Chapter XI: Epilogue

Of the books passed in review in the preceding pages, as of several others couched in the same vein and recently published in England and Germany, perhaps the best that can be said is this, that, at any rate, they are untrammelled by orthodox prejudice, and fearlessly written. That they belong, so to speak, to the extreme left, explains the favour with which they are received by that section of the middle-class reading public which has conceived a desire to learn something of the origins of Christianity. Unschooled in the criticism of documents, such readers have learned in the school Bible-lesson and in the long hours of instruction in what is called Divinity, to regard the Bible as they regard no other collection of ancient writings. It is, as a rule, the only ancient book they ever opened. They have discovered that orthodoxy depends for its life on treating it as a book apart, not to be submitted to ordinary tests, not to be sifted and examined, as we have learned from Hume and Niebuhr, Gibbon and Grote, to sift ancient documents in general, rejecting ab initio the supernatural myths that are never absent from them. The acuter minds among the clergy themselves begin nowadays to realize that the battle of Freethought and Rationalism is won as far as the miracles of the Old Testament are concerned; but as regards those of the New they are for ever trying to close up their ranks and rally their hosts afresh. Nevertheless, the man in the street has a shrewd suspicion that apologetics are so much special pleading, and that miracles cannot be eliminated from the Old and yet remain in the New Testament. He has never received any training in methods of historical research himself, and it is no easy thing to obtain; but he is clever enough to detect the evasions of apologists, and, with instinctive revulsion, turns away to writers who "go the whole hog" and argue for the most extreme positions, even to the length of asserting that the story of Jesus is a myth from beginning to end. Any narratives, he thinks, that have the germs of truth in them would not need the apologetic prefaces and commentaries, the humming and hawing, the specious arguments and wire-drawn distinctions of divines, any more than do Froissart or Clarendon or Herodotus. If the New Testament needs them, then it must be a mass of fable from end to end. Such is the impression which our modern apologists leave on the mind of the ordinary man.

I can imagine some of my readers objecting here that, whereas I have so rudely assailed the method of interpretation of New Testament documents adopted by the Nihilistic school--I only use this name as a convenient label for those who deny the historical reality of Jesus Christ--I nevertheless propound no rival method of my own. The truth is there is no abstract method of using documents relating to the past, and you cannot in advance lay down rules for doing so. You can only learn how to deal with them by practice, and it is one of the chief functions of any university or place of higher education to imbue students with historical method by setting before them the original documents, and inspiring them to extract from them whatever solid results they can. A hundred years ago the better men in the college of Christchurch at Oxford were so trained by the dean, Cyril Jackson, who would set them the task of "preparing for examination the whole of Livy and Polybius, thoroughly read and studied in all their comparative bearings." [53] No better curriculum, indeed, could be devised for strengthening and developing the faculty of historical judgment; and the schools of Literae Humaniores and Modern History, which were subsequently established at Oxford, carried on the tradition of this enlightened educationalist. In them the student is brought face to face in the original dialects with the records of the past, and stimulated to "read and study them in their comparative bearings." One single branch of learning, however, has been treated apart in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and pursued along the lines of tradition and authority--I mean the study of Christian antiquities. The result has been deplorable. Intellectually-minded Englishmen have turned away from this field of history as from something tainted, and barely one of our great historians in a century deems it worthy of his notice. It has been left to parsons, to men who have never learned to swim, because they have never had enough courage to venture into deep water. As we sow, so we reap. The English Church is probably the most enlightened of the many sects that make up Christendom. Yet what is the treatment which it accords to any member of itself who has the courage to dissociate himself from the "orthodoxy" of the fourth century, of those Greek Fathers (so-called) in whom the human intelligence sank to the nadir of fanaticism and futility? An example was recently seen in the case of the Rev. Mr. W. H. Thompson, a young theological tutor of Magdalen College in Oxford, who, animated by nothing but loyalty for the Church, recently liberated his soul about the miracles of the Gospels in a thoroughly scholarly book entitled Miracles in the New Testament. The attitude of the clergy in general towards a work of genuine research, which sets truth above traditional orthodoxy, was revealed in a conference of the clergy of the southern province, held soon after its publication on May 19, 1911. The following account of that meeting is taken from the Guardian of May 26, 1911:--

The Rev. R. F. Bevan, in the Canterbury Diocesan Conference on
May 19, 1911, proposed "that this Conference is of opinion that
the clergy should make use of the light thrown on the Bible by
modern criticism for the purposes of religious teaching." The
Bishop of Croydon moved the following rider: "But desires to
record its distrust of critics who, while holding office in the
Church of Christ, propound views inconsistent with the doctrines
laid down in the creeds of the Church."

He said it was needful to define what was meant by modern
criticism. He referred to a book which had been published quite
lately by the Dean of Divinity of Magdalen College, Oxford, a
review of which would be found in the Guardian of May 12. He must
honestly confess he had not read the book for himself.... He then
premised from the review that the work in question rejects the
evidence both for the Virgin Birth of Christ and for his bodily
Resurrection from the tomb ..., and added that the toleration by
Churchmen of such doctrines and such views being taught within the
bosom of the Church was to him most sad and inexplicable. If such
was the instruction which young Divinity students were receiving
at the universities, no wonder that the supply of candidates for
ordination was falling off.

The Rev. J. O. Bevan said it was not in the power of any man or
any body of men to ignore the Higher Criticism or to suppress
it. It had "come to stay," and its influence for good or evil
must be recognized.

The President (Archbishop of Canterbury) said that "Bible teaching
ought to be given with a background of knowledge on the part of the
teacher. He should deprecate as strongly as anybody that men who
felt that they could not honestly continue to hold the Christian
creeds should hold office in the Church of England. But he saw
no connection between the sort of teaching which the Conference
had now been considering and the giving up of the Christian
creed. The Old Testament was a literature which had come down to
them from ancient days. Modern investigation enabled them now to
set the earlier stages of that literature in somewhat different
surroundings from those in which they were set by their fathers and
grandfathers." With regard to the book which had been referred to,
the Archbishop said that, if the rider proposed was intended to
imply a censure upon a particular writer, nothing would induce him
to vote for it, inasmuch as he had not read the book, and knew
nothing, at first hand, about it. He thought members ought to
pause before they lightly gave votes which could be so interpreted.

The motion, on being put to the meeting, was carried with one
dissentient. The rider was also carried by a majority.

It amounts, then, to this, that a rule of limited liability is to be observed in the investigation of early Christianity. You may be critical, but not up to the point of calling in question the Virgin Birth or physical resurrection of Christ. The Bishop of Croydon opines that the free discussion of such questions in University circles intimidates young men from taking orders. If he lived in Oxford, he would know that it is the other way about. [54] If Mr. Thompson had been allowed to say what he thought, unmolested; if the Bishops of Winchester and of Oxford had not at once taken steps to silence and drive him out of the Church, students would have been better encouraged to enter the Anglican ministry, and the more intellectual of our young men would not avoid it as a profession hard to reconcile with truth and honesty and self-respect.

In the next number of the same journal (June 2, 1911) is recorded another example of how little our bishops are inclined to face a plain issue. It is contained in a paragraph headed thus:--

SYMBOLISM OF THE ASCENSION.

The Bishop of Birmingham on the Second Coming.

Preaching to a large congregation in Birmingham Cathedral ... the
Bishop of Birmingham said that people had found difficulty in
modern times about the Ascension, because, they said, "God's
heaven is no more above our heads than under our feet." That
was perfectly true. But there were certain ways of expressing
moral ideas rooted in human thought, and we did not the less
speak continually of the above and the below as expressing what
was morally high and morally low, and we should go on doing so
to the end. The ascension of Jesus Christ and his concealment
in the clouds was a symbolical act, like all the acts after his
Resurrection; it was to impress their minds with the truth of
his mounting to the glory of God. Symbols were the best means
of expressing the truth about things which lay outside their
experience; and the Ascension symbolized Christ's mounting to the
supreme state of power and glory, to the perfect vision of God,
to the throne of all the world.... The Kingdom was coming--had to
come at last--"on earth as it is in heaven"; and one day, just
as his disciples saw him passing away out of their experience
and sight, would they see him coming back into their experience
and their sight, and into his perfected Kingdom of Humanity.

Now, I am sure that what people in modern times chiefly want to know about the Ascension is whether it really happened. Did Jesus in his physical body go up like a balloon before the eyes of the faithful, and disappear behind a cloud, or did he not? That is the plain issue, and Dr. Gore seems to avoid it. If he believes in such a miracle, why expatiate on the symbolism of all the acts of Jesus subsequent to his resurrection? Such a miracle was surely sufficient unto itself, and never needed our attention to be drawn to its symbolical aspects and import. Does he mean that the legend is no more than "a certain way of expressing moral ideas rooted in human thought"? May we welcome his insistence on its moral symbolism as a prelude to his abandonment of the literal truth of the tale? I hope so, for in not a few apologetic books published by divines during the last twenty-five years I have encountered a tendency to expatiate on the moral significance of extinct Biblical legends. It is, as the Rev. Mr. Figgis expresses it, a way of "letting down the laity into the new positions of the Higher Criticism." Would it not be simpler, in the end, to tell people frankly that a legend is only a legend? They are not children in arms. Why is it accounted so terrible for a clergyman or minister of religion to express openly in the pulpit opinions he can hear in many academical lecture-rooms, and often entertains in the privacy of his study? When the Archbishop of Canterbury tells his brother-doctors that "modern investigation enables them now to set the earlier stages of Old Testament literature in somewhat different surroundings from those in which they were set by their fathers and grandfathers," he means that modern scholarship has emptied the Old Testament of its miraculous and supernatural legends. But the Anglican clergyman at ordination declares that he believes unfeignedly the whole of the Old and New Testaments. How can an Archbishop not dispense his clergy from belief in the New, when he is so ready to leave it to their individual consciences whether they will or will not believe in the Old? The entire position is hollow and illogical, and most of the bishops know it; but, instead of frankly recognizing facts, they descant upon the symbolical meaning of tales which they know they must openly abandon to-morrow. One is inclined to ask Dr. Gore why Christ could not have imparted in words to his followers the secret of his mounting to the supreme state of power and glory? Did they at the time, or afterwards, set any such interpretation on the story of his rising up from the ground like an airship or an exhalation? Of course they did not. They thought the earth was a fixed, flat surface, and that, if you ascended through the several lower heavens, you would find yourself before a great white throne, on which sat, in Oriental state, among his winged cherubim, the Most High. They thought that Jesus consummated the hackneyed miracle of his ascension by sitting down on the right hand of this Heavenly Potentate. If Dr. Gore doubts this, let him consult the voluminous works of the early Fathers on the subject. The entire legend coheres with ancient, and not with modern, cosmogony. How can it possibly be defended to-day on grounds of symbolism, or on any other? The same criticism applies to the legend of the Virgin Birth. The Bishop of London is reduced to defending this thrum of ancient paganism by an appeal to the biological fact of parthenogenesis among insects. Imagine the mentality of a modern bishop who dreams that he is advancing the cause of true religion and sound learning by assimilating the birth of his Saviour to that of a rotifer or a flea!

The books of Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson and others of their school are, no doubt, blundering extravaganzas, all the more inopportune because they provoke the gibes of Dr. Moulton; but they are at least works of Freethought. Their authors do not write with one eye on the truth and the other on the Pope in the Vatican, or on the obsolete dogmas of Byzantine speculation. It is possible, therefore, to discuss with them, as it is not with apologists, who take good care never to lay all their cards on the table, and of whom you cannot but feel, as the great historian Mommsen remarked, that they are chattering in chains (ex vinculis sermocinantes). In the investigation of truth there can be no mental reserves, and argument is useless where the final appeal lies to a Pope or a creed. You cannot set your hand to the plough and then look back.

It was not, then, within the scope of this essay to try to determine how much and what particular incidents traditionally narrated of Jesus are credible. Such a task would require at least a thousand pages for its discharge; I have merely desired to show how difficult it is to prove a negative, and how much simpler it is to admit that Jesus really lived than to argue that he was a solar or other myth. The latter hypothesis, as expounded in these works, offends every principle of philology, of comparative mythology, and of textual criticism; it bristles with difficulties; and, if no better demonstration of it can be offered, it deserves to be summarily dismissed.

On the other hand, no absolute rules can be laid down a priori for the discerning in early Christian or in any other ancient documents of historical fact. But students embarking on a study of Christian origins will do well to lay to heart the aphorism of Renan (Les Apôtres, Introd. xxix), that "one can only ascertain the origin of any particular religion from the narratives or reports of those who believed therein; for it is only the sceptic who writes history ad narrandum." It is in the very nature of things human that we could not hope to obtain documents more evidential than the Gospels and Acts. It is a lucky chance that time has spared to us the Epistles of Paul as well, and the sparse notices of first-century congregations and personalities preserved in Josephus and in pagan writers. For during the first two or three generations of its existence the Church interested few except itself. In the view of a Josephus, the Jewish converts could only figure as Jews gone astray after a false Messiah, just as the Gentile recruits were mere Judaizers, objects--as he remarks, B. J., II, 18, 2--of equal suspicion to Syrian pagans and Jews alike, an ambiguous, neutral class, spared by the knife of the pagans, yet dreaded by the Jews as at heart aliens to their cause. [55] There were no folklorists or comparative religionists in those days watching for new cults to appear; and there could be little or no inclination to sit down and write history among enthusiasts who dreamed that the end of the world was close at hand, and believed themselves to be already living in the last days. For this is the conviction that colours the whole of the New Testament; and that it does so is a signal proof of the antiquity of much that the book contains. If a Christian of the first century ever took up his pen and wrote, it was not to hand down an objective narrative of events to a posterity whose existence he barely contemplated, but, as against unbelieving Jews, to establish from ancient prophecy his belief in Jesus as the promised Messiah, or perhaps as the Word of God made flesh. All Christians were aware that Jews, both in Judæa and of the Dispersion, roundly denied their Christ to have been anything better than an impostor and violator of the Law. They heard the pagans round them echoing the scoffs of their Messiah's own countrymen. Accordingly, the earliest literature of the Church, so far as it is not merely homiletic and hortative, is controversial, and aims at proving that the Jewish people were mistaken in rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. The Jews neither then nor now have fought with mere shadows; and just in proportion as they bore witness against his Messiahship, they bore witness in favour of his historical reality. It is a pity that the extreme negative school ignore this aspect of his rejection by the Jews.

Let me cite one more wise rule laid down by Renan in the same Introduction: "An ancient writing can help us to throw light, firstly, on the age in which it was composed, and, secondly, on the age which preceded its composition."

This indicates in a general fashion the use which historians should make of the New Testament. We have at every turn to ask ourselves what the circumstances its contents reveal presuppose in the immediate past in the way both of ideas or aspirations and of fact or incidents.

In conclusion, I cannot do better than quote the words in which Renan defines in general terms the sort of historical results we may hope to attain in the field of Christian origins. It is from the Introduction already cited, pp. vi and vii:--

In histories like this, where the general outline (ensemble)
alone is certain, and where nearly all the details lend themselves
more or less to doubt by reason of the legendary character of
the documents, hypothesis is indispensable. About ages of which
we know nothing we cannot frame any hypothesis at all. To try
to reconstitute a particular group of ancient statuary, which
certainly once existed, but of which we have not even the debris,
and about which we possess no written information, is to attempt an
entirely arbitrary task. But to endeavour to recompose the friezes
of the Parthenon from what remains to us, using as subsidiary to
our work ancient texts, drawings made in the seventeenth century,
and availing ourselves of all sources of information; in a word,
inspiring ourselves by the style of these inimitable fragments,
and endeavouring to seize their soul and life--what more legitimate
task than this? We cannot, indeed, after all, say that we have
rediscovered the work of the ancient sculptor; nevertheless, we
shall have done all that was possible in order to approximate
thereto. Such a method is all the more legitimate in history,
because language permits the use of dubitative moods of which
marble admits not. There is nothing to prevent our setting before
the reader a choice of different suppositions, and the author's
conscience may be at rest as soon as he has set forth as certain
what is certain, as probable what is probable, as possible what
is possible. In those parts of the field where our footstep slides
and slips between history and legend it is only the general effect
that we must seek after.... Accomplished facts speak more plainly
than any amount of biographic detail. We know very little of the
peerless artists who created the chefs d'oeuvre of Greek art. Yet
these chefs d'oeuvre tell us more of the personality of their
authors and of the public which appreciated them than ever could do
the most circumstantial narratives and the most authentic of texts.

NOTES

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

[2] Op. cit. p. 214.

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

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

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

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

[7] Christianity and Mythology, p. 286.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[16] See Luke x, 17-20.

[17] La Vie Religieuse, p. 134.

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

[19] The Christ Myth, 2nd ed., p. 18.

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

[21] In Mark xv, 39, the utterance of the heathen centurion, "truly this man was a Son of God," can obviously not have been inspired by messianic conceptions; it can have meant no more than that he was more than human, as Damis realized his master Apollonius to be on more than one occasion. Nor can Mark have intended to attribute Jewish conceptions to a pagan soldier.

[22] For example, he gravely asserts (Die Weltanschauung des alten Orients, Leipzig, 1904, p. 41) that Saul's melancholy is explicable as a myth of the monthly eclipsing of the moon's light! Perhaps Hamlet's melancholy was of the same mythic origin. A map of the stars is Winckler's, no less than Jensen's, guide to all mythologies. But, to do him justice, Winckler never fell into the last absurdity of supposing that Jews at the beginning of our era were engaged in a secret cult of a Sun-god named Joshua; on the contrary, he declares (op. cit., p. 96), that, just in proportion as we descend the course of time, we approach an age in which the heroes of earlier myth are brought down to the level of earth. This humanization of the Joshua myth was, he held, complete when the book of Joshua was compiled.

[23] Cp. p. 342: "In all his allusions to the movement of his day he (Paul) is dealing with Judaizing apostles who preached circumcision." And p. 348: "Paul's Cephas is simply one of the apostles of a Judaic cult that preaches circumcision."

[24] To wit, of a Sun-god, who is also Mithras and Osiris, and of a Vegetation-god annually slain on the sacred tree. We are gravely informed that "not till Dr. Frazer had done his work was the psychology of the process ascertained." Dr. Frazer must be blushing at this tribute to his psychological insight.

[25] Euseb., in Esai, xviii, 1 foll., p. 424, foll. The words might mean Justin; but when he quotes Justin he always gives his name. The Gospels cannot be intended.

[26] Encycl. Bibl., art, "Paul."

[27] Words italicized in the sequel are citations of the text of Acts.

[28] I expect Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson, in their next editions, to broach the view that the earlier chapter was forged to explain the later one, and that in the later one "The Seven" are a cryptic reference to the Pleiades.

[29] The relevant part of this commentary is preserved in an old Armenian version of which we have ancient MSS.

[30] The difficulties largely vanish on the assumption that Galatians is the earliest of the Epistles, and that in Gal. ii, 1, dia d "after four" was misread in an early copy as dia id "after fourteen." This is Professor Lake's conjecture. Such misreadings of the Greek numerals are common in ancient MSS.

[31] Christianity and Mythology, p. 354.

[32] Why did they not do so in their "teaching," if it was intended (see p. 344) for the Jews of the Dispersion, instead of confining themselves to precepts "simply ethical, non-priestly, and non-Rabbinical"?

[33] Ecce Deus, p. 8.

[34] Note in Matthew the phrase (xxiii, 8): "But be ye not called Rabbi: for one is your teacher, and all ye are brethren."

[35] The passage in which Josephus mentions John the Baptist runs as follows: "To some of the Jews it seemed that Herod had had his army destroyed by God, and that it was a just retribution on him for his severity towards John called the Baptist. For it was indeed Herod who slew him, though a good man, and one who bade the Jews in the practise of virtue and in the use of justice one to another and of piety towards God to walk together in baptism. For this was the condition under which baptism would present itself to God as acceptable, if they availed themselves of it, not by way of winning pardon for certain sins, but after attaining personal holiness, on account of the soul having been cleansed beforehand by righteousness. Because men flocked to him, for they took the greatest pleasure in listening to his words, Herod took fright and apprehended that his vast influence over people would lead to some outbreak of rebellion. For it looked as if they would follow his advice in all they did, and he came to the conclusion that far the best course was, before any revolution was started by him, to anticipate it by destroying him: otherwise the upheaval would come, and plunge him into trouble and remorse. So John fell a victim to Herod's suspicions, was bound and sent to the fortress of Machaerus, of which I have above spoken, and there murdered. But the Jews were convinced that the loss of his army was by way of retribution for the treatment of John, and that it was God who willed the undoing of Herod."

[36] The suspect passage in which Josephus refers to Jesus runs thus, Ant. xviii, 3, 3: "Now about this time came Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one may call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive what is true with pleasure, and he attracted many Jews and many of the Greeks. This was the 'Christ.' And when on the accusation of the principal men amongst us Pilate had condemned him to the cross, they did not desist who had formerly loved him, for he appeared to them on the third day alive again; the divine Prophets having foretold both this and a myriad other wonderful things about him; and even now the race of those called Christians after him has not died out."

I have italicized such clauses as have a chance to be authentic, and as may have led Origen to say of Josephus that he did not believe Jesus to be the Christ. For the clause "This was the Christ" must have run, "This was the so-called Christ." We have the same expression in Matt. i, 16, and in the passage, undoubtedly genuine, in which Josephus refers to James, Ant., xx, 9, 1. Here Josephus relates that the Sadducee High-priest Ananus (son of Annas of the New Testament), in the interval of anarchy between the departure of one Roman Governor, Festus, and the arrival of another, Albinus, set up a court of his own, "and bringing before it the brother of Jesus who was called Christ--James was his name--and some others, he accused them of being breakers of the Law, and had them stoned."

In the History of the Jewish War, iv, 5, 2, Josephus records his belief that the Destruction of Jerusalem was a divine nemesis for the murder of this Ananus by the Idumeans.

There is not now, nor ever was, any passage in Josephus where the fall of Jerusalem was explained as an act of divine nemesis for the murder of James by Ananus. Origen, as Professor Burkitt has remarked, "had mixed up in his commonplace book the account of Ananus's murder of James and the remarks of Josephus on Ananus's own murder."

[37] So in Acts xviii, 12, we read of faction fights in Corinth between the Jews and the followers of Jesus the Messiah; Gallio, the proconsul of Achaia, who cared for none of the matters at issue between them, is a well-known personage, and an inscription has lately been discovered dating his tenure of Achaia in A.D. 52.

[38] Tacitus very likely wrote Chrestiani. He says the mob called them such, but adds that the author of the name was Christ, so implying that Christianus was the true form, and Chrestianus a popular malformation thereof. The Roman mob would be likely to deform a name they did not understand, just as a jack-tar turns Bellerophon into Billy Ruffian. Chrestos was a common name among oriental slaves, and a Roman mob would naturally assume that Christos, which they could not understand, was a form of it.

[39] Mr. Robertson recognizes (p. 124), though without realizing how much it damages his theory, that the miracles of the Gospels are "visibly unknown to the Paulinists"--presumably the early churches addressed by Paul in his Epistle. Do we not here get a glimpse of an early stage of the story of Jesus before it was overlaid with miracles? Yet Mr. Robertson, in defiance of logic, argues that the absence of miraculous tales of Jesus in the Paulines confirms what he calls "the mythological argument."

[40] It is true that this is from a speech put into Paul's mouth by the author of Acts; but Paul himself is no less emphatic in Romans i, 23, where of the Greeks he writes that, "though they knew God, they glorified him not as God.... Professing themselves wise, they were turned into fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of a corruptible man." Such were the feelings excited in Paul by a statue of Pheidias; how different from those it roused in his contemporary Dion, who wrote as follows of it: "Whoever among mortal men is most utterly toilworn in spirit, having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before this image must utterly forget all the terrors and woes of this mortal life." So strong was the prejudice of the Church (due exclusively to its Jewish origin) against plastic or pictorial art that Eusebius and Epiphanius condemned pictures of Christ as late as the fourth century, while the Eastern churches, even to-day, forbid statues of Jesus and of the Saints. Of the great gulf which separated Jew from Gentile on such points Mr. Robertson seems not to have the faintest notion.

[41] I trust my readers will forgive my use of a fox-hunting phrase in so serious a context, but I cannot think of any other so apt.

[42] P. 48. After citing the rather problematic allusion to Plato (Rep. ii, 361 D) in the apology of Apollonius (c. 172), the just man shall be tortured, he shall be spat on, and, last of all, he shall be crucified. Harnack has said that there is no other reference to this passage of Plato in old-Christian literature. "Why?" asks Mr. Smith. "Because Christians were not familiar with it? Impossible. The silence of the Christians was intentional, and the reason is obvious. The passage was tell-tale. Similarly we are to understand their silence about the pre-Christian Nazarenes and many other lions that were safest when asleep." This is in the true vein of a Bacon-Shakesperians armed with his cypher.

[43] See note (1).

[44] Elsewhere Mr. Smith qualifies this position, p. 35: "Of course, the cult was not intended to remain, and did not in fact remain, secret; it was at length brought into the open." But perhaps Mr. Smith is here alluding to his own revelation.

[45] Mark xvi, 9. The circumstance that Mark xvi, 9-20, was added to the Gospel by another hand in no way diminishes the significance of the passage here adduced.

[46] In the same manner, as we know from Origen (Com. in Evang. Ioannis, tom. xiii, 27), the Samaritans had a Messiah named Dositheos, who rose from the dead, and professed himself to be the Messiah of prophecy. His sect survived in the third century, as also his books, which, as Origen says, were full of "myth" about him to the effect that he had not tasted of death, but was somewhere or other still alive. By all the rules of criticism as used by Mr. Robertson and his friends, we must deny that Dositheos ever lived. The idea of a human hero being an angel or divine power made flesh was common among Jews, and in their apocryph, "The Prayer of Jacob" (see Origen, op. cit., tom. ii, 25), that worthy represented himself as such in the very language of Paul and of the Fourth Gospel: "I who spoke to you, I, Jacob and Israel, am an angel of God and a primeval spirit, as Abraham and Isaak were created in advance of all creatures. But I, Jacob, ... called Israel by God, a man seeing God, because I am first-born of all living beings made alive by God." We also learn that Uriel was sent forth by God to herald Jacob's descent upon earth, where he "tabernacled among men." Jacob declares himself to be "archangel of the power of God, and arch-captain among the sons of God, Israel the foremost minister of the Presence." Paul, we observe, did not need to go outside Judaism for his conceptions of Jesus, nor Justin Martyr either, who regularly speaks of Jesus as an archangel. So also among the pagans. In Augustus Cæsar his contemporaries loved to detect one of the great gods of Olympus just descended to earth in the semblance of a man. He was the god Mercury or some other god incarnate. His birth was a god's descent to earth in order to expiate the sins of the Romans. Thus Horace, Odes, I, 2, v. 29: Cui dabit partes scelus expiandi Juppiter, and cp. v. 45: Serus in coelum redeas--"Mayest thou be late in returning to heaven."

[47] Das Gilgamesch Epos in der Weltliteratur, 1906.

[48] P. 933: "Die Jesus-sage nach den Synoptikern--wie auch die nach Johannes--unterscheidet sich nun aber von allen anderen bisher erörterten Gilgamesch-sagen dadurch, dass sie hinter dem Gros der Sage nicht nur einzelne Bruchstücke von ihr als Nachzügler bringt, sondern eine lange Reihe von Stücken der Sage in fast ungestörter ursprünglicher Reihenfolge," etc.

[49] P. 818. So weit von Johannis Person allein. Verfolgen wir nun die Jesus-Sage weiter.

Im Gilgamesch Epos wird erzählt, wie zu Eabani in der Wüste der Jäger mit der Hierodule hinauszieht, wie Eabani ihrer habe geniesst, und dann mit ihr nach Erech kommt, wo grade oder ihm zu Ehre ein Fest gefeiert wird, wie er sich dort an Gilgamesch anschliesst und ihn durch Diesen königliche Ehren zuteil werden. Welche Metamorphosen diese Geschehnisse in den Sagen des alten Testaments erlebt haben, darf jetzt in der Hauptsache als bekannt vorausgesetzt werden. In zahlreichen Gilgamesch-Sagen fanden wir nun die Begegnung mit der Hierodule wieder. Aber vergeblich suchen wir sie dort in den drei ersten Evangelien, wo ihr Platz wäre, falls diese etwa eine Gilgamesch-Sage enthalten sollten, nämlich unmittelbar hinter Johannis Auftreten in der Wüste. Ebenso wenig finden wir an dieser Stelle etwa einen Reflex von Eabani's Einzug in das festlich erregte Erech. Wohl dagegen treffen wir an ursprünglicher Stelle ein Wiederhall von Gilgamesch's Begegnung mit Eabani.

[50] P. 820. Jesu Taufe durch Johannes wäre sonst auch daraus geworden, dass Eabani, nach dem er an Gilgamesch's Hof gelangt ist, durch Diesen Königlicher Ehren teilhaft wird.

[51] Nach Lukas (i, 15 and vii, 33) trinkt Johannes keinen Wein, ist also ein Nasiräer, der keinen Wein trinkt und dessen Haar nicht kekürzt wird, ebenso wie Joseph-Eabani, wie Simson als ein Eabani, wie Samuel-Eabani, wie Absolom als Eabani wenigstens einen üppigen Haarwuchs besitzt, und wie der Eabani des Epos, mit dem langen Haupthaar eines Weibes, in der Wüste mit den Tieren zusammen Wasser trinkt, und wie Eabani mit diesen Tieren zusammen nur Gras und Krauter frisst, so isst Johannes, nach Lukas wenigstens, kein Brot.

[52] P. 838: Wie für Xisuthros, liegt für Jesus ein Schiff bereit, und, wie Xisuthros und Jonas, "flieht" Jesus in ein Schiff.

[53] I cite an unfinished memoir of my grandfather, W. D. Conybeare, himself a pioneer of geology and no mean palæontologist, who owed much of his discernment in these fields to such a training in historical method as he describes.

[54] Within the last two months the theological faculties of Oxford and Cambridge, and the examining chaplains (of various bishops) resident in those universities, have addressed a petition to the Archbishop of Canterbury praying him to absolve candidates for Ordination of the necessity of avowing that "they believe unfeignedly in the whole of the Old and New Testaments," because so many competent and well-qualified students are thereby deterred from taking holy orders. The Archbishop would, it seems, make the individual clergyman's conscience the sole judge (to the exclusion of the Bishop of Croydon) of the propriety of his retaining his orders in spite of his rejection of this and that tradition or dogma. That is at least a sign that opinion is on the move.

[55] Such is Renan's interpretation of this passage in L'Ante-Christ, ed. 1873, p. 259, and he is undoubtedly right in detecting in it a reference to the Christians scattered abroad in the half-Syrian and pagan, half-Jewish and monotheist, cities of Syria.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Historical Christ;, by Fred. C. Conybeare