Chapter II: The Central Myth (2)

On a careful balance, however, the presumption seems rather against a triple rite. What is quite clear is that for the early Jesuists the "prophecy" in 53rd Isaiah possessed the highest importance. For us, that lyric chapter is still somewhat enigmatic. Gunkel, who is here followed by Professor Drews, [108] takes the view that the suffering figure described is really that of the typical victim of the human sacrifice; and it certainly fits that conception at points where it does not easily compose with that of the figure of oppressed Israel. [109] The victim was "wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities"; and conceptually "with his stripes we are healed." On the other hand, who were "we" for "Isaiah" if not Israel itself? The only interpretation seems to be that the past generations had suffered for the present; and this does not yield an intellectually satisfying figure. But still more improbable, on the whole, is the suggestion that the Hebrew prophet or quasi-prophetic lyrist--whatever date we may assign to the chapter--has really perceived and figured the tragic vision of the sacrificial victim as he is here supposed to have done. It would be a psychological feat extremely remarkable even for that highly gifted writer; [110] and moreover it would finally compose still less with the general idea of the context than does the supposed presentment of the suffering People. It is difficult to reach any satisfying notion of Isaiah's general meaning on the view of Gunkel and Drews.

We are thus far held, then, to the inference that, as Isaiah's chapter was certainly taken by the early Christists [111] who had adopted the Messianic idea to be a prophecy of their Messiah, the Christ myth was shaped in accordance with it. There are three main strands in the Christ myth, the Jesuist, the Christist or Messianic, and that of the Teaching God. The "suffering" motive serves to bind the three together; and the concrete item, "he was numbered with the transgressors," bracketed as it is with "he poured out his soul unto death," gives a very definite ground for the item of the forced companionship of the malefactors in the Crucifixion scene. It is, in short, apparently one of the specifically Judaic motives in the myth construction. Earlier in the narrative the Messiah is frequently grouped with "publicans and sinners": he comes "eating and drinking," in contrast with the ascetic figure of the Baptist. That feature is probably part of the atmosphere of the myth-motive of the sacrificial victim, with the leper-host and the anointing by the "sinner." But the "two thieves" are inferribly supplied from another side.

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

§ 6. Minor Ritual and Myth Elements

In the later myth the robbers, as it happens, are made to embody certain features of sacrificial ritual. We are told in the fourth gospel that the Jews "asked of Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away,"--"that the bodies should not remain on the cross upon the sabbath, for the day of that sabbath was a high day." Accordingly the soldiers break the legs of the two thieves, "but when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs." The implication is that the men's legs were to be broken by way of killing them--a patently untrue suggestion. [112] The spear-thrust which "howbeit" was given to Jesus would have been the way of killing the others if they were alive: breaking the legs was a brutality which would not ensure death.

The explanation is that both leg-breaking and spearing were features of sacrificial rites. It may have been by way of purposive contrast to the former procedure that in the priestly ritual [113] of the passover it is enacted that no bone of the (unspecified) victim shall be broken. The breaking of the leg-bones in human sacrifice was one of the horrible expedients of the primitive world for securing the apparent willingness of the victim: it is to be found alike in Dravidian and in African sacrifice. [114] An alternative method, which tended to supersede the other, was that of drugging or intoxication, of which we find still more widespread evidence. In ancient Jerusalem, we find the practice transferred to ordinary execution on the cross, the humane women making a practice of giving a narcotic potion of wine and incense to the victim. [115] Thus associated with the deaths of ordinary criminals, it suggested to some of the Jesuist myth-makers a ground for specializing the record.

In the first two gospels, a drink is offered to Jesus on the cross--wine [116] mingled with gall, in Matthew; wine mingled with myrrh in Mark--"but he received it not"; this, in Matthew, after tasting. The Marcan form is probably the first, as it describes the customary narcotic: the idea is to indicate that in the case of the divine victim no artifice was needed to secure an apparent acquiescence: he was a voluntary sufferer. "Gall," in Matthew, may have reference to pagan mysteries in which a drink of gall figured. [117] In Luke, vinegar is ostensibly offered as part of the derision. In John, no drink is mentioned till the end, when the dying victim says, "I thirst." Having partaken of "a sponge full of the vinegar upon hyssop," he says, "It is finished," and dies. In Matthew, this act of compassion takes a simpler form, the sponge of vinegar being given on the utterance of the despairing cry, while other bystanders jeer: in Mark, the giver of the sponge also jeers.

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

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

Nowhere else is the literal basis of the symbol of "body and blood" so insisted upon. Its writers had present to their minds an actual ritual in which the eating of the body of a Sacrificed God, first actually, then symbolically, was of cardinal importance. The later myth puts new stress on the conception, as if it had been felt that the earlier was not sufficiently explicit; and it makes the Jewish high-priest lay down the doctrine of human sacrifice from the Judaic side. [118] It is in this atmosphere of sacrificial ideas that we get the item of the piercing of the divine victim with a spear. The detail is turned specially to the account of the Johannine doctrine of resurrection by putting what passed in popular physiology for a certain proof of death--the issuing of "blood and water." [119] But here again we find both a Hebrew motive [120] and a pagan motive for the detail. In the sacrifice of the sacred slave of the Moon-Goddess among the primitive Albanians, the victim was allowed the customary year of luxury and licence, and was finally anointed and slain by being pierced to the heart with a sacred lance through the side. And there are other eastern analogues. [121]

It is the fourth gospel, finally, that introduces the "garment without seam," combining a Hebraic with a pagan motive. In order to fulfil a "prophecy" held to be Messianic, [122] the synoptics make the soldiers cast lots for the garments of Jesus. The fourth gospel specifies a simple allotment of the garments in general, as if they could have been numerous enough to go round the soldiery, but limits the act of "casting lots" to the chiton, the under garment. Thus the soldiers both "divide the raiment" and cast lots for the "vesture." The making of this "without seam" is at once an assimilation of Jesus to the high-priest and an assimilation of the Slain God to the Sun-God and other deities. [123] A special chiton was woven for Apollo in Sparta; as a peplos or shawl was woven for Hêrê at Elis. And this in turn had for the pre-Christian pagans mystic meanings as symbolizing the indivisible solar robe of universal light, ascribed to Osiris; the partless robe of Ahura Mazda; Pan's coat of many colours, and yet other notions. Always the story is itemized in terms of myth, of ritual, of symbol, of doctrine, never in terms of real biography.

§ 7. The Cross

It is not at all certain, and it is not probable, that in the earlier stages of the myth the cross as such was prominent. Early crucifixion was not always a nailing of outstretched hands in the cross form, but often a hanging of the victim by the arms, tied together at the wrists, with or without a support to the body at the thighs. [124] The stauros was not necessarily a cross: it might be a simple pile or stake. In the Book of Acts (v, 30) Peter and the Apostles are made to speak of Jesus "whom ye slew, hanging him on a tree." This was in itself a common sacrificial mode; and all sacrificial traditions are more or less represented in the New Testament compilation.

But there was an irresistible compulsion to a divinizing of the cross as of the victim. Ages before the Christian era the symbol had been mystic and sacrosanct for Semites, for Egyptians, for Greeks, for Hindus; and the Sacred Tree of the cults of Attis, Dionysos, and Osiris lent itself alike to many symbolic significances. [125] The cross had reference to the equinox, when the sacred tree was cut down; to the victim bound to it; to the four points of the compass; to the zodiacal sign Aries, thus connected with the sacrificial lamb; [126] and to the universe as symbolized in the "orb" of the emperor, with the cross-lines drawn on it. The final Christian significance of the cross is a composite of ideas associated with it everywhere, from Mexico to the Gold Coast, in both of which regions it was or is a symbol of the Rain-God. [127] The Dravidian victim, the deified sacrifice, was as-it-were crucified; [128] as was a victim in a Batak sacrifice, where, as on the Gold Coast, the St. Andrew's-cross form is enacted. [129] The commonness of some such procedure in African sacrificial practice points to its general antiquity.

It would appear, too, that in the mysteries of the Saviour Gods not only a crucified aspect of the God but a simulation of that on the part of the devotees was customary. Osiris was actually represented in crucifix form; [130] and in the ritual the worshipper became "one with Osiris," apparently by being "joined unto the sycamore tree." [131] When, then, in the Epistle to the Galatians [132] we find "Paul" addressing the converts as "those before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly set forth (proegraphê) crucified," and declaring of himself: [133] "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus," we are at once pointed to the Syrian practice of stigmata, which appears to connect with both Osirian and Christian usage. In his remarkable account of the life of the sacred city of Hierapolis--a microcosm of eastern paganism--Lucian, after telling how children are sacrificed with the votive pretence that they are oxen, records that it is the universal practice to make punctures in the neck or in the hands, and that "all" Syrians bear such stigmata. [134] One of the principal cults of the place was that of Attis, the castrated God of Vegetation, in whose mysteries the image of a youth was bound to a tree, [135] with a ritual of suffering, mourning, resurrection and rejoicing. As Dionysos was also "he of the tree," it is not improbable that he, who also died to rise again, may have been similarly adored. On the other hand, the representation of the Saviour Prometheus suffering in a crucified posture tells of an immemorial concept. [136]

For the Jews, finally, the cross symbol was already mystically potent, being a mark of salvation in connection with the massacre-sacrifice of the Passover, and by consequence salvatory in times of similar danger. [137] When with this was combined the mystic significance of the sign in Platonic lore as pointing to the Logos, [138] the mythic foundation for Christism was of the broadest. The crucifix is late in Christian art; but the wayside cross is as old as the cult of Hermes, God of boundaries. [139]

§ 8. The Suffering Messiah

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

Now, these are adequate though not numerous documentary grounds for the doctrine, on Jewish principles of interpretation. Jewish, indeed, the Messianic idea is not in origin: it is Perso-Babylonian; [140] and the idea of a suffering or re-arising Messiah may well have come in from that side. But equally that may have found some Jewish acceptance. We can see very well that in Daniel "the Anointed One"--that is, "the Messiah" and "the Christ"--refers to the Maccabean hero; but that as well as the other passages, on Jewish principles, could apply to the Messiah of any period; and the Septuagint reading of Psalm xxii, 16: "They pierced my hands and my feet," was a specification of crucifixion. It is not impossible that that reading was the result of the actual crucifixion of Cyrus, who had been specified as a "Christ" in Isaiah. We have nothing to do here with rational interpretation: the whole conception of prophecy is irrational; but the construing of old texts as prophecies was a Jewish specialty.

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

His being a carpenter, occupying the field of barbaric Galilee,
and suffering death as a culprit, are not features which the
constructor of an imaginary tale would go out of his way to
introduce wherewith to associate his hero, and therefore, probably,
we have here real facts presented to us, [141]

he was far astray. Anything might be predicated of a Jewish Messiah. Not only had the Messianic Cyrus been crucified: the anointed and triumphant Judas Maccabæus, under whose auspices the Messianic belief had revived in Israel in the second century B.C., had finally fallen in battle; and his brother Simon, who was actually regarded as the Messiah, was murdered by his son-in-law. [142]

It is not here argued that the Messianic idea had been originally connected with the Jesus cult; on the contrary that cult is presented as a non-national one, surviving in parts of Palestine in connection with belief in an ancient deity and the practice of an ancient rite, in a different religious atmosphere from that of Messianism. The solution to which we shall find ourselves led is that at a certain stage the Messianic idea was grafted on the cultus; and this stage is likely to have begun after the fall of Jerusalem, when for most Jews the hope of a Maccabean recovery was buried. Then it was that the idea of a Messiah "from above," [143] supernaturally empowered to make an end of the earthly scene, became the only plausible one; and here the conception of a Slain God who, like all slain Gods, rose again, invited the development. Jesuists could now make a new appeal to Jews in general upon recognizably Jewish lines. They were of course resisted, even as Sadducees were resisted by Pharisees, and vice versa. The statement in the Messiah article in the Encyclopædia Biblica that it is highly improbable that "the Jews" at the time of Christ believed in a suffering and atoning Messiah is nugatory. No one ever put such a proposition. But "the Jews" had in course of time added much to their creed, and might have added this, were it not that the Jesus cult became identified with Gentile and anti-Judaic propaganda.

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

As for the item of "the carpenter," we have seen [144] not only that that is mythic, but that the myth-theory alone can account for it.

§ 9. The Rock Tomb

In the first gospel (xxvii, 57 sq.) we have a comparatively simple version of the story of Joseph of Arimathea, a rich disciple of Jesus, who gets the dead body of the crucified, wraps it in clean linen, and lays it "in his own new tomb, which he had hewed out in the rock." In Mark and Luke we have visibly elaborated accounts, in which, however, while the rock tomb is specified, it is not described as Joseph's "own," though it is represented as hitherto unused. Such a narrative points very directly to the Mithraic rite in which the stone image of the dead God, after being ritually mourned over, is laid in a tomb, which, Mithra being "the God out of the rock," would naturally be of stone--a simple matter in a cult whose chief rites were always enacted in a cave. [145] Details thus thrown into special prominence, while in themselves historically insignificant, can be understood only as mythically motived. So noticeable is the Mithraic parallel that the Christian Father who angrily records it exclaims, Habet ergo diabolus Christos suos--"the devil thus has his Christs." In Mithraism the rock tomb, which is an item in a ritual of death and resurrection, is mythically motived throughout: in the gospel story, historically considered, the item is meaningless.

Obvious as is the mythological inference, it is met by the assertion that round Jerusalem "soil was so scarce that every one was buried in a rock tomb." [146] Such a criticism at once defeats itself. If every one was buried in a rock tomb, what was the point of the emphasised detail in the gospels, which are so devoid of details of a really biographical character? Obviously, rock tombs were the specialty of the rich; and Joseph of Arimathea is described in all the synoptics as a man of social standing. Is the motive of the story nothing better than the desire to record that Jesus was richly buried?

"Scores of such tombs remain," cries the critic: "were they all Mithraic?" The argument thus evaded is that there was no real tomb. If there was one thing which the early Jesuists, on the biographical theory, might be supposed to keep hold of, it was the place of their Lord's sepulchre; yet nothing subsists but an admittedly false tradition. At Jerusalem, as one has put it, there are shown "two Zions, two Temple areas, two Bethanys, two Gethsemanes, two or more Calvarys, three Holy Sepulchres, several Bethesdas." [147] It is all myth. "There is not a single existing site in the Holy City that is mentioned in connection with Christian history before the year 326 A.D., when Constantine's mother adored the two footprints of Christ on Olivet." [148] She was shown nothing else. [149] "The position of the traditional sites of Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre, in the middle of the north quarter of Jerusalem, seems to have given rise to suspicions very early." [150] It well might. I have known a modern traveller who, on seeing the juxtaposed sites, at once realized that he was on the scene, if of anything, of an ancient ritual, not of events such as are narrated in the gospels. The traditional Golgotha is only fifty or sixty yards away from the Sepulchre; [151] and near by is "Mount Moriah," upon which Abraham is recorded to have sought to sacrifice Isaac.

Colonel Conder, who accepts without misgiving all four gospel narratives, and attempts to combine them, avows that the "Garden Tomb" chosen by General Gordon, in the latterly selected Calvary, is impossible, being probably a work of the twelfth century; [152] and for his own part, while inclined to stand by the new Golgotha, avows that "we must still say of our Lord as was said of Moses, 'No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.'" [153] Placidly he concludes that "it is well that we should not know." [154] But what does the biographical theory make of such a conclusion? Its fundamental assumption is that of Renan, that the personality of Jesus was so commanding as to make his disciples imagine his resurrection. In elaborate and contradictory detail we have the legends of that; and yet we find that all trace of knowledge alike of place of crucifixion and tomb had vanished from the Christian community which is alleged to have arisen immediately after his ascension. The theory collapses at a touch, here as at every other point. There is no more a real Sepulchre of Jesus than there is a real Sepulchre of Mithra; and the bluster which offers the solution that at Jerusalem every one was buried in a rock tomb is a mere closing of the eyes to the monumental fact of the myth.

The critic is all the while himself committed to the denial that there was any tomb. Professing to follow the suggestion [155] of M. Loisy that Jesus was thrown into "some common foss," which in his hands becomes "the common pit reserved for crucified malefactors," he affirms [156] that "the words ascribed in Acts xiii, 29, to Paul certainly favour the Abbé's view." They certainly do not. The text in question runs:

And when they had fulfilled all things that were written of him
they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a tomb.

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

§ 10. The Resurrection

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

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

But it is practically certain that a liturgical resurrection was or had been practised in contemporary cults which had at one time enacted an annual sacrifice of the representative of the God, abstracted in myth as the death of the God himself. And in our own time the survival of an analogous practice has been noted in India. At the installation of the Rajahs of Keonjhur it was anciently the practice for the Rajah to slay a victim: latterly there is a mock-slaying, whereupon the mock-victim disappears. "He must not be seen for three days; then he presents himself to the Rajah as miraculously restored to life." [157]