical or
religious gift in the compiler, the answer is that precisely the fact
of such a compilation is the disproof of the assertion in the Gospels
that the whole was delivered as a sermon on a mountain. A sermon it
never was and never could be; and if the compiler was a man of unique
character and qualification he was not the Gospel Jesus but the very
type of which Mill denied the possibility!

That the Gospel ethic is non-original becomes more and more clear with
every extension of relevant research. The Testaments of the Twelve
Patriarchs, written between 109 and 106 B.C. by a Quietist Pharisee,
is found to yield not only origins or anticipations for pseudo-historic
data in the Gospels but patterns for its moral doctrine. Thus the
notion that the Twelve Apostles are to rule over the tribes in the
Messianic kingdom is merely an adaptation of the teaching in the
Testaments that the twelve sons of Jacob are so to rule. [4] There
too appears for the first time in Jewish literature the formula
"on His right hand"; [5] and a multitude of close textual parallels
clearly testify to perusal of the book by the Gospel-framers and the
epistle-makers. But above all is the Jewish book the original for the
doctrines of forgiveness and brotherly love. Whereas the Old Testament
leaves standing the ethic of revenge alongside of the prescription to
forgive one's enemy, the Testaments give out what a highly competent
Christian editor pronounces to be "the most remarkable statement
on the subject of forgiveness in all ancient literature. They show
a wonderful insight into the true psychology of the question. So
perfect are the parallels in thought and diction between these
verses [Test. Gad, vi, 3-7] and Luke xvii, 3; Matt. xviii, 15, 35,
that we must assume our Lord's acquaintance with them. The meaning
of forgiveness in both cases is the highest and noblest known to
us--namely, the restoring the offender to communion with us, which
he had forfeited through his offence.... We now see the importance
of our text. It shows that pre-Christian Judaism possessed a noble
system of ethics on the subject of forgiveness." [6]

Here the tribute goes to a Pharisee; in another connection it redounds
to the other butt of Christian disparagement, the Scribes. As our
editor points out, the collocation of the commands to love God and
one's neighbour is even in Luke (x, 25-27) assigned not to Jesus but
to a Scribe. But this too is found in the Testaments. "That the two
great commandments were already conjoined in the teaching of the
Scribes at the time of our Lord we may reasonably infer from our
text, [7] which was written 140 years earlier, and from the account
in Luke." [8] And here too, a century before the Christian era,
we have a Jewish predication of the salvation of the Gentiles, [9]
in the patronizing Jewish sense.

It is only for men partly hypnotized by sectarian creed that there
can be anything surprising in these anticipations. The notion that
Sacred Books contain the highest and rarest thought of their respective
periods is a delusion that any critical examination of probabilities
will destroy. Relatively high and rare thought does not find its
way into Sacred Books; what these present is but the thought that
is perceptible and acceptable to the majority, or a strong minority,
of the better people; and it is never purified of grave imperfection,
precisely because these never are. Perfect ethic is the possession
of the perfect people, an extremely rare species. The ethic of the
Testaments, which is an obvious improvement on that of average Jewry,
is in turn imperfect enough; even as that of the Gospels remains
stamped with Jewish particularism, and is irretrievably blemished by
the grotesquely iniquitous doctrine of damnation for non-belief.

Such asseverations as Mill's, constantly repeated as they are by
educated men, are simply expressions of failure to comprehend
the nature and the possibilities of life, of civilization, of
history. The thesis is that in a world containing no one else capable
of elevated thought, moral or religious, there suddenly appeared a
marvellously inspired teacher, who chose a dozen disciples incapable
of comprehending his doctrine, and during the space of one or many
years--no one can settle whether one or two or three or four or ten or
twenty--went about alternately working miracles and delivering moral
and religious sayings (including a doctrine of eternal hell-fire for
the unrepentant wicked, among whom were included all who refused
to accept the new teaching); and that after the execution of the
teacher on a charge of blasphemy or sedition the world found itself in
possession of a supernormal moral and religious code, which constituted
the greatest "moral reform" in the world's history. The very conception
is a chimera. In a world in which no one could independently think the
teacher's moral thoughts there could be no acceptance of them. If the
code was pronounced good, it was so pronounced in terms of the moral
nature and moral convictions of those who made the pronouncement. The
very propagandists of the creed after a few generations were found
meeting gainsayers with the formula anima naturaliter Christiana.

Christianity made its way precisely because (1) it was a construction
from current moral and religious material; and because (2) it
adopted a system of economic organization already tested by Jews
and Gentiles; and (3) because its doctrines were ascribed to a God,
not to a man. Anything like a moral renovation of the world it never
effected; that conception is a chimera of chimeras. While Mill, the
amateur in matters of religious research, who "scarcely ever read a
theological book," [10] ascribed to Christian morality a unique and
original quality, Newman, the essentially religious man, deliberately
affirmed with the Rationalists that "There is little in the ethics of
Christianity which the human mind may not reach by its natural powers,
and which here or there ... has not in fact been anticipated." [11]
And Baur, who gave his life and his whole powers to the problem
which Mill assumed to dispose of by a dithyramb, put in a sentence
the historic truth which Mill so completely failed to grasp:--


    How soon would everything true and important that was taught by
    Christianity have been relegated to the order of the long-faded
    sayings of the noble humanitarians and thinking sages of antiquity,
    had not its teachings become words of eternal life in the mouth
    of its Founder! [12]


And a distinguished Scottish theologian and scholar has laid it
down that


    there is probably not a single moral precept in the Christian
    Scriptures which is not substantially also in the Chinese
    classics. There is certainly not an important principle in Bishop
    Butler's ethical teachings which had not been explicitly set
    forth by Mencius in the fourth century B.C. The Chinese thinker
    of that date had anticipated the entire moral theory of man's
    constitution expounded so long afterwards by the most famous of
    English moral philosophers. [13]







CHAPTER III

ILLUSIONS AS TO GOSPEL ETHIC


Strictly speaking, the whole problem of the moral value and the
historical effects of Christianity lies outside the present issue;
but we are forced to face it when the question of the truth of its
historic basis is dismissed by a professed logician with a rhetorical
thesis to the effect that "religion cannot be said to have made a
bad choice in pitching on" the personality of which he is challenged
to prove the historicity. Mill answers the challenge by begging the
question; and where he was capable of such a course multitudes, lay
and clerical, will long continue to be so. For Mill the problem was
something extraneous to his whole way of thought. Broadly speaking,
he never handled a historical problem, properly so called. Other
defenders of the historicity of Jesus, in turn, charge a want of
historic sense upon all who venture to put the hypothesis that the
Gospel Jesus is a mythical creation. The charge has been repeatedly
made by men who can make no pretence of having ever independently
elucidated any historical problem; and in one notable case, that of
Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter, it is made by a scholar who has committed
himself to the assertion of the historicity of Krishna. Such resorts
to blank asseveration in such matters are on all fours with the blank
asseveration that the Gospel Jesus, in virtue of the teachings ascribed
to him, is a figure too sublime for human invention.

The slightest reflection might obtrude the thought that it is precisely
the invented figure that can most easily be made quasi-sublime. Is it
pretended that Yahweh is not sublime? Is the Book of Job pretended
to be historical? The Gospel Jesus is never shown to us save in a
series of statuesque presentments, healing, preaching, prophesying,
blessing, denouncing, suffering; he is expressly detached from domestic
relationships; of his life apart from his Messianic career there is
not a vestige of trace that is not nakedly mythical; of his mental
processes there is not an attempt at explanation save in glosses
often palpably incompetent; and of his plan or purpose, his hopes or
expectations, no exegete has ever framed a non-theological theory that
will stand an hour's examination. Those who claim as an evidence of
uniqueness the fact that he is never accused by the evangelists of
any wrong act do but prove their unpreparedness to debate any of the
problems involved. A figure presented as divine, in a document that
aims at establishing a cult, is ipso facto denuded of errancy so far
as the judgment of the framers of the picture can carry them. But
all that the framers and redactors of the Gospels could achieve was
to outline a figure answering to their standards of perfection, free
of what they regarded as sin or error. Going to work in an age and
an environment in which ascetic principles were commonly posited as
against normal practice, they guard the God from every suggestion
of carnal appetite; and the dialecticians of faith childishly ask
us to contrast him with ancient Pagan deities whose legends are the
unsifted survivals of savage folklore. As if any new Sacred Book in
the same age would not have proceeded on the same standards; and as
if the religious Jewish literature of the age of Christian beginnings
were not as ascetic as the other. But inasmuch as the compilers of
the Gospels could not transcend the moral standard of their time,
they constantly obtrude its limitations and its blemishes. Had Mill
attempted anything beyond his dithyramb, he would have been hard put
to it to apply his ecstatic epithets to such teachings as these:--


    Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

    Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or tittle shall in no
    wise pass away from the law [of Moses].

    Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of
    fire. [Compare Matt. xxiii, 17: "Ye fools and blind"; and Luke xii,
    20: "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee."]

    Whosoever shall marry her [the woman divorced without good cause]
    shall commit adultery.

    Give to him that asketh thee.

    Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth. Seek ye first
    [God's] kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things
    [that were to be disregarded] shall be added unto you.

    Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing,
    but inwardly are ravening wolves. [Compare the warning against
    saying, Thou fool.]

    Go not into any way of the Gentiles, and enter not into any city
    of the Samaritans.

    Whosoever shall not receive you, ... as ye go forth out of that
    house or that city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I
    say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom
    and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city.

    I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.

    Think not that I come to send peace on the earth: I came not to
    send peace, but a sword.... He that loveth father or mother more
    than me is not worthy of me.

    It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of
    judgment than for you [Chorazin and Bethsaida; because of
    non-acceptance of the teacher].... It shall be more tolerable
    for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for you.

    Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account
    thereof in the day of judgment.

    Therefore speak I to them in parables, because seeing they see not,
    and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.

    In the end of the world the angels shall ... sever the wicked
    from the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire.

    In vain do they worship me, teaching as their doctrines the
    precepts of men.

    Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? [retort
    for the employer who pays the same for a day's work and for
    an hour's].

    If ye have faith and doubt not ... even if ye shall say unto this
    mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea, it shall be done.

    And his lord commended the unrighteous steward because he had
    done wisely.... And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends by
    means of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when it shall fail,
    they may receive you into the eternal tabernacles.

    I say unto you that unto everyone that hath shall be given; but
    from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

    And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors.... So
    also shall my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not
    everyone his brother from your hearts.


When such a mass of unmanageable doctrines is forced on the
notice of the dithyrambists, there promptly begins a process of
elimination--the method of Arnold, to which Mill would doubtless
have subscribed, denying as he did that Jesus ever claimed to be the
Son of God. Whatever is not sweetly reasonable in the Gospels, said
Arnold, cannot be the word of Jesus; let us then pick and choose as we
will. And justly enough may it be argued that we have been listening to
different voices. It cannot be the same man who prohibited all anger,
vetoing even the use of "Thou fool," and then proceeded to vituperate
Scribes and Pharisees in the mass as sons of hell; to curse a barren
tree; and to call the erring "Ye fools and blind"--any more than it
was the same man who said, "I am meek and lowly in heart," and "A
greater than Solomon is here," or annulled precepts of the law after
declaring that not a jot or tittle of it should pass away. But with
what semblance of critical righteousness shall it be pretended that in
a compilation thus palpably composite it was the teacher who said all
the right things and others who said all the wrong, when as a matter of
documentary fact the better sayings can all be paralleled in older or
contemporary writings? That challenge is never so much as faced by the
dithyrambists; to face it honestly would be the beginning of their end.

Some seem prepared to stake all on such a teaching as the parable
of the Good Samaritan, which actually teaches that a man of the
religiously despised race could humanely succour one of the despising
race when religious men of the same race passed him by. Is the
parable then assimilated by those who stress it? Can they conceive
that a Samaritan could so act? If yes, why cannot they conceive
that a Samaritan, or another Jew than one, could put forth such a
doctrine? Here is a story of actual human-kindness, paralleled in a
hundred tales and romances of later times, a story which, appealing
as it does to every reader, may reasonably be believed to have been
enacted a thousand times by simple human beings who never heard of
the Gospels. Yet we are asked to believe that only one Jewish or
Gentile mind in the age of Virgil was capable of drawing the moral
that the kindly and helpful soul is the true neighbour, and that the
good man will be neighbourly to all; so rebuking the tribalism of
the average Jew.

When, fifteen years ago, I wrote of "the moderate ethical height of
the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is partly precedented in Old
Testament teaching [Deut. xxiii, 7--an interpolation; cp. the Book
of Ruth]," Dr. J. E. Carpenter indignantly replied: "The field of
Greek literature is open; will Mr. Robertson take the Good Samaritan
and from Plato to Plotinus find his match?" And the Rev. Thomas James
Thorburn, D.D., LL.D., in his later work Jesus the Christ: Historical
or Mythical? (1912), wrote (p. 68):--


    Dr. Estlin Carpenter has invited (we believe, in
    vain!) Mr. Robertson to produce an equal to this same parable
    out of the whole range of Greek literature, which undoubtedly
    contains the choicest teaching of the ancient world.


Dr. Thorburn in his bibliography cited the first and second (1912)
editions of Pagan Christs; he thoughtfully omitted, in launching his
"we believe, in vain!", to ascertain whether there had been a second
edition of Christianity and Mythology, in which any reply I might
have to make to Dr. Carpenter might naturally be expected to appear,
that critic having challenged the proposition as put in the first
edition. A second edition had appeared, in 1910, and there I had duly
given the simple answer which the two learned Doctors of Divinity,
so conscious of knowing all Greek literature from Plato to Plotinus,
were unable to think of for themselves. The field of Greek literature,
as Dr. Carpenter justly observes, is open; and it would have been
fitting on his part to perambulate a little therein. The demanded
instance lay to the hand of unlearned people in so familiar an author
as Plutarch--in the tale of Lycurgus and Alcander. As Dr. Thorburn
and Dr. Carpenter, however, must be supposed to have been ignorant
of that story, it may be well to tell it briefly here.

Lycurgus having greatly exasperated the rich citizens by proposing
the institution of frugal common meals, they made a tumult and stoned
him in the market-place, so that he had to run for sanctuary in a
temple. But one of his pursuers, a violent youth named Alcander, caught
up with him, and, striking him with a club as he turned round, dashed
out one of his eyes. Lycurgus then stood calmly facing the citizens,
letting them see his bleeding face, and his eye destroyed. All who
saw him were filled with shame and remorse. They gave up Alcander
to his mercy, and conducted Lycurgus in procession to his house to
show their sympathy. He thanked them and dismissed them, but kept
Alcander with him. He did him no harm, and used no reproachful words,
but kept him as his servant, sending away all others. And Alcander,
dwelling with Lycurgus, noting his serenity of temper and simplicity
of life and his unwearying labours, became his warmest admirer, and
ever after told his friends that Lycurgus was the best of men. In
one version of the tale Lycurgus gave back his freedom to Alcander
in presence of the citizens, saying, You gave me a bad citizen;
I give you back a good one.

If our Doctors of Divinity are unable to see that this represents
a rarer strain of goodness than the deed of the Good Samaritan,
they must be told that they are lacking in that very moral judgment
upon which they plume themselves. Forever sitting in the chair of
judgment, defaming all who dissent from them, they are ethically less
percipient than the cultured laity. Thousands of kindly human beings,
I repeat, have succoured wounded strangers, even those of hostile
races; and the tone held over the Gospel parable by some Christians
is but the measure of their misconception of human nature. Their
sectarian creed has bred in them a habit of aspersing all humanity,
all character, save the Christian, thus stultifying the very lesson
of their parable, the framer of which would fain have taught men to
transcend these very fanaticisms. They will not be "neighbours" to
the pagan to the extent of crediting him with their own appreciation
of magnanimity and human-kindness; they cannot even discuss his
claim without seeking arrogantly to browbeat his favourers. Forever
acclaiming the beauty of the command to forgive injuries, they cannot
even debate without insolence where they know their sectarian claims
are called in question. And I shall be agreeably disappointed if they
proceed to handle the tale of Lycurgus and Alcander without seeking
to demonstrate that somehow it falls below the level of the Gospels,
where, as it happens, the endurance of violence and death by the
God-man is in effect presented as God-like. But for that matter,
even the oft-cited saying "Father, forgive them," occurs only in
Luke of all the Gospels, and, being absent from two of the most
ancient codices, betrays itself as a late addition to the text. It
may be either Jewish or Gentile. For Plutarch, the Spartan tale is
something edifying and gratifying, but he makes no parade of it as
a marvel; and in his essay Of Profiting by our Enemies he speaks of
the forgiveness of enemies as a thing not rarely to be met with:--


    To forbear to be revenged of an enemy if opportunity and occasion
    is offered, and to let him go when he is in thy hands, is a point
    of great humanity and courtesy; but him that hath compassion of
    him when he is fallen into adversity, succoureth him in distress,
    at his request is ready to show goodwill to his children, and an
    affection to sustain the state of his house and family being in
    affliction, who doth not love for this kindness, nor praise the
    goodness of his nature? (Holland's translation.)


Had that passage appeared in a Gospel, how would not our Doctors of
Divinity have exclaimed over the moral superiority of Christian ethic,
demonstrating that it alone appealed to the heart! In actual fact
we find them denying that such passages exist. The most disgraceful
instance known to me appears to implicate an Austrian theologian. In
the "Editor's Forewords" to the Early English Text Society's volume
of Queen Elizabeth's Englishings there is a note on Plutarch's De
Curiositate, àpropos of Elizabeth's translation of that essay:--


    In De Curiositate, as well as in his other writings, Plutarch
    proves himself to be a true Stoic philosopher, to possess
    first-rate moral principles and great fear of God.... His
    religious views sometimes remind us, like those of Seneca,
    of Christian teaching; but here there is always one important
    omission--viz., the commendation of charity or brotherly love; of
    this Christian virtue the stoic, so virtuous in his own relations,
    knows absolutely nothing.


At the close of the "Forewords" the Editor, Miss Caroline Pemberton,
mentions that "The comments on the writings of Boethius and Plutarch
are by Dr. J. Schenk, of Meran, Tyrol." To Dr. Schenk, then, must
apparently be credited the high-water mark in Christian false-witness
against paganism. Either he did or he did not know that Plutarch in
other writings had given full expression to the ethic of brotherly
love. If he did not know, he was not only framing a wanton libel
in sheer ignorance but giving a particularly deadly proof of his
own destitution of the very virtue he was so unctuously denying
to the pagan. A man devoid not merely of charity but of decent
concern for simple justice poses as a moral teacher in virtue of his
Christianism; even as the professional encomiasts of the parable of
the Good Samaritan demonstrate their own blindness to its meaning,
playing the Levite to the Pagan.

Plutarch, so much better a man than his Christian critic, was in turn
no innovator in ethics. As every student knows, such doctrines as those
above cited from him are far older than the Christian religion. Five
centuries before the Christian era Confucius put the law of reciprocity
in the sane form of the precept that we should not do unto others
what we would not that they should do unto us. Are we to suppose that
the rule had been left to Confucius to invent? Christians who cannot
conform to it are not ashamed to disparage the precept of Confucius as
a "negative" teaching, implying that there is a higher moral strain in
their formula which prescribes the doing to others what we would wish
them to do to us. There, if any difference of code be really intended,
we are urged to confer benefits in order to have them returned. If
no difference is intended, the disparagement is mere deceit. In
the ancient Hindu epic, the Mahâbhârata, it is declared that "The
Gods regard with delight the man who ... when struck does not strike
again," and that "The good, when they promote the welfare of others,
expect no reciprocity." How long are we to listen to the childish
claim that moral maxims which in India were delivered millenniums
ago by forgotten men were framable in Seneca's day only in Syria,
and there only by one "unique and effulgent" personality, whose mere
teaching lifted humanity to new heights? Had no nameless man or woman
in Greece ever urged the beauty of non-retaliation before Plato?

If clerics cannot rise above the old disingenuous sectarian spirit,
it is time at least that laymen should. The more historic comprehension
a man has of the ancient world, of Plutarch's world, with all its sins
and delusions, the less can he harbour the notion of the moral miracle
involved in the thesis of the unique teacher, suddenly revealing to an
amazed humanity heights of moral aspiration before undreamt of. And
any considerate scrutiny of the logia of the Gospels will inevitably
force the open-minded student to recognize multiplicity of thought and
ideal, and compel him to seek some explanation. An effort to detach
a possible personality by the elimination of impossible adjuncts is
the next natural step.







CHAPTER IV

THE METHOD OF BLUSTER


For anyone who will soberly and faithfully face the facts there must
sooner or later arise the problem, Is there any unifying personality
behind this medley of many sets of doctrines, many voices, many
schools? Even if it were possible to piece together from it a coherent
body of either ethical or religious thought, and jettison the rest,
is there any reason to believe that the selected matter belongs to the
Gospel Teacher with the Twelve Disciples, crucified on the morning
after the Passover under Pontius Pilate? When the crowning doctrine
of sacrament and sacrifice is seen to be but the consummation of a
religious lore beginning in prehistoric and systematic human sacrifice,
and traceable in a score of ancient cults, is it possible to claim that
the palpably dramatic record of Last Supper, Agony, Betrayal, Trial,
and Crucifixion is a historic record of a strange coincidence between
cult practice and biography? And if that goes, what is left? If,
says Loisy, the condemnation of Jesus as pretended Messiah by Pilate
"could be put in doubt, one would have no motive for affirming the
existence of Christ." [14] And it can!

Some, assuming to settle the problem by rhetoric, in effect stand
for a "personality" without any pretence of establishing what the
"personality" taught. And this inexpensive device will doubtless
long continue to be practised by the large class who insist upon
solving all such problems by instinct. An example of that procedure
is afforded by an article headed "A Barren Controversy," by the
Rev. Frederick Sinclair, in a magazine entitled Fellowship, the
organ of the Free Religious Fellowship, Melbourne, issue of March,
1915. The controversy is certainly barren enough as Mr. Sinclair
conducts it. His religious temper is of a familiar type. "It is a
hard task to prove the obvious," he begins; "and no obligation is
laid on us to examine and refute the evidences alleged in support of
this or that cock-and-bull theory." We can imagine how the reverend
critic would have shone in the sixteenth or the seventeenth century,
disposing of the Copernican theory, which so presumptuously assailed
"the obvious." True to his principles, he does not hamper himself
by meeting arguments or evidence. "Mythical theories about Christ
have about as much scientific value and importance as the theories
of the Baconians about Shakespeare. They ... are products ... of
that perverted credulity which will swallow anything, so long as
it is not orthodox; and they are best met by the method of satire
adopted by Whately in his 'Historic Doubts' on Napoleon." And yet
our expert renounces that admirable instrument in favour of the
simpler procedure vulgarly known as "bluff." He is in reality a good
example of the psychosis of the very Baconism which he contemns,
and which he would probably be quite unable to confute. An æsthetic
impression of "reality" derived from a hypnotized perusal of Mark,
and a feeling that only one man could deliver such oracles, are the
beginning and end of his dialectic and scholarly stock-in-trade;
even as a consciousness that Bacon must be the author of the Plays,
and that the actor Shakespeare could not have written them, is the
beginning and end of the ignorant polemic of the Baconists.

To do him justice, it should be noted that Mr. Sinclair warns
his readers both before and after his case that his handling of
the theme and their preparation for estimating it leave a great
deal to be desired by those who care to see applied "the method of
careful criticism." Still, he is satisfied that it is "adequate to
the particular question we have been considering." And this is how
Mr. Sinclair has considered:--


    Anyone who will pay this controversy the compliment of a few hours'
    consideration is advised to bring his own judgment to bear on it
    in the following way: Let him begin by taking a copy of St. Mark's
    Gospel, which is the earliest of the four, in either of the English
    versions, and read it through, pencil in hand, striking out all
    the miraculous or quasi-miraculous stories. Then, gathering up
    what remains, let him read it, first as a whole, then singly,
    episode by episode, always keeping the eye of the imagination open,
    dismissing as far as possible any prepossessions, and letting the
    author make his own impression, without the interfering offices
    of critic or commentator. Having done this, let the reader ask
    of himself of each story: Is this a story which seems to belong
    to actual life, to be told of a real human being, with distinct
    individuality, or is it rather a literary invention, designed
    to add something to a conventional figure? Does the narrative
    move with the freedom and variety of life, or does it fit into
    a conventional, symmetrical design? Does the writer's style and
    method arouse the suspicion of literary artifice? Must one say
    of this or that story that its reality is the reality of life,
    or of an art which cunningly counterfeits life?


The open-minded reader, I trust, will hardly need to be told that
what is here done is to set a false problem and ignore the real
issue. Mr. Sinclair either cannot understand that issue or elects
to evade it. Probably the former is the explanation. No critic of
the Gospels, so far as I remember, ever suggested that any of them
"cunningly counterfeits life"; and certainly no one ever pretended
that Mark [15] exhibits a "conventional, symmetrical design," though
Wilke argued that it "freely moulded the traditional historical
material in pursuance of literary aims," and B. Weiss praises its
literary colouring. It is a heap of unreal incident, fortuitously
collocated, [16] and showing nothing approaching to symmetrical
design. "Conventional" raises another question; in this as in all
the Gospels there is plenty of convention.

Let us but follow for a little the simple method of selection
prescribed by Mr. Sinclair, and see what we get. What we are to make of
Mark i, 1-9, is far from clear. It sets forth the advent of John as the
fulfilment of a prophecy--i.e., a miracle; and it describes his mission
in the baldest conceivable summary, save for the sentence: "And John
was clothed with camel's hair, and had a leathern girdle about his
loins, and did eat locusts and wild honey." Is this "convention" or
"reality"? I am not inclined to call it "literary artifice," unless we
are to apply that description to the beginning of the average nursery
tale, as perhaps we should. What must strike the inquiring reader is
that if we were to have a touch of "reality" about the Baptist we
should be told something about his inner history, his antecedents,
and what he preached. What we are told is that "he preached, saying,
There cometh after me he that is mightier than I.... I baptized you
with water; but he shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit."

If this part of the narrative has not been "struck out" by
Mr. Sinclair's neophytes as plainly belonging to the miraculous,
the next five verses presumably must be. The non-miraculous narrative
begins at v. 14:--


    Now, after that John was delivered up, Jesus came into 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 [not a word of which has been communicated].

    And passing along by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew
    the brother of Simon casting a net in the sea; for they were
    fishers. And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will
    make you to become fishers of men. And straightway they left the
    nets, and followed him. And going on a little further, he saw
    James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who also were
    in the boat mending the nets. And straightway he called them;
    and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired
    servants, and went after him.


This "episode," for Mr. Sinclair, "seems to belong to real life,
to be told of a real human being with distinct individuality." For
critical readers it is a primitive "conventional" narrative, told by a
writer who has absolutely no historic knowledge to communicate. Of the
preaching of the Saviour he has no more to tell than of the preaching
of the Baptist. Both are as purely "conventional," so far, as an
archaic statue of Hermes. Of "the freedom and variety of life" there
is not a trace; Mr. Sinclair, who professes to find these qualities,
is talking in the manner of a showman at a fair. The important process
of making disciples resolves itself into a fairy tale: "Come and I
will make you fishers of men; and they came." A measure of "literary
artifice" is perhaps to be assigned to the items of "casting a net,"
"mending the net," and "left their father in the boat with the hired
servants"; [17] but it is the literary art of a thousand fairy tales,
savage and civilized, and stands for the method of a narrator who
is dealing with purely conventional figures, not with characters
concerning which he has knowledge. The calling of the first disciples
in the rejected Fourth Gospel has much more semblance of reality.

If the cautious reader is slow to see these plain facts on the pointing
of one who is avowedly an unbeliever in the historic tradition, let him
listen to a scholar of the highest eminence, who, after proving himself
a master in Old Testament criticism, set himself to specialize on the
New. Says Wellhausen: "The Gospel of Mark, in its entirety, lacks the
character of history." [18] And he makes good his judgment in detail:--


    Names of persons are rare: even Jairus is not named in [codex]
    D. Among the dramatis personæ it is only Jesus who distinctively
    speaks and acts; the antagonists provoke him; the disciples are
    only figures in the background. But of what he lived by, how he
    dwelt, ate, and drank, bore himself with his companions, nothing
    is vouchsafed. It is told that he taught in the synagogue on the
    Sabbath, but no notion is given of the how; we get only something
    of what he said outside the synagogue, usually through a special
    incident which elicits it. The normal things are never related,
    only the extraordinary.... The scantiness of the tradition is
    remarkable. [19]

    The local connection of the events, the itinerary, leaves as
    much to be desired as the chronological; seldom is the transit
    indicated in the change of scene. Single incidents are often
    set forth in a lively way, and this without any unreal or merely
    rhetorical devices, but they are only anecdotally related, rari
    nantes in gurgite vasto. They do not amount to material for a life
    of Jesus. And one never gets the impression that an attempt had
    been made among those who had eaten and drunk with him to give
    others a notion of his personality. [20]


Wellhausen, it is true, finds suggestions of a real and commanding
personality; but they are very scanty, the only concrete detail
being the watching the people as they drop their offerings into
the collecting-chest! "Passionate moral sensibility distinguishes
him. He gives way to divine feeling in anger against the oppressors
of the people and in sympathy with the lowly." But here too there
is qualification:--


    But in Mark this motive for miracles seldom comes out. They are
    meant to be mainly displays of the Messiah's power. Mark does
    not write de vita et moribus Jesu: he has not the aim of making
    his person distinguishable, or even intelligible. It is lost for
    him in the divine vocation; he means to show that Jesus is the
    Christ. [21]


Then we have a significant balancing between the perception that Mark
is not history, and that, after all, it is practically all there is:--


    Already the oral tradition which he found had been condensed
    under the influence of the standpoint from which he set out. He
    is silent on this and that which he can omit as being known to
    his readers--for instance, the names of the parents of Jesus
    (!). Nevertheless, he has left little that is properly historical
    for his successors to glean after him; and what they know in
    addition is of doubtful worth....

    Why is not something more, and something more trustworthy,
    reported of the intercourse of the Master with his disciples? It
    would rather seem that the narrative tradition in Mark did not
    come directly from the intimates of Jesus. It has on the whole
    a somewhat rude and demotic cast, as if it had previously by a
    long circulation in the mouth of the people come to the rough
    and drastic style in which it lies before us.... Mark took up
    what the tradition carried to him.


Such is the outcome of a close examination by an original scholar who
takes for granted the historicity of Jesus. It is a poor support to
a pretence of finding a lifelike narrative.

If the reader under Mr. Sinclair's tutelage will at this point vary his
study somewhat (at the cost of a few extra hours) by reading samples
of quite primitive folk-lore--say the Hottentot Fables and Tales
collected by Dr. Bleek, in which the characters are mostly, but not
always, animals; or some of the fairy tales in Gill's Myths and Songs
of the South Pacific--and then proceed to the tale of Tom Tit Tot,
as given by Mr. Edward Clodd in the dialect of East Anglia, he will
perhaps begin to realize that unsophisticated narrators not only can
but frequently do give certain touches of quasi-reality to "episodes"
which no civilized reader can suppose to have been real. In particular
he will find in the vivacious Tom Tit Tot an amount of "the freedom and
variety of life" in comparison with which the archaic stiffness and
bareness of the Gospel narrative is as dumb-show beside drama. And
if he will next pay some attention to the narrative of Homer, in
which Zeus and Hêrê are so much more life-like than a multitude of
the human personages of the epic, and then turn to see how Plutarch
writes professed biography, some of it absolutely mythical, but all
of it on a documentary basis of some kind, he will perhaps begin
to suspect that Mr. Sinclair has not even perceived the nature of
the problem on which he pronounces, and so is not in a position to
"consider" it at all. Plutarch is nearly as circumstantial about
Theseus and Herakles and Romulus as about Solon. But when he has real
biographical material to go upon as to real personages he gives us a
"freedom and variety of life" which is as far as the poles asunder
from the hieratic figures of the Christian Gospel. Take his Fabius
Maximus. After the pedigree, with its due touch of myth, we read:--


    His own personal nickname was Verrucosus, because he had a little
    wart growing on his upper lip. The name of Ovicula, signifying
    sheep, was also given him while yet a child, because of his slow
    and gentle disposition. He was quiet and silent, very cautious in
    taking part in children's games, and learned his lessons slowly
    and with difficulty, which, combined with his easy obliging ways
    with his comrades, made those who did not know him think that he
    was dull and stupid. Few there were who could discern, hidden in
    the depths of his soul, his glorious and lion-like character.


This is biography, accurate or otherwise. Take again the Life of
Pericles, where after the brief account of parentage, with the item
of the mother's dream, we get this:--


    His body was symmetrical, but his head was long out of all
    proportion; for which reason in nearly all his statues he is
    represented wearing a helmet; as the sculptors did not wish,
    I suppose, to reproach him with this blemish.... Most writers
    tell us that his tutor in music was Damon, whose name they say
    should be pronounced with the first syllable short. Aristotle,
    however, says that he studied under Pythocleides. This Damon,
    it seems, was a sophist of the highest order....


The "biographer" who so satisfies Mr. Sinclair's sense of actuality has
not one word of this kind to say of the youth, upbringing, birthplace,
or appearance of the Teacher, who for him was either God or Supreme
Man. Seeking for the alleged "freedom and variety of life" in the
narrative, we go on to read:--


    And they go into Capernaum; and straightway on the sabbath day he
    entered into the synagogue and taught. And they were astonished
    at his teaching: for he taught them as having authority, and not
    as the scribes. And straightway there was in their synagogue a
    man with an unclean spirit--


and straightway we are back in the miraculous. Mr. Joseph McCabe, who
in his excellent book on the Sources of the Morality of the Gospels
avows that he holds by the belief in a historical Jesus, though unable
to assign to him with confidence any one utterance in the record,
fatally anticipates Mr. Sinclair by remarking that "If the inquirer
will try the simple and interesting experiment of eliminating from the
Gospel of Mark all the episodes which essentially involve miracle,
he will find the remainder of the narrative amazingly paltry." To
which verdict does the independent reader begin to incline? Thus the
"episodes" continue, after three paragraphs of the miraculous:--


    And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose up and went
    out, and departed into a desert place, and there prayed. And Simon
    and they that were with him followed after him; and they found him,
    and say unto him, All are seeking thee. And he saith unto them, Let
    us go elsewhere into the next towns, that I may preach there also;
    for to this end came I forth. And he went into their synagogues
    throughout all Galilee, preaching and casting out devils.


It would seem sufficient to say that Mr. Sinclair, with his "freedom
and variety of life," is incapable of critical reflection upon what he
reads. In the opening chapter we have not a single touch of actuality;
the three meaningless and valueless touches of detail ("a great
while before day" is the third) serve only to reveal the absolute
deficit of biographical knowledge. We have reiterated statements that
there was teaching, and not a syllable of what was taught. The only
utterances recorded in the chapter are parts of the miracle-episodes,
which we are supposed to ignore. Let us then consider the critic's
further asseveration:--


    It will be observed that certain distinct traits appear in
    the central figure, and that these traits are not merely those
    of the conventional religious hero, but the more simple human
    touches of anger, pity, indignation, despondency, exultation;
    these scattered touches, each so vivid, fuse into a natural and
    intelligible whole. The Jesus of Mark is a real man, who moves
    and speaks and feels like a man (!)--"a creature not too bright
    or good for human nature's daily food"--


a notable variation from the more familiar thesis of the "sublime" and
"unique" figure of current polemic. Looking for the alleged details,
we find Jesus calling the fifth disciple: "He saith unto him, Follow
me. And he arose and followed him"--another touch of "freedom and
variety." Then, after a series of Messianic utterances, including
a pronouncement against Sabbatarianism of the extremer sort, comes
the story of the healing of the withered hand, with its indignant
allocution to "them" in the synagogue: "Is it lawful on the sabbath
day to do good, or to do harm, to save a life or to kill?" Here, in a
miracle story, we have an intelligible protest against Sabbatarianism:
is it the protest or the indignation that vouches for the actuality
of the protesting figure? Nay, if we are to elide the miraculous,
how are we to let the allocution stand?

These protests against Sabbatarianism, as it happens, are the
first approximations to actuality in the document; and as such they
raise questions of which the "instinctive" school appear to have
no glimpse, but which we shall later have to consider closely. In
the present connection, it may suffice to ask the question: Was
anti-Sabbatarianism, or was it not, the first concrete issue raised by
the alleged Teacher? In the case put, is it likely to have been? Were
the miraculous healing of disease, and the necessity of feeding the
disciples, with the corollary that the Son of Man was Lord of the
Sabbath, salient features in a popular gospel of repentance in view of
the coming of the Kingdom of God? If so, it is in flat negation of the
insistence on the maintenance of the law in the Sermon on the Mount
(Mt. v, 17-20), which thus becomes for us a later imposition on the
cultus of a purely Judaic principle, in antagonism to the other. That
is to say, a movement which began with anti-Sabbatarianism was after a
time joined or directed by Sabbatarian Judaists, for whom the complete
apparatus of the law was vital. If, on the other hand, recognizing
that anti-Sabbatarianism, in the terms of the case, was not likely to
be a primary element in the new teaching, that its first obtrusion in
the alleged earliest Gospel is in an expressly Messianic deliverance,
and its second in a miracle-story, we proceed to "strike out" both
items upon Mr. Sinclair's ostensible principles, we are deprived of
the first touch of "indignation" and "anger" which would otherwise
serve to support his very simple thesis.







CHAPTER V

SCHMIEDEL AND DEROGATORY MYTH


From this point onwards, every step in the investigation will be found
to convict the Unitarian thesis of absolute nullity. It is indeed,
on the face of it, an ignorant pronouncement. The characteristics
of "anger, pity, indignation, despondency, exultation," are all
present in the myth of Herakles, of whom Diodorus Siculus, expressly
distinguishing between mythology and history, declares (i, 2) that
"by the confession of all, during his whole life he freely undertook
great and continual labours and dangers, in order that by doing
good to the race of men he might win immortal fame." Herakles was,
in fact, a Saviour who "went about doing good." [22] The historicity
of Herakles is not on that score accepted by instructed men; though I
have known divinity students no less contemptuous over the description
of the cognate Samson saga as a sun myth than is Mr. Sinclair over
the denial of the historicity of Jesus.

So common a feature of a hundred myths, indeed, is the set of
characteristics founded on, that we may at once come to the basis
of his argument, a blundering reiteration of the famous thesis of
Professor Schmiedel, who is the sole source of Mr. Sinclair's latent
erudition. "The line of inquiry here suggested," he explains, "has
been worked out in a pamphlet of Schmiedel, which will be found in
the Fellowship library." But the dialectic which broadly avails for
the Bible class will not serve their instructor here. The essence
of the argument which Professor Schmiedel urges with scholarlike
sobriety is thus put by Mr. Sinclair with the extravagance natural
to his species:--


    Many [compare Schmiedel!] of the stories represent him [Jesus] in a
    light which, from the point of view of conventional hero-worship,
    is even derogatory; his friends come to seize him as a madman;
    he is estranged from his own mother; he can do no mighty work in
    the unsympathetic atmosphere of his own native place.


The traditionalist is here unconsciously substituting a new and
different argument for the first. Hitherto the thesis has been
that of the "vividness" of the record, the "human touches," the
"speaking and feeling like a real man," the "freedom and variety of
life." Apparently he has had a shadow of misgiving over these simple
criteria. If, indeed, he had given an hour to the perusal of Albert
Kalthoff's Rise of Christianity, instead of proceeding to vilipend a
literature of which he had read nothing, he would have learned that
his preliminary thesis is there anticipated and demolished. Kalthoff
meets it by the simple observation that the books of Ruth and Jonah
supply "human touches" and "freedom and variety of life" to a far
greater degree than does the Gospel story considered as a life of
Jesus; though practically all scholars are now agreed that both of
the former books are deliberately planned fictions, or early "novels
with a purpose." Ruth is skilfully framed to contend against the
Jewish bigotry of race; and Jonah to substitute a humane ideal for
the ferocious one embalmed in so much of the sacred literature. Yet
so "vividly" are the central personages portrayed that down till the
other day all the generations of Christendom, educated and uneducated
alike, accepted them unquestioningly as real records, whatever might
be thought by the judicious few of the miracle element in Jonah.

It is thus ostensibly quite expedient to substitute for the simple
thesis of "vividness" in regard to the second Gospel the quite
different argument that some of the details exclude the notion that
"the author" regarded Jesus as a supernatural person. But this thesis
instantly involves the defence in fresh trouble, besides breaking down
utterly on its own merits. In the early chapters of Mark, Jesus is
emphatically presented as a supernormal person--the deity's "beloved
Son," "the Holy One of God," who has the divine power of forgiving
sins, is "lord even of the sabbath," and is hailed by the defeated
spirits of evil as "the Son of God," and the "Son of the Most High
God." Either the conception of Jesus in Mark vi is compatible with all
this or it is not. If not, the case collapses, for the "derogatory"
episode must be at once branded as an interpolation. And if it
be argued that even as an interpolation it testifies at once to a
non-supernaturalist view of the Founder's function and a real knowledge
of his life and actions, we have only to give a list of more or less
mythical names in rebuttal. To claim that the episode in Mark vi, 1-6,
is "derogatory from the point of view of conventional hero-worship,"
and therefore presumptively historical, is to ignore alike Jewish and
Gentile hero-worship. In the Old Testament Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob,
Judah, Moses, Aaron, Samson, David, and Solomon are all successively
placed in "derogatory" positions; and the Pagan hero-worshippers of
antiquity are equally with the Jewish recalcitrant to Mr. Sinclair's
conviction of what they ought to do.

Professor Schmiedel is aware, though Mr. Sinclair apparently is
not, that Herakles in the myth is repeatedly placed in "derogatory"
positions, and is not only seized as a madman but actually driven
mad. The reader who will further extend Mr. Sinclair's brief curriculum
to a perusal of the Bacchæ of Euripides will find that the God,
who in another story is temporarily driven mad by Juno, is there
subjected to even greater indignities than those so triumphantly
specified by our hierologist. Herakles and Dionysos, we may be told,
were only demigods, not Gods. But Professor Schmiedel's thesis is that
for the writer of Mark or of his original document Jesus was only a
holy man. On the other hand--to say nothing of the myths of Zeus and
Hêrê, Arês and Aphroditê, Hephaistos and Poseidon--Apollo, certainly
a God for the framers of his myth, is there actually represented
as being banished from heaven and living in a state of servitude to
Admetus for nine years. A God, then, could be conceived in civilized
antiquity as undergoing many and serious indignities. These simple
à priori arguments are apt to miscarry even in the hands of careful
and scrupulous scholars like Professor Schmiedel, who have failed to
realize that no amount of textual scholarship can suffice to settle
problems which in their very nature involve fundamental issues of
anthropology, mythology, and hierology. As Professor Schmiedel is never
guilty of browbeating, I make no disparagement of his solid work on the
score that he has not taken account of these fields in his argument;
but when his untenable thesis is brandished by men who have neither his
form of scholarship nor any other, it is apt to incur summary handling.

Elsewhere I have examined Professor Schmiedel's thesis in detail. [23]
Here it may suffice to point out (1) as aforesaid, that the argument
from derogatory treatment is not in the least a proof that in an
ancient narrative a personage is not regarded as superhuman; (2) that
a suffering Messiah was expressly formulated in Jewish literature
in the pre-Christian period; [24] and (3) that there are extremely
strong grounds for inferring purposive invention--of that naïf kind
which marks the whole mass of early hierology--in the very episodes
upon which he founds. The first concrete details of the Founder's
propaganda in Mark, as we have seen, exhibit him as clashing with
the Judaic environment. In later episodes he clashes with it yet
further. The "derogatory" episodes exhibit him as clashing with his
personal environment, his family and kin, concerning whom there has
been no mention whatever at the outset, where we should expect to find
it. All this is in line with the anti-Judaic element of the Gospel. If
at early stages in the larger Jesuine movement there were reasons
why the Founder should be represented as detaching himself from the
Mosaic law; as being misunderstood and deserted by his disciples; and
as disparaging even the listening Jewish multitude (concerning whom
Mark, iv, 10 sq., makes him say that "unto them that are without,
all things are done in parables, that seeing they may see and not
perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest haply they
should turn again, and it should be forgiven them"), is there anything
unlikely in his being inventively represented as meeting antipathetic
treatment from his family? [25] At a time when so-called "brothers of
the Lord" ostensibly claimed authority in the Judæo-Gentile community,
an invented tale of original domestic hostility to the Teacher would
be as likely as the presence of authorities so styled is unlikely
on the assumption that the story in Mark was all along current. The
very fact that allusions to the family of the Lord suddenly appear in
a record which had introduced him as a heavenly messenger, without
mention of home or kindred or preparation, tells wholly against the
originality of the later details, which in the case of the naming of
"the carpenter" and his mother have a polemic purpose. [26]







CHAPTER VI

THE VISIONARY EVANGEL


All this applies, of course, to the "Primitive Gospel" held to
underlie all of the synoptics, Mark included--a datum which reduces
to comparative unimportance the question of priority among these. As
collected by the school of Bernhard Weiss, [27] the primitive Gospel,
like Mark, set out with a non-historical introduction of the Messiah
to be baptized by John. It then gives the temptation myth in full;
and immediately afterwards the Teacher is made to address to disciples
(who have not previously been mentioned or in any way accounted for)
the Sermon on the Mount, with variations, and without any mount. In
this place we have the uncompromising insistence on the Mosaic law;
and soon, after some miracles of healing and some Messianic discourses,
including the liturgical "Come unto me all ye that labour," we have
the Sabbatarian question raised on the miracle of the healing of the
man with the dropsy, but without the argument from the Davidic eating
of the shewbread. [28]

There is no more of the colour of history here than in Mark: so
obviously is it wanting in both that the really considerate exegetes
are driven to explain that history was not the object in either
writing. In both "the twelve" are suddenly sent--in the case of Mark,
after a list of twelve had been inserted without any reference to
the first specified five; in the reconstructed "primitive" document
without any list whatever--to preach the blank gospel, "The kingdom of
God is at hand," with menaces for the non-recipient, the allocutions
to Chorazin and Bethsaida being here made part of the instructions
to the apostles.

What, then, are the disciples supposed to have preached? What had
the Teacher preached as an evangel of "the Kingdom"? The record has
expressly represented that his parables were incomprehensible to his
own disciples; and when they ask for an explanation they are told
that the parables are expressly meant to be unintelligible, but that
to them an explanation is vouchsafed. It is to the effect that "the
seed is the word." What word? The "Kingdom"? The mystic allegories
on that head are avowedly not for the multitude: they could not have
been. Yet those allegories are the sole explanations ever afforded in
the Gospels of the formula of "the Kingdom" which was to be the purport
of the evangel of the apostles to the multitude. They themselves had
failed to understand the parables; and they were forbidden to convey
the explanation. What, then, had they to convey?

And that issue raises another. Why were there disciples at
all? Disciples are understood to be prepared as participants in
or propagandists of somebody's teaching--a lore either exoteric
or esoteric. But no intelligible view has ever been given of the
purpose of the Gospel Jesus in creating his group of Twelve. If we
ask what he taught them, the only answer given by the documents is:
(1) Casting out devils; (2) The meaning of parables which were meant
to be unintelligible to the people: that is, either sheer thaumaturgy
or a teaching which was never to be passed on. On the economic life
of the group not one gleam of light is cast. Judas carried a "bag,"
but as to whence came its contents there is no hint. The whole concept
hangs in the air, a baseless dream. The myth-makers have not even
tried to make it plausible.

The problems thus raised are not only not faced by the orthodox
exegetes; they are not seen by them. They take the most laudable
pains to ascertain what the primitive Gospel was like, and, having
settled it to the satisfaction of a certain number, they rest from
their labours. Yet we are only at the beginning of the main, the
historic problem, from which Baur recalled Strauss to the documentary,
with the virtual promise that its solution would clear up the other.

A "higher" criticism than that so-called, it is clear, must set about
the task; and its first conclusion, I suggest, must be that there
never was any Christian evangel by the Christ and the Twelve. These
allegories of the Kingdom are framed to conceal the fact that the
gospel-makers had no evangel to describe; though it may be claimed
as a proof of their forensic simplicity that they actually represent
the Founder as vetoing all popular explanation of the very formula
which they say he sent his disciples to preach to the populace. An
idea of the Kingdom of God, it may be argued, was already current
among the Jews: the documents assert that that was the theme of the
Baptist. Precisely, but was the evangel of Jesus then simply the
evangel of John, which it was to supersede? And was the evangel of
John only the old evangel, preached by Pharisees and others from
the time of the Maccabees onwards? [29] Whatever it was, what is
the meaning of the repeated Gospel declaration that the nature of
the Kingdom must not be explained to the people? There is only one
inference. The story of the sending forth of the twelve is as plainly
mythical as is Luke's story of the sending forth of the seventy,
which even the orthodox exegetes abandon as a "symmetrical" myth;
though they retain the allocution embodied in it. What is in theory
the supreme episode in the early propaganda of the cult is found to
have neither historical content nor moral significance. Not only
is there not a word of explanation of the formula of the evangel,
there is not a word of description of the apostles' experience,
but simply the usual negation of knowledge:--


    And the disciples returned and told him all that they had done,
    saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy
    name. And he said, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven;
    behold I have given you power to tread on serpents and scorpions
    and over all the power of the enemy; notwithstanding, in this
    rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you, but rejoice
    because your names are written in heaven.... (Luke x, 17-20, with
    "the disciples" for "the seventy").


And this is history, or what the early Christian leaders thought fit
to put in place of history, for Christian edification. The disciples,
be it observed, had exorcized in the name of Jesus where Jesus had
never been, a detail accepted by the faithful unsuspectingly, and
temporized over no less unsuspectingly by the "liberal" school, but
serving for the critical student to raise the question: Was there,
then, an older cult of a Jesus-God in Palestine? Leaving that problem
for the present, we can but note that the report in effect tells
that there was no evangel to preach. To any reflecting mind, it is
the utterance of men who had nothing to relate, but are inserting an
empty framework, wholly mythical, in a void past. Themselves ruled by
the crudest superstition, they do but make the Divine Teacher talk on
their own level, babbling of Satan falling from heaven, and of treading
on serpents. All the labours of the generations of laborious scholars
who have striven to get to the foundations of their documents have
resulted in a pastiche which only the more clearly reveals the total
absence of a historic basis such as the Gospels more circumstantially
suggest. In the end we have neither history nor biography, but an
absolutely enigmatic evangel, set in a miscellany of miracles and of
discourses which are but devices to disguise the fact that there had
been no original evangel to preach. If the early church had any creed,
it was not this. It originated in a rite, not in an evangel.

One hypothesis might, indeed, be hazarded to save the possibility of
an actual evangel by the Founder. If, taking him to be historical,
we assume him to have preached a political doctrine subversive
of the Roman rule, and to have thereby met his death, we could
understand that, in a later period in which the writers connected
with the movement were much concerned to conciliate the Romans, it
might have been felt expedient, and indeed imperative, to suppress
the facts. They would not specify the evangel, because they dared
not. On this view the Founder was a Messiah of the ordinary Jewish
type, aiming at the restoration of the Jewish State. But such a Jesus
would not be the "Jesus of the Gospels" at all. He would merely be
a personage of the same (common) name, who in no way answered to
the Gospel figure, but had been wholly denaturalized to make him a
cult-centre. On this hypothesis there has been no escape from the
"myth-theory," but merely a restatement of it. A Jesus put to death
by the Romans as a rebel Mahdi refuses to compose with the Teacher
who sends out his apostles to preach his evangel; who proclaims,
if anything, a purely spiritual kingdom; and who is put to death as
seeking to subvert the Jewish faith, the Roman governor giving only
a passive and reluctant assent. On the political hypothesis, as on
the myth-theory here put, the whole Gospel narrative of the Tragedy
which establishes the cult remains mythical. We have but to proceed,
then, with the analysis which reveals the manner of its composition
and of its inclusion in the record.

It is admitted by the reconstructors that the primitive Gospel had
no conclusion, telling nothing of Last Supper, Agony, Betrayal,
Crucifixion, or Resurrection. It did not even name Judas as the
betrayer. And they explain that it was because of lacking these
details that it passed out of use, superseded by the Gospels which
gave them. As if the conclusion, were it compiled in the same fashion,
could not have been added to the original document, which ex hypothesi
had the prestige of priority. Why the composer of the original did not
add the required chapters is a question to which we get only the most
futile answers, as is natural when the exegetes have not critically
scrutinized the later matter. Thus even Mr. Jolley is content to say:--


    The omission of any account of the Passion or Resurrection is
    natural enough in a writing primarily intended for the Christians
    of Judæa, some of them witnesses of the Crucifixion, and all,
    probably, familiar with the incidents of the Saviour's Judæan
    ministry, as well as with the events preceding and following
    the Passion, especially when we remember that the author had no
    intention (!) of writing a biography. [30]


Here the alleged fact that only some had seen the Crucifixion,
while all knew all about the ministry, is given as a reason why the
ministry should be described and the Crucifixion left undescribed
and unmentioned!

The problem thus impossibly disposed of is really of capital
importance. Any complete solution must remain hypothetical in the
nature of the case; but at least we are bound to recognize that
the Primitive Gospel may have had a different conclusion, as it may
further have contained matter not preserved in the synoptics. That
might well be a sufficient ground for its abandonment by the Christian
community; and some such suspicion simply cannot be excluded, though
it cannot be proved. But whatever we may surmise as to what may have
been in the original document, we can offer a decisive reason why the
existing conclusion should not have been part of it. That conclusion
is primarily extraneous to any gospel, and is not originally a piece
of narrative at all.

Bernhard Weiss ascribes to Mark the original narrative of the closing
events, making Matthew a simple copyist--a matter of no ultimate
importance, seeing that it is the same impossible and unhistorical
narrative in both documents. Like all the other professional exegetes,
Bernhard Weiss and his school have failed to discern that the document
reveals not only that it is not an original narrative at all, but that
it could not possibly be a narrative. "It was only in the history
of the passion," writes Weiss, "that Mark could give a somewhat
connected account partly of what he himself had seen and partly of
what he gathered from those who witnessed the crucifixion." [31]
Whether "passion" here includes the Agony in the Garden is not clear:
as it is expressly distinguished from the crucifixion, which Mark
by implication had not seen, the meaning remains obscure. Like the
ordinary traditionalists, Weiss assumes that "after Peter's death Mark
began to note down his recollections of what the Apostle had told him
of the acts and discourses of Jesus." Supposing this to include the
record of the night of the Betrayal, what were Mark's possible sources
for the description of the Agony, with its prayers, its entrances and
exits, when the only disciples present are alleged to have been asleep?

It is the inconceivable omission of the exegetes to face such problems
that forces us finally to insist on their serious inadequacy in this
regard. They laboriously conduct an investigation up to the point at
which it leaves us, more certainly than ever, facing the incredible,
and there they leave it. Their work is done. That the story of the
Last Night was never framed as a narrative, but is primarily a drama,
which the Gospel simply transcribes, is manifest in every section,
and is definitely proved by the verses (Mk. xiv, 41-42) in which,
without an intervening exit, Jesus says: "Sleep on now, and take
your rest.... Arise, let us be going." The moment the document is
realized to be a transcript of a drama it becomes clear that the
"Sleep on now, and take your rest" should be inserted before the
otherwise speechless exit in verse 40, where the text says that
"they wist not what to answer him." Two divergent speeches have by
an oversight in transcription been fused into one.

That the story of the tragedy is a separate composition has been
partly perceived by critics of different schools without drawing any
elucidating inference. Wellhausen pronounces that the Passion cannot
be excepted from the verdict that Mark as a whole lacks the character
of history. "Nothing is motived and explained by preliminaries." [32]
But "we learn as much about the week in Jerusalem as about the year in
Galilee." [33] And the Rev. Mr. Wright gets further, though following
a wrong track:--


    The very fact that S. Mark devotes six chapters out of sixteen
    to events which took place in the precincts of Jerusalem makes
    me suspicious. Important though the passion was, it seems to
    be narrated at undue length. The proportions of the history are
    destroyed. [34]


Precisely. The story of the events in Jerusalem is no proper part
either of a primary document or of the first or second Gospel. In its
detail it has no congruity with the scanty and incoherent narrative
of Mark. It is of another provenance, although, as Wellhausen notes,
quite as unhistorical as the rest. The non-historicity of the entire
action is as plain as in the case of any episode in the Gospels. Judas
is paid to betray a man who could easily have been arrested without
any process of betrayal; and the conducting of the trial immediately
upon the arrest, throughout the night, the very witnesses being
"sought for" in the darkness, is plain fiction, explicable only by
the dramatic obligation to continuous action.







CHAPTER VII

THE ALLEGED CONSENSUS OF SCHOLARS


Such is the historical impasse at which open-minded students find
themselves when they would finally frame a reasoned conception of
the origin of the Christian religion. The documentary analysis having
yielded results which absolutely repel the accepted tradition, however
denuded of supernaturalism, we are driven to seek a solution which
shall be compatible with the data. And some of us, after spending
many years in shaping a sequence which should retain the figure of
the Founder and his twelve disciples, have found ourselves forced
step by step to the conclusion that these are all alike products
of myth, intelligible and explicable only as such. And when, in
absolute loyalty to all the clues, with no foregone conclusions to
support--unless the rejection of supernaturalism be counted such--we
tentatively frame for ourselves a hypothesis of a remote origin in
a sacramental cult of human sacrifice, with a probable Jesus-God
for its centre in Palestine, we are not surprised at being met by
the kind of explosion that has met every step in the disintegration
of traditional beliefs from Copernicus to Darwin. The compendious
Mr. Sinclair, who makes no pretension to have read any of the works
setting forth the new theories, thus describes them:--


    The arguments of Baconians and mythomaniacs are alike made up of
    the merest blunders as to fact and the sheerest misunderstanding
    of the meaning of facts. Grotesque etymologies, [35] arbitrary
    and tasteless emendations of texts, forced parallels, unrestrained
    license of conjecture, the setting of conjecture above reasonably
    established fact, chains of argument in which every link is of
    straw, appeals to anti-theological bias and to the miserable
    egotism which sees heroes with the eyes of the valet--these are
    some of the formidable "evidences" in deference to which we are
    asked to reverse the verdicts of tradition, scholarship, and common
    sense. They have never imposed on anyone fairly conversant with
    the facts. Those who have not such knowledge may either simply
    appeal to the authority of scholars, OR, BETTER STILL, SUPPORT that
    authority by exercizing their own IMAGINATION AND COMMON SENSE.


That tirade has seemed to me worth preserving. It is perhaps a monition
to scholars, whose function is something higher than vituperation, to
note how their inadequacies are sought to be eked out by zeal without
either scholarship or judgment, and, finally, without intellectual
sincerity. The publicist who alternately tells the unread that they
ought to accept the verdict of scholars, and that it is "better still"
to "support" that verdict by unaided "imagination and common sense,"
has given us once for all his moral measure.

Dismissing him as having served his turn in illustrating
compendiously the temper which survives in Unitarian as in Trinitarian
traditionalism, we may conclude this preliminary survey with a comment
on the proposition that we should take the "verdict of scholars." It
has been put by men, themselves scholars in other fields, whom to
bracket with Mr. Sinclair would be an impertinence. But I have always
been puzzled by their attitude. They proceed upon three assumptions,
which are all alike delusions. The first is that there is a consensus
of scholars on the details of this problem. The second is that the
professional scholars have a command of a quite recondite knowledge as
regards the central issue. The third is that there is such a thing as
professional expertise in the diagnosis of Gods, Demigods, and real
Founders in religious history. Once more, the nature of the problem
has not been realized.

Let us take first the case of a real scholar in the strictest sense of
the term, Professor Gustaf Dalman, of Leipzig, author of "The Words
of Jesus, considered in the light of Post-Biblical Jewish Writings
and the Aramaic Language." [36] To me, Professor Dalman appears to be
an expert of high competence, alike in Hebrew and Aramaic--a double
qualification possessed by very few of those to whose "verdict" we
are told to bow. By his account few previous experts in the same field
have escaped bad miscarriages, as a handful of excerpts will show:--


    M. Friedmann, Onkelos und Akylas, 1896, still holds fast to the
    traditional opinion that even Ezra had an Aramaic version of the
    Tora. In this he is mistaken.

    H. Laible, in Dalman-Laible's Jesus Christ in the Talmud, etc.,
    incorrectly refers it [the phrase "bastard of a wedded wife"] to
    Jesus. The discussion treats merely of the definition of the term
    "bastard."

    Adequate proof for all three parts of this assertion [A. Neubauer's
    as to the use of Aramaic in parts of Palestine] is awanting.

    F. Blass ... characterizes as Aramaisms idioms which in some cases
    are equally good Hebraisms, and in others are pure Hebraisms and
    not Aramaisms at all.

    P. W. Schmiedel ... does not succeed in reaching any really
    tenable separation of Aramaisms and Hebraisms.

    Resch entirely abandons the region of what is linguistically
    admissible.... And the statement of the same writer that this
    ... "belongs very specially to the epic style of narration in
    the Old Testament" is incomprehensible.

    The idioms discussed above ... show at once the incorrectness of
    Schmiedel's contention that the narrative style of the Gospels
    and the Acts is the best witness of the Greek that was spoken
    among the Jews. The fact is that the narrative sections of the
    Synoptists have more Hebrew features than the discourses of Jesus
    communicated by them.

    Such a book as Wünsche's Neue Beiträge, by reason of quite
    superficial and inaccurate assertions and faulty translations,
    must even be characterized as directly misleading and confusing.

    The want of due precaution in the use made of [the Jerusalem
    Targums of the Pentateuch] by J. T. Marshall is one of the things
    which were bound to render his efforts to reproduce the "Aramaic
    Gospel" a failure.

    Harnack supposes it to be an ancient Jewish conception that
    "everything of genuine value which successively appears upon earth
    has its existence in heaven--i.e., it exists with God--meaning in
    the cognition of God, and therefore really." But this idea must be
    pronounced thoroughly un-Jewish, at all events un-Palestinian,
    although the medieval Kabbala certainly harbours notions of
    this sort.

    Holtzmann ... thereby evinces merely his own ignorance of Jewish
    legal processes.

    Especially must his [R. H. Charles's] attempts at retranslation
    [of the Assumptio Mosis] be pronounced almost throughout a failure.

    [Even in the pertinent observations of Wellhausen and Nestle]
    we feel the absence of a careful separation of Hebrew and Aramaic
    possibilities.... He [Wellhausen] must be reminded that the Jewish
    literature to this day is still mainly composed in Hebrew.


These may suffice to illustrate the point. Few of the other experts
escape Dalman's Ithuriel spear; and as he frankly confesses past
blunders of his own, it is not to be doubted that some of the others
have returned his thrusts. [37] Supposing then that this body of
experts, so many of them deep in Aramaic, so opposed to each other
on so many issues clearly within the field of their special studies,
were to unite in affirming the historicity of the Gospel Jesus,
what would their consensus signify? Simply that they were agreed in
affirming the unknown, the improbable, and the unprovable, while they
disputed over the known. Their special studies do not give them the
slightest special authority to pronounce upon such an issue. It is
one of historic inference upon a mass of data which they among them
have made common property so far as it was not so already, in the main
documents and in previous literature. Dalman, who takes for granted
the historicity of Jesus and apparently of the tradition in general,
pronounces (p. 9) that


    the actual discourses of Jesus in no way give the impression that
    He had grown up in rural solitude and seclusion. It is true only
    that He, like the Galileans generally in that region, would have
    little contact with literary erudition.


If Professor Dalman cannot see that the proposition in the first
sentence is extremely disturbing to the traditional belief in its
Unitarian form, and that the second is a mere petitio principii which
cannot save the situation, other people can see it. His scholarship
gives him no "eminent domain" over logic; and it does not require a
knowledge of Aramaic to detect the weakness of his reasoning. Fifty
experts in Aramaic carry no weight for a thinking man on such a
non-linguistic issue; and he who defers to them as if they did is
but throwing away his birthright. When again Dalman writes (p. 60)
that "Peter must have appeared (Acts x, 24) from a very early date
as a preacher in the Greek language," he again raises an insoluble
problem for the traditionalists of all schools, and his scholarly
status is quite irrelevant to that.

When, yet again, he writes (p. 71) that "what is firmly established is
only the fact that Jesus spoke in Aramaic to the Jews," his mastery
of Aramaic has nothing to do with the case. He is merely taking for
granted the historicity of the main tradition; and until he faces the
problems he has ignored (having, as he may fairly claim, been occupied
with others), and repelled the criticisms which that tradition incurs,
his vote on the unconsidered issue has no more value to a rational
judgment than any other. I have seldom read a scholarly treatise more
satisfying than his within its special field, or more provocative of
astonishment at the extent to which specialism can close men's eyes
to the problems which overlap or underlie theirs.

And that is the consideration that has to be realized by those
who talk of scholarship (meaning simply what is called New
Testament scholarship) settling a historical problem which turns
upon anthropology, mythology, hierology, psychology, and literary
and historical science in general. On these sides the scholars in
question, "Wir Gelehrten vom Fach," as the German specialists call
themselves in the German manner, are not experts at all, not even
amateurs, inasmuch as they have never even realized that those other
sciences are involved. They have fallen into the rôle of the pedant,
properly so-called, who presumes to regulate life by inapplicable
knowledge. And even those who are wholly free of this presumptuous
pedantry, the sober, courteous, and sane scholars like Professor
Schmiedel, whose candour enables him to contribute a preface to
such a book as Professor W. B. Smith's Der vorchristliche Jesus,
to whose thesis he does not assent--even these, as we have seen,
can fail to realize the scope of the problem to the discussion of
which they have contributed.

Professor Schmiedel's careful argument from "derogatory" episodes
in the gospel of Mark, be it repeated, is not merely inconclusive;
it elicits a rebuttal which turns it into a defeat. Inadequate even
on the textual side, it is wholly fallacious on the hierological
and the mythological; and no more than the ordinary conservative
polemic does it recognize the sociological problem involved. For
those who seek to study history comprehensively and comprehendingly,
the residuum of the conservative case is a blank incredibility. Even
Dalman, after the closest linguistic and literary analysis, has
left the meaning of "the Kingdom of God" a conundrum; [38] and the
conservative case finally consists in asserting that Christianity
as a public movement arose in the simple announcement of that
conundrum--the mere utterance of the formula--throughout Palestine
by a body of twelve apostles, who for the rest "cast out devils,"
as instructed by their Teacher. The "scholarship" which contentedly
rests facing that vacuous conception is a scholarship not qualified
finally to handle a great historical problem as such. It conducts
itself exactly as did Biblical scholarship so long in face of the
revelations of geology, and as did Hebrew scholarship so long over
the problem of the Tabernacle in the wilderness.

Deeply learned men, in the latter case, went on for generations
solemnly re-writing history in the terms of the re-arranged documents,
when all the while the history was historic myth--perceptible as such
to a Zulu who had lived in a desert. And when the Zulu's teacher proved
the case by simple arithmetic, he met at the hands alike of pedants
and of pietists a volley of malignant vituperation, the "religious"
expert Maurice excelling many of the most orthodox in the virulence of
his scorn; while the pontifical Arnold, from the Olympian height of his
amateurism, severely lectured Colenso for not having written in Latin.

Until the scholars and the amateurs alike renounce their own
presumption, their thrice stultified airs of finality, their estimate
of their prejudice and their personal equation as a revelation from
within, and their sacerdotal conviction that their science is the
science of every case, they will have to be unkindly reminded that they
are but blunderers like other men, that in their own specialties they
convict each other of errors without number, and that the only path
to truth is that of the eternal free play and clash of all manner of
criticism. It is an exceptionally candid orthodox scholar who writes:
"It is a law of the human mind that combating error is the best way to
advance knowledge. They who have never joined in controversy have no
firm grasp of truth. Hateful and unchristian as theological disputes
are apt to become, they have this merit, that they open our eyes." [39]
Let the conservative disputants then be content to put their theses
and their arguments like other men, to meet argument with argument
when they can, and to hold their peace when they have nothing better
to add than boasts and declamation.

Before the end of the nineteenth century the very school which we
are asked to regard as endowed with quasi-papal powers in matters of
historical criticism was declared by one of its leading representatives
in Germany to have been on a wrong track for fifty years. In the
words of Professor Blass:--


    Professor Harnack, in his most recent publication, even while
    stating that now the tide has turned, and that theology, after
    having strayed in the darkness and led others into darkness (see
    Matt. xv, 14) for about fifty years, has now got a better insight
    into things, and has come to a truer appreciation of the real
    trustworthiness of tradition, still puts Mark's gospel between 65
    and 70 A.D., Matthew's between 70 and 75, but Luke's much later,
    about 78-93. [40]


And Blass, who dates Luke 56 or 60, goes on:--


    Has that confessedly untrustworthy guide of laymen, scientific
    theology, after so many errors committed during fifty years,
    now of a sudden become a trustworthy one? Or have we good reason
    to mistrust it as much, or even more than we had before? In
    ordinary life no sane person would follow a guide who confessed
    to having grossly misled him during the whole former part of
    the journey. Evidently that guide was either utterly ignorant
    of the way, or he had some views and aims of his own, of which
    the traveller was unaware, and he cannot be assumed now to have
    acquired a full knowledge, or to have laid those views and aims
    wholly aside.


Thus does one Gelehrter vom Fach estimate the pretensions of
a whole sanhedrim of another Fach. Blass is a philologist;
and incidentally we have seen how another philologist, Dalman,
handles him in that capacity. Elsewhere, after another fling at the
theological scholars--with a salvo of praise to Harnack for his Lukas
der Arzt--and a comment on the fashion in which every German critic
swears by his master, he avows that "we classical philologists ... have
seen similar follies among ourselves in fair number." [41] It is most
true; and the philologists are as much divided as the theologians.

Of course, it is not by philology that Blass has reached the standpoint
from which he can contemn the professional theologians. He is really
on the same ground as they, making the same primary assumptions of
historicity: the only difference is that while they, following the
same historical tradition, yet scruple to accept prophecies as having
been actually made at the time assigned to them, and feel bound to date
the prophecy after the event, the consistent philologist recognizes no
such obligation in the present instance, and puts a rather adroit but
very unscholarly argument on the subject, with which we shall have to
deal later. But for those to whom the exact dating of the Gospels is a
subsidiary problem, his argument has only a subsidiary interest; and
the fact that he unquestioningly agrees with his flouted theological
colleagues in accepting the historicity of Jesus gives no importance
to their consensus.

If, as he says, they are in the mass utterly untrustworthy guides on
any historical issue (an extravagance to which, as a layman, I do
not subscribe), their agreement can be of no value to him where he
and they coincide. After telling Harnack that men who have confessedly
been astray for fifty years have no right to expect to be listened to,
he makes much of Harnack's support as to the historicity of the Acts--a
course which will not impose upon thoughtful readers. All the while,
of course, Professor Blass is simply applying a revised historical
criticism to a single issue or set of issues, and even if he chance
to be right on these he has set up no new historical method. No more
than the others has he recognized the central historical problem;
and he must be well aware that that reversion to tradition announced
by Harnack, and at this point acquiesced in by him, cannot for a
moment be maintained as a general critical principle in regard to
the New Testament any more than in regard to the Old. All that he can
claim is that many theologians have confessedly blundered seriously
on historical problems. But that is quite enough to justify us in
admonishing the mere middlemen and the experts alike to change the
tone of absurd assurance with which they meet further innovations of
historical theory.







CHAPTER VIII

CONSERVATIVE POSITIONS


It is only just to confess that the conservatives are already
learning to employ some prudential expedients. Met by the
challenge to their own nakedly untenable positions, and offered a
constructive hypothesis, diversely elaborated from various quarters,
they mostly evade the discussion at nearly every point where
the impossible tradition is concretely confronted by a thinkable
substitute, and spend themselves over the remoter issues of universal
mythology. Habitually misrepresenting every argument from comparative
mythology as an assertion of a historical sequence in the compared
data, they expatiate over questions of etymology, and are loud in
their outcry over a suggestion that a given historical sequence may
be surmised from data more or less obscure. But to the question how
the evangel could possibly have begun as the record represents, or
how the consummation could possibly have taken place as described,
they either attempt no answer whatever or offer answers which are worse
than evasions. One professional disputant, dealing with the proposition
that such a judicial and police procedure as the systematic search
for witnesses described in the Gospel story of the Trial could not
take place by night, "when an Eastern city is as a city of the dead,"
did not scruple to say that the thesis amounted to saying that in an
Eastern city nothing could happen by night. This controversialist is
an instructor of youth, and claims to be an instructed scholar. And
his is the only answer that I have seen to the challenge with which
it professes to deal. Loisy agrees that the challenge cannot be met.

To the hypothesis that there was a pre-Christian cult of a Jesus-God,
the traditionalist--above all, the Unitarian, who seems to feel
the pinch here most acutely--retorts with a volley of indignant
contempt. He can see no sign of any such cult. In the mind's eye he
can see, as a historic process, twelve Apostles creating a Christian
community by simply crying aloud that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,
excommunicating for the after life those who will not listen, and all
the while assiduously casting out devils. His records baldly tell him
that this happened; and "we believe in baptism because we have seen
it done." But whereas, in the nature of the case, the reconstruction
of the real historic process must be by tentative inference from a
variety of data which for the most part the records as a matter of
course obscured, he makes loud play with the simple fact that the
records lack the required clear mention, and brands as "unsupported
conjecture" the theorem offered in place of the plain untruth with
which he has so long been satisfied.

In his own sifted and "primitive" records we have the narration of
the carrying of the Divine Man to a height ("pinnacle of the temple"
only in the supposed primitive Gospel) by Satan for purposes of
temptation. For a mythologist this myth easily falls into line as a
variant of the series of Pan and the young Zeus at the altar on the
mountain top, Pan and Apollo competing on the top of Mount Tmolus,
Apollo and Marsyas, all deriving from the Babylonian figures of the
Goat-God (Capricorn) and the Sun-God on the Mountain of the World,
representing the starting of the sun on his yearly course. That
assignment explains at once the Pagan myths and the Christian,
which is thus shown to have borrowed from the myth material of
the Greco-Oriental world in an early documentary stage. Challenged
to evade that solution, he mentions only the Pan-Zeus story, says
nothing of the series of variants or of the Babylonian original,
and replies that he is


    unable to trace any real and fundamental connection between the
    stories. In the Buddhist narrative [which had been cited as an
    analogue [42]] the "temptation" to satisfy the cravings of hunger,
    the promptings of ambition, and the doubts as to the overruling
    Providence of God, are all wanting. In the Roman story, too, Pan,
    as representing in satyr-form the lower and animal propensities
    of man, is a very different being to the Hebrew Satan; moreover,
    there is no tempting of Jupiter, as there is of Jesus. Jupiter,
    likewise, is wholly a god; Jesus is a sorely bested Man, although
    divine. There is, in short, not the least affinity between any
    of these narratives beyond the general idea of trial. [43]


And this figures as a refutation. For our traditionalist, comparative
mythology does not and cannot exist; for him there can be no
fundamental connection between any two nominal myths unless they are
absolutely identical in all their details; and the goat-footed Pan and
the goat-footed Satan (certainly descended from the Goat-God Azazel)
are merely "very different beings," though Satan for the later Jews
and Jesuists actually corresponded to Pan (who is not a mere satyr
for the Greeks) not only in being the spirit of concupiscence [44]
but in being "the God of this world," as the Gospel myth in effect
shows him to be. And this exhibition of ignorance of every principle of
mythology passes for "scholarship," and will be duly so certificated
by Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who undertakes to preside in that
department, as in politics, with about equal qualifications.

By way of constructive solution of the problem we have from the
apologist this:--


    If a conjecture may be hazarded here, we should be inclined to
    say that the Christian narrative largely presents, in picturesque
    and symbolic form, the subjective experiences and doubts of
    Jesus--whether these were of internal origin merely, or were
    suggested externally by some malignant spiritual being--as to His
    capacities and power for the great work which He had undertaken.


The thoroughly orthodox, it would appear, must still be catered for,
albeit only by the concession of the possibility of "some" malignant
spiritual being, which seems a gratuitous slight to the canonical
Satan, whose moral dignity had immediately before been acclaimed. But,
after expressly insisting on the elements of "temptation" and
"ambition" in the story, with the apparent implication that the young
Teacher may have had a passing ambition to become a world conqueror,
our exegete, in conclusion, collapses to the position of the German
exegetes who, the other day, were still debating on the spiritual
interpretation of what they could not perceive to be a pure myth
of art.

At this stage of enlightenment we hear allusions to "psychology,"
though I have not yet met with any explicit pretence that the
traditionalist scholars know anything about psychology that is not
known to the rest of us. In any case, the suggestion may be hazarded
that the first researches they make into psychology might usefully
be directed to their own, which is a distressing illustration of the
survival of the intellectual methods of the ancient apologists for
the Vedas and for the mythology of the Greeks.

A severe scrutiny of psychic processes is indeed highly necessary in
this as in so many other disputes in which the affections wrestle with
the reason. Such a process of analysis gives us the real causation
of the testimony borne by Mill, which is so widely typical. For
non-religious as for religious minds the conception they form of the
Gospel Jesus is commonly a resultant of a few dominant impressions,
varying in each case but all cognate. Jesus is figured first to the
recipient spirit as a blessed babe in the arms of an idealized mother,
and last as dying on the cross, cruelly tortured for no crime--the
supreme example of the martyred philanthropist. In the interim he
figures as commanding his dull disciples to "Suffer little children to
come unto me," and as "going about doing good," all the while preaching
forgiveness and brotherly love. No knowledge of the impossibility of
most of the particularized cures will withhold even instructed men
from soothing their sensibilities by crediting the favourite figure
with some vague "healing power" and talking of the possibilities of
"faith healing," even as they loosely accredit some elevating quality,
some practical purport, to the visionary evangel, so absolutely
mythical that the Gospel writers can tell us not a word of its matter.

Even Professor Schmiedel, expressly applying the tests of naturalism,
negates those tests at the outset by taking for granted the Teacher's
possession of unquantified "psychic" healing powers, though the
narratives twenty times tell of cures which cannot possibly be
described as cases of faith-healing. [45] If for the sane inquirer
the absolute miracle stories are false, and these stories are false,
by what right does he allot evidential value to wholesale allegations
of multitudinous cures from the same sources? By the sole right
of his predilections. The measure which he metes to the thousand
prodigies in Livy is never meted to those of the Gospels. For him,
these are different things, being seen in another atmosphere.

In men concerned to be intellectually law-abiding, these dialectic
divagations are decently veiled; by others they are passionately
flaunted. No recollection of the anger of Plato at those who denied
that the Sun and Planets were divine and blessed beings can withhold
certain professed scholars from the same angry folly in a similar
predicament. But even where theological animus has been in a manner
disciplined by the long professional battle over documentary problems,
the sheer lack of logical challenge on fundamental issues has left
all the disputants alike, down till the other day, taking for granted
data to which they had no critical right.

Throughout the whole debate, even in the case of scholars who profess
to be loyal to induction, we find that there is a presupposition
upon which induction has no effect. Bernhard Weiss, quoting from
Holtzmann the profoundly subversive proposition that "Christianity
has been 'book-learning' from the beginning," in reply "can only say,
God be praised that it is not so." Yet the real effect of his own
research is to show us much--to show that there was no oral evangel,
that the formula of "the kingdom of heaven" is but a phrase to fill
a blank. Even candid inquirers who see the difficulty, like Samuel
Davidson, leave it unsolved. Says Davidson:--


    When we try to form a correct view of Jesus's utterances
    regarding this Kingdom of God, we find they have much vagueness
    and ambiguity. Their differences also in the Synoptic Gospels
    and the fourth are so apparent that the latter must be left
    out of account in any attempt to get a proper sketch of Jesus's
    hopes. His apostles and other early reporters misunderstood some
    of His sayings, making them crasser. Oral tradition marred their
    original form. This is specially the case with respect to the
    enthusiastic hopes about the kingdom He looked for. But as the
    ideal did not become actual we must rest in the great fact that
    the Christianity He introduced was the nucleus of a perfect system
    adapted to universal humanity. [46]


"We must" do no such thing. We "must" draw a licit inference. The
alleged great fact is morally a chimera, and historically a
hallucination. To admit that all the evidence collapses, and then
to posit the visionary gospel with a "must," is to abandon critical
principle. The "must" is simply the eternal presupposition. And the
choice of the sincere student "must" be between that negation of
science and a fresh scientific search, from which the presupposition,
as such, is excluded. If it can reappear as a licit conclusion,
so be it. But it has never yet so arisen.







CHAPTER IX

BLASS AND FLINDERS PETRIE


A very interesting attempt to bring the synoptic problem to a new
critical test has latterly been made by Dr. Flinders Petrie in his
work, The Growth of the Gospels as shown by Structural Criticism
(1910). His starting point is the likelihood that logia, analogous
to the non-canonical fragments discovered in recent years, were the
original material from which the Gospels were built up. The hypothesis
is prima facie quite legitimate, there being nothing to repel it. As he
contends, there is now evidence that writing was in much more common
use in some periods of antiquity than scholars had formerly supposed;
and scraps of writing by non-scholarly persons, he argues, may have
been widely current in the environment with which we are concerned. All
the while he is founding on data from the Egypt of the third century
for a Palestinian environment of the first; and he is obliged to stress
the point that Matthew the tax-gatherer was a "professional scribe,"
while his argument runs that Matthew used the detached jottings of
other people, not his own. But let us follow out his thesis:--


    We cannot doubt [writes Dr. Petrie] that such was the course
    of growth when we look at the logia. Those collections of brief
    sayings could hardly have come into existence if full narratives
    and sufficient standards of information in the Gospels were already
    circulating. They belong essentially to a preparatory age, when
    records were in course of compilation. But, once written out,
    they naturally survived side by side with the Gospels, which had
    only used a portion of their material. [47]


It is not quite clear whether Dr. Petrie meant here to claim not only
that the so-called Logia Iesou published in 1897 and 1904 are anterior
to and independent of the Gospels (though found only in third-century
MSS.), but that they are on the same footing of credibility with the
Gospels. This, however, seems inevitably to follow from his position,
though it appears to suggest to him no difficulty about the general
historicity of the Gospel story, which he too takes for granted. Let
us then note the problems raised.

A main feature of Dr. Petrie's inquiry is that, following Professor
Blass, he insists on making the predictions of the fall of Jerusalem
part of the early documentary matter collected in the "Nucleus" which
for him is the equivalent of Weiss's Primitive Gospel. The argument of
Blass [48] is drawn from the case of Savonarola, who in 1496 predicted
that Rome would be sacked, and that horses would be stabled in the
churches, as actually happened in the year 1527. If such a prophecy
could be made and fulfilled in one case, urges Blass, it might be
in another; hence there can be no rigorous application of the canon,
Omne vaticinium post eventum, which has been relied on by the modern
school of critical theologians. Dr. Petrie appears to have made no
investigation of his own, being content to quote and support Blass;
and the point is well worth critical consideration.

Let us premise that scientific criticism, which has no concern with
Unitarian predilections, stands quite impartially towards the question
of Gospel dates. The modern tendency to carry down those dates, either
for the whole or for any parts of the Gospels, towards or into the
second century, is originally part of the general "liberal" inclination
to put a Man in place of a God, though some believers in the God
acquiesce as to the lateness of the act of writing. Those who have
carried on the movement have always presupposed the general historicity
of the Teacher, and have been concerned, however unconsciously, to find
a historical solution which saved that presupposition. The rational
critic, making only the naturalist presupposition, is committed to
no set of documentary dates. And he is not at all committed to the
denial that an inductive historic prediction, as distinguished from
a supernaturalist prophecy, may be made and fulfilled. Many have
been. Much has been said of the "marvellous prescience" of Burke in
predicting that the anarchy of the French Revolution would end in
a tyranny. He was in fact merely inferring, as he well might, that
what had happened in the history of ancient Rome and in the history
of England would happen in France. By a similar historical method
several French and other writers in the eighteenth century reached
the forecast of the revolt of the American colonies from Britain
without getting any credit for divine inspiration. And so, perhaps,
might Savonarola at the end of the fifteenth century predict a sack
of Rome, and a Jew in the first century a sack of Jerusalem.

But let us see what Savonarola actually did. He was, so to speak, a
professional prophet, and while he predicted not only a sack of Rome
but his own death by violence, he also, by the admission of sympathetic
biographers, put forth many vaticinations of an entirely fantastic
character. Here again he might very well have a Jewish prototype. For
us the first question is, What did he actually predict in history,
and how and why did he predict it? In 1494 he seems to have predicted
the French invasion which took place in that year. Villari asserts
that he did so in the sermons he preached in Lent, but admits that
"it is impossible to ascertain the precise nature" of the sermons in
question. [49] Father Lucas goes further, and points out that there
is no trace in them of the alleged prophecy [50] which Savonarola
in his Compendium Revelationum (1495) claims to have made but does
not date. Villari further admits that the sermons of that year are
so badly reported


    as to have lost almost every characteristic of Savonarola's
    style. Their reporter, unable to keep pace with the preacher's
    words, only jotted down rough and fragmentary notes. These were
    afterwards translated into barbarous dog-Latin--by way of giving
    them a more literary form--and published in Venice. For this
    reason Quétif and some other writers entertained doubts of their
    authenticity. [51]


Villari nevertheless is satisfied of it on internal grounds, and we may
accept his estimate. The main allegation is that in 1494 Savonarola,
who had for years been preaching that national sin would elicit
divine chastisement,


    in those Lenten discourses, and also in some others, foretold the
    coming of a new Cyrus, who would march through Italy in triumph,
    without encountering any obstacles, and without breaking a single
    lance. We find numerous records of these predictions, and the
    terrors excited by them, in the historians and biographers of
    the period; and Fra Benedetto reports his master's words in the
    following verses [thus literally translated]:--


        Soon shalt thou see each tyrant overthrown,
        And all Italy shalt thou see vanquished,
        To her shame, disgrace, and harm.
        Thou, Rome, shalt soon be captured:
        I see the blade of wrath come upon thee;
        The time is short, each day flies past:

        My Lord will renovate the Church,
        And convert every barbarian people.
        There will be but one fold and one shepherd.
        But first Italy will have to mourn,
        And so much of her blood will be shed
        That her people shall everywhere be thinned.


Here there is obvious confusion, apart from the fact that the predicted
regeneration and unification of the church never took place. The
invader is to do no fighting, and yet so much blood will be shed
that everywhere the people of Italy will be thinned. Are we, then,
to believe that the "Cyrus" prediction was made at the same time? Is
there not ground for suspicion that it was interpolated post eventum,
in the Latin report? The only alternative solution seems to be that
Villari or the Italian compiler has mixed prophecies of different
years. In his sermon of November 1, 1494, Savonarola speaks of the
French invasion as the "scourge" he had predicted [52]--an odd way of
speaking of one promised before as "the Lord's anointed," even though
the French host is said to be "led by the Lord." In any case his own
claim to have predicted of "Cyrus" is unsupported by evidence, and,
even if accepted, does not involve a date earlier than 1493-4. [53]

To predict the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France in Lent
of 1494, or even late in 1493, was easy enough. [54] The invasion had
been fully prepared, and was expected, even as was the Armada in the
England of 1588. Savonarola was very likely to have inside knowledge of
the scheme, and the Pope positively charged him with having helped to
engineer it. Florence in effect received Charles as a friend. There
had been, further, abundant discussion of the expedition both in
France and Italy long before it set out. Guicciardini tells that wise
Frenchmen were very apprehensive about it, and that Ferdinand of Naples
reckoned that it must fail. Fail it finally did. Savonarola might
even predict that the invader would not be resisted, for there was no
force ready in Italy to repel that led by Charles, with its great train
of artillery. It is an extreme oversight of Villari's to allege [55]
that in the autumn, "unexpectedly as a thunderclap from a clear sky,
came the news that a flood of foreign soldiery was pouring down from
the Alps to the conquest of Italy.... All felt taken unawares." This
assertion is completely exploded by the record of Guicciardini, and
no historian will now endorse it. Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan,
had incited Charles to the invasion; the preparations had been open
and extensive; and they had been abundantly discussed both in France
and Italy. [56] The statement that "the Friar alone had foreseen the
future" is absolute myth.

The fact remains that the invasion was not resisted, and that Rome
was "captured" in the sense of being entered by Charles, who did no
military damage and marched out again. But when Charles proceeded to
withdraw from Italy, having effected nothing, a battle was fought
and won by him. It was two years later that Savonarola, acting on
his standing doctrine that sin in high places must elicit divine
vengeance, resumed his predictions of disaster to Rome, whose Pope
was his enemy. As it happened, 1496 was again a year of expected
invasions. Charles, now the ally of Florence, was announced to be
preparing for a second inroad, and the apprehensive Sforza invited and
furthered the intervention of the emperor Maximilian as he had before
invited Charles. Predictions were again to be expected; at Bologna
at least one was actually made; and the prophet, one Raffaele da
Firenzuola, was tortured and banished. [57] Charles gave up his plan,
but Maximilian came, albeit with a small force, and was welcomed by
the Pisans.

It was before the coming of Maximilian [58] that Savonarola resumed
his prophecy of the coming scourge in a series of sermons, in one of
which he announces that Italy will be overwhelmed because she is full
of sanguinary deeds; that Rome will be besieged and trampled down;
and that because her churches have been full of harlots they will be
made "stables for horses and swine, the which will be less displeasing
to God than seeing them made haunts of prostitutes.... Then, O Italy,
trouble after trouble shall befall thee; troubles of war after famine,
troubles of pestilence after war." Again, in another sermon: "There
will not be enough men left to bury the dead; nor means enough to dig
graves.... The dead will be heaped in carts and on horses; they will
be piled up and burnt.... And the people shall be so thinned that few
shall remain." [59] At the same time he repeatedly predicted his own
death by violence.

On the latter head he had abundant reason for his forecast. On the
former it is very certain that he was not thinking of something
that was not to happen for thirty years. Again and again he assured
his hearers and his correspondents that his predictions were to be
fulfilled "in our time." Towards the end of 1496 he described himself
as "The servant of Christ Jesus, sent by him to the city of Florence to
announce the great scourge which is to come upon Italy, and especially
upon Rome, and which is to extend itself over all the world in our
days and quickly." [60] In 1497, in a letter to Lodovico Pittorio,
chancellor to d'Este, after speaking of the Lord's prediction of the
fall of Jerusalem, he writes: "Great tribulations are always [i.e. in
the Scriptures] predicted many years before they come. Yet I do not
say that the tribulations which I have foretold will be so long in
coming; nay, they will come soon; indeed I say that the tribulation
has already commenced." [61]

Yet again, in 1498, he claims in a sermon that "a part has come to
pass," noting that "in Rome one has lost a son"--a reference to the
murder of the Duke of Gandia, son of the Pope; and adding that "you
have seen who has died here, and I could tell you, an I would, who
is in hell"--supposed to be a reference to Bernardo del Nero. [62]
All this was in terms of Savonarola's theological and Biblical
conception of things, the ruling political philosophy of his age,
as of many before. Wickedness and injustice, fraud and oppression,
were dominant in high places, and God must of necessity punish, in
the fashion in which he was constantly described as doing so in the
Sacred Books, from the Deluge downwards. In Savonarola's view the
cup of Rome's abominations was full, and punishment had been earned
by the men then living, in particular by Pope Alexander.

Within two years Savonarola had been put to death, after many tortures;
and Alexander died in 1503 (not by poison, as the tradition goes)
without having seen the predicted desolation. It was under the more
respectable of the two Medicean Popes that Rome was twice sacked in
1527 by the forces of Charles V; and though there had been infinite
slaughter and pestilence in Italy, the regeneration and reunion of
Christendom predicted by Savonarola did not follow. When no reform
whatever had followed on the French invasion he had explained that his
prediction in that case was subject to conditions. Yet he announced
that his prophecy of the conversion of the Turks was unconditional,
declaring at the close of the Compendium Revelationum that it would
be fulfilled in fifteen years, and assuring his hearers in 1495 that
some of them would live to see the fulfilment. [63]







CHAPTER X

THE SAVONAROLA FALLACY


Our business, of course, is not to expose the prophetic miscarriages
of Savonarola, but simply to make clear what manner of thing his
prophesying was. [64] It was an instance of a kind of vaticination
as old as Troy and Jerusalem, which had gone on in Christendom for
centuries. Long before his day religious men had predicted wars,
pestilences, famines, and the conversion of the Turks. [65] The wars
and plagues and famines were very safe prognostications: they came
in every decade. And when we come to his alleged prediction of the
sack of Rome we realize immediately, not only that the one detail of
coincidence is wholly fortuitous, but that, like his predecessors,
he was simply predicting a return of common evils already experienced
a hundred times. [66]

The argument of Blass and others on this topic, confidently accepted
and endorsed by Dr. Petrie, works out as sheer mystification. They
lay special stress on the fact that in the sack of 1527 horses were
stabled in the churches. It is likely enough: the same thing has been
done a thousand times in the wars of Christendom. But the argument
has been very negligently conducted. In the first place, though he
tells of infinitely worse things, such as the wholesale violation
of women, including nuns, the historian Guicciardini does not give
the detail about the horses. That occurs in the document Il Sacco di
Roma, ascribed latterly to his brother Luigi, which was first printed
in 1664. Still, let us assume that the printing was faithful. If an
interpolator had meant to vindicate Savonarola he would presumably
have noted that the prophet specified not only horses but pigs,
whereas the narrative says nothing of the latter. We are thus left
with the item of the stabling of horses in the churches.

Here we have to note that as regards the main event Savonarola is
predicting a thing that had repeatedly happened in Catholic times, and
that as regards the minor details he is speaking with his eye on Jewish
history. It was not the mere presence of horses and pigs in churches
that he meant to stress, but the defilement that they brought. In
the case of the Jewish Temple the "abomination of desolation" had
been understood to include the defiling of the altar with swine's
flesh. [67] This, in all likelihood, was the origin of Savonarola's
prediction as to the bringing of pigs into the sanctuary at Rome,
which, as we have seen, was not fulfilled.

But there was nothing new about a Catholic sack of Rome. The city had
been hideously sacked and in large part destroyed under Gregory VII
(1084) by Robert Guiscard, the Pope's ally, after having been captured
without sacking by the German Emperor. It just missed being sacked by
Frederick II in 1239. In 1413 it was captured by Ladislaus of Naples,
who gave all Florentine property in the city to pillage. No question
of heresy arose in these episodes; nor did the forces of the Church
itself blench at either sack or sacrilege. Faenza was foully sacked in
1376 by Hawkwood, called in for its defence by the bishop of Ostia;
and in 1377 the same condottiere massacred the population of Cesena
under the express and continuous orders of Robert, Cardinal of Geneva,
the papal legate, afterwards the "anti-pope" Clement VII. No more
bestial massacre took place in the pandemonium of the fourteenth
century; and the sacking of the churches and the violation of the
nuns was on the scale of the bloodshed. [68] In view of the endless
atrocities of the wars of the Church and of Christendom there is a
certain ripe absurdity about the exegetical comments on the subject
of the sack of Rome in 1527. Says Blass:--


    Especially remarkable is this, that he [Savonarola] extends the
    devastation to the churches of Rome, which in any ordinary capture
    (!) by a Catholic army would have been spared, but in this case
    were not at all respected, because a great part of the conquering
    army consisted of German Lutherans, for whom the Roman Catholic
    churches were rather objects of hatred and contempt than of
    veneration. Now Lutheranism did not exist in 1496. [69]


And Dr. Petrie adds: "Such a detail seemed excessively unlikely before
the rise of Lutheranism; yet it came to pass." [70] It is interesting
to realize the notions held by scholars of such standing in regard
to European history after a century signalized by so much historic
research; and to find that such an ignorant proposition as that just
cited should for Dr. Petrie "explode the dogma" that really fulfilled
prophecies [71] have been framed post eventum.

For centuries before Luther the desecration of churches was a regular
feature in every Christian war of any extent. It is arguable, perhaps,
that in the sack of Rome the German troops might have made a special
display of that mania for ordure as an instrument of war of which we
have had such circumstantial accounts from Belgium of late, and of
which similar details have been preserved in the domestic history
of Paris since 1870. [72] But the stabling of horses in churches
was a familiar act of warfare, often explicable by the simple fact
that the horses of an army could not otherwise be accommodated. The
clerical chroniclers mention such things when they can tell a tale
of the divine vengeance. Thus Spelman tells how "Richard, Robert,
and Anesgot, sons of William Sorenge, in the time of William Duke
of Normandy, wasting the country about Say, invaded the church of
St. Gervase, lodging their soldiers there, and making it a stable
for their horses. God deferred not the revenge." [73] In 1098 "the
Earl of Shrewsbury made a dog-kennel of the church of St. Fridank,
laying his hounds in it for the night-time; but in the morning he
found them mad." [74] The putting of cattle in churches was sometimes a
necessity of defensive warfare. In 1358, according to Jean de Venette,
many unfortified villages in France made citadels of their churches to
defend themselves from brigands; [75] and in such cases the animals
would be taken indoors. Fine churches, on the other hand, were often
burned in the wars of that period. [76] And when the Turks invaded
Friuli in 1477 and 1478, burning and ravaging, [77] they were likely
enough to have stabled their horses in churches. It was probably of
the Turks that Savonarola was thinking, predicting as he so constantly
did their speedy conversion to Christianity.

Lutheranism can have had very little to do with the matter: the
brutality of the German Landsknechts was notorious long before Luther
was heard of. But there was nothing specially German in the matter
either. The Italian condottieri in general were "full of contempt for
all sacred things." [78] It is instructive to note that Savonarola
predicts nothing of the wholesale violation of nuns and other women
which was to take place at Rome as it had done in a hundred other
sacks of cities: he must have known that these things happened;
but the thing that appealed to his imagination was the theological
pollution resulting from putting horses and pigs in churches. He was
not predicting: he was remembering. Long before his time, besides,
Church Councils had to pass edicts against the use of churches as
barns in time of peace.

It will be remembered that his main items are slaughters, famines,
and pestilences. There was famine and pestilence in Florence when he
was prophesying in 1496; there was more in 1497; [79] and a terrible
pestilence had visited Venice during the Turkish invasions of 1477 and
1478. The preacher's description of a plague in a city is an account
of what had happened a dozen times in the history of Florence, before
and after the Plague which figures in the forefront of Boccaccio's
Decameron. Preaching from the text of Amos, he arraigns Italy and Rome
as Amos arraigns Israel and Judah; and his menaces are the menaces
of the Hebrew prophet, immeasurable slaughters, famine, pestilence,
and captivity, with the old corollary of regeneration and restoration,
in the case of Italy and the Church as in the case of Israel. And his
added detail of church desecration is at once a Biblical idea and a
familiar item from Christian history.

In the historic crusade against the Albigenses in 1209, when Béziers
was captured and every human being therein slain, seven thousand were,
by the famous order of the Papal Legate, [80] put to the sword in
the great church of St. Mary Magdalene, to which they had fled for
sanctuary; and the whole city, with its churches, was burned to the
ground. During the Hundred Years' War between England and France,
says a social historian, a cleric--


    in the rural districts of France the passage of the ravagers was
    traced by blackened ruins, by desecrated churches, by devastated
    fields, by the mutilated bodies of women and children.... Strange
    forms of disease which the chroniclers of those times sum up
    in the names of "black death," or plague, were born of hunger
    and overleapt the highest barriers ... and ran riot within the
    overcrowded cities. [81]


In the wars of Burgundy and France in the fifteenth century Catholics
habitually plundered Catholic churches. At the siege of Saint-Denis
in 1411 "the Germans, the Bretons, and the Gascons promised themselves
the pillage of the church and the treasures of the abbey." [82] Later
"the English, the Picards, and the Parisians ... entered the monastery
... pillaged the apartments of the inmates, and carried away the cups,
the utensils, all the furniture." [83] At Soissons, in 1414,


    the Germans, the Bretons, and the Gascons were as so many
    wild beasts. The Comte d'Armagnac himself could not restrain
    them. After having pillaged the houses they set upon the convents
    and the churches, where the women had taken refuge. They could
    not escape the brutality of the men of war; the holy ornaments,
    the reliquaries, all was seized without respect; the hostia,
    the bones of the martyr, trodden under foot. Never had an army
    of Christians, commanded by such great seignors and formed of so
    many noble chevaliers, committed such horrors within the memory
    of man. [84]


The historian is quite mistaken; the same horrors had been many times
enacted, and even on a greater scale. At the sack of Constantinople
by the Christian crusaders in 1204,


    the three Western bishops had strictly charged the crusaders to
    respect the churches and the persons of the clergy, the monks, and
    the nuns. They were talking to the winds. In the frantic excitement
    of victory all restraint was flung aside, and the warriors of the
    cross abandoned themselves with ferocious greed to their insatiable
    and filthy lewdness. With disgusting gestures and in shameless
    attire an abandoned woman screamed out a drunken song from the
    patriarchal chair in the church of Sancta Sophia.... Wretches blind
    with fury drained off draughts of wine from the vessels of the
    altar; the table of oblation, famed for its exquisite and costly
    workmanship, was shattered; the splendid pulpit with its silver
    ornaments utterly defaced. Mules and horses were driven into the
    churches [85] to bear away the sacred treasures; if they fell
    they were lashed and goaded till their blood streamed upon the
    pavement. While the savages were employed upon these appropriate
    tasks, the more devout were busy in ransacking the receptacles of
    holy relics and laying up a goodly store of wonder-working bones
    or teeth to be carried away to the churches of the great cities
    on the Rhine, the Loire, or the Seine. [86]


Savonarola was simply predicting for Rome, perhaps with his eye
on the Turks, such a fate as befell Constantinople at Christian
hands, regarding both as acts of divine vengeance, and expecting the
capture of Rome to come soon. He pointed to the French invasion--he
well might--as showing what was likely to happen. [87] The practice
of church desecration had never ceased in Christendom for a single
generation. In 1315 Edward Bruce, in his raid in Ireland, is reported
to have burned churches and abbeys with all the people in them,
and to have wrecked and defaced other churches, with their tombs and
monuments. During the centuries between the battle of Bannockburn and
the union of the English and Scottish crowns, churches, cathedrals,
or abbeys were plundered or burned on both sides in nearly every
great border raid. Frenchmen and Burgundians wrecked each other's
churches. In his thirteenth chapter Philip de Commines tells "Of the
storming, taking, and plundering the city of Liège; together with the
ruin and destruction of the very churches." The Duke of Burgundy set
a battalion of his guards to defend them, and killed one soldier of
those who tried to enter; but later the soldiers forced an entrance,
and all were completely plundered. "I myself," says Commines, "was
in none but the great church, but I was told so, and saw the marks
of it, for which a long time after the Pope excommunicated all such
as had any goods belonging to the churches in that city unless they
restored them; and the duke appointed certain officers to go up and
down his country to see the Pope's sentence put in execution." [88]
As late as 1524, in the course of the campaign of Henry VIII in France,
two churches were held and defended as fortresses on the French side,
and captured by the invaders; [89] and in 1487 Perugia "became a
beleaguered fortress under the absolute despotism of the Baglioni,
who used even the cathedrals as barracks." [90] Savonarola could not
have missed hearing of that.

If there was anything astonishing for Italians in the desecration of
churches at the sack of Rome, they must have had short memories. The
conspiracy of the Pazzi in 1478, in which Giuliano de' Medici was slain
during high mass in the cathedral church of Florence, had been backed
by the Pope; and the sacrilege of the planned deed was reckoned so
horrible that one of the first appointed assassins, who blenched at it,
had to be replaced by priests, who had transcended such scruples. [91]
On the capture of Brescia by the French under Gaston de Foix in 1512,
"things sacred and profane, the goods, the honour, and the life of the
inhabitants were for seven days delivered up to the greed, the lust,
and the cruelty of the soldier," only the nuns being spared. [92]
In 1526 the Milanese told the Constable Bourbon, the general of
their ally:--


    Frederick Barbarossa anciently desolated this city; his vengeance
    spared neither the inhabitants, nor the edifices, nor the
    walls; but that was nothing in comparison with the evils we now
    suffer. The barbarism of an enemy is less insupportable than the
    unjust cruelty of a friend ... our miseries have endured more
    than a month; they increase every hour; and, like the damned,
    we suffer, without hope, evils which before this time of calamity
    we believed to be beyond human endurance. [93]


Guicciardini testifies that the Spaniards of the emperor's forces
had been more cruel than the Germans, [94] violating the women and
reducing to rags the men of their own allies.







CHAPTER XI

THE LOGIA THEORY AND THE HISTORICAL TEXT


So much for the "especially remarkable" fact that churches were
desecrated in the sack of Rome in 1527, and that Savonarola should
in 1496 have predicted such things for his own day. We have seen
that his prediction was not a forecast of the event, that he had no
idea of the causation of the ultimate sack of Rome, that he really
prophesied an early event, and that he was simply announcing speedy
divine vengeance after the manner of the Hebrew and many previous
Christian prophets. What ground for argument, then, does his case
furnish for an inference as to the date of the quasi-prophecy of the
fall of Jerusalem in the third Gospel? Blass, despite his "especially
remarkable" argument, puts his case pretty low:--


    Accidentally, you will say, the event [in 1527] corresponded with
    the prophecy. But that is not my point, whether it was accidental,
    or the prophet had really foreseen the event; for in the case of
    the prophecies recorded by Luke you may raise the same controversy
    if you like. [95]


What then were the manner and the matter of the prophecy in Luke? The
Messiah expressly grounds his prediction upon the non-acceptance by
Jerusalem of him and his mission:--


    If thou [Jerusalem] hadst only known in this day the things which
    belong unto peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the
    days shall come upon thee when thine enemies shall cast up a bank
    about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side,
    and shall dash thee to the ground, and thy children within thee;
    and they shall not leave in thee one stone on another (Luke xix,
    42-44).

    But when ye see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that
    her desolation is at hand. Then let them that are in Judæa flee
    unto the mountains.... For these are days of vengeance, that all
    things which are written may be fulfilled.... And they shall fall
    by the edge of the sword, and shall be led captive into all the
    nations, and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles,
    until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. And there shall
    be signs in sun and moon and stars.... And then shall they see
    the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. But
    when these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up
    your heads; because your redemption draweth nigh (id. xxi, 20-28).


"I do not think," says Blass, "that either the former or the latter
of these foretellings is very distinct, since there are neither names
given nor peculiar circumstances indicated; only the common order of
events is described...." That will certainly not hold in respect of
the "shall not leave in thee one stone on another," or the "cast up
a bank about thee," which is a distinct specification of the Roman
siege method of 70.

But let us follow up the implication, which is that a Jewish
vaticinator, mindful of Daniel, might about the year 30 so predict
the events of the year 70, and a world of other events which never
happened, without astonishing us more than does Savonarola.

As we shall see, not only the circumstantial details but the remainder
of the prediction completely exclude the idea of fortuitous real
vaticination, even if it be argued that prophecies of quite visionary
prodigies may conceivably have been made at any date. As to the
prophecy of the fall of the temple, which is common to the three
synoptics, the Professor leaves it "out of the present discussion,"
seeing that the liberal theologians are willing to let it stand as a
prophecy ante eventum. Certainly he may well contemn such a critical
method. The prophecy as to the temple, and that in Matthew (xxiv,
3-31) and Mark (xiii, 3-27) as to the sequence of war, persecution,
dissension, false prophets, evangelization of the whole world, the
abomination of desolation in the holy place, false Christs (twice
specified), signs and wonders, and the final cosmic catastrophe--all
this is certainly on all fours, critically considered, with the
presages in Luke. But how shall rational criticism be induced to take
the whole mass of quasi-vaticination as the utterance of a wandering
thaumaturg of the year 30? It is idle for Professor Blass to explain
to us that when Luke makes Jesus say "Jerusalem shall be trodden down
of the Gentiles," with mere reminiscence of the Septuagint Daniel, and
Matthew and Mark make him speak with exact reference to Sept. Dan. ix,
end, they are citing independently from their original. Their original
may just have been the cited passage in Daniel, with no intervening
document. "It is self-evident," says the Professor, [96] "that the
real speech of Christ must have been longer than we read it now in
any Gospel." That thesis cannot be self-evident of which the subject
invites and admits a wholly different explanation; and the "must"
is a sample of the Professor's critical ethic.

Similarly Dr. Petrie assumes that there were any number of logia
current, all genuine, and that the gospel-makers simply cite from
them wherever they are found appropriate to the circumstances of
the moment. "These episodes, thus brought into prominence by the
conditions of the time, were therefore incorporated in the Nucleus,
or in the gospels which grew upon that." [97] It now behoves us to
consider that interesting development of traditionalist theory.

The Nucleus, be it explained, is Dr. Petrie's substitute for the
Primitive Gospel of the school of B. Weiss, and is constructed
by the simple and certainly quite objective process of selecting
"everything that is common to all three synoptics in a parallel
text"--that is, occurring in all three in the same order. This is
the "structural" test, and it yields a document which does not, like
the Weiss selection, end before the Last Supper, but goes on to the
Resurrection. But this Nucleus, be it noted, was practically complete
almost immediately after the Founder's death. The close "suggests
a document drawn up within a few months of the final events." [98]
How, then, Dr. Petrie can speak of logia incorporated in the Nucleus
in respect of the conditions of the time, is not very clear. By
his account the prevalent Christian idea about the year 30, during
the Ministry, "was the proper understanding of the law, which was
not yet abrogated in any particular." At this stage, accordingly,
the Sermon on the Mount would be the prominent logion. "And when
we notice how the fulfilling of the law is the main theme of the
nucleus, and how little [even] of the completed Gospels refer to
the Gentile problems, we must see how devoid of historic sense is
the anachronism of supposing the main body of the Gospels to have
originated as late as the Gentile period" [99] [i.e. 60-70!]. But
in 40-50, with the spread of the Church, as set forth in the Acts,
"the Samaritans were welcomed, and Gentile proselytes such as the
centurion Cornelius"; whereupon the suitable logia would be added to
the Gospels current. Then in 50-60, when the Gentiles began to enter
in decisive numbers, there was "a special meaning in the parable
of the Prodigal Son, and in the subjection to kings and rulers";
hence further embodiments. Then, after the fall of Jerusalem in 70,
"Christianity lost its sense of any tie to Judaism."

It will be admitted that this is a stirring change from the run of
New Testament criticism of the past seventy years. That criticism
more or less unconsciously recognized the problem set up by the
entire ignorance of gospel teaching revealed in the Pauline and other
epistles. Dr. Petrie, following Professor Blass in an unhesitating
acceptance of the narrative of the Acts, simply ignores the Pauline
problem altogether. He boldly credits the Church with a Gospel before
Paul's conversion, and, like other traditionalists, supplies Paul,
the gospel-less, with a physician, Luke, who had collected from the
scattered mass of logia more gospel than anybody else!

Thus has the pendulum swung back to the furthest extreme from that at
which men carried down the Gospel dates to accommodate the data. As
to chronology, Dr. Petrie is practically at the orthodox standpoint
of Professor Salmon. [100] An objective and ostensibly scientific
method, involving no element of personal bias or preference, is
employed to make a selection from the Gospels which shall present as
it were mathematically or statistically the earliest elements in the
synoptics. On that selection, however, there is brought to bear no
further critical principle whatever. It is assumed that it must all
come from the traditional founder, a mass of whose utterances must
have been committed by auditors to writing as they were delivered
(the power to write being held to be common in Galilee and Judea in
the first century because it was common in Egypt in the third); and a
nucleus collection of these separate documents must have been made soon
after the crucifixion, and there and then wound up. At any rate, such
a collection is yielded by selecting the groups or blocks of matter
which occur in all three synoptics in the same order; and this must
have been made about the year 30, because it is mainly occupied with
the problems of the law, and very little with "the Gentile problems"
which so soon began to come to the front. The history of the Acts is
here taken as unassailable ground, like the main Gospel record.

Two comments here at once suggest themselves. Dr. Petrie's line of
construction might with perfect congruity be employed to yield evidence
that the assumed original Teacher was mainly concerned with problems
of the law; and (2) the inferred multitude of original floating dicta
may with immense gain in plausibility be transmuted into a series
of interpolations made by different hands long after the supposed
Founder's death. For what critical right has Dr. Petrie to subsume
a store of floating Jesuine dicta which supplied the Church, in its
changing circumstances, for three or four decades, with suitable
parables and teachings to meet every new problem? If you profess to
seek a strictly impersonal principle of selection, why not apply a
strictly impersonal principle of inference from the result?

Obviously the additional logia are far more likely to have been
invented than found. Such a chronic windfall of papyri is a
sufficiently fantastic hypothesis on the face of it, in no way
justifiable from the recent discovery of a few enigmatic scraps
that had not been embodied, and suggest no community of thought with
those embodied. But even if we allow the probable existence of many
floating leaves, where is the likelihood that their sayings all came
from the same Teacher? In the terms of the hypothesis, he occupied
himself mainly with the law (unless the lost logia outbulk the saved),
while at the same time he duly provided for the Samaritans and the
Gentiles! His disciples and apostles, nonetheless, paid no attention
to these latter provisions until they found that such provisions were
really necessary to accommodate the thronging converts! All this is
very awkwardly suggestive of the Moslem saying that the Khalif Omar
"was many a time of a certain opinion, and the Koran was revealed
accordingly." [101] It would indeed have been a remarkable experience
for the evangelist to discover the logion (Mt. xvi, 17-19) as to the
founding of the Church on the rock of Peter when a Petrine claim had
to be substantiated. To the eye of Dr. Rendel Harris, an orthodox but
a candid scholar, the "rock" text suggests an adaptation of a passage
in the Odes of Solomon in which God's "rock" is the foundation not
of the Church but of the Kingdom. [102] Such probabilities Dr. Petrie
never considers.

Let us see how Dr. Petrie's method explains Matthew x, 5: "Go not
into any way of the Gentiles, and enter not into any city of the
Samaritans." It occurs only in Matthew: Luke gives the parable of
the Good Samaritan, with its flings at the lawyer and at the Jews
in general; and in John the Founder makes Samaritan converts. The
anti-Gentile text Dr. Petrie never discusses! Yet his method does not
permit him to exclude it. It belongs to his "sixth class," of "sayings
and episodes which only occur in one Gospel. These classes are almost
entirely in Matthew and Luke, and are the accretions which were added
after the Gospels had finally parted company." [103] So that after the
Gentile period had set in, Matthew, the one "professional scribe among
the apostles," somehow found a logion Iesou which suited the need
of the Church to exclude Samaritans and Gentiles, while Luke found
another which suited the need to welcome them. And yet, in respect
of its very purport, the anti-Gentile and anti-Samaritan teaching
ought, if genuine, to belong, on Dr. Petrie's general principle,
to the earliest collection of all. Such is the dilemma to which we
are led by the strictly statistical method of selection, conducted
without any higher light.







CHAPTER XII

FAILURE OF THE LOGIA THEORY


To the open-minded reader it must be already plain that, unless we
are to be led into mere chaos, there must at once be added to the
statistical test either the proviso that given sayings may for the
purposes of certain sections of the Church have been left out in
certain Gospels, or that for the purposes of certain sections they
may have been invented. And the moment such a concession is made,
the primary assumption of necessary authenticity is destroyed. If
the anti-Samaritan precept is the utterance of the Founder, the
pro-Samaritan parable is not; or else the Founder was literally all
things to all men. If either could be foisted on a gospel, anything
could be; and the futile historical argument to save the prediction
of the fall of Jerusalem--an argument proceeding, as we have seen, on
a quite uncritical view of one uninvestigated and loosely described
case--becomes doubly irrelevant. Dr. Petrie's Nucleus of triple
tradition contains the prophecy:--


    The Son of Man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto
    the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver
    him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify him;
    and the third day he shall rise again.


Is that to be salved as historical, on the pretext that Blass has
by the case of Savonarola "exploded the dogma" of omne vaticinium
post eventum, or is to be salved by the plea that Savonarola, like
Lincoln, predicted his own death at the hands of his enemies? And if
prudence perforce abandons that course, why was the vaguer prophecy
about Jerusalem sought to be salved at all? Why was not the miracle
prediction included in the Savonarola argument? Considered as a whole,
the other is not at all a bare prediction of the sacking of a city,
fortuitously fulfilled forty years after utterance: it is a Messianic
judgment, carrying a whole eschatology bound up with it. [104] And
the fact that different gospels give it differently is not to be
rationally explained by Professor Blass's device of saying that Jesus
must have said a great deal more still, and that Luke selected what
would appeal to Gentiles, while Matthew and Mark omitted what would
give pain to Jews. This conception of evangelists playing fast and
loose with the known divine oracles to suit men's susceptibilities
ought to be disturbing to any believer's moral sense; while that of
a set of propagandists inventing oracles to suit their own religious
aim puts the Gospel-makers in a line with the whole succession of
Jewish and early Christian framers of supposititious documents,
as men of their age, well-meaning, narrow, deluded, devoted.

We have come back to the fundamental issue between authoritarian
supernaturalism and free reason. If the prediction of the betrayal,
the trial, the scourging, the mocking, the crucifixion, and the
resurrection is to stand, there need be no more discussion over
miracles or anything else. "It is written," and there an end. Biblical
criticism has once more become blasphemy. If reason is to have any
access to the matter, the prediction must fall as a fiction; and if the
"exploded" argument from Savonarola is to be revived, it will have
to be restricted to the case of the prediction to which it was so
prudentially applied. But if one hopeless prophecy is to be dropped
as post eventum, it is mere irrelevance to debate over another which
is only in one selected and isolated aspect less hopeless, while as
a whole it is equally so.

Savonarola's prediction of the fall of Rome was one of many, motived
by religion and invited by the absolute fact of previous invasions,
of which the last had occurred only two years before. The one concrete
detail in which it was "fulfilled" was simply a specification of a
common feature in the warfare of the age. Another invasion of Italy
was believed to be imminent, and actually took place in the year
of the prophecy, without fulfilling that in any detail. The Gospel
prophecy is Messianic, devoid of political motivation, accompanied
by a whole apparatus of Christian eschatology, and backed by other
predictions of pure miracle. The details of the siege and the sequel
are as plainly supplied after the event as those of the betrayal,
the mockery, the scourging, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. To
hold by one set of predictions and abandon the other is mere critical
trifling. Even orthodox critics give up the early chapters of Luke
as late accretions. What kind of credit is it that is to be saved by
making him the faithful chronicler of a real prophecy?

The prediction of the fall of the temple, which is in the Nucleus
as being common in matter and order to all three synoptics, is
in no better case. On Dr. Petrie's principle, it is one of the
earliest accepted sayings--that is, it was embodied when the Jesuist
movement was pre-occupied over the law, and yet it did not disturb
that pre-occupation. On his theory, it should not have appeared in
the Nucleus at all, or in any Gospel until the occasion arose. Thus
incompatible with Dr. Petrie's own theory, it is equally incompatible
with any critical principle. This is a concrete Messianic prophecy, not
to be salved by any juggling with mere historiography. In the terms of
the case, it was made at a time when there was no politically visible
reason for making it, [105] and is not in the least to be explained as
were the vaticinations of Savonarola. On the principles of Professor
Blass, it ought to have been far too "painful" for preservation by
men adhering to the Jewish law.

It is quite thinkable, of course, that the compilers of the Gospels
may have found such quasi-predictions already committed to writing,
and merely embodied them. But that admission only carries us back to
the problem of authenticity. If any current "scrap of paper" concerning
"Jesus" or "the Lord" could thus secure canonicity, what trust is
to be put in the canon? It is recorded in the history of Islam that
Abu Daoud, who collected some half-a-million traditions concerning
Mohammed, rejected all but 4,800, which included "the authentic, those
which seem to be authentic, and those which are nearly so." [106]
This again, it may be argued, proves that false traditions do not
negate the historicity of the personage they concern. And that is
clearly true. There may conceivably have been a Teacher in whose
mouth many invented sayings were put even in his lifetime. But when we
thus come to the historicity problem, there is simply no such basis
in the Gospels as we have in the life of the confessedly "Illiterate
Prophet." The Gospel life begins and ends in miracle, and it yields
no intelligible evangel apart from that ostensibly founded on the
sacrificial death--the death, that is, of the God.

Apart from the sacramental rite, the whole body of the Teaching is
but a mass of incompatibilities, telling of a dozen standpoints,
legalism and anti-legalism, Judaism and Gentilism, Davidism and
non-Davidism, asceticism and the contrary, a meek Messiah and one
claiming to be greater than Solomon, a Teacher vetoing invective and
one freely indulging in it, a popular and unexplained Gospel for the
masses who are declared to be purposely excluded from comprehension
of that very Gospel, whereof the esoteric explanations yield nothing
that could apply to the alleged propaganda.

Even self-contradictions, it may be argued, do not negate the
authenticity of a teaching. Carlyle and Buskin abound in them;
who escapes them? Many passages in the Koran are contradicted or
abrogated by others, 225 verses being cancelled by later ones. [107]
Here indeed there is plain ground for critical doubt; and some of us
must emphatically decline to accept Muir's verdict, endorsing Von
Hammer's, that "we may upon the strongest presumption affirm that
every verse in the Koran is the genuine and unaltered composition of
Mohammed himself." [108] But even if we are satisfied that Mohammed
in his long life deliberately modified his doctrine, there is no room
for such an explanation in the case of a teacher who is never once
said to avow modification, and whose whole teaching career ostensibly
covers but a year in the synoptic record.

As the tradition stands, whether read with Unitarian or with
Trinitarian assumptions, it is a mere mosaic of enigma and
contradiction. If the Teacher never called himself the Son of
God in a miraculous sense, how came the men for whom his word was
law, and who in the terms of the thesis knew his life history and
parentage if any one did, to call him so? In Dr. Petrie's Nucleus,
the triple tradition, the Founder does assure his disciples that
"in the regeneration" he will sit in the throne of glory, and they
on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes. What room is there for
Gentilism here? And if downright miracle and miraculous prediction
alike be given up as unhistorical, on what grounds can we give credence
to this as a really delivered oracle?

On the other hand, no fundamental difficulty remains when we recognize
that the whole Gospel record is the composite result of a process of
making a life history for a God. The command of the Messiah to Peter
to keep silence as to his Messianic character is quite intelligible
as providing at once the claim by Jesus and an explanation of the
fact that no such Messianic movement was historically recorded. The
blank enigma of the early "popular" evangel is solved when we realize
that there had been no such evangel; that the cult had really grown
out of the ancient sacramental rite; that the growing movement had to
evolve a quasi-biography when the God of the rite was to be developed
into a Messiah; and that the Judaism of the old Messianic idea had
to be transmuted into universalism when the cult came to a Gentile
growth. All the contradictory texts fall (more or less clearly) into
their orders as survivals of the divergent sects formed by the changing
situation--or, let us say, of those changing needs of the widening cult
which Dr. Petrie so arbitrarily makes a ground for the mere selection
of dicta from a floating mass of written notes, but which may so much
more rationally be taken as grounds for producing the required oracle.

That there were such scattered and floating oracles, indeed, we are not
critically entitled to deny. The Judæo-Greek world was indeed familiar
with oracles of "the Lord." The Gospel Jesus is made to predict that
there would come after him many saying "I am Christ"; and while the
traditionalist must accept this as true prediction, the historian must
pronounce that various "Christs" or quasi-Christs did come. We have
some of their names and their brief secular history. [109] Each of
these men would be "the Lord" for his followers; and some of them,
surely, propounded some teaching. The Gospel ethic of reciprocity,
we know, was put in a saner form by Hillel; did he get it from the
Jesuists? Christian scholars do not claim as much. [110] There is no
Messianic item in the Gospels, apart from the lore of the sacrament,
which may not have been in the legend of any "Christ." As it happens,
the best authenticated saying of "the Lord" is one which no Christian
now accepts--the fantastic millenarian prediction given by Papias,
who had it from "the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord,"
and textually quoted by Irenæus, who is practically corroborated by
Eusebius. The latter, it is true, pronounces Papias very limited in
his comprehension; [111] but has not the same thing been said many
times of the disciples by believers in the gospel Jesus?

The logion preserved from Papias, we know, is in the Apocalypse of
Baruch, which imitated the Book of Enoch, both of which are full
of oracles of "the Lord." But this only proves that oracles passing
current in other quarters and of another source could pass current
with devout Jesuists as oracles of Jesus. The Apocalypse of Baruch is
pronounced by Canon Charles, who has so ably edited that and other
remains of Jewish literature of the same age, a "beautiful" book,
"almost the last noble utterance of Judaism before it plunged in the
dark and oppressive years that followed the destruction of Jerusalem";
a book written when "breathing thought and burning word had still
their home in Palestine, and the hand of the Jewish artist was still
master of its ancient cunning." [112] It was admittedly long more
widely current in Christian than in Jewish circles, and fell into
discredit only when it was felt to contain "an implicit polemic
against Christianity." It is to its early Christian vogue that we
owe its preservation in a Syriac translation made from the Greek:
"of the Hebrew original every line has perished, save a few still
surviving in rabbinic writings."

Who can say how many other such Jewish books may not have furnished
items for the compilers of the Gospels? The Sermon on the Mount
we know is a Judaic compilation; and the "Slavonic Enoch" contains
sets of beatitudes closely analogous to those of the Sermon. To the
traditionalist these things are matters of profound perplexity; for
the rational critic they are evidences for the naturalist conception
of the rise of Christianity.







CHAPTER XIII

RESURGENCE OF THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM


When the "selection" theory is applied to the logia actually recovered
at Oxyrhynchus it conspicuously fails to square these with the
traditionalist assumption. On Dr. Petrie's principle they were left
out of the Nucleus and Gospels alike because they met no need of the
Christian organization. That is to say, oracles of the Son of God
were simply ignored by the apostles and the organizers because they
did not serve any useful purpose. Independent criticism finds in them
plain marks of Judaism, of Gnosticism, of Christian heresy, and of a
Christism irreconcilable with the Gospel record. [113] Logion iv, iii,
a, runs: "I stood in the midst of the world, and in flesh I was seen
of them; and I found all drunken, and none found I athirst among them"
[sc. for the word]--the saying of a retrospective Christ, no longer
in the flesh, such as we find in the Gnostic Pistis Sophia and the
Odes Of Solomon. [114] On the traditionalist view this at least must
be tolerably late; what then does the "selection" argument gain from
the recovered papyri?

But it fares no better when confronted with the opening chapters
of Luke. For the Blass school these are to be dated 50-60. Already
Luke's "many" [115] had drawn up their narratives; and these, we
are to suppose, included the miracle story of the birth of John,
the Annunciation, the kinship and intercourse of Elizabeth and Mary,
the preparation of John "in the desert," a different account of the
birth at Bethlehem, the appearance of the Divine Child in the Temple,
and all the rest of it; but no mention of the flight into Egypt. We are
asked to believe that all these added narratives were current among
the faithful "from the first," but that Mark and Matthew did not see
fit to include them in their Gospels, though Matthew saw reason to
tell of the flight into Egypt, and Luke to suppress it. Whatever may
be the outcome of the "liberal" method of handling the Gospels, it
is safe to say that this will never appease the critical spirit. The
"gospel of the Infancy" thus embodied in Luke is visibly cognate with
the "apocryphal" gospels which were never allowed into the canon,
but were more or less popular in the Church. A compromise between
traditionalism and the statistical method may set up the position that
the stories were current from the first, although all fictitious;
but this involves the awkward consequence that the whole atmosphere
"from the first" is one of unrestrained invention. Would the inventors
of all these myths have any scruple about putting in the mouth of "the
Lord" any medley of teachings collected from the present and the past?

Luke inserts the episode of the mission of the seventy, with the
usual lack of time measurement, between the mission of the twelve and
the decisive visit to Jerusalem. In this narrative, the twelve bring
back no message, merely reporting "what things they had done." Their
mission is in effect made of no account: we read of more miracles,
predictions of the approaching tragedy, the Transfiguration, and a
series of episodes disparaging the disciples; and then we come upon
the mission of the seventy, who are "sent two and two before his face
into every city and place whither he himself was about to come." To the
seventy is now ascribed the joyful report which the Weiss school calmly
assign to the Primitive Gospel, and ascribe to the returning twelve,
though Matthew and Mark have no mention of it. Thus Luke is in effect
represented as connecting with a new mission story a result which he
found connected in the primitive story with the mission of the twelve,
while Matthew and Mark had seen fit to suppress the result altogether.

What gain in credibility, then, is effected by substituting the
"selection" theory for one in which the third evangelist is implicitly
represented as a framer of fiction? For Dr. Petrie, the story of the
seventy is a logion ignored by the first two Gospel-makers, presumably
as serving no purpose, albeit one of the most important items in the
history. What kind of narrators, then, were the men who passed it
over? The alternatives are equally destructive to credence: on either
view we are dealing with men who would invent anything or suppress
anything. And yet the subject of the missions lies at the core of the
historical problem. To the eye of rational criticism it is an evolving
legend. If we take Mark as the first selector or collector, we have
the twelve sent forth "by two and two" without money or supplies; with
authority over unclean spirits; and with no specified message whatever,
though the twelve are to make a solemn and minatory testimony against
those who refuse to hear them. "And they went out, and preached that
men should repent. And they cast out many devils, and anointed with
oil many that were sick, and healed them." They make no report.

In Matthew, similarly, the twelve are empowered to cast out spirits
and heal diseases, and are "sent forth" with a peremptory veto on
any visit to Samaritans or Gentiles, to "preach, saying, The kingdom
of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the
lepers, cast out devils: freely ye received, freely give." As in Mark,
they are to go unfurnished; and are to withhold their peace from the
unworthy, testifying as aforesaid. Then ensues a long discourse, with
no explanation of the kingdom of heaven, though the missioners are to
"proclaim upon the housetops" what they "hear in the ear." Then, "when
Jesus had made an end of commanding his twelve disciples, he departed
thence to teach and preach in their cities." Of the mission there is
not another word: the disciples are not even mentioned as returning.

Upon this kind of basis Luke erects a new structure. The twelve
are sent forth to exorcise, heal, and preach, unfurnished; and as
before they are to give testimony against those who will not receive
them. "And they departed, and went throughout the villages, preaching
the Gospel, and healing everywhere." "And the apostles, when they
were returned, declared unto him what things they had done." The
story is not suppressed, and it is supplied with a conclusion; but
it is on the mission of the seventy that stress is visibly laid:
they "return with joy," and are told to rejoice that their names are
written in heaven. "In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit";
and after the discourse on the Father and the Son [116] the disciples
are "privately" told that many prophets and kings had desired in vain
to see and hear what they had seen and heard.

In face of all this the methods of the Bernhard Weiss school and the
selection theory are alike invalid. They furnish no explanation. The
third Gospel is simply substituting a mission to the Gentiles for a
mission to the Jews, under cover of a story of a preparatory mission
to all the places that were to be visited by the Teacher on his way to
his death at Jerusalem. The seventy--in some MSS. seventy-two--stand
for the seventy or seventy-two peoples into whom, by Jewish tradition,
mankind was divided. The notion that a genuine logion of this kind was
all along lying ready to be used is surely fantastic. It is a planned
myth, eking out the main myth. It yields only the same Gospel of one
phrase, not meant to be understood by the hearers. But it carries in
symbol a provision for the Gentiles; and immediately upon it there
follows the story of the Good Samaritan, demonstrating that the real
tie among men is not nationality but humanity, and impeaching the
fanaticism and hypocrisy of the Jewish leaders.

Facing once more the sharp antithesis between this and the strictly
Judaic command in Matthew, we dismiss as a futility the notion that
the same teacher delivered both about the same time, and that the
pro-Gentile compiler merely "selected" one and dropped the other. The
two sayings are framed for two schools or two sects; and it is idle
to see history in either. If the deified Teacher had delivered the
first, the second would have been a daring blasphemy. They are alike
but men's counsels ascribed to "the Lord." To this conclusion we are
always driven. The starting-point of the diverging sects must be looked
for in something else than a body of oracular teaching of any kind.







CHAPTER XIV

ORTHODOXY AND THE "ORAL" HYPOTHESIS


The diverging schools of documentary "construction" being thus
alike unable to yield a coherent notion either of the process of
Gospel-making or of the beginnings of the cultus, it is not surprising
to find yet a third school of scholarly interpretation undertaking to
do better, and to build on an "oral" basis where others have vainly
built on documents. This theory, long ago predominant in Germany,
[117] is latterly represented in England by the Rev. Arthur Wright,
author of The Composition of the Gospels, a Synopsis of the Gospels,
and Some New Testament Problems.

Writing before the appearance of Dr. Petrie's treatise, Mr. Wright did
not contemplate that development of the later school which gives the
earliest possible dates for the Gospels; but we may feel sure that
he would give it small quarter. Himself essentially orthodox, and
making without question all the primary assumptions of historicity,
he dates the Epistle of James before the year 50, Paul's Epistles to
the Thessalonians in the year 52; Mark about 70; Matthew "not much"
later; Luke in 80; and John later still. [118] He is not tied to the
synoptics: when they become unmanageable he vigorously rectifies them
by the aid of the Fourth Gospel. But on his own lines he is so candid
that he can always be read with pleasure; and his arguments are well
worth consideration.

Mr. Wright's theory, in brief, is that the Gospels, one and all,
represent the late consignment to paper of matter preserved from the
first in the Christian catechetical schools, given by the apostles
and preserved by their pupils in the Rabbinical fashion. As Matthew
divides plausibly into fifty-one lessons, and Mark in the Westcott and
Hort text into forty-eight paragraphs, it is suggested that the plan in
both cases had been to attain to a set of fifty-one or fifty-two; and


    If there really was an attempt to provide every Sunday with
    a Gospel of its own, we shall understand why the formation of
    Gospel sections proceeded rapidly at first and then ceased; we
    shall understand why all our Gospels are so short and contain so
    little which is not essential; we shall understand how S. Mark's
    order became fixed. [119]


This plausible but dangerous detail, however, is not insisted on;
what is essential is the datum of long oral tradition. Orthodox
as he is, too, Mr. Wright holds that Luke i; ii; iii, 23-38, "are
comparatively late additions, which never formed part of the primitive
oral teaching." [120] Thus he can summarily get rid of a number of
incredibilities which the other schools more prudently leave to be
excised by the reader as he sees fit. But we shall find him making
a stout fight for many others.

On the "oral" theory every Church had its own tradition, [121]
"differing both in contents and wording from that of other
Churches, and in particular exhibiting much mixture and many
sayings of Christ which are not in our Gospels at all" [122]--an
interesting approximation, in effect, to the theory of scattered
leaflets. Thus is to be accounted for the endless variety in Gospel
phrasing and detail. For Mr. Wright, further, it is inconceivable
that any evangelist left out anything he knew of. "The common idea"
(before Dr. Petrie) "that they picked and selected what was specially
adapted to their readers, I most confidently reject." [123] Matthew
would gladly have given the parable of the Prodigal Son, and Luke the
story of the Syrophoenician woman, which would so well have suited
his purpose. [124] "He did not give it because he had never heard of
it." Thus, in brief, Mr. Wright posits much teaching lost even from
the oral tradition, as Dr. Petrie posits many lost leaflets.

But Mr. Wright's conception of the oral tradition, upon scrutiny,
becomes disquieting to the critical sense. In one place, discussing
Luther's estimate of the Epistle of James as an epistle of straw, he
remarks--with a great deal more truth, I fancy, than he dreams of--that
James's Epistle "is Christianity in swaddling-clothes." [125] Again,
the opening verses of John's Gospel "reveal a depth of knowledge
to which S. James never attained. Not that S. James would have
contradicted them or doubted their truth. But it is one thing to
see truth when it is set before you; it is another to set it forth
yourself. There is such a thing as latent knowledge." [126] Yet on
the same page with the swaddling-clothes passage Mr. Wright has said,
with regard to Mark's omission of the words, "Come unto me all ye
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest":--


    Was it humility that made him deliberately omit them as too good
    for so insignificant a creature as himself to record? Or was it a
    conscious or unconscious feeling that they were unsuited to his
    readers? A man with such preposterous humility was ill-equipped
    for the work of an evangelist. Readers so unchristian would not
    value a Gospel.


What now becomes of the two presentments of James and John? Both must
presumably have known most that was to be known, ex hypothesi. Yet
James has not a word of specifically Christian doctrine, and, save
in two sentences, one of which has every appearance of interpolation,
while the other is only less suspicious, no mention of Jesus. John, on
the other hand, as an apostle (whether or not the beloved one), must
on the theory have heard many of the sayings given in the synoptics,
which he does not report. Why does he not? Had he never heard of the
"Come unto me" allocution? Could he conceivably have put it aside
from a preposterous humility? If he had not heard that, had he not
heard the Sermon on the Mount, or any of the parable-solutions given
in the synoptics as specially addressed to the twelve disciples? Can
Mr. Wright, holding by the central tradition of Jesus and the twelve,
believe that John had heard none of the teachings which he does not
repeat? If, on the other hand, he admits wholesale suppression in
John's case, what becomes of the argument above cited?

It matters little that Mr. Wright credits John with evolving the
Logos doctrine out of his own profound meditation, and with having
"remoulded" the sayings of Jesus which he does give. That is a standing
device of exegesis, Unitarian and Trinitarian alike; and by his account
the general oral tradition did the same thing indefinitely. But all
the while Mr. Wright is going a great deal further. He alternately
insists that every evangelist told all he knew, and assumes that the
two evangelists who are alleged to have been apostles did not. If,
he writes--


    If, as becomes increasingly probable, a Johannine course of
    teaching was extant in comparatively early times, it is not
    strange that, as S. John dealt chiefly with the Judæan ministry,
    S. Peter should have refused to intrude into his brother Apostle's
    domain. They may have agreed at the outset to divide the work
    thus between them.


It is impossible to reconcile this with Mr. Wright's theory of the
inclusiveness of the evangelists. Why should not Mark do what Matthew
and John did in the terms of the case?

Of course this is not the true critical solution; the immediate
question is the consistency of Mr. Wright's critical principles. To
the eye of unbiassed criticism the "Come unto me" logion is not a
possible oracle at all; it is an unintelligently inserted liturgical
formula from the mysteries, misplaced and meaningless as a public
teaching. [127] As regards the fair historical inference from the
wide difference between the synoptic Gospels and the fourth, it is
not possible to accept any of Mr. Wright's solutions, tried by his
own tests. To suggest that John had not "heard" of the Virgin Birth
story is for him impossible, unless he post-dates that as he does the
birth-stories in Luke. If he follows that course, what can he make of
the 13th chapter of John, a palpable interpolation or substitution
between the 12th and the 14th, which form a sequence that the 13th
absolutely breaks? [128] If that interpolation be admitted, what
exactly is left to fight for?

In any case, the implication that Matthew, the apostle, "had not heard
of" what John declares to be the first miracle, or of the raising
of Lazarus, is as destructive of every traditionalist assumption as
is the implication that John the Apostle had not heard of the Sermon
on the Mount, or of the parables of the mystery of the kingdom. Mark
and Luke expressly declare that John was present at the raising of
Jairus' daughter; and the fourth Gospel makes no mention of it. It
was perhaps to meet cruces of this kind that Mr. Wright makes John
and Peter "divide between them" the portions of the ministry; but
such a device simply destroys, as we have seen, another main part of
his case. Mr. Wright may well reject the thesis of Mr. Halcombe, who,
severely condemning "modern criticism," produces a modern criticism of
his own, which makes John's Gospel the first--another of the hopeless
devices of traditionalist critics to escape from the imbroglio of the
tradition. Mr. Halcombe gravely reasons that the best Gospel came
first; and Mr. Wright pronounces that "such a plan of composition
seems unworthy of God and incredible in man." [129] But his own theory
presents only a different set of incredibilities. He accepts without
a misgiving the most staggering anomalies. "If it were not for a
single incidental statement in S. John" (iv, 1, 2), he writes, "we
should have concluded confidently that the sacrament of holy baptism
was first instituted after the Resurrection." John's statement is in
fact the sole intimation that Jesus or the disciples ever baptized
at all; and it is either a designed or redacted equivoque or a flat
contradiction in terms:--


    When therefore the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that
    Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although
    Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples), he left Judæa,
    and departed again into Galilee.


The exegesis which can take this for a historical datum, and compose
it with the theory of an oral tradition in which baptism either by
Jesus or by his disciples never appears, is really outside serious
discussion. The proposition that, given the main tradition, either
Jesus or the disciples baptized freely, and that yet neither Matthew,
Mark, nor Luke ever heard of it, is a mere flouting of the critical
reason to which it professes to appeal. And there is no alternative
save an honest confession that the record is incredible. The whole
Christian tradition of baptism breaks down on examination, as does
the record of the acceptance of the higher mission of Jesus by John,
followed by statements affirming the continuance of John's movement
and teaching alongside of the Jesuine. Mr. Wright is severe on the
orthodox harmonists in general. "If I am right," he remarks, "the
exhausting labours and tortuous explanations of the harmonists,
in their endeavour to reconcile what cannot be reconciled, have
been wasted." [130] That is exactly what the attentive reader must
regretfully say of Mr. Wright's own reconstructions.

His handling of the problems of the date of the crucifixion and the
duration of the Ministry is a warning to every student who desires
to be loyal to critical principle. By his final admission, no one
can tell whether the Ministry lasted one, two, three, four, ten, or
twenty years. He frankly rejects Sir William Ramsay's attempt to salve
as history Luke's story of the census. The alleged procedure, he sees,
is simply impossible--"S. Luke evidently has somewhat misunderstood the
situation"--and he solves the problem by throwing over Luke's opening
chapters as late accretions. But the question of the duration of the
Ministry, which is bound up with that of the date of the crucifixion,
and thus lies at the very centre of the whole historic problem, he
is content to leave as insoluble, yet without a misgiving as to the
historicity of the record.

John makes Jesus go four times to Jerusalem; while in the synoptics we
note "the extraordinary fact that they do not bring Christ to Jerusalem
until He entered it to be crucified." [131] John puts the cleansing
of the temple at the beginning of the Ministry, and the synoptics
place it at the close. Orthodox exegesis then assumes two cleansings,
but "such a repetition is, to say the least, highly improbable,"
for Mr. Wright. "What end would such a repetition serve? And if
repeated, why should not S. Mark or S. John have told us so?" [132]
Why, indeed! So Mr. Wright suggests that the synoptics may have
telescoped several years into one. "Events in real life move much
more slowly." [133] They certainly do!

Yet, on the other hand, "the one-year ministry would solve many
difficulties. It is the only scheme which reconciles S. Luke,
S. Matthew, and S. John. Not improbably it is true: the more I
consider it, the more attractive it appears." [134] Such, evidently,
was the view of the Christian and other Gnostics. But Irenæus, the
first Father to handle the problem, declared for a ministry of about
twenty years, founding not only on the quotation in John, "Thou art
not yet fifty years old," but on the fact that "all the elders who had
known John the disciple of the Lord in Asia witness that he gave them
this tradition." [135] On the other hand, in Mr. Wright's opinion,
"ten years is the utmost length to which we can stretch the ministry
without throwing overboard S. Luke's chronology altogether." [136]
Yet Bishop Westcott declared concerning the record of Irenæus that,
"however strange it may appear, some such view is not inconsistent
with the only fixed historical dates which we have with regard to the
Lord's life, the date of His birth, His baptism, and the banishment
of Pilate." Thus turns the kaleidoscope of the tradition of which
Harnack has latterly affirmed the "essential rightness, with a few
important exceptions."

It is hardly necessary to point out that the "oral" hypothesis, like
the "documentary" and that of scattered logia, is more compatible
with the negative than with the affirmative answer on the question
of historicity. Contradictions and anomalies irreconcilable with
the assumption of a real historical process present not difficulty
but confirmation to the theory of a fictitious production, whether
documentary or oral, to establish a transforming cult, supplying a
quasi-historical basis where none such existed. Contradictory episodes
and dicta stand for diverging sects and movements. Save for incidental
concessions, all the traditionist schools alike ignore the grounds
for inferring a long-continued modification of the Gospels at many
hands; though, when Celsus late in the second century alleged the
common practice of interpolation, Origen could only explain that it
was the work of heretics. Such a procedure is for the rational critic
only the natural continuance of the method of formation.

Over the point upon which Mr. Wright most completely diverges from
the various Unitarian schools--his acceptance of the Fourth Gospel
as essentially historical--we need not here concern ourselves. Those
who can accept the Fourth and the Synoptics cannot be supposed to
admit the application of criticism to fundamentals at all, however
critically they may handle secondary issues. And they have their
defence. The liberalizers who see that the Fourth as a whole is a work
of invention, making free play with previous material, and yet cannot
conceive that the synoptics had beforehand followed a similar method,
can make no claim to critical consistency. They merely realize that
the Fourth and the Synoptics cannot all be records of a real Life and
Teaching, and they decide to reject the last rather than the prior
documents. The argument from "vividness" and lifelike detail simply
goes by the board. In the fourth Gospel there are many more lifelike
details than in the second; but that is not allowed to count.

For the rational inquirer, however, the fact remains that the
dismissal of the fourth Gospel is a beginning of historical as
distinct from documentary discrimination; and it is to those who have
made such a beginning that a further critical argument falls to be
addressed. Mr. Wright, facing a chaos of doctrinal contradictions and
chronological divergences, falls back trustingly on the reflection
that "after all we are not saved by the Gospels, but by Christ." He
has no misgiving as to the evangelists being inspired. "Inspiration
quickens their spiritual perception, but does not altogether preserve
them from errors of fact": e.g. Mt. i, 9, 11; Mk. iii, 26; Lk. ii, 2;
John xii, 3; Acts v, 36; vii, 16. [137] Perhaps Mr. Wright would grant
some dozens more of errors of fact if pressed; but his faith would not
be modified unless he should be shaken on the resurrection. "History
as well as criticism leaves us no room to question this. On so sure
a foundation is our most holy faith erected." [138] For Mr. Wright
that is supremely certain which a myriad Christian scholars now find
incredible. And we can but take our leave of him with the question of
the Jew of Celsus, "Did Jesus come into the world for this purpose,
that we should not believe in him?"







CHAPTER XV

THE METHOD OF M. LOISY


Turning away, so to speak, to the Gentiles, we concentrate our case
in countering that of the "emancipated" defenders of the historicity
of the Founder, as put by M. Loisy, the equal of any of the German or
English professionals in scholarly competence, and the superior of
some of them in candour. Precisely because Catholicism yields least
preparation for the work of critical science, one who slowly makes his
way out of it into the "liberal" position is reasonably to be credited
with a special capacity for the task. And he is on the whole the most
useful theorist for the purposes of the "liberal" school, inasmuch
as he is prepared to give up many documentary items to which others
needlessly cling. Nonetheless, M. Loisy is a confident champion of the
historicity of the gospel Jesus. He does not indeed combine his summary
presentment of his case with a discussion of the myth theory--that
he is content to put aside in mass with the epithet "superficial";
but he puts his own construction all the more unreservedly.

It is interesting to note his certitudes. No one of his school,
perhaps, has more frequently claimed indubitability on points of
inference. For instance:--


    The advent of Jesus in the time of the procurator Pontius Pilate
    is a fact as certain as a thousand other facts on the subject
    of which no one dreams of raising the slightest suspicion; it is
    not doubtful that he announced the speedy coming of the kingdom
    of God ... since that idea ... which is the fundamental idea of
    the preaching of Christ in the synoptics, was incontestably that
    of his first disciples and Paul....

    Great as are the real obscurities of the evangelical history,
    they are less numerous than they seem, and without doubt also
    less considerable on the important points.

    Paul ... does not say that Jesus predicted his death and
    resurrection. He does not even say what was the ground for his
    execution; but it does not seem doubtful that this ground was
    precisely the announcement of that kingdom of God which the
    apostles and Paul himself preached.

    Paul and the other apostles practised exorcisms in the name of
    Jesus on certain patients. It is told that Jesus had done the
    same, and without doubt he had really done it, with still more
    assurance and more success than his disciples.

    He [Jesus] without doubt never frequented the schools of the
    rabbins.

    His family was certainly pious.

    One fact is certain, that a seizure was concerted of which he
    [Judas] was the principal agent.

    It was without doubt arranged [at the house of the high priest
    at earliest daylight] that they should content themselves with
    denouncing the Galilean prophet to the Roman authority.

    Without doubt he [Jesus] expected to his last moment the succour
    which only death could bring him.

    It was Peter, it would seem, who first obtained the proof and
    the definitive certainty [of the resurrection] that faith called
    for. One day, at dawn, fishing on the lake of Tiberias, he saw
    Jesus. Already, without doubt, he had assembled around him the
    other disciples. [139]


It is enviable to be so sans doute on so many points in a narrative
of which so much has had to be abandoned as myth. The odd thing is
that with all these certitudes M. Loisy introduces his book with
the declaration, "We must [il faut] now renounce writing the life
of Jesus. All the critics agree in recognizing that the materials
are insufficient for such an enterprise." [140] And then, after
an introduction in which he contests the view that nothing can be
written with certainty, he gives us a Life of Jesus which is simply
Renan revised!

It is certainly brief; but that is because he is content to say only
what he thinks there is to say, whereas his predecessors were at
more or less pains to embed the thin thread of biography in a large
mat of non-biographical material. M. Loisy seems to have become a
little confused in the process of prefixing a critical introduction
to three chapters of the former introduction to his commentary on the
synoptics. "The present little book," he writes, "does not pretend
to be that history which it is impossible to recover." Naturally
not. But it proffers a Life of Jesus all the same.

M. Loisy is quite satisfied that there was a Jesus of Nazareth,
son of Joseph, a "worker in wood, carpenter, furniture maker,
wheelwright." [141] "And Jesus followed originally the same
profession." When he began his preaching of the speedy coming of
the heavenly kingdom, "his mother Mary was a widow, with numerous
children. It is not certain that Jesus was the eldest...." "It was
probably John the Baptist who, unknowingly, awoke the vocation of
the young carpenter of Nazareth. The crisis which traversed Judæa
had evoked a prophet.... This preaching of terror made a great
impression.... John was usually on the Jordan, baptizing in the
river those touched by his burning words. Jesus was drawn like many
others.... He was baptized, and remained some time in the desert."

And so it goes on. "What appears most probable" is that Jesus had
already "passed some time in solitude. A time of reflection and of
preparation was indispensable between the life of the carpenter and the
manifestation of the preacher of the evangel. Pushed to the desert by
the sentiment of his vocation, Jesus was bound (devait) to be pursued
by a more and more clear consciousness of that vocation." Thus M. Loisy
can after all expand his sources. It was after the imprisonment of the
Baptist that Jesus felt he "was to replace him, and by the better title
because he felt himself predestined to become the human chief of the
Kingdom, there to fill the function of Messiah." But "almost in spite
of himself" he worked miracles. From his first stay at Capernaum the
sick were brought to him to heal; and, fearing that the thaumaturg
might hurt the preacher of the Kingdom, he left the place, only to
be followed up and forced to make cures. "He operated with a peculiar
efficacy on the category of patients supposed to be specially possessed
by the demon.... He spoke to them with authority, and calm returned,
at least for a time, to those troubled and unquiet souls." As to the
greater cures, M. Loisy observes that "perhaps" there was ascribed to
the healer the revivification of a dead maiden. On the instantaneous
cures of lepers and the blind he naturally says nothing whatever.

The dilemma of M. Loisy here recalls that of Professor Schmiedel over
the same problem. The latter, claiming that it would be "difficult to
deny" healing powers to Jesus, in view of the testimonies, is fain to
argue that the Healer's personal claim (Mt. xi, 5; Lk. vii, 22; not
in Mk.) to have healed the sick, the blind, the deaf, the lepers, and
raised the dead, meant only a spiritual ministration, inasmuch as the
claim concludes: "the poor also have the Gospel preached to them." On
this view the assumed healing power really counts for nothing; and
the last clause, which Schmiedel contends would be an anti-climax
if the healings were real, becomes absolutely an anti-climax of
the most hopeless kind. One day men will dismiss such confusions
by noting that the theory of spiritual healing, an attempt to evade
the mass of miracle, is only miracle-mongering of another kind. Are
we to take it that regeneration of the morally dead, deaf, blind,
and leprous is to be effected wholesale by a little preaching? Did
the Christian community then consist wholly or mainly of these?

M. Loisy in turn blenches at a claim in which "raising the dead"
figures as a customary thing, with cures of leprosy and blindness;
and he too falls back on the "spiritual" interpretation, [142] failing
to note the flat fallacy of making the preaching to the poor at once
a contrast and a climax to the spiritual healings, which also, on
the hypothesis, are precisely matters of preaching. The Teacher is
made to say: "I raise the spiritually dead, and cure the spiritually
leprous, deaf, and blind, by preaching to them: to the poor I just
preach." Schmiedel does not see that the preaching of the Gospel to
the poor is added as the one thing that could be said to be done for
them, who would otherwise have had no benefit; and that on his own
view he ought to treat this as a late addition. On the contrary, he
insists that the "evangelists" could not have thought of adding it;
and that it makes an excellent climax if we take the healings to be
purely spiritual.

The rational argument would be, of course, that the first writer did
make the Lord talk figuratively; and that a later redactor, taking
the words literally, added the item of the poor, which he could not
have done if he took them figuratively. But the irreducible fallacy is
the assumption that as a figurative claim the speech is historic, one
order of miracle being held allowable when another is not. Schmiedel
has exemplified his own saying that "with very few exceptions all
critics fall into the very grave error of immediately accepting a
thing as true as soon as they have found themselves able to trace
it to a 'source'." [143] It does not in the least follow that by
substituting spiritual for physical miracle we acquire a right to
claim historicity. And by the claim we simply cancel the "fame"
of the records.

M. Loisy, committing himself to some acts of healing where Schmiedel,
after accepting the general claim, commits himself to none, balances
vaguely between acts of faith-healing so-called and cures of sheer
insanity, and accepts the tradition of


    an unfruitful point at Nazareth. [144] "A prophet is not without
    honour, save in his own country and among his own kin, and in
    his own house," Jesus had said before the disdainful astonishment
    of his fellow-citizens and the incredulity of his family; and he
    could work no miracle in that place.


M. Loisy, it will be observed, here assumes that we are dealing with
real cures, and tacitly rejects the qualifying clauses in Mark vi,
5, and Matthew xiii, 58, as he well may. They are indeed stamped
with manipulation. "He could there do no mighty work save that he
laid his hands upon a few sick folk and healed them," says the first;
"he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief," says
the other. Such passages raise in an acute form the question how any
statement in the Gospels can reasonably be taken as historical. What
were the alleged mighty works done elsewhere save acts of healing the
sick? And how many cases for such healing would naturally be presented
by one small hamlet? If, again, all the healings were spiritual,
what are we left with beyond the truism that sinners who did not
believe were unbelieving?

As the modifications produce pure counter-sense, it is critically
permissible to surmise that they were lacking in the first copies,
and were inserted merely to guard against profane cavils. But as the
whole episode is found only in Matthew and Mark, it cannot figure
in Dr. Petrie's Nucleus; and for similar reasons it is absent from
the Primitive Gospel of the school of Bernhard Weiss. M. Loisy,
recognizing that it is the kind of item that Luke would avoid for
tactical reasons, is loyal enough to accept it as historical without
the modifying words, and seeks no better explanation than that given
in the cited words of Jesus.

For those who aim at a rational comprehension of the documents,
the critical induction is that the story was inserted for a reason;
and the explanation which satisfies M. Loisy is so ill-considered
that it only emphasizes the need. A prophet is likely to be looked
at askance by his own people: yes, if he be an unimpressive one;
but upon what critical principles is M. Loisy entitled to assume,
as he constantly does, that the historic Jesus made a profound
and ineffaceable impression upon all who came in contact with him,
from the moment of his call to his disciples, and that nevertheless
he had not made the slightest impression of superiority upon his own
kinsmen and fellow-villagers, up to the age of thirty? How can such
propositions cohere? Jesus has only to leave Nazareth and to command
men to follow him, in order to be reverently recognized as a Superman:
for M. Loisy, it is his mere personality that creates the faith which,
after his death, makes his adherents proclaim him as a re-arisen
God. Is this the kind of personality that in an eastern village would
be known merely as that of "the carpenter," or the carpenter's son?

M. Loisy, it is true, claims that Jesus had needed a period of solitude
and meditation in the desert to make him a teacher, thus partly
implying that before that experience the destined prophet might not be
recognizable as such. But is it a historic proposition that the short
time of solitude had worked a complete transformation? Was a quite
normal or commonplace personality capable of such a transfiguration
in a natural sense? That the critic had not even asked himself the
question is made plain by his complete failure to raise the cognate
question in regard to the marvellous healing powers with which he
unhesitatingly credits the teacher, on the strength of the wholly
supernaturalist testimony of the Gospels. These powers, according
to M. Loisy, were also the instantaneous result of the short period
of solitude in the desert. What pretensions can such a theory make
to be in conformity with historical principles? Cannot M. Loisy see
that he has only been miracle-mongering with a difference?

It is bad enough that we should be asked to take for granted, on the
strength of a typically Eastern record of wholesale thaumaturgy, a
real "natural" gift for healing a variety of nervous disorders. But
a natural gift of such a kind at least presupposes some process of
development. M. Loisy obliviously asks us to believe that all of a
sudden a man who had throughout his life shown no abnormal powers
or qualities whatever, began to exercise them upon the largest scale
almost immediately after he had left his native village. Now, whatever
view be taken of the cynical formula that a prophet has no honour in
his own village, it is idle to ask us to believe that a great healer
has none. The local healer of any sort has an easy opening; and the
redacted Gospels indicate uneasy recognition of the plain truth that
Jesus needed only to heal the sick at Nazareth as elsewhere to conquer
unbelief. It was precisely the cures that, in the Gospel story, had
won him fame in the surrounding country. M. Loisy has merely burked
the problem.

A little later he takes as historical the "terrible invectives"
pronounced against Capernaum and the neighbouring cities, which he
attempts to explain. After all, the multitude had not gone beyond a
"benevolent curiosity, quite ready to transform itself into an ironical
incredulity. They had seen the miracles; they awaited meantime the
kingdom, without otherwise preparing for it; and as the kingdom did
not come they inclined less and less to believe in it." So they were
doomed to a terrible judgment for their faithlessness. But why then was
nothing said of the wholly unbelieving Nazareth? [145] If the towns
which would not receive the disciples were to be testified against,
what should be the fate of the hostile birthplace?

Before such problems, the method of "liberal" accommodation here as
always breaks down. To the eye of the evolutionist there is no great
mystery. The avowal that the Founder either could not or did not
work wonders at Nazareth might serve any one of several conceivable
purposes. It might meet the cavils of those who in a later day found
and said that nothing was known at Nazareth of a wonder-working Jesus
who had dwelt there; even as the often-repeated story of the command
to healed persons to keep silence could avail to turn the attacks of
investigating doubters in regard to the miraculous cures. Or it might
serve either to impugn the pretensions of those who at one stage of the
movement called themselves "Nazarenes" in the sense of followers of the
man of Nazareth, or to include the birthplace with the family and the
disciples in that disparagement of the Jewish surroundings which would
arise step for step with the spread of the Gentile movement. Any of
these explanations is reasonable beside the thesis that a man gifted
with marvellous healing powers, suddenly developed without any previous
sign of them, could either find no one in his own village to let him
try them, or to recognize them even when applied there, while the
country round about, ex hypothesi, was ringing with his fame. And
the criticism which puts us off with such solutions is really not
well entitled to impute "superficiality" to those who reject it.

The whole "carpenter" story, in which M. Loisy sees no difficulty, is
one of the weakest of the Gospel attempts at circumstantiality. A trade
or calling for the Messiah, as a true Jew, was perhaps as requisite
in the eyes of some Jews as either a Davidic descent or an argument
to prove that Davidic descent was for the Messiah unnecessary--both of
which requirements the Gospels meet. Every good Jew, we are told, was
required to have a handicraft or profession. A "Ben-Joseph," again,
was called-for to meet the requirement, common among the Samaritans
but not confined to them, of a Messiah so named. [146] But how came
it that "the carpenter" of Mark is only "the carpenter's son" in
Matthew? We can conceive the Gentilizing Luke putting both statements
aside as ill-suited to his purpose, his Jesus being a God competing
with Gentile Gods; but if there really was an early knowledge that
Jesus was a carpenter, why should Matthew minimize it? And how came
it that Origen [147] knew of no Gospel "current in the churches"
in which Jesus was described as a carpenter?

In this matter, as about the Infancy generally, the apocryphal gospels
are as rich in detail as the canonical are poor. Again and again
does Joseph figure in them as a working carpenter, or plough-maker,
or house-builder. [148] The words of Origen might imply that it was
from some such source that Celsus drew his statement that Jesus was
a carpenter; and yet none of the preserved apocrypha speaks of Jesus
as working at carpentry save by way of such miracles as that of the
elongation of the piece of wood. Having regard to the mythical aspect
of the whole, we suggest an easily misinterpreted Gnostic source
for the basis. For some schools of the Gnostics, the Jewish God
was the Demiourgos, the Artisan or Creator, a subordinate being in
their divine hierarchy. The word could mean an artisan of any kind;
and architector, the term in the Latin version of Thomas, points to
a reflex of the idea of "creator" which attached to the Gnostic term.

That the doctrine of the Demiourgos was already current in Jewish
circles before the period commonly assigned to Christian Gnosticism
has been shown with much probability by Dr. S. Karppe. In a Talmudic
passage given as cited by Rabbi Jochanan ben Saccai before the middle
of the first century, C.E., there is denunciation of those who "spare
not the glory of the Creator"; and other passages interpret this
in the sense of a heresy which "diminishes God" and "sows division
between Israel and his God." [149] Debate of this kind emerges with
the name of the Judæo-Christian heretic Cerinthus. For him, Jesus,
though naturally born, was entered at his baptism by Christ, the son
not of the Jewish God, the Demiourgos, but of the Supreme God. [150]
There might well be, however, round Cerinthus, who retained Jewish
leanings, Jews who held to the Judæo-Christian primary position
that Jesus was the son of Yahweh. By some early Gnostics he could
hardly fail to be so named. Could not then the Gnostic "Son of the
Demiourgos," the Artificer, become for more literal Christists "son
of the carpenter," even as the mystic seamless robe of Pagan myth
became for some a garment which had to be cut in pieces to be divided?

Met by such suggestions, M. Loisy tells us that we are superficial. But
is he otherwise? Is he not simply evading his problem? Can he
see nothing strange in the sudden mention of the carpenter in a
"primary" gospel which had set out with a divine personage and had
never mentioned his parents or upbringing? On the mythic theory the
apparition of the Messiah without antecedents is precisely what was to
be expected; if there was any clear Jewish expectation on the point,
it was that he should come unlooked for, unheralded save, on one view,
by "Elias." [151] Thus the Gospel record fits into the myth theory
from the outset, while on the assumption of historicity it is but a
series of enigmas.

Holding by that assumption, M. Loisy is forced to violent measures to
reconcile the isolated Marcan mention of "the son of Mary and brother
of James and Joses and Judas and Simon" with the repeated mentions
in the closing chapters of (1) "Mary the mother of James the less
and of Joses and Salome; who when he was in Galilee followed [Jesus]
and ministered unto him"; (2) "Mary the mother of Joses"; and (3)
"Mary the mother of James and Salome." In these closing chapters this
Mary the mother of James and Joses and Salome figures first as simply
one who followed and ministered to Jesus, then as the mother of Joses,
then as the mother of James and Salome, but never as the mother of
Jesus. By what right does M. Loisy extract his certitude from the
prior text?

His simple course is to decide that Mary the mother of James and of
Joses and of Salome in the closing chapters is not Mary the mother of
James and Joses and Judas and Simon in chapter vi. "Certain Fathers,"
he had noted in his great work on the Synoptics (citing in particular
Chrysostom), "desirous of making the synoptics accord with John,
identify Mary the mother of James and Joses [in ch. xv] with the
mother of Jesus; but it is evident that if the synoptics had thought
of the mother of the Saviour they would not have thus designated
her." [152] Precisely! And if the Gospel of Mark in its original form
had contained the passage in chapter vi, how could it possibly have
spoken in chapter xv of a Mary the mother of James and Joses without
indicating either that she was or was not the same Mary? Would it
have deliberately specified two Maries, each the mother of a James
and a Joses, without a word of differentiation?

To the faithful critic there is only one course open. He is bound to
conclude that the passage in chapter vi is a late interpolation, the
work of an inventor who had perhaps either accepted or anticipated
the Johannine record that Mary the mother of Jesus was present at
the crucifixion, but who did not--perhaps in his copy of Mark could
not--completely carry out his purpose by making the Mary at the
crucifixion the mother of the crucified Lord.

We are not here concerned with the exegesis of those Fathers who
desired to save the perpetual virginity of Mary; our business is
simply with the texts. And we can but say that if, with M. Loisy, we
make the Mary of chapter xv another Mary than her of chapter vi, we
are bound on the same principle to find a third and a fourth Mary in
"the mother of Joses" (xv, 47) and the "mother of James and Salome"
(xvi, 1). [153] It will really not do. The mythological theory, which
traces the mourning Maries to an ancient liturgy of a God-sacrifice
and finds the mother-Mary of chapter vi an alien element, may seem
to M. Loisy superficial, but it meets a problem which he simply evades.

The only serious difficulties for M. Loisy, apparently, are the
miracles and the prophecies. On the latter he makes no use of the
Savonarola argument; and in his smaller work he ignores the "rock"
text; but for him "the scene of Cæsarea Philippi, with the Messianic
confession of Peter, seems thoroughly historic"; and on the other hand
the story of Peter's denial of his Master causes him no misgiving. For
a rational reader, the conception of the shamed Peter figuring
soon afterwards as the merciless judge and supernatural slayer of
the unhappy Ananias is extremely indigestible. The personage thus
evolved is not only detestable but incredible. How could the coward
apostle figure primarily and continuously as a pillar of the Church
described? Harnack's method, as Professor Blass complains, [154]
treats the denigration of Peter as the result of the strife between
the Judaizing and the Gentilizing sections of the early Church; it
is the natural hypothesis. Without it we are left to the detestable
and impossible figure of the apostle who denies his Lord and has no
mercy for a weak brother who merely keeps back part of a sum of money
when professing freely to donate the whole. The critical reader will
prefer to follow Harnack.

But if we give up the story of the Denial, how shall we retain
those which exalt and glorify the Judaizing apostle? If we give up
Matthew's "rock" texts, with what consistency can we take as pure
history the episode in Mark in which Peter, first of the twelve,
declares "Thou art the Christ," eliciting the charge to "tell no
man of him," followed by the prediction of death and resurrection,
spoken "openly"? The episode in Mark passes into, and in Matthew
is followed by, the fierce rebuke to the expostulating Peter, "Get
thee behind me, Satan, for thou mindest not the things of God, but
the things of men"--a strange sequel to Matthew's "Blessed art thou,
Simon Bar-Jonah; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee,
but my Father which is in Heaven."

This is one of the passages that force the conclusion either that
"Mark" had before him the fuller record, in "Matthew" or elsewhere, and
turned it from a Petrine to an anti-Petrine purpose, or that a redactor
did so. There is no escape from the evidence that we are dealing with
two sharply conflicting constructions. The "Blessed art thou" passage
and the "Satan" passage will not cohere. Which came first? Had "Luke"
either before him? His "Get thee behind me, Satan" (iv, 8; A.V.),
addressed to the devil in the Temptation, is ejected from the revised
text as being absent from most of the ancient codices; and its presence
in the Alexandrine suggests an attempt to get in somewhere a saying
which otherwise had no place in the third Gospel. The absence alike
of the blessing and the aspersion on Peter sets up the surmise that
both are quite late, and that the insertion of one elicited the other.

Again and again we find in the Gospels such traces of a strife over
Petrine pretensions. In the story of the Denial, which we have found
so incompatible with the attitude ascribed to Peter in the Acts,
everyone since Strauss has recognized a process of redaction and
interpolation. M. Loisy, saying nothing of the central problem,
avowedly finds in Mark "a manipulation, deliberate and ill-managed,
of a more simple statement." [155] This might have sufficed to put
him on his guard; but all he has to say, after reducing the confused
details to the inferred "simpler statement," is that "if there is
in any part of the second Gospel a personal recollection of Peter it
is the story of the denial in the form in which Mark found it." [156]
Which makes sad havoc of the Peter-Mark tradition; for the story of the
denial betrays itself as a late anti-Petrine invention, as aforesaid.







CHAPTER XVI

THE TRIAL CRUX


Thus lax in his treatment of the subsidiary historical problems,
M. Loisy is of necessity accommodating when he faces those which he
recognizes to be central. Over the story of the "purification" of
the temple--which Origen found at once unjustifiable and signally
miraculous, since it was inconceivable that so great a multitude
should have yielded to the mere attack of one man with a scourge of
small cords--he has again no misgivings. He feels that some such story
was needed to motive the priestly action against Jesus. [157] In the
story of the astonishing sophism ascribed to Jesus on the subject of
the tribute to Cæsar he sees only "cleverness" (habileté); and yet
he accepts as historical--again by necessity of his thesis--Jesus's
admission that he claimed to be king of the Jews. In the story of
the betrayal he sees fit, docilely following Brandt, to allege "a
little confused fighting, some blows given and received" over and
above the cutting off of the ear of Malchus, an imagined item which
he finds in none of the Gospels. Over the prayers of the Lord while
the disciples slept he had hesitated in his commentary; [158] falling
back on the notable avowal that "the sort of incoherence which results
from describing a scene which passed while the witnesses [!] were
asleep is without doubt to be explained by the origin and character
of the narrative rather than by a negligence of the narrator." For
once, I unreservedly assent to the sans doute. Quite unwittingly,
M. Loisy has put himself in line with our mythical theory, which
postulates a drama as the origin of the narrative.

All the same, he accepts the narrative as history; and he sees
nothing in the fusion of the two speeches: "Sleep on.... It is
enough.... Arise now,"... though he rejects the proposal of Bleek,
Volkmar, and Wellhausen to turn "Sleep on" into an interrogation,
[159] and admits that the "It is enough" is an "unclear and very
insufficient transition" from "Sleep on" to "Arise." Once more, which
is the more superficial, this lame handling or the recognition of a
transcribed drama with two speeches combined because of the omission
of an exit and an entrance, in what M. Loisy admits to be "a highly
dramatic mise en scène"?

But it is over the trial in the house of the high priest that M. Loisy
most astonishingly redacts the narrative. In his commentary he
recognizes that Matthew's story, in which the scribes and the elders
are "already gathered together" in the dead of night when Jesus is
brought for trial, and the story of Mark, in which they "come together
with" the high priest, are equally incredible; and that the story of
the quest for witnesses in the night is still more so.

Once again we have a sans doute with which we can agree. "The nocturnal
procedure, no doubt, did not take place." [160] Recognizing further
that a Jewish blasphemer was by the Levitical law to be stoned, not
crucified, he simply gives up the whole narrative as a product of
"the Christian tradition," bent on saddling the Jews rather than
the Romans with the responsibility of the crucifixion. [161] In his
smaller work he simply cuts the knot and alleges:--


    "As soon as the first daylight had come (dès les premiers lueurs
    du jour), a reunion was held at the house of (chez) the chief
    priest," where it was without doubt [!] arranged that they should
    content themselves with denouncing the Galilean prophet to the
    Roman authority as a disturber and a false Messiah. But it was
    necessary to arrange the terms of the accusation and distribute
    the rôles, to get together and prepare the witnesses. These
    measures were soon taken. As soon as morning had come (dès le
    matin) the priests brought their prisoner chained before the
    tribunal of Pontius Pilate. [162]


One certainly cannot call this manipulation of the texts
"superficial." It is sheer deliberate dissolution and reconstruction
of the narrative, by way of substituting something more plausible for
the incredible original, when all the while the credibility of the
original is the thesis maintained. And yet even the reconstruction is
so thoughtlessly managed that we get only a slightly less impossible
account. Only a scholar who never followed the details of a legal
process could suggest that the task of hunting up witnesses and
arranging a procedure could be carried through between "earliest dawn"
and "morning." And for the headlong haste of such a procedure, only
an hour or so after the arrest of the prisoner, no explanation is
even suggested. A violent impossibility in the record, destructive
of all faith in its historicity at this point, is sought to be
saved by a violent redaction which simply "makes hay" of the very
documents founded on. And this illicit violence is resorted to
because M. Loisy recognizes that if he is to retain a historical
Jesus at all he must bring the whole trial story into a historical
shape. He certainly had cause to take drastic measures. Long ago it
was pointed out that by Jewish law a prisoner must not be condemned
to death on the day of his trial: Judicia de capitalibus finiunt
eodem die si sint ad absolutionem; si vero sint ad damnationem,
finiuntur die sequente. [163] This might alone suffice to "bring
into doubt" the priestly trial; to say nothing of the modern Jewish
protest that a capital prosecution and execution on either the day
after or the day of the Passover, at the instance of the High Priest,
was unthinkable. [164] There were good reasons, then, for seeking to
found on the trial before Pilate.

Let us now survey broadly the process of historical criticism thus
far. 1. At an early stage the reconstructors gave up as pure fiction
the third trial before Herod, which appears solely in Luke. They did
not ask what historical knowledge, or what sense of history, can have
existed in a community among which such an absolute invention found
ready currency. 2. The next step was to reject as "unhistorical"
the narrative of the fourth Gospel, in which Jesus (a) is examined
by Annas the high priest, but in no sense tried; (b) is then sent
bound to Caiaphas the high priest; (c) is immediately passed on from
Caiaphas to Pilate, who examines him within doors while the priests
remain outside, there being thus no Jewish witnesses; (d) tells
Pilate "My kingdom is not of this world," and convinces him that
he is not punishable. Rejecting this account, as they well might,
the reconstructors failed to ask themselves what such an invention
signifies. 3. Next disappears the so-called historical narrative of the
trial before the high priest and chief priests in the synoptics. [165]
That in turn, taken on its merits, is found flagrantly incredible; and
now M. Loisy in effect puts it aside, reducing it to a fundamentally
different form.

Three of the trial stories are thus in turn rejected as hopelessly
unhistorical. And now we are invited to regard as "incontestable"
the fourth, the trial before Pilate as related in the synoptics; the
Johannine version being dismissed as fiction. In the scientific sense
of the word [166] the rejected stories have been classed as myths. And
still we are told that the "myth-theory" is outside discussion.

Yet, even in coming to the trial before Pilate, M. Loisy has to
begin by noting the improbability that the entire sanhedrim should
have attended it, as is alleged by the synoptics. "In the minds of
the evangelists the sanhedrim represents the Jews, and it was the
Jews who caused the death of Jesus. Hence the general expressions
which the redactors used the more willingly because they were very
incompletely informed on the facts." [167] Still, the trial must stand
good. Judas goes the way of myth; but the unintelligible procedure
of Pilate must be salved. With his general loyalty to the facts as
he sees them M. Loisy notes, with Brandt, that in the synoptics as
in John there is no Jesuist eye-witness or auditor to report for the
faithful what took place. "Here begin the gaps in the Passion-history,"
remarks Brandt. [168] "Tradition could learn only by indirect ways the
general features of the interrogation and the principal incidents which
passed between the morning of Friday and the hour of the crucifixion,"
says Loisy. [169] The student really concerned to get at history
is compelled to pronounce that the record thus avowed to be mainly
guesswork is myth. Let us take the report as we have it in Mark:--


    And straightway [after the condemnation by the priests] in the
    morning the chief priests, with the elders and scribes and the
    whole council, held a consultation, and bound Jesus and carried
    him away, and delivered him up to Pilate. And Pilate asked him,
    Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answering saith unto him,
    Thou sayest.... And Pilate again asked him, saying, Answerest
    thou nothing? behold how many things they accuse thee of. But
    Jesus no more answered anything; insomuch that Pilate marvelled.


To this meagre record, in which a capital case is carried before
the governor without the slightest documentary preliminaries, and in
which he begins to interrogate before a word has been said about the
indictment, Matthew adds nothing save the story of Pilate's wife's
dream, which the reconstructors are fain to dismiss; while Luke,
who sees fit to premise specific charges of anti-Roman sedition,
follows them up simply by Pilate's question and Jesus's assenting
answer; and then, quite unintelligibly, makes Pilate declare "unto
the chief priests and the multitudes, I find no fault in this man."

What can it mean? All the exegetes now agree that the "Thou sayest" of
Jesus has the force of "I am." [170] By avowing that he called himself
King of the Jews he committed a very grave offence towards Rome, unless
he explained the title in a mystic sense; and the records exclude any
such explanation. In Mark and Matthew the effect is the same: Pilate
finds no guilt, and proposes release; but yields to the multitude and
the priests. Could any serious student bring himself to regard this
as history unless he presupposed the historicity of the crucifixion
and was ready to let pass any semblance of motivation for it?

Once more we must affirm that the documents merely reveal entire
ignorance of any judicial procedure. Pilate finally puts to death a
Jewish prisoner at the request of the sanhedrim and the multitude on a
charge for which he finds no evidence. That Pilate should make light
of a Jew's life is indeed easily to be believed: he is exhibited to
us by Josephus as an entirely ruthless Roman; but both the synoptics
and the fourth Gospel present him in an entirely different light;
and no record or commentary makes it intelligible that the Roman
governor should crucify a politically unoffending Jew for a purely
ecclesiastical Jewish offence. The offence against Rome he is expressly
represented as finding imaginary; and yet on the other hand the offence
as avowed is very real. By the method of mere accommodation or partial
critical rationalism the ascription of the prosecution to the Jews is
accounted for as the result of the later developed anti-Judaism of the
Christians. But on that view what historical basis have we left? If
the later Christians could invent the trial and the Resurrection,
what was to prevent their inventing the crucifixion? M. Loisy admits
that if the trial goes the historicity of Jesus goes with it; then
the crucifixion becomes myth. To say that this is impossible is to
beg the question: the myth theory offers the solution.

Given the datum of an original cult-sacrament which had grown out of
an ancient ritual-sacrifice, the crucifixion is the first step towards
the establishment of a biography of Jesus. A trial and a condemnation,
again, are necessary preliminaries to that; and when we critically
examine these we find that they are patently unhistorical. Upon no
theory of historicity can their contradictions and impossibilities be
explained. Once we make the hypothesis, however, that the crucifixion
is itself myth, the imbroglio becomes intelligible.

What we do know historically is that the early Christists included
Judaizers and Gentilizers; this is established by the sect-history,
apart from the Acts and the Epistles. For the Judaizers an execution
by the Romans was necessary; for the Gentilizers, who were bound to
guard against official Roman resentment, and whose hostility to the
Jews was progressive, a Jewish prosecution was equally necessary. In
the surviving mystery-play, predominantly a Gentile performance as
it now stands in the Gospels, an impossible Jewish trial is followed
by an equally impossible Roman trial, in which Jesus by doctrinal
necessity avows that he is King of the Jews, thereby salving his
Messiahship; while, to keep the guilt on Jewish shoulders and
to exclude the suspicion of anti-Roman bias, Pilate is made to
disclaim all responsibility. Such is, briefly, the outcome of the
myth theory. Upon what other theory can the documents be explained?

Upon what other theory, again, can we explain the vast contrast between
the triumphal entry into Jerusalem a few days before and the absolute
unanimity of the priest-led multitude in demanding the execution
of Jesus against the wish of Pilate? The reconstructors accept both
items, with arbitrary modifications, as historical; though the story
of the entry is preceded by a mythical item about the choice of the
ass-foal whereon never man had sat, [171] which is much more stressed
and developed than the main point. We are asked to believe that Jesus
on his entry is enthusiastically acclaimed by a great multitude as
Son of David and King of Israel; and that a few days later not a
voice is raised to save his life. Gentilizing Christians could easily
credit such things of the Jews. Can a historical student do so? For
the former it was enough that in the narrative the Messiahship of
the Lord had been publicly accepted; coherence was not required. But
historicity means coherence.

Last of all, the item of Barabbas, one of the elaborate irrelevancies
which leap to the eye in a narrative so destitute of essentials,
turns out to carry a curious corroboration to the myth-theory. This is
not the place to develop the probable kinship of the Barabbas of the
Gospels with the (misspelt) Karabbas [172] of Philo; but we may note
the probable reason for the introduction of the name into the myth. As
the story stands, it serves merely to heighten the guilt of the Jews,
making them in mass save the life of a murderer rather than that of
the divine Saviour. The whole story is plainly unhistorical: "neither
these details nor those which follow," remarks M. Loisy (after noting
the "extremely vague indications under an appearance of precision"
in regard to the antecedents of Barabbas), "seem discussible from
the point of view of history." [173] In point of fact, Pilate is made
to release an ostensible ringleader of "men who in the insurrection
[unspecified] had committed murder," thus making his action doubly
inconceivable. Why was such an item introduced at all?

It is not a case for very confident explanation; but when we note
that Barabbas means "Son of the Father"; that the Karabbas of Philo
is treated as a mock-king; and that the reading "Jesus Barabbas" in
Matt, xxvii, 16, 17, was long the accepted one in the ancient church,
[174] we are strongly led to infer (1) that the formula "Jesus the
Son of the Father" was well known among the first Christians as
being connected with a popular rite--else how could such a strange
perplexity be introduced into the text?--and (2) that the real reason
for introducing it was that those anti-Christians who knew of the name
and rite in question used their knowledge against the faith. The way
to rebut them was to present Jesus Barabbas not only as a murderer
but as the man actually released to the Jewish people instead of
Jesus the Christ, proposed to be released by Pilate.

Again, then, on the mythical theory, we find a meaning and a sane
solution where the historical theory can offer none. Sir James Frazer's
hypothesis that the story of the triumphal entry may preserve a
tradition of a mock-royal procession for a destined victim is only a
partial solution; and his further hypothesis of a strangely ignored
coincidence between a Barabbas rite and the actual crucifixion of
the Christian "Son of the Father" is but a sacrifice of mythological
principle to the assumption of historicity. The conception of Jesus
as sacrificed lies at the core of early Christian cult-propaganda.







CHAPTER XVII

THE JESUS-FIGURE OF M. LOISY


It is the same, finally, with the story of the original evangel as
with the story of the tragedy; M. Loisy fails to come within sight
of historicity in the one case as in the other. Having fallen back
on the thesis, so popularized by Renan, that faith in the necessary
resurrection of the Messiah created the legend of the empty tomb and
the divine apparitions, he proceeds to formulate the Teaching which
had created the faith. The historic creed of Christianity is thus
figured as a pyramid poised on the apex of a hallucination; but we
are assured that the hallucination resulted from the greatness of
the Personality of the slain Teacher.

Taking no note of any other conception of a possible origination of
the cult, M. Loisy pronounces that to explain it we must hold that the
"group of adherents" had before the crucifixion evolved a "religious
life" sufficiently deep to sustain the feeling that the death of
the Master was an accident, "grave no doubt [!] and perturbing, but
reparable"; [175] and to explain this religious life he goes back
to the Master's doctrine. And the moment he begins his exposition he
vacillates anew over the old dilemma:--


    Jesus pursued a work, not the propagation of a belief; he did
    not explain theoretically the Kingdom of Heaven, he prepared its
    coming by exhorting men to repent. Nevertheless even the work
    of Jesus attaches itself to the idea of the celestial kingdom;
    it defines itself in that idea, which presupposes, implies, or
    involves with it other ideas. It is this combination of ideas
    familiar to Christ that we must reconstruct with the help of
    the Gospels.... The idea of the kingdom of God is, in a sense,
    all the Gospel; but it is also all Judaism.... [176]


Exactly. Jesus, in effect, preached just what the Baptist is said
to have preached; only without baptism. The monition to repent was
simply the monition of all the prophets and all the eschatologists;
and it had not the attraction of baptism which the evangel of the
Baptist was said to have. So that the Twelve, on the showing of
M. Loisy, went through Jewry uttering only one familiar phrase--and
casting out devils--and dooming those who refused to hear them. And,
by their own report, it was in casting out devils that they had
their success. The simple name of Jesus, according to the Gospels,
availed for that where he had never appeared in person. Yet, again,
the name is used by non-adherents for the same purpose (Mk. ix,
38). And still M. Loisy confidently claims that there is no trace of
a pre-Christian Jesus cult in Palestine! [177]

Concerning the nullity of the original evangel he is quite unwittingly
explicit when he is resisting the myth theory; albeit in the act of
contradicting himself:--


    Paul, indeed, proclaims [se réclame du] an immortal Christ, or
    more exactly a Christ dead and re-arisen, not the Jesus preaching
    the evangel in Galilee and at Jerusalem. But his attitude is easy
    to explain.... He was aware of the circumstances of the death of
    Christ, and of what was preached by his followers.... If he boasted
    of having learned nothing from the old [sic] apostles, it was that,
    in reality, he had never been at their school.... But he was able
    [il lui arrive] also to affirm the conformity of his teaching
    with theirs: that is what he did in the passage ... touching the
    death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul converted had nothing to
    demand of the first apostles of Jesus, because he knew already
    what they had preached. [178]


So that the doctrine of an immortal or resurrected Christ was the
sole doctrine of the Apostles. There was no other evangel. And this
doctrine, which had just been declared to be born of the personal
impression made by Jesus on his followers, is also the doctrine of
Paul, who had never seen Jesus.

The primary evangel having thus simply disappeared, we revert to
the Jesuine Teaching (addressed in large part only to the disciples)
which had formed among disciples and adherents such a "religious life"
as served to develop the conviction that the Master could not really
die, and so prepared the foundation upon which Paul built historic
Christianity. [179] We have seen how M. Loisy vacillates over the
Founder's conception of the Kingdom of God in relation to his moral
teaching. When it is a question of a myth theory, M. Loisy insists
upon exactitude. "In order that the thesis should be sustainable,
it would be necessary that a well-defined myth should have existed in
some Jewish sect." [180] But there is no call for well-defined proofs
or notions when it is a question of defending the tradition. For
our critic, Jesus is first and foremost an intense believer in a
miraculous advent of that Kingdom which had come simply to mean "the
sovereignty of God." [181] Even this conception is of necessity vague
to the last degree:--


    The primitive nationalism subsisted at least in the framework
    [cadre] and the exterior economy of the kingdom of God; it
    maintained itself also in [jusque dans] the evangel of Jesus. At
    the same time the kingdom of God is not a simple moral reform,
    to safeguard the law of the celestial Sovereign and guarantee the
    happiness of the faithful. The action of Yahweh ... governs the
    entire universe.... [The cosmological tradition] developed the
    idea of a definite triumph of light over darkness, of order over
    chaos, a triumph which was to be the final victory of good over
    evil.... The terrestrial kingdoms ... were to disappear, to give
    place to the reign of Israel, which was the reign of the just,
    the reign of God. In this great instauration of the divine order,
    in this regeneration of the universe, the divine justice was to
    manifest itself by the resurrection of all the true faithful. [182]


This transformation, then--the long current dream of Jewry--was to
be a vast miracle, and in that miracle Jesus believed he was to play
the part of the Messiah, the divine representative. That expectation
sustained him till the moment of his death. [183] Nevertheless "his
idea of the reign of God was not a patriotic hallucination or the
dream of an excited [exalté] mystic. The reign of God is the reign of
justice." [184] (As if the second sentence proved the first.) And yet,
all the while: "On the whole, the Gospel ethic is no more consistent
than the hope of the kingdom.... Considered in themselves, as the
Gospel makes them known to us, they are not mythic but mystic." [185]

Thus helped to a definite conception, we turn to the ethic, which we
have seen to be in the main a compilation from Jewish literature. This
fact M. Loisy admits, only to deny that it has any significance:--


    He opposes the voice of his conscience to the tradition of the
    doctors. There lies precisely the originality of his teaching,
    which, if one recomposed the materials piece by piece, could be
    found scattered in the Biblical writings or in the sayings of the
    rabbis. Like every man who speaks to men, Jesus takes his ideas
    in the common treasure of his environment and his time; but as to
    what he makes of it [pour le parti qu'il en tire] one does not
    say that it proceeds from any one. This independence results,
    probably, at once from his character and from the circumstances
    of his education. [186]


Thus, as regards the Sermon on the Mount, the act of collecting a
number of ethical precepts and maxims from the current literature and
lore of one's people and curtly enouncing them, without development,
is a proof of supreme moral originality, and is to be regarded as
opposing the voice of one's conscience to tradition. Had the rabbis,
then, no conscience? Was their ethic a mere tradition, even when they
gave out or originated the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount? Was
Hillel but a mouth-piece of the law? M. Loisy must in justice pardon us
for avowing that so far he has but duplicated a worn-out paralogism,
and that he has evaded the plain documentary fact that the Sermon is
a literary compilation, [187] and not a discourse at all.

And when we turn to specific teachings, his commentary does but compel
us to ask how the teaching which he insists upon taking as genuinely
uttered by the Teacher can be associated with the Messianist he has
been describing. Accepting as genuine the story of the woman taken in
adultery, now bracketed in the English Revised Version as being absent
from the most ancient manuscripts, but presumably found in the lost
Gospel of the Hebrews, [188] he remarks that "the elect of the kingdom
must not use marriage; they were to be as the angels in heaven"; [189]
and at the same time he describes the veto on divorce as "a trait so
personal to the teaching of Christ, and so difficult to comprehend if
one denies all originality to that teaching." [190] That is to say,
the believer in the speedy end of all marriage relations, and the
establishment of a new and angelic life for all who survive, occupied
himself earnestly with the restriction or abolition of divorce!

At other junctures M. Loisy is ready to see how the doctrines of
sections and movements in the later Christian Church were introduced
into the Gospels. He will not admit of such an explanation here. Does
he then see a supreme moral inspiration in the Montanists and
other Christian sectaries who set their faces against the sexual
instinct? Has he forgotten the text in Malachi (ii, 14-16), vetoing
a heartless divorce? And has he never heard of the saying of Rabbi
Eliezer, echoed elsewhere in the Talmud, that the altar sheds tears
over him who puts away his first wife? Is the moral originality of
the Gospel teaching to be established by merely ignoring all previous
teaching to the same effect?

But it is hardly necessary thus to revert to the question of the
ethical originality of the Gospel teaching: the essential issue
here is the impossible combination presented to us by M. Loisy as
his historical Jesus. Without any sign of misgiving he offers us
the figure of a mystic awaiting the imminent end of the old order of
things and the substitution of a new and heavenly order, doubled with a
moralist deeply preoccupied over certain details of the vanishing life
and a prescription for their regulation in the future in which they
were not to exist. M. Loisy is, indeed, liable to be censured by the
orthodox and the "liberals" alike for his explicit avowal that "It is
very superfluous to seek in the Gospel a doctrine of social economy,
or even a program of moral conduct for individual existences which
were to go on according to the order of nature, in the indefinite
sequence of humanity." [191] This seems to overlook the passage
(Mt. xxv, 34-46) in which eternal life is promised to those who
succour the distressed. Such a rule for conduct does seem to indicate
some regard for the continuance of life on the normal lines. It is,
we know, a simple adaptation from the ritual of the Egyptian Book of
the Dead, but it has had from many commentators even such praise for
"originality" as M. Loisy has bestowed on the Teaching in general.

Such teaching is, in point of fact, quite undeserving of praise for
"spirituality," inasmuch as it in effect recommends benevolence as a
way of securing eternal life. He who succours the distressed on the
motive so supplied is plainly a long way below the Good Samaritan or
the simple compassionate human being of everyday life. But this is
really the ground-note of all the Gospel ethic. The Beatitudes are
promises of compensatory bliss; and, indeed, in a system which founds
upon immortality there is no escape from this kind of motivation. The
Pagan appeal, made alternately to nobleness and to concern for good
repute among one's fellows, is clearly on the higher plane, and would
tend to maintain, so far as mere moral appeal can, a nobler type of
human being. It is not even clear, in the light of the general Judaism
of the doctrine of the Kingdom, whether "one of these my brethren"
can mean more than "one of the faith."

But however that may be, we have to note that for M. Loisy the
promise of reward at the judgment for help given to the distressed
is not a Jesuine utterance. It occurs only in Matthew; and we may
readily agree that, if such an allocution were really delivered by
the alleged Founder, it could not conceivably have been left to one
collector to preserve it. "The redactor of the first Gospel," comments
M. Loisy in his best critical vein, "thought he ought to put this here
to complete his collection of instructions concerning the parousia
and the great judgment. It is ... a piece in which is developed,
from the point of view of the last judgment, the word of the Lord:
'He that receiveth you receiveth me.'" So that a teaching which still
makes a great impression on the Christian consciousness is confessedly
but a development by an unknown hand of a bare Messianic phrase. "It
has been visibly arranged to close the compilation of discourses and
parables made here by the redactor of the first Gospel." [192]

Yet when we come to the parable of the Good Samaritan, which occurs
only in Luke, and which also cannot be conceived as being deliberately
omitted by the previous evangelists if it had been uttered by
the Master, M. Loisy indulges in a very long discourse that reads
like a preserved sermon, only to conclude that "the parable of the
Samaritan thus offers itself as one of the most authentic testimonies
[un témoignage authentique entre tous] of the teaching of Jesus. It
is clear that the evangelist has not invented it, but that he has
found it ready made, and that he has only given it a frame, in his
fashion." [193] It is with a certain embarrassment over the spectacle
of a good scholar's divagation that one proceeds to point to the
absolute non sequitur in M. Loisy's comment. Supposing we agree that
the evangelist found the parable ready made, wherein is this case
differentiated from that of the passage in Matthew last noted? That
is at least as likely to have been found ready made; yet it is not in
that case claimed by M. Loisy that the passage is therefore a record of
a real Jesuine utterance. He sees that it is a "patch," a development.

Now, the parable of the Good Samaritan is a plain documentary "patch,"
an insertion without context, between the address of Jesus to the
disciples after that to the returned Seventy (whose mission M. Loisy
had somewhat nervously dismissed as the evangelist's "figurative
frame for the evangelizing of the pagans" [194]) and the resumption:
"Now, as they went on their way...." It is impossible to imagine a
more palpable insertion. First the mythic Seventy, the creation of
a Gentilizing Christian, make their report on the exact lines of the
report of the Twelve; then Jesus addresses them; then he "rejoices in
the Holy Spirit." Then, "turning to the disciples, he said privately,
Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see...." This last
suggests an earlier allocution to the Twelve which has had to be turned
into a "private" speech to them to distinguish it from the reply to the
Seventy. [195] But however that may be, the natural sequel is verse 38,
"Now, as they went on their way...." And it is between these points
of natural connection that we get the parable episode beginning:
"And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him...."

Well may M. Loisy say that the episode is a thing "found ready made";
it has certainly no place in the original document. But it was
"made" by a later hand, and it was inserted either by him who made
it or by him who "found" it. It is the work of a Gentilizer, aiming
at Jewish priests and Levites, and in a less degree at the scribes,
whom he treats as comparatively open to instruction. It is part of
the Gentilizing propaganda which evolved the story of the mission of
the Seventy, and it is naturally inserted after that episode. But to
admit that to be a work of redaction and to call the parable a genuine
Jesuine utterance is only to give one more distressing illustration of
the common collapse of the simplest principles of documentary criticism
under the sway of conservative prepossession. M. Loisy retains the
parable of the Good Samaritan as Jesuine simply because he feels
that to abandon it is to come near making an end of the claim for the
moral originality of the Gospels. It is probably from a Gentile hand,
though it may conceivably have come from an enlightened Jew.

And so we find M. Loisy, with all his scholarly painstaking and his
laudable measure of candour, presenting us finally with an uncritical
result. His historical Jesus will not cohere. It is a blend of early
Judaic eschatology with later ethical common sense, early Judaic
humanity and particularism with later Gentile universalism; even as
the Gospels are a mosaic of a dozen other diverging and conflicting
tendencies, early and late. "One can explain to oneself Jesus,"
exclaims M. Loisy; "one cannot explain to oneself those who invented
him." [196] Let the reader judge for himself whether M. Loisy has
given us any explanation; and whether, after our survey, there is
any scientific difficulty in the conception of an imaginary personage
produced, like an ideal photograph resulting from a whole series of
superimposed portraits, by the continued travail of generations of
men variously bent on picturing a Messiah for their hopes, a God for
their salvation, and a Teacher for their lives.







CHAPTER XVIII

THE PAULINE PROBLEM


How much M. Loisy is swayed by prepossession may be further gathered
from his argumentation over the "testimony of Paul" in connection
with his criticism of the myth theory. Professor Drews, he remarks,
does not follow those who contest the authenticity of the Epistles,
"though the interest of his thesis imperiously demands it"; and again:
"Paul is a dangerous witness for the mythic hypothesis." [197]

It may be worth while for me here to note that a study of the Pauline
epistles, on the view that "the four" were probably genuine in the
main, was a determining factor in my own resort to the mythical
hypothesis. The critical situation created by realizing that Paul
practically knew nothing of the Gospel narratives save the detachable
item of the resurrection was for me almost exactly analogous to that
created by realizing that the Israel of the Book of Judges knew nothing
of the Pentateuchal life in the wilderness. So far from being a witness
against the myth theory, the Pauline literature was one of the first
clear grounds for that theory. The school of Van Manen can realize,
what M. Loisy cannot, that the spuriousness of the whole Pauline
literature, so far from being "imperiously required" by the myth
theory, sets up for that a certain complication. [198] As a matter of
fact, Van Manen took exactly the converse view to that of M. Loisy:--


    He was at bottom a man of conservative character, and it was only
    with great reluctance that he found himself compelled to abandon
    the Paul consecrated by tradition. But when, as a man of science,
    he had once made this sacrifice to his convictions, his belief
    in an historical Jesus received a fresh accession of strength;
    now at length the existence of Jesus had become probable. If the
    letters were written a century later than the time when Jesus
    lived, then his deification in the Pauline letters ceases to be
    so astonishing. [199]


Decidedly M. Loisy had been somewhat superficial in his estimate
of the tendencies of the argument over Paul. Now, the myth theory,
as it happens, is neither made nor marred by any decision as to
the spuriousness of the Pauline letters. The crucial point is that,
whether early or late--and the dating of them as pseudepigrapha is a
difficult matter--the cardinal epistles have been interpolated. This
became clear to me at an early stage in my studies, independently of
any previous criticism. That the two passages, 1 Cor. xi, 23-28; xv,
3-11, are interpolations, and that in the second case the interpolation
has been added to, are as clear results of pure documentary analysis
as any in the whole field of the discussion. [200] And when M. Loisy
ascribes to Professor Drews an "entirely gratuitous hypothesis of
interpolation," and implies that such hypotheses are set up because
the texts are "extremely awkward for the mythic theory," [201] he is
himself misled by his parti pris. Whereas I came to my conclusions
[202] as to interpolation while working towards the myth theory,
exactly the same conclusions as mine, I afterwards found, had been
previously reached by at least one continental scholar [203] who had
not the mythic theory in view; and later by others [204] who equally
stood aloof from it. M. Loisy would do well to ask himself whether
it is not he who is uncritically swayed by his presuppositions,
and whether the men to whom he imputes such bias are not the really
disinterested critics.

In regard to the text of 1 Cor. xv, 3 sq., he describes as surprising
the argument that the account of the appearance of Jesus to
"five hundred at once" is shown to be late by its absence from the
Gospels. This very silence of the evangelists, he insists, "renders
unplausible [invraisemblable] the entirely gratuitous hypothesis
of an interpolation." [205] One is driven to wonder what conception
M. Loisy has formed of the manner of the compilation of the Gospels. On
his view, Paul had very early put in currency the record that the
risen Jesus had appeared to "above five hundred brethren at once";
yet this record, so welcome to the Church, was never inserted in
the Gospels. Why not? In M. Loisy's opinion, one of them, at least,
was penned or redacted in the Pauline interest:--


    One may without doubt ... affirm that the oldest of the synoptics,
    the Gospel of Mark, was composed, in a certain measure, in favour
    of Paul.... The same Gospel seems to have the conscious purpose
    of lowering the Galilean disciples to the advantage of Paul and
    his disciples. [206]


And while M. Loisy justly rejects, as opposed to the internal evidence,
the claim that "Luke" is the intimate of Paul, and even denies that the
third Gospel is really Pauline in tendency, [207] he will hardly say
that it is anti-Pauline, or likely on that or any other score to repel
an important item of testimony to the appearances of the risen Jesus,
supplied by such an authority as the Apostle to the Gentiles. He can
give no reason whatever, then, why the "five hundred" item should
appear neither in Gospels nor Acts. It is in point of fact to be
taken as a very late interpolation indeed. And if M. Loisy, as in
duty bound, would but note the sequence: "then to the twelve; then
... to above five hundred ... then to all the apostles," he might,
as simple critic, see that there have been successive tamperings.

As to the genuineness and the dating of the epistles, it may be
well at this point to put the issue clearly. The general case of
Van Manen is decidedly strong; and the entire absence from the Acts
of any mention of any public epistle by Paul is all in Van Manen's
favour. The Epistle to the Romans is so far dissolved under criticism
that it might be classed as neither Pauline nor an epistle. [208]
That there are late literary elements in the rest of the cardinal
"four" I have myself argued, [209] independently of the question of
the interpolations of quasi-history. For a free historical student
there can be no primary question of how the dating of the epistles
will affect the problem of the historicity of Jesus: the problem is
to be scientifically solved on its merits. But while the school of Van
Manen fail to recognize interpolations in the epistles as they stand,
and to revise their chronology in the light of that fact, they are
postponing the critical settlement. That the rejection of all the
Pauline epistles as pseudepigraphic is not at all a counter stroke
to the myth theory is shown by Mr. Whittaker's definite acceptance
of both positions. Van Manen was premature on the historicity question.

Assuredly there is much to be done before the myth theory can be
reduced to a definitive scientific form. It is to be hoped that, free
as it is from perverting commitments, it may be developed rather more
rapidly than the "liberal" theory of the human Christ, which has been
on the stocks for over a hundred years without securing any higher
measure of unanimity than exists among the Christian sects. But it
can have no rapid acceptance. Questions of myth analogies--always
open to the perverse handling of men who cannot or will not see that
in mythology and anthropology claims of analogy are not claims of
derivation--are apt to be obscure at best; and the establishment
of the hypothesis of a pre-Christian Jesus cult has been admitted
from the outset to be difficult. And the sociological history of the
rise of Christianity, to which the myth question is but preparatory,
has still to be written.

In this direction too there may be complications. Pastor Kalthoff's
very important treatise on The Rise of Christianity puts the theory
that the Church began as a communistic body; and Karl Kautsky, in
his Der Ursprung des Christenthums (1908), has vigorously developed
that conception. It has some strong grounds, and it is beset by very
serious difficulties, which Kautsky, I think, has not met. When he
denies that there were Hellenistic experiments and propagandas which
in a later period could have set some Christian enthusiasts upon
inventing a communistic beginning for the Church, he seems to ignore
his own argument from the Epistle of James, and evidence which he could
have found in Kalthoff. But unless the communistic theory (adumbrated
long ago in De Quincey's rash thesis that the Essenes were the first
Christians) is pressed as giving the whole origin of Christianity,
it remains a part rather of the sociological problem than of the
hierological inquiry. And I do not think that Kalthoff, had he lived,
would have so pressed it. He saw, I think, that there is a primary
religious factor and problem, and that the other is secondary. There
was a sacramental cult before there could be any communism. When the
origin of the cult is made fairly clear the question of communism may
be settled. But the Acts is a very dubious basis for a historical
theory, and the Epistle of James tells rather of Ebionism than of
communism. The history of the Ebionites and the Nazarenes, which for
me was one of the points of reversion to a myth theory, seems to be
the true starting point for the history of the Church.







CHAPTER XIX

THE HISTORY OF THE DISCUSSION


In all things, finally, one must be prepared for a boundless operation
of the spirit of controversy, which is as it were the atmosphere of
intellectual progress, and, like the physical atmosphere, is traversed
by much dust, many gusts, and many persistent currents. An infinite
quantity of mere insolence and mere personal aspersion arises round
every problem that disturbs widespread prejudice: we have seen some
of it even in a survey which aims solely at bringing out the main
arguments on our issue. And where a body of doctrine is related to
an economic foundation, controversy is sure to be specially protracted.

This has already been abundantly seen in the development of the
"liberal" view of the human Christ, of which M. Loisy may be taken
as an advanced representative; while Professor Schmiedel may rank
as an exponent too advanced to be otherwise than suspect for some
of the school. It is instructive to realize that M. Loisy stands
to-day very much where Strauss did eighty years ago. What was
then revolutionary heresy is now become a very respectable form of
professional theology. Only in his old age did Strauss himself realize
to what philosophical conclusions his critical method led; and on
the historicity question he seems to have made no serious advance at
all. Challenged by Ullmann to say whether, on his theory, the Church
created the Christ of the Gospels or he the Church, Strauss replied
that the alternative was false, and that both things had happened;
the Christ being created by the faith of the Church, which faith in
turn was created by the person of the historical Jesus. From that
gyratory position he never really departed; and that is the position
of M. Loisy to-day.

If it has taken eighty years to yield only that amount of progress,
through a whole library of laborious scholarly literature, there can
be no great weight left in the appeal to scholarly authority. The
authority of to-day is the heretic of our grandfathers' day. It is
for the radical innovator, on the other hand, to learn the lesson
which was not duly learned by his predecessors, unless it be that
in some cases they were merely silenced by orthodox hostility. While
many Freethinkers, probably, had come privately to the view of those
intimates of Bolingbroke who are referred to by Voltaire as denying
the historicity of Jesus, the two writers who first gave European
vogue to the proposition, Dupuis and Volney, staked everything on the
astronomical elements of the cult, and on the chief myth-analogies
with Pagan religions. Their argument was both sound and important,
so far as it went; but for lack of investigation on the Jewish side
of the problem, and of the necessary analysis of the Gospels, they
failed to make any serious impression on the scholars, especially as so
many Freethinking critics, down to Reimarus and Voltaire, treated the
historicity of Jesus as certain. [210] And when an anonymous German
writer in 1799 published a treatise on Revelation and Mythology in
which, according to Strauss, he posited the whole life of Jesus as
pre-conceived in Jewish myth and speculation, he made no impression on
an age busily and vainly occupied with the so-called "rationalizing"
of myths and miracles by reducing them to natural events misunderstood.

Later, another--or the same?--anonymous German, also cited by Strauss,
in a review article condemned every attempt to find a historical basis
for the Gospel myths; but in both cases the anonymity sufficiently
told of the general resentment against any such view. And when
Strauss himself, the first to handle the problem with an approach to
scientific thoroughness, not only adhered to the central assumption
of historicity, but argued confidently that the mythical dissolution
of so many of the details made no difference to faith, it was natural
that interest in his undertaking should slacken. The fact that it
had ruined his career would perhaps count for still more. Freedom
of academic discussion in Germany has never meant any minimizing of
pious malice; and Strauss all his life long had to bear his cross
for the offence of a new advance in historical science.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who for almost the first time, after Schmiedel,
has brought the note of amenity into the argument for historicity as
against the negative, remarks that the greatest Lives of Jesus are
those which have been written with hate--to wit, those by Reimarus
and Strauss. Reimarus, whom Dr. Schweitzer genially overrates,
was indeed given to invective against mythological personages,
from Moses downward; but "hate" is a strange term to apply to the
calm and judicial procedure of Strauss. As well ascribe to hate the
rise of Unitarianism. If hate is to be the term for Strauss's mood,
what epithet is left for that of his opponents, who, as Dr. Schweitzer
relates, circled him with unsleeping malignity to the end, and sought
to ostracize the clerical friend of his youth who delivered an address
over his grave? It is only historic religion that can foster and
sustain such hates as these. It is true that Bruno Bauer, who so
suddenly advanced upon Strauss's position, detecting new elements
of mythic construction in the Gospels, and arriving ten years later
at the definite doctrine of non-historicity, exhibited a play of
storm and stress in the earlier part of his inquiry. He reviled at
that stage, not the Jesus whose "life" he was investigating, but
the theologians who had so confounded confusion. "These outbreaks
of bitterness," Dr. Schweitzer admits, "are to be explained by the
feeling of repulsion which German apologetic theology inspired in
every genuinely honest and thoughtful man by the methods which it
adopted in opposing Strauss." [211] Add that the same methods were
being employed towards Bauer, and the case is perhaps simplified.

With these cases before him, and with the record to write of a hundred
and thirty years of admittedly abortive discussion, Dr. Schweitzer
could not forgo an exordium in praise of the "German temperament" which
had so wonderfully kept the discussion going. Such a record seems a
surprising ground for national pride; but it may be granted him that
the German temperament will never lack material for self-panegyric,
which appears to be the breath of its nostrils. To those, however,
for whom science is independent of nationality, the lesson has
a somewhat different aspect. What has been lacking is scientific
thoroughness. Bruno Bauer's flaws of mood and method were such that
his more radical penetration of the problem at certain points made
no such impression as did the orderly and temperate procedure of
Strauss. "One might suppose that between the work of Strauss and that
of Bauer there lay not five but fifty years--the critical work of a
whole generation." [212] "Bauer's 'Criticism of the Gospel History'
is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only
now coming to recognize, after half a century, is the ablest and most
complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which
is anywhere to be found." [213]

But his mood and his method not only made him fail to establish his
mythical theory; they meant miscarriage in the very conception of
it--a mere substitution of a subjective notion for the method of
inductive science. Bauer's final way of putting the theory merely
discredits it. He decides that the whole myth was the creation of
one evangelist, whereby he shows that he is no mythologist. He never
reached the true myth basis. After all, "the German temperament"
seems to fall short, at some rather essential points, of the faculty
for solving great historical problems; one feels it somewhat acutely
when Dr. Schweitzer comes to the undertaking himself.

The great merit of Schweitzer's book is its manly and genial tone;
though, as this is freely bestowed on the most extreme heretics, he may
make another impression when he speaks of the "inconceivable stupidity"
of the average Life of Jesus in the treatment of the connection of
events. What his book mainly demonstrates is the laborious futility
of the age-long discussion maintained by the professional theologians
of Germany. When he comes to the latest developments, which are but
extensions of the common-sense analyses of Bruno Bauer, he is full
of admiration for criticisms which, I can testify, have occurred
spontaneously to unpretending Freethinkers with no claim to special
training. Some of the most important myth elements in the Gospels--for
instance, the story of Barabbas--he does not even glance at, having
apparently, like the other specialists, never realized that there is
anything there to explain.

By Dr. Schweitzer's account, the great mass of the German specialists
for a century past have been unable to see contradictions and
incompatibilities in the Gospels which leap to the eyes; to himself,
Wrede's statement of some of them appears to be a revelation. It would
seem that the simple old "Secularist" method of exposing these had
covered ground which for the specialists was wholly unexplored. Thus
it comes about that the myth theory, addressed to men who had never
realized the character of their own perpetually conned documents,
fared as it might have done if addressed to the Council of Trent.

Of no myth-theories save those of Bruno Bauer and Pastor Kalthoff,
which alike ignore the clues of mythology and anthropology, does
Dr. Schweitzer seem to have any knowledge. He is capable of giving
a senseless account of a book he has not seen, and, it may be,
of one he has seen. Of Christianity and Mythology he alleges that
"according to that work the Christ-myth is merely a form of the
Krishna-myth"--a proposition which tells only of absolute ignorance
concerning the book. If, as I suspect, he has no better ground for
his account of Hennell's Inquiry as "nothing more than Venturini's
'Non-miraculous History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth' tricked
out with a fantastic paraphernalia of learning," [214] it speaks
ill for the regular functioning of his critical conscience. But
where he has to deal with concrete arguments he is straightforward,
alert, and readily appreciative; and his survey as a whole leads
up to a complete dismissal of the whole work of the liberal school
so-called. In his summing-up, the only critical choice left is between
"complete scepticism" and "complete eschatology"--that is, between
the avowal that there is no evidence for a historical Jesus, and the
conviction that the historical Jesus was purely and simply a Jewish
"hero and dreamer," whose entire doctrine was the advent of the
kingdom of God, the ending of the old order, in which consummation
he secretly believed he was to figure as the Messiah.

The bare statement of the proposition hardly reveals its
significance. Dr. Schweitzer's "dreamer" is not M. Loisy's, who is
conceived as having had something to teach to his disciples, and even
to the multitude. Dr. Schweitzer's Jesus has, indeed, disciples for
no assignable reason, but he is expressly declared to be no Teacher,
even as Wrede's Teacher is expressly declared to be no Messiah. The
joint result is to leave the ground tolerably clear for the scientific
myth theory, of which Dr. Schweitzer has not come within sight,
having omitted to inquire about it. As he sums up:--


    Supposing that only a half--nay, only a third--of the critical
    arguments which are common to Wrede and the "Sketch of the Life
    of Jesus" [by Schweitzer] are sound, then the modern historical
    view of the history is wholly ruined. The reader of Wrede's book
    cannot help feeling that here no quarter is given; and any one
    who goes carefully through the present writer's "Sketch" must come
    to see that between the modern historical and the eschatological
    life of Jesus no compromise is possible. [215]


Let us see, then, to what the eschatological theory amounts, considered
as a residual historical explanation.







CHAPTER XX

THE GROUND CLEARED FOR THE MYTH THEORY


The issue as between Schweitzer and Wrede comes to this. Wrede sees
that the Messiahship is a creation following upon the belief in the
resurrection, and only uncritically deducible from the documents. For
him, Jesus is a Teacher who was made into a Messiah by his followers
after his death, the Gospels being manipulated to conceal the fact
that he made no Messianic claims. Schweitzer sees that the Teaching
Jesus is a documentary construction; and that, unless the Crucified
One had some Messianic idea, the Gospel story as a whole crumbles to
nothing. And he asks:--


    But how did the appearance of the risen Jesus suddenly become for
    them [the disciples] a proof of His Messiahship and the basis of
    their eschatology? That Wrede fails to explain, and so makes this
    "event" an "historical" miracle which in reality is harder to
    believe than the supernatural event. [216]


So be it: Wrede's thesis is here, after all, part of the common
content of the "liberal" ideal, which cannot stand. But how does
his critic make good the converse of a would-be Messiah who was
no Teacher, but yet had disciples, and was finally crucified for
making a secret Messianic claim? The answer is too naïve to be
guessed. Accepting, in defiance of every suggestion of common sense,
the story of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Dr. Schweitzer
decides that "the episode was Messianic for Jesus, but not Messianic
for the people." With no authority save the documents which at
this point he radically and recklessly alters, he decides that the
multitude had hailed Jesus "as the Prophet, as Elias," whatever
the texts may say; and Jesus, feeling he was the Messiah, "played
with his Messianic self-consciousness" all the while. Why, then,
was he put to death? Simply because Judas betrayed his secret to
the priests! Dr. Schweitzer can see well enough the futility of the
betrayal story as it stands, inasmuch as Judas is paid to do what was
not required--identifying a well-known public figure. But rather than
admit myth here he will invent a better story for himself, and we get
this: Jesus had dropped Messianic hints to his disciples, and Judas
sold the information. And all the while none of the other disciples
knew this, though at the trial the priests went among the people
and induced them "not to agree to the Procurator's proposal. How? By
telling them why He was condemned; by revealing to them the Messianic
secret. That makes him at once from a prophet worthy of honour into
a deluded enthusiast and blasphemer." [217]

"In the name of the Prophet, figs!" Dr. Schweitzer has, he believes,
saved the character of "the mob of Jerusalem" at last; and by what a
device! By assuming that to claim to be the Messiah was to blaspheme,
which it certainly was not; [218] and by assuming that the mob who
had (on Schweitzer's view) acclaimed an Elias would be struck dumb
with horror on being told that Elias claimed to be the Messiah. The
secret of this psychosis is in Dr. Schweitzer's sole possession,
as is the explanation of the total absence of his statement from all
the literature produced by the generation which, on his assumption,
knew all about the case. And this is what is left after a survey of
the German exegesis "from Reimarus to Wrede."

It is to be feared that neither the scholars nor the laity will
accept either of Dr. Schweitzer's alternatives, and that the nature
of his own prestidigitatory solution may tend somewhat to weaken
the effect of his indictment of the kaleidoscopic process which
has hitherto passed as a solution among the experts. Dr. Schweitzer
seems to realize all absurdities save his own. None the less, he has
done a critical service in arguing down all the rest, though even
in his final verdict he exhibits symptoms of the "sacred disease,"
the theologian's malady of self-contradiction:--


    The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah,
    who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the
    Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final
    consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by
    rationalism, [219] endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed
    by modern theology in an historical garb....

    He passes by our time and returns to his own....

    The historical foundation of Christianity as built up by
    rationalistic, by liberal, and by modern theology no longer exists;
    but that does not mean that Christianity has lost its historical
    foundation....

    Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force
    streams forth from Him and flows through our time also [220]....


"Loves me, loves me not," as the little girls say in counting the
flower petals. We seem entitled to suggest in the interests of simple
science, as distinguished from Germanic Kultur, that temperament might
perhaps usefully be left out of the debate; and that the question of
what Jesus stands for may be left over till we have settled whether
the film presented to us by Dr. Schweitzer can stand between us and
a scientific criticism which assents to all of his verdict save the
reservation in favour of his own thesis.

Meantime, let us not seem to suggest that the English handling of
the historical problem during the nineteenth century has been any
more scientific than the German. Hennell's treatment of it was but
a simplification of Strauss's; and Thomas Scott's Life of Jesus
was but an honest attempt to solidify Kenan. In the early part of
the nineteenth century little was achieved beyond the indispensable
weakening of the reign of superstition by critical propaganda. In early
Victorian England, where Freethought had been left to unprofessional
freelances, still liable to brutal prosecution, an anonymous attempt
was made to carry the matter further in a curious book entitled "The
Existence of Christ Disproved by Irresistible Evidence, in a Series
of Letters by a German Jew." It bears no date, but seems to have been
published between 1841 and 1849, appearing serially in thirty penny
weekly numbers, printed in Birmingham, and published in London by
Hetherington. As Hetherington, who died in 1849, was imprisoned in
1840 for the "blasphemous libel" of publishing Haslam's Letters to
the Clergy, but not earlier or later on any similar charge, he would
seem to have been allowed to publish this without molestation.

About the author I have no information. He writes English fluently
and idiomatically, and had read Strauss in the original. But though
he presses against Hennell the argument from the case of Apollos,
latterly developed by Professor W. B. Smith with such scholarly skill,
the book as a whole has little persuasive power. The author is one
of the violent and vehement men who alone, in the day of persecution,
were likely to hazard such a thesis; and he does it with an amount of
vociferation much in excess of his critical effort or his knowledge. It
made, and could make, no impression whatever on the educated world;
and I never met any Freethinker who had seen or heard of it.

It is in another spirit, and in the light of a far greater accumulation
of evidence than was available in the first half of the last century,
that the mythical theory has been restated in our day. In particular
it proceeds upon a treasury of anthropological lore which was lacking
to Bruno Bauer, as it was to Ghillany, who was so much better fitted
than Bauer to profit by such light. As knowledge of the past gradually
arranges itself into science, and the malice of religious resistance
recedes from point to point before the sapping process of culture,
the temper of the whole debate undergoes a transmutation. After a
generation in which a Lyell could only in privacy avow his views as
to the antiquity of man, came that in which Tylor, without polemic,
could establish an anthropological method that was to mean the
reduction of all religious phenomena, on a new line, to the status
of natural phenomena. And even the malice of the bigoted faithful,
which will subsist while the faith endures, falls into its place as
one of these, equally with the malice of the conventional theorists
who meet the exposure of their untenable positions with aspersion in
defect of argument.

But the fact that a recent German exegete has been found capable of
facing the problem in a spirit of scientific candour and good temper,
and with something of the old-time detachment which made Rosenkranz
marvel at Carlyle's tone towards Diderot, may be a promise of a more
general resort to civilized controversial methods. In any case, the
fact that a trained New Testament critic, undertaking to establish
the historicity of Jesus, has affirmed the scientific failure of all
the preceding attempts, and offered a historic residuum which few will
think worth an hour's consideration, seems a sufficient demonstration
that the mythical theory is the real battleground of the future.

In that connection it is interesting to note that Sir J. G. Frazer,
who has so warmly contended that, as history cannot be explained
"without the influence of great men," we must accept the historicity
of Jesus, [221] latterly propounds a tentative theory of a historic
original for Osiris, whom he supposes to have been perhaps evolved
from the idealized personality of an ancient King Khent, buried
at Abydos. [222] It is a mere suggestion, and it at once evokes the
reminder that, on the theorist's own general principles, King Khent may
be regarded as having been theocratically identified with the already
existing God. However that may be, the hypothesis does nothing to save
Sir James's irrelevant plea about the operation of "great men" and
"extraordinary minds" in the founding of all religions, for he does
not suggest that King Khent's career in any way resembled the myth
of Osiris, or that he first taught the things Osiris is said to have
taught. So that, in the case of Osiris as of Jesus, the required great
men and extraordinary minds may still, in the terms of the claim, be
inserted at any point rather than in the personage named or suggested
as Founder. [223] If we agree to call the compiler of the Sermon on
the Mount and the parables of the Kingdom and the Prodigal Son and
the Good Samaritan great men and extraordinary minds, Sir James's very
simple argument is turned. And we should still be left asking who were
the historic founders of the cults of Zeus and Brahma and Attis and
Adonis, Dionysos and Herakles and Krishna and Aphrodite and Artemis.

On the other hand, as it happens, that very suggestion as to King
Khent points afresh to the myth theory as the solution of the Gospel
problem. Nothing emerges oftener in Sir James's great survey than the
ancient connection between kingship and liability to sacrifice. It
will not avail to close off that connection by claiming King Khent as
a potentate of an age after that of sacrificed kings. The sacrificial
past would still have to be taken into account in explaining the
deification of King Khent. And it is just an analogous process that
is suggested in our theory of the Jesus myth. A long series of slain
Jesuses, ritually put to death at an annual sacrament "for the sins
of many," is the ultimate anthropological ground given for the special
cultus out of which grew the mythical biography of the Gospels.

And if Sir James remains satisfied with his charge that in putting
such a theory we "flatter the vanity of the vulgar," we may be
permitted to ask him which line of propaganda is likeliest to appeal
to the multitude. Let him, in his turn, be on his guard against the
vulgarity which seeks support in science from popular prejudice. As to
his pronouncement that the theory which he so inexpensively attacks
"will find no favour with the philosophic historian," one must just
point out that it does not lie with him to draw up the conclusions of
philosophic history outside of his own great department, or even, for
that matter, in that department. His own historical generalizations,
when they seek to pass from the strictly anthropological to the
sociological status, will often really not bear the slightest critical
analysis. They express at times an entire failure to realize the
nature of a historical process, offering as they do mere chance
speculations which patently conflict with the whole mass of the
evidence he has himself collected. It is not an isolated opinion that
by such abortive attempts at "philosophic history" he has tended to
lessen the usefulness even of that collection, for which all students
are his grateful debtors. In short, he would do well to turn from his
ill-timed incursion into dogmatics to the relevant problem which he
has forced upon so many of his readers--namely, What has become of
his mythological maxim that the ritual precedes the myth?

While the professed mythologist rejects the application of the
myth theory to the current religion in the name of "philosophic
history," students ostensibly more concerned about religion reject
the historicity theory in the name of their religious ideals, finding
in the myth theory the vindication of these. Thus Professor Drews has
from the first connected the argument of his Das Christusmythe with
a claim to regenerate religion by freeing it from anthropomorphism;
and I have seen other theistic pronouncements to the same effect;
to say nothing of the declarations of scholarly Churchmen that for
them the Jesus of the Gospels is a God or nothing, and that for them
the historicity argument has no religious value. Such positions seem
to me, equation for equation, very sufficiently to balance the bias
of Sir James Frazer. For my own part, I am content to maintain the
theory in the name of science, and it is by scientific tests that I
invite the reader to try it.







CONCLUSION


Enough has now been said to make it clear to the open-minded reader
that the myth-theory is no wanton challenge to belief in a clear
and credible historical narrative. It is not the advocates of the
myth-theory who have raised the issue. The trouble began with the
attempts of the believers to solve their own difficulties. Before
the rise of criticism so-called we find them hating and burning
each other in their quarrels over the meaning of their central
sacrament. As soon as criticism began to work on the problem of the
miracles and the contradictions in the narratives of these, they set
themselves to frame "Harmonies" of the Gospels which only brought
into clearer relief their discordance. After the spread of scientific
views had shaken the belief in miracles, they set themselves, still as
believers, to frame explanatory Lives of Jesus in which miracles were
dissolved into hallucinations or natural episodes misunderstood; and,
as before, no two explanations coincided. A "consensus of scholars"
has never existed.

It was after a whole generation of German scholars had laboured
to extract a historical Jesus from the Gospel mosaic that Strauss
produced his powerful and sustained argument to show that most of
the separate episodes which they had arbitrarily striven to reduce
to history were but operations of the mythopoeic faculty, proceeding
upon the mass of Jewish prophecy and legend under the impulse of the
Messianic idea. Strauss was no wanton caviller, but a great critic,
forced to his work by the failure of a multitude of Gelehrten vom
Fach to extract a credible result from what they admitted to be,
as it stood, a history in large part incredible.

Strauss, in turn, believing at once in a residual historical Jesus and
in the perfect sufficiency of a mere ideal personage as a standard for
men's lives and a basis for their churches, left but a new enigma to
his successors. He had stripped the nominal Founder of a mass of mythic
accretions, but, attempting no new portrait, left him undeniably more
shadowy than before. Later "liberal" criticism, tacitly accepting
Strauss's negations, set itself anew to extract from the Gospels,
by a process of more or less conscientious documentary analysis, the
"real" Jesus whom the critics and he agreed to have existed. Renan
undertook to do as much in his famous "romance"; and German critics,
who so characterized his work, produced for their part only much duller
romances, devoid of Renan's wistful artistic charm. And, as before,
every "biographer" in turn demurred to the results of the others.

It is the result of the utter inadequacy of all these attempts to solve
the historical problem, and of the ever-growing sense of the inadequacy
of a mere legendary construction to form a code for human life and a
basis for a cosmic philosophy, that independent inquirers in various
countries have set about finding out the real historical process of the
rise of Christianity, dismissing the worn-out convention. Small-minded
conservatives at once exclaim, and will doubtless go on saying, that
those who thus explain away the "historical Jesus," are moved by their
antipathy to Christianity, and to theism in general. The assertion
is childishly false. One of the leading exponents of the myth-theory
gives his theism--or pantheism--as the primary inspiration of his
work. The present writer, as he has more than once explained, began
by way of writing a sociological history of the rise of Christianity
on the foundation of a historical Jesus with twelve disciples--this
long after coming to a completely naturalistic view of religion,
which excluded theism. From such a point of view there was no à priori
objection whatever to a historical Jesus. At one time he sketched a
hypothesis of several successive Jesuses. The intangibility of any
historical Jesus was the conclusion slowly forced by a long attempt
to clear the historical starting-point, supposed to be irreducible.

Since that discovery was reached, the discrediting of the conventional
view has been carried to the verge of nihilism by men who still posit
a historical Jesus, but critically eliminate nearly every accepted
detail, leaving only a choice between two shadowy and elusive
historical concepts, even less tenable than those they reject. In
the works of Schweitzer and Wrede, there is literally more direct
and detailed destruction of Gospel-myth than had been attempted
by almost any advocate of the myth-theory who had preceded them;
though, as we have seen, it is not difficult to carry the process
further. In the name of the historicity claim, they have gone on
eliminating one by one myth elements where the myth-theorists had
been content to recognize myth in mass. He who would re-establish
the historical Jesus has to combat, first and foremost, the latest
scientific champions of the belief in the historicity.

Those English critics who, like Dr. Conybeare, have declaimed so
loudly of a consensus of critics and of historical common-sense on
the side of a "historical Christ," are simply fulminating from the
standpoint of the German "liberalism" of thirty years ago. Nine-tenths
of what they violently affirm has been definitely and destructively
rejected by the latest German representatives of the critical class,
in the very name of the defence of the historicity of Jesus. Orthodox
Germans, on the other hand, have been pointing out that the "liberal"
view is no longer "modern," the really modern criticism having
shown that the Gospel-figure is a God-figure or nothing. Vainly they
hope to reinforce orthodoxy by the operations of a strict critical
method. [224] Our English "liberal-conservatives," all the while,
are fighting with obsolete (German) weapons, and in total ignorance
of the real course of the campaign in recent years.

In such circumstances, those of us who did our thinking for ourselves,
without waiting for new German leads, have perhaps some right to appeal
anew to readers to do the same. There is no race quarrel involved. But
perhaps those students in the English-speaking countries who in the
past have been wont to follow the German leads of the generation
before their own, may now realize that they were unduly diffident,
and proceed to make that use of their own faculties which Germans
were always making from time to time.







NOTES


[1] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 179, note.

[2] That is, even supposing the Annals to be genuine. Professor
W. B. Smith speaks of a contention "of late" that they are forged by
Poggio Bracciolini, but refers only to the work of Ross, 1878. The
thesis has been far more efficiently maintained in a series of works
by Hochart (1890, etc.), which are worth Professor Smith's attention.

[3] See the collection of illustrations in Mr. Joseph McCabe's Sources
of the Morality of the Gospels (R. P. A., 1914), and his excellent
chapter on "The Parables of the Gospel and the Talmud."

[4] The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, ed. by R. H. Charles,
1908, pp. lxxx, 97, 122, 213, 214.

[5] Id. pp. lxxxi, 213.

[6] Id. pp. xciii-xciv.

[7] Id. Test. Iss. v, 2; Dan. v, 3; Iss. vii, 6.

[8] Id. p. xcv.

[9] Id. p. 210 sq.

[10] Bain, J. S. Mill, p. 139.

[11] Letter to W. S. Lilly, cited in his Claims of Christianity,
1894, pp. 30-31.

[12] Das Christenthum ... der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, 1853,
pp. 35-36. (Eng. trans, i, 38.)

[13] Prof. Flint in "St. Giles Lectures" on "The Faiths of the World,"
1882, p. 419.

[14] Jésus et la tradition évangélique, 1910, p. 45.

[15] It should be explained that in using, for convenience sake, the
traditional ascriptions of the four Gospels, I do not for a moment
admit that these hold good of the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John of
the tradition. In not one case is that tradition historically valid.

[16] The Rev. A. Wright (N. T. Problems, 1898, p. 15) pronounces it
"completely unchronological." Sanday acquiesces (id., p. 177).

[17] Such details, imposed on an otherwise empty narrative, suggest
a pictorial basis, as does the account of the Baptist. Strauss cites
the Hebrew myth-precedent of the calling of Elisha from the plough
by Elijah.

[18] Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 1905, p. 51.

[19] Id. p. 47.

[20] Id. p. 51.

[21] Id. p. 52.

[22] Note the identity of terms, euergeton in Acts (x, 38), euergetesas
in Diodorus.

[23] Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 441 sq.; Pagan Christs,
2nd ed. pp. 229-236. A notably effective criticism is passed on the
thesis in Prof. W. B. Smith's Ecce Deus, p. 177 sq. Mr. Sinclair,
of course, does not dream of meeting such replies.

[24] What else is signified by Acts iii, 18; xvii, 3?

[25] Dr. W. B. Smith sees in the story a mere symbolizing of the
rejection of Jesus by the Jews. This may very well be the case.

[26] Dr. Flinders Petrie even infers a "late" reference to the
Virgin-Birth. The Growth of the Gospels, 1910, p. 86. This Loisy
rejects.

[27] See the useful work of Mr. A. J. Jolley, The Synoptic Problem
for English Readers, 1893.

[28] Yet B. Weiss had contended (Manual, Eng. tr. ii, 224) that Mark
ii, 24 ff., 28, "must be taken from a larger collection of sayings in
which the utterances of Jesus respecting the keeping of the Sabbath
were put together (Matt. xii, 2-8)."

[29] Cp. Dr. R. H. Charles, The Book of Jubilees, 1902, p. xiv.

[30] Work cited, p. 94.

[31] Manual of Introd. to the N. T., Eng. tr. 1888, ii, 261.

[32] Einleitung, p. 51.

[33] Id. p. 49.

[34] Some N. T. Problems, 1898, p. 176.

[35] I have wasted a good deal of time in reading and in confuting
the Baconians, but only in one or two of them have I met with any
etymologies. Their doctrine had no such origin, and in no way rests
on etymologies. Not once have I seen in their books an appeal to
anti-theological bias, and hardly ever an emendation, though there are
plenty of "forced parallels." Nor are etymologies primary elements
in any form of the myth theory. Mr. Sinclair seems to "unpack his
mouth with words" in terms of a Shakespearean formula.

[36] Eng. trans. by Prof. D. M. Kay, 1902.

[37] Wellhausen notably does--Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien,
1905, pp. 39-41. Dr. R. H. Charles, who in his masterly introduction to
the Assumption of Moses indicates so many blunders of German scholars,
may be reckoned quite able to criticize Dalman in his turn.

[38] Cp. Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, 1909, pp. 65-66.

[39] Rev. A. Wright, Some New Testament Problems, p. 212.

[40] Blass, Philology of the Gospels, 1898, p. 35.

[41] Die Entstehung und der Charakter unserer Evangelien, 1907, p. 9.

[42] With the customary bad faith of the orthodox apologist,
Dr. Thorburn represents as a sudden change of thesis the proposition
that "the Christian narrative is merely an ethical adaptation of the
Greek story," because that proposition follows on the remark that the
Christian myth "might fairly be regarded" [as it actually has been]
"as a later sophistication" of the Buddhist myth. On this "might"
there had actually followed, in the text quoted, the statement: "There
are fairly decisive reasons, however, for concluding that the Christian
story was evolved on another line." This sentence Dr. Thorburn conceals
from his readers. There had been no change of thesis whatever.

[43] Rev. Dr. T. J. Thorburn, Jesus the Christ: Historical or
Mythical?, p. 231.

[44] Dr. Thorburn appears to be wholly unaware of this fact of Jewish
theology. See Dr. Schechter's Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology,
1909, ch. xv; Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, ii, 304.

[45] The Nemesis of this uncritical method appears in its development
at the hands of Dr. Conybeare: "That Jesus was a successful exorcist
we need not doubt, nor that he worked innumerable faith cures" (Myth,
Magic, and Morals, 2nd. ed., p. 142). Such a writer "need not doubt"
anything he wants to believe. In particular he "need not doubt"
that the disciples were "successful exorcists" also.

[46] Introd. to the N. T., 3rd. ed., i, 4.

[47] Work cited, p. 7.

[48] Put in the Neue Kirchliche Zeitschrift, 1896, p. 964 sq.; and
Philology of the Gospels, 1898, pp. 41-43. Professor Blass has worked
this argument diligently. See his Die Entstehung und der Charakter
unserer Evangelien, 1907, p. 24.

[49] Villari, Life of Savonarola, Eng. trans. 1-vol. ed. p. 185.

[50] Herbert Lucas, S.J., Fra Girolamo Savonarola, 2nd ed. 1906,
p. 116. Father Lucas does not deny that such a sermon might possibly
have been preached late in 1493. Cp. p. 118.

[51] Life of Savonarola, as cited, p. 186.

[52] Villari, p. 214.

[53] See the investigation of Father Lucas, pp. 114-18.

[54] I had written this, and the confutation of Villari, before
reading the work of Father Lucas.

[55] As cited, p. 189. Father Lucas comments more mildly on the
misstatement; but it is really a grave departure from historical truth.

[56] Cp. Lucas, p. 117 note.

[57] Lucas, p. 129 note.

[58] This, again, he might well expect, as he avows that he had
correspondents in Germany who applauded his attitude towards the
Papacy. Villari, pp. 439, 519, 609. But Maximilian was invited
by Sforza in the name of the Papal League, by way of forestalling
Charles. Id. p. 458.

[59] Villari, pp. 411-13. Cp. Perrens's Jérome Savonarole, 1854, ii,
88 sq., 95 sq.; Lucas, p. 201.

[60] Manifesto A tutti li Christiani; Lucas, p. 236.

[61] Id. p. 256.

[62] Id. p. 278.

[63] Lucas, p. 70.

[64] Nor are we here concerned with the question of Savonarola's
"sincerity." On that head it may be noted that Perrens the Rationalist
and Lucas the sympathetic and moderate Catholic are very much at one.

[65] Lucas, p. 69 note. Compare the references of Lucas and those of
Villari (p. 317) for researches on the subject.

[66] Cp. Perrens, as cited, ii, 94.

[67] 1 Mac. i, 47, 54, 59.

[68] Refs. in De Potter, L'Esprit de l'Église, 1821, iv, 95-98.

[69] Philology of the Gospels, p. 43.

[70] Growth of the Gospels, p. 45.

[71] Professed prophecies, that is, not political calculations.

[72] The systematic deposition of ordure in the drawers of commodes in
1870, in beds and rooms and on piles of food in 1914, is a historical
fact. As to the sack of Rome, Cantù's account is: "Delle bolle papali
stabbiano i cavalli" (Istoria degli Italiani, ed. 1876, ix, 372).

[73] History of Sacrilege, 1698, p. 113.

[74] Id. p. 122.

[75] Zeller, L'histoire de France racontée par les contemporains,
vol. 21, p. 102.

[76] Id. vol. 22, p. 17.

[77] Sismondi-Toccagni, Storia delle repub. ital., 1852, iv, 123.

[78] Burckhardt, Renaissance in Italy, Eng. tr., ed. 1892, p. 23.

[79] Villari, pp. 463, 532, 554-55.

[80] "Slay all! God will know his own!"

[81] Rev. W. Denton, England in the Fifteenth Century, 1888, pp. 81-82.

[82] Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne, ed. 7ième, iii, 234.

[83] Id. ib. p. 248.

[84] Id. ib. p. 416.

[85] This detail, from Niketas, is also given by Gibbon, ch. lx, near
end, and by Michaud, Hist. des Croisades, iii (1817), 154-55. Mills
omits it. Michaud, like Cantù, stresses the point of ordure. So does
Fleury, Hist. éccles., xvi, 149.

[86] Rev. Sir G. W. Cox, The Crusades, 8th ed. p. 157.

[87] Perrens, ii, 95.

[88] Memoirs of Philip de Commines, Bohn trans. i, 158.

[89] Hall's Chronicle, Hen. VIII, ed. 1550, fol. 112.

[90] Burckhardt, Renaissance in Italy, Eng. tr. ed. 1892, p. 29.

[91] Perrens, Hist. de Florence, 1434-1531, i, 385.

[92] Guicciardini, lib. x, c. 4.

[93] Id. xvii, 3.

[94] Though in reporting the sack of Rome he makes the Germans behave
the more brutally as regards the cardinals.

[95] Philology of the Gospels, p. 41.

[96] As cited, p. 46.

[97] Work cited, p. 34.

[98] Id. p. 40.

[99] Id. p. 38.

[100] Histor. Introd. to the N. T., 4th ed. 1889, p. 111.

[101] Nöldeke, Sketches from Eastern History, 1892, p. 28.

[102] The Odes and Psalms of Solomon, ed. Rendel Harris, 1909,
pp. 74, 118.

[103] Work cited, p. 49.

[104] Bousset (The Anti-Christ Legend, Eng. tr. p. 23) "assumes,
with many recent expositors, that the distinctly apocalyptic part of
Matt. xxiv and Mark xiii is a fragment of foreign origin introduced
amid genuine utterances of the Lord. It is also evident that, compared
with that of Mark, the text of Matthew is the original." Here we have
the old strategy of compromise.

[105] The assertion of Dr. Conybeare (Myth, Magic, and Morals,
p. 46), that the destruction of the temple was "an event which any
clear-sighted observer of the growing hostility between Jew and
Roman must have foreseen," is characteristic of that writer's way of
interpreting documents. A second reading may perhaps yield him another
impression. Forty years of non-fulfilment is a precious proof of the
"must."

[106] Muir and Weir, Life of Mohammed, ed. 1912, p. xlii.

[107] Muir and Weir, as cited, p. xxvi.

[108] Id. p. xxviii. Contrast the pronouncements of Palmer, Kuenen,
and Nicholson, cited in the author's History of Freethought, 3rd
ed. i, 250.

[109] Josephus, Antiq. xx, 5, § 1; Bel. Jud., vii, 11; Dio Cassius,
lxix; Orosius, vii, 12.

[110] E.g. the orthodox Ewald, Geschichte Christus' und seiner Zeit,
3te Ausg. p. 31 note.

[111] "Stupidity" is ascribed to him by Blass (Entstehung, p. 8),
who on his own principles has no right whatever to reject such a
"tradition."

[112] Compare with this avowal of an orthodox scholar, Mill's
assumption of the total absence of genius in Palestine apart from
Jesus.

[113] See the collection of opinions in Dr. Charles Taylor's The
Oxyrhynchus Logia and the Apocryphal Gospels, 1899, pp. 15-19, 23,
24, 25, 27, 39, 42, etc.

[114] These logia, it should be noted, are always ascribed to
"Ies." The full name Iesous is never given, and there is no cognomen.

[115] "Many," says Blass (Entstehung, p. 11), may mean 3, 4, 5,
or even more.

[116] Codices A and C preface this with "And turning to his disciples,
he said."

[117] Strauss speaks of it as having been "firmly established." Das
Leben Jesu, Einl. § 9, end.

[118] Some New Testament Problems, 1898, pp. 197-98.

[119] Id. p. 14.

[120] Id. p. 15.

[121] Elsewhere (p. 200) Mr. Wright speaks of the traditions as
"circulated in an oral form from very early times"; but he does not
appear to mean this in the natural sense.

[122] Id. p. 102.

[123] Id. p. 213.

[124] Would it? For Loisy it is stamped with Jewish exclusiveness. The
"dog" merely gets a compassionate crumb.

[125] Id. p. 209.

[126] Id. p. 215.

[127] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 388.

[128] The "Arise, let us go hence," at the end of ch. 14, is another
interpolation which has no meaning in the context.

[129] Work cited, p. 209.

[130] Id. p. 178.

[131] Id. p. 175.

[132] Id. p. 177.

[133] Id. p. 176.

[134] Id. p. 191.

[135] Id. p. 186.

[136] Id. p. 187.

[137] Id. pp. 222, 223.

[138] Id. p. 123.

[139] Jésus et la tradition évangélique, 1910, pp. 9, 12, 36, 40,
56, 57, 99, 102, 105, 113.

[140] So, for instance, Wernle: "On the basis of these oldest sources
we can write no biography, no so-called Life of Jesus" (Die Quellen
des Lebens Jesu, 1905, p. 82).

[141] Work cited, p. 56 sq.

[142] Les Évangiles, i, 663 sq.

[143] Encyc. Bib. as cited, col. 1,872.

[144] It should be remembered that the Gospels do not specify Nazareth,
but speak simply of "his own country" (patris). Professor Burkitt,
recognizing the mass of difficulties in regard to Nazareth, suggests
that that name is a "literary error," and that the patris of Jesus
was Chorazin (Proc. of Brit. Acad. vol. v, 1912, pp. 17-18).

[145] See above, p. 147, note, as to the theory of Prof. Burkitt, that
Jesus was born at Chorazin. On that view, the unbelieving birthplace
was denounced.

[146] Strauss, in pointing to this detail in Jewish Messianism (Das
Leben Jesu, Abschn. III, Kap. i, § 112) abstained from stressing it on
the score that there are no certain traces of it before the Babylonian
Gemara, the compilation of which took place in the Christian era,
and the book Sohar, of which the age is doubtful. Principal Drummond
(The Jewish Messiah, 1877, p. 357) further agreed, with Gfrörer, that
the doctrine of a Messiah Ben-Joseph is extremely unlikely to have
been pre-Christian. The obvious answer is that it is overwhelmingly
unlikely to have been post-Christian! But that thesis is apparently not
now maintained even by orthodox scholars. Bousset, who in his confused
way suggests that the notion of a suffering and dying Messiah "would
seem to have been suggested by disputations with the Christians"
(The Anti-Christ Legend, 1896, p. 103), avows immediately that
Wünsche traces "a very distinct application of Zechariah xii, 10,
to the Messiah Ben Joseph" in the Jerusalem Talmud; and goes on to
suggest that the notions of the "two witnesses" and the two Messiahs
"may rest upon a common source, which, however, is still to be sought
further back than Jewish tradition."

[147] Against Celsus, vi, 36, end.

[148] Protevang., ix, 1; Pseud. Matt., x, 1; xxxvii, 1 sq.; Hist. of
Joseph the Carpenter; Thomas, 1st. Gr. form, xiii, 1 sq.; 2nd Gr. form,
xi, 1 sq.; Lat. xi, 2 sq.; Arabic Gosp. of the Infancy, xxxviii, xxxix.

[149] Karppe, Essais de critique et d'histoire de philosophie, 1902,
pp. 51-52.

[150] Irenæus, Ag. Heresies, i, 26; Hippolytus, Ref. of all Heresies,
vii, 21. See Baur, Das Christenthum, p. 174. (Eng. trans. i, 199.) The
fact that Cerinthus is the earliest known Christian Gnostic, being
traditionally associated with the Apostle John (Euseb. Hist. Eccl. iii,
28) goes far to support Dr. Karppe's view that Gnosticism entered
Christianity from the Jewish side.

[151] Cp. Apoc. of Baruch, xxix, 3; 4 Esdras, vii, 28; xiii, 32; John,
vii, 27; Justin, Dial. cum Tryph., 8; and Charles's note on Apoc. of
Baruch, as cited, giving these and other references. See also Schodde's
ed. of the Book of Enoch, pp. 47, 57; and the Rev. W. J. Deane's
Pseudepigrapha, 1891, p. 17.

[152] Les évangiles synoptiques, 1907-8, ii, 697.

[153] The varying designations, certainly, point to repeated additions
to the text. But the question arises whether the Maria he Iose or
Maria Iose of Mk. xv, 47, may have been meant to specify "Mary the
wife of Joseph."

[154] Entstehung, p. 22. Of course Harnack's method is really only
a development of Baur's.

[155] Les évangiles synoptiques, ii, 617.

[156] Id. p. 618.

[157] Jésus et la tradition, p. 92.

[158] Les évangiles synoptiques, ii, 562.

[159] Id. p. 570.

[160] Id. p. 599.

[161] Id. p. 610.

[162] Jésus et la tradition, p. 102.

[163] Babl. Sanhedrin, ap. Lightfoot, cited by Strauss.

[164] Compare the other Jewish declarations collected by Brandt,
Die evangelische Geschichte, 1893, p. 150 sq.

[165] In Luke the high priest is not in the story, and the chief
priests and others take as well as try the prisoner.

[166] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. xviii, 2, 122;
Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 287, note 4.

[167] Les évangiles, ii, 624.

[168] Die evangelische Geschichte, 1893, p. 88.

[169] Les évangiles, ii, 632.

[170] E.g. Dalman, The Words of Jesus, p. 312; Brandt, Die evangelische
Geschichte, p. 89; Loisy, Les évangiles, ii, 517, note; 604, note; 633.

[171] This is the one of the two stories preferred by the "liberal"
school, who dismiss the story of the two asses as a verbal
hallucination rather than recognize a zodiacal myth. It makes no
final difference. The "ass the foal of an ass," in their exegesis,
still means an unbroken colt, an impossible steed for a procession.

[172] See Pagan Christs, 2nd ed., and Christianity and Mythology,
2nd ed., per index.

[173] Les évangiles, ii, 643.

[174] Nicholson, The Gospel According to the Hebrews, 1879, pp. 141-42.

[175] Jésus et la tradition, p. 114.

[176] Id. pp. 117-18.

[177] A propos d'histoire des religions, 1911, pp. 274-281.

[178] Id. pp. 296-97.

[179] Id. p. 314.

[180] Id. p. 280.

[181] So Dalman (The Words of Jesus, p. 94 sq.), as well as Loisy. They
agree that "kingdom of heaven" was only a more reverent way of saying
the same thing. (Jésus et la tradition, p. 128.)

[182] Jésus et la tradition, pp. 125-26.

[183] Id. p. 105. Cp. p. 168.

[184] A propos d'histoire des religions, p. 287.

[185] Id. pp. 288-89.

[186] Jésus et la tradition, p. 136.

[187] Schmiedel pronounces it a
"conglomerate." Encyc. Bib. art. Gospels, col. 1,886.

[188] See Nicholson, The Gospel according to the Hebrews, 1879,
p. 52 sq.

[189] Jésus et la tradition, p. 143.

[190] Id. ib. and A propos d'histoire des religions, p. 288.

[191] Jésus et la tradition, p. 141.

[192] Les évangiles synoptiques, ii, 482-83.

[193] Id. ii, 357.

[194] Id. i, 152.

[195] See above, p. 127.

[196] A propos d'histoire des religions, p. 290.

[197] A propos d'histoire des religions, pp. 291, 304.

[198] Dr. G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, Radical Views about the
New Testament, Eng. tr. 1912, p. 102.

[199] Id. pp. 101-2.

[200] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 341, 357.

[201] A propos d'histoire des religions, p. 294.

[202] First published in 1886.

[203] J. W. Straatman, in Critical Studies on First Corinthians,
1863-65, cited by Mr. Whittaker.

[204] W. Seufert, Der Ursprung und die Bedeutung des Apostolates,
1887, p. 46; Sir G. W. Cox, lect. in Religious Systems of the World,
3rd ed. p. 242.

[205] A propos d'histoire des religions, p. 295.

[206] Id. p. 310.

[207] Les évangiles, i, 172, 173. Contrast the case put long ago by
Zeller, The Acts of the Apostles, Eng. tr. 1875, i, 129-30.

[208] Compare, however, the elaborate essay of Prof. G. A. Deissmann,
in his Bible Studies (Eng. tr. 1901), on "Letters and Epistles," p. 48.

[209] Short History of Christianity, 2nd ed. p. 4.

[210] Wieland was something of a Freethinker; but when Napoleon in
the famous interview mooted the problem raised by Dupuis and Volney,
Wieland treated it as pure absurdity. He was then an old man.

[211] The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Eng. tr. of Von Reimarus zu
Wrede), 1910, p. 153.

[212] Schweitzer, p. 151.

[213] Id. p. 159.

[214] Work cited, p. 161.

[215] Id. p. 329.

[216] Id. p. 343.

[217] Id. p. 395.

[218] Compare Dalman, The Words of Jesus, p. 313.

[219] I.e., the old German "rationalism" so-called, the theological
method of compromise with reason.

[220] Id. pp. 396-97.

[221] Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 3rd ed. (vols. v and vi of 3rd ed. of The
Golden Bough) i, 312, note. See the passage discussed in Christianity
and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 281.

[222] Adonis, Attis, Osiris, as cited, ii, 19 sq., and pref. to vol. i.

[223] Compare Prof. W. B. Smith's criticism of the "great man" theory
as put by Von Soden--Ecce Deus, p. 9 sq.

[224] See the brochure of Prof. R. H. Grützmacher, Ist das liberale
Jesusbild modern? 1907.






End of Project Gutenberg's The Historical Jesus, by John M. Robertson