is mark’s gospel a religious romance? i can imagine some people arguing that mark’s gospel might be a religious novel, of which the scene is laid in jerusalem and galilee among jews; that it was by a literary artifice impregnated with jewish ideas; that the references to sadducees and pharisees were introduced as appropriate to the age and clime; that the old jewish scriptures are for the same reason acknowledged by all the actors and interlocutors as holy writ; that demonological beliefs were thrown in as being characteristic of palestinian society of the time the writer purported to write about; that it is of the nature of a literary trick that the peculiar messianic and apocalyptic beliefs and aspirations rife among jews of the period b.c. 50–a.d. 160 and later, are made to colour the narrative from beginning to end. all these elements of verisimilitude, i say, taken singly or together, do not of necessity exclude the hypothesis that it may be one of the most skilfully constructed historical novels ever written. have we not, it may be urged, in the recognitions or itinerary of saint clement, in the acts of thomas, in the story of paul and thecla, similar compositions?
certainly not in the way assumed by drews and robertson, in view of what we know of the dates and diffusion of the gospels, of their literary connections with one another, and of the reappearance of their chief person? dramatis in the pauline letters, such a hypothesis [82]is of course wildly improbable, yet not utterly absurd. we have to assume in the writer a knowledge of the messianic movement among the jews, a familiarity with their demonological beliefs and practices, with their sects, and so forth; and it is all readily assumable. in the greek novel of chariton we have an example of such an historical romance, the scene being laid in syracuse and asia minor shortly after the close of the peloponnesian war. but such romances are not cult documents of a parabolic or allegorical kind, as the gospels are supposed by these writers to be. they do not bring a divine being down from olympus, and pretend all through that he was a man who was born, lived, and died on the cross in a particular place and at a particular date. we have no other example of documents whose authors, by way of honouring a god up in heaven who never made any epiphany on earth nor ever underwent incarnation, made a man of him, and concocted an elaborate earthly record of him. why did they do it? what was the object of the “jesuists” and “christists” in hoaxing their own and all subsequent generations and in building up a lasting cult and church on what they knew were fables?
whose hypothesis is self-destructive, in the homeric hymns and other religious documents not only of the greeks, but of the hindoos, we have no doubt histories of the gods written by their votaries; but in these hymns they put down what they believed, they did not of set design falsify the legend of the god, and describe his birth and parentage, when they knew he never had any; his ministrations and teaching career, when he never ministered or taught; his persecution by enemies and his death, when he was never persecuted and [83]never died. or are we to suppose that all these things were related in the sun-god joshua legend? no, reply messrs. drews and robertson. for the stories told in the gospels are all modelled on pagan or astral myths; the persons who move in their pages are the gods and demigods of egyptian, greek, latin, hindoo legends. clearly the saviour-god joshua had no legend or story of his own, or it would not be necessary to pad him out with the furniture and appurtenances of osiris, dionysus, serapis, ?sculapius, and who knows what other gods besides. and—strangest feature of all—it is jews, men circumcised, propagandists of jewish monotheism, who, in the interests of “a judaic cult” (p. 348), go rummaging in all the dustbins of paganism, in order to construct a legend or allegory of their god. why could they not rest content with him as they found him in their ancient tradition?
and irreconcilable with ascertained history of judaism the gospels, like any other ancient document, have to be accounted for. they did not engender themselves, like a mushroom, nor drop out of heaven ready written. i have admitted as possible, though wild and extravagant, the hypothesis of their being a messianic romance, which subsequently came to be mistaken for sober history; and there are of course plenty of legendary incidents in their pages. but such a hypothesis need not be discussed. it is not that of these three authors, and would not suit them. they insist on seeing in them so many manifestoes of the secret sect of jews who worshipped a god joshua. for dr. drews and mr. robertson the gospels describe a “jesuine” mystery play evolved “from a palestinian rite of human sacrifice in which the annual victim was ‘jesus the son of the father.’?” there is [84]no trace in jewish antiquity of any such rite in epochs which even remotely preceded christianity, nor is the survival of such a rite of human sacrifice even thinkable in jerusalem, where the “christists” laid their plot. and why should they eke out their plot with a thousand scraps of pagan mythology?
prof. smith’s hypothesis of a mythical jesus mythically humanized in a monotheistic propaganda, i was taught in my childhood to venerate the gospels; but i never knew before what really wonderful documents they are. let us, however, turn to professor w. b. smith, who does not pile on paganism so profusely as his friends, nor exactly insist on a pagan basis for the gospels. his hypothesis in brief is identical with theirs, for he insists that jesus the man never existed at all. jesus is, in professor smith’s phrase, “a humanized god”; in the diction of messrs. drews and robertson, a myth. professor smith allows (ecce deus, p. 78) that the mere “fact that a myth, or several myths, may be found associated with the name of an individual by no means relegates that individual into the class of the unhistorical.” that is good sense, and so is the admission which follows, that “we may often explain the legends from the presence of the historical personality, independently known to be historic.” but in regard to jesus alone among the figures of the past he, like his friends, rules out both considerations. the common starting-point of all three writers is that the earliest gospel narratives do not “describe any human character at all; on the contrary, the individuality in question is distinctly divine and not human, in the earliest portrayal. as time goes on it is true that certain human elements do creep in, particularly in luke and john?…. in mark there is really no man at all; the jesus is god, or at least essentially divine, [85]throughout. he wears only a transparent garment of flesh. mark historizes only.”
lacks all confirmation, defies the texts, how is it, we ask, that humanity has pored over the synoptic gospels for nearly two thousand years, and discerned in them the portraiture at least of a man of flesh and blood, who can be imaged as such in statuary and painting? even if it were conceded, as i said above, that the gospel representation of jesus is an imaginary portrait, like that of william tell or john inglesant, still, who, that is not mad, will deny that there exist in it multiple human traits, fictions may be of a novelist, yet indisputably there? mr. smith’s hardy denial of them can only lead his readers to suspect him of paradox. moreover, the champions of traditional orthodoxy have had in the past every reason to side with professor smith in his attempted elimination of all human traits and characteristics. yet in recent years they have been constrained to admit that in luke and john the human elements, far from creeping in, show signs of creeping out. “the received notion,” adds professor smith, “that in the early marcan narratives the jesus is distinctly human, and that the process of deification is fulfilled in john, is precisely the reverse of the truth.” once more we rub our eyes. in mark jesus is little more than that most familiar of old jewish figures, an earthly herald of the imminent kingdom of heaven; late and little by little he is recognized by his followers as himself the messiah whose advent he formerly heralded. as yet he is neither divine nor the incarnation of a pre-existent quasi-divine logos or angel. in john, on the other hand, jesus has emerged from the purely jewish phase of being messiah, or servant of god (which is [86]all that lord or son of god1 implies in mark’s opening verses). he has become the eternal logos or reason, essentially divine and from the beginning with god. and rests on an obsolete and absurd allegorization of themhere obviously we are well on our way to a deification of jesus and an elimination of human traits; and the writer is so conscious of this that he goes out of his way to call our attention to the fact that jesus was after all a man of flesh and blood, with human parents and real brethren who disbelieved in him. he was evidently conscious that the superimposition on the man jesus of the logos scheme, and the reflection back into the human life of jesus of the heavenly r?le which paul ascribed to him qua raised by the spirit from the dead, was already influencing certain believers (called docetes) to believe that his human life and actions were illusions, seen and heard indeed, as we see and hear a man speak and act in a dream, but not objective and real. to guard against this john proclaims that he was made flesh. nevertheless, he goes half way with the docetes in that he rewrites all the conversations of jesus, abolishes the homely parable, and substitutes his own theosophic lucubrations. he also emphasizes the miraculous aspect of jesus, inventing new miracles more grandiose than any in previous gospels, but of a kind, as he imagines, to symbolize his conceptions of sin and death. he is careful to eliminate the demonological stories. they were as much of a stumbling-block to john as we have seen them to be [87]to mr. w. b. smith. we must, therefore, perforce accuse the latter of putting a hypothesis that from the outset is a paradox. the documents contradict him on every page.
why should the robber chief joshua have been selected as prototype of jesus? a thesis that begins by flying in the face of the documents demands paradoxical arguments for its support; and the pages of all three writers teem with them. of a jesus that is god from the first it is perhaps natural to ask—anyhow our authors have asked it of themselves—which god was he? and the accident of his bearing the name jesus—he might just as well have been called jacob or sadoc or manasseh, or what not—suggests joshua to them, for joshua is the hebrew name which in the lxx was grecized as iesouē, and later as iesous. that in the old testament joshua is depicted as a cut-throat and leader of brigands, very remote in his principles and practice from the jesus of the gospels, counts for nothing. the late dr. winckler, who saw sun and moon myths rising like exhalations all around him wherever he looked in ancient history and mythology,2 has suggested that joseph was originally a solar hero. ergo, joshua was one too. ergo, there was a hebrew secret society in jerusalem in the period b.c. 150–a.d. 50 [88]who worshipped the sun-god-saviour joshua. ergo, the gospels are a sustained parable of this sun-god. thus are empty, wild, and unsubstantiated hypotheses piled one on top of the other, like pelion on ossa. not a scintilla of evidence is adduced for any one of them. first one is advanced, and its truth assumed. the next is propped on it, et sic ad infinitum.
why make him the central figure of a monotheistic cult? what, asks professor smith (ecce deus, p. 67), was the active principle of christianity? what its germ? “the monotheistic impulse,” he answers, “the instinct for unity that lies at the heart of all grand philosophy and all noble religion.” again, p. 45: “what was the essence of this originally secret jesus cult, that was expressed in such guarded parabolic terms as made it unintelligible to the multitude?… it was a protest against idolatry; it was a crusade for monotheism.”
the earliest christianity was no monotheistic propaganda this is, no doubt, true of christianity when we pass outside the gospels. it is only not true of them, because on their every page jewish monotheism is presupposed. why are no warnings against polytheism put into the mouth of jesus? why is not a single precept of the sermon on the mount directed against idolatry? surely because we are moving in a jewish atmosphere in which such warnings were unnecessary. the horizon is purely jewish, either of jerusalem as we know it in the pages of josephus or of certain galilean circles in which even a knowledge of greek seems not to have existed before the third century. the very proximity of greek cities there seems to have confirmed the jewish peasant of that region in his preference of aramaic idiom, just as the native of bohemia to-day turns his back on [89]you if you address him in the detested german tongue.
robertson and drews allow the jesuists to have been mainly jewish in cult and feeling messrs. robertson and drews concede that the original stock of christianity was jewish. thus we read in christianity and mythology (p. 415) that the lord’s prayer derives “from pre-christian jewish lore, and, like parts of the sermon (on the mount), from an actually current jewish document.” the same writer admits (p. 338) the existence of “judaic sections of the early church.” when he talks (p. 337) of the tale of the anointing of jesus in matthew xxvi, 6–13, and parallel passages, being “in all probability a late addendum” to the “primitive gospel” of bernhard weiss’s theory, “made after the movement had become pronouncedly gentile,” he presupposes that, to start with anyhow, the movement was mainly jewish. he admits that in the first six paragraphs of the early christian document entitled the didaché we have a purely jewish teaching document, “which the jesuist sect adopted in the first or second century.” he cannot furthermore contest the fact that the jesuists “took over the jewish scriptures as their sacred book; that they inherited the jewish passover and the paschal lamb, which is still slain in eastern churches; that the leaders of the secret sect in jerusalem upheld the jewish rite of circumcision against paul.”3 all this is inconceivable if the society was not in the main and originally one of hebrews. when he goes on to argue that the gospels are the manifesto of a cult of an old sun-god [90]joshua, son of a mythic miriam, he at least admits that the early “christists” selected from ancient jewish superstition, and not from pagan myth, the central figure of their cult, and that they chose for their deity a successor and satellite of moses with a hebrew lady for his mother. we may take it for granted, then, that the parent society out of which the christian church arose was profoundly and radically jewish; and mr. robertson frankly admits as much when he affirms that “it was a judaic cult that preached circumcision,” and that “its apostles with whom paul was in contact were of a judaizing description.” here is common ground between myself and him.
if so, how could they devote themselves to pagan mystery plays? what i want to know is how it came about that a society of which jerusalem was the focus, and of which the nucleus and propagandists were jews and judaizers, could have been given over to the cult of a solar god, and how they could celebrate mystery plays and dramas in honour of that god; how they can have manufactured that god into “a composite myth” (p. 336), and constructed in his honour a religious system that was “a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage.” for such, we are told (p. 305), was “the christian system.”
robertson admits that jews could never borrow from pagan rituals in that age we are far better acquainted with jewish belief and ritual during the period b.c. 400–a.d. 100 than we are with that of the pagans. the content of the greek mysteries is an enigma to our best hellenists; we know next to nothing of the inside of mithraism; for the oriental cults of the late roman republic and early empire we are lamentably deficient in writings that might exhibit to us the arcana of their worship and the texture of their beliefs. not so with judaism. [91]here we have the prophets, old and late; for the two centuries b.c. we have the apocrypha, including the maccabean books; we have the so-called books of enoch, of jubilees, of the twelve patriarchs, the fourth ezra, baruch, sirach, and many others. we have the voluminous works of philo and josephus for the first century of our era; we have the babylonian and other talmuds preserving to us a wealth of jewish tradition and teaching of the first and second centuries. here let mr. robertson speak. as regards the lord’s prayer and the sermon on the mount, he insists (p. 415 foll.) that they were inspired by parallel passages in the talmud and the apocrypha, and he argues with perfect good sense for the priority of the talmud in these words: “it is hardly necessary to remark here that the talmudic parallels to any part of the sermon on the mount cannot conceivably have been borrowed from the christian gospels; they would as soon have borrowed from the rituals of the pagans.”
yet affirms that christists, indistinguishable from jews, did so borrow wholesale and yet he asks us to believe that a nucleus of jews, hidden in jerusalem, the heart of judaism, a sect whose apostles were judaizers and vehement defenders of circumcision—all this he admits—were, as late as the last half of the first century, maintaining among themselves in secret a highly eclectic pagan cult; that they evolved “a gospel myth from scenes in pagan art” (p. 327); that they took a sort of modern arch?ological interest in pagan art and sculpture, and derived thence most of their literary motifs; that the figure of jesus is an alloy of dionysus, osiris, adonis, krishna, ?sculapius, and fifty other ancient gods and demigods, with the all-important “sun-god-saviour joshua, son of miriam”; that the story of peter rests on “a pagan basis of myth” (p. 340); [92]that maria is the true and original form of the hebrew miriam, and is the same name as myrrha and moira (μο?ρα), etc., etc.
the central idea of a god joshua a figment of robertson’s fancy such are the mutually destructive arguments on the strength of which we are to adopt his thesis of the unhistoricity of jesus. his books, like those of dr. drews, are a welter of contradictory statements, unreconciled and irreconcilable. nevertheless, they reiterate them in volume after volume, like orthodox christians reiterating articles of faith and dogmas too sacred to be discussed. who ever heard before them of a jewish cult of a sun-god-saviour joshua? such a cult must have been long extinct when the book of joshua was written. who ever heard of this sun-god having for his mother a miriam, until mr. robertson discovered a late persian gloss to the effect that joshua, son of nun, had a mother of the name? even if this tradition were not so utterly worthless as it is, it would prove nothing about the sun-god. on the basis of such gratuitous fancies we are asked to dismiss jesus as a myth. it does not even explain the birth legends of the christiansit does not even help us to understand how the myths of the virgin birth arose. since when, i would like to know, did we need such evidence against that legend? if i thought that the rebuttal of it depended on such evidence, i should be inclined to become a good papist and embrace it. it is enough for me to have ascertained, by a comparison of texts and by a study of early christian documents, that it is a late accretion on the traditions of jesus of nazareth. that is the real evidence, if any be wanted, against it. mr. robertson admits that the first two chapters of luke which are supposed—perhaps wrongly—to embody this legend are “a late fabulous introduction.” again he writes (p. 189): [93]“only the late third gospel tells the story (of luke i and ii); the narrative (of the birth) in matthew, added late as it was to the original composition, which obviously began at what is now the third chapter, has no hint of the taxing.”
evidence of the protevangelion this is good sense, and i am indebted to him for pointing out that so loosely was the myth compacted that in the protevangelion (c. 17) the statement is that it was decreed “that all should be enrolled who were in bethlehem of jud?a,” not all jews over the entire world.
robertson assumes the antiquity of the legend merely to suit his theory surely all this implies that the legend of the miraculous birth was no part of the earliest tradition about jesus. nevertheless, it is so important for mr. robertson’s thesis (that jesus was a mythical personage) that he should from the first have had a mythical mother, that he insists on treating the whole of christian tradition, early or late, as a solid block, and argues steadily that the virgin birth legend was an integral part of it from the beginning. jesus was a myth; as such he must have had a myth for a mother. now a virgin mother is half-way to being a mythical one. therefore mary was a virgin, and must from the beginning have been regarded as such by the “christists.” such are the steps of his reasoning.
the “christists” at once extravagantly pagan and extravagantly monotheist and jewish i have adduced in the preceding pages a selection of the mythological equations of mr. robertson and dr. drews in order that my readers may realize how faint a resemblance between stories justifies, in their minds, a derivation or borrowing of one from the other. nor do they ever ask themselves how jewish “christists” were likely to come in contact with out-of-the-way legends of bacchus or dionysus, of hermes, [94]of old pelasgic deities, of cybele and attis and isis, osiris and horus, of helena dendrites, of krishna, of janus, of sundry ancient vegetation-gods (for they are up to the newest lights), of apollonius of tyana, of ?sculapius, of herakles and oceanus, of saoshyant and other old persian gods and heroes, of buddha and his kith and kin, of the eleusinian and other ancient mysteries. prick them with a pin, and out gushes this lore in a copious flood; and every item of it is supposed to have filled the heads of the polymath authors of the christian gospels. every syllable of these gospels, every character in them, is symbolic of one or another of these gods and heroes. hear, o israel: “christians borrowed myths of all kinds from paganism” (christianity and mythology, p. xii). and we are pompously assured (p. xxii, op. cit.) that this new “mythic” system is, “in general, more ‘positive,’ more inductive, less à priori, more obedient to scientific canons, than that of the previous critics known to me [i.e., to mr. robertson] who have reached similar anti-traditional results. it substitutes an anthropological basis, in terms of the concrete phenomena of mythology, for a pseudo-philosophical presupposition.” heaven help the new science of anthropology!
a receipt for the concoction of a gospel and what end, we may ask, had the “jesuists” and “christists” (to use mr. robertson’s jargon) in view, when they dressed up all this tagrag and bobtail of pagan myth, art, and ritual, and disguised it under the form of a tale of messianic judaism? for that and nothing else is, on this theory, the basis and essence of the gospels. was it their aim to honour paganism or to honour jewish monotheism, when they concocted a “christ cult” which is “a synthesis of the two most [95]popular pagan myth-motives,4 with some judaic elements as nucleus and some explicit ethical teaching superadded” (p. 34). we must perforce suppose that the gospels were a covert tribute to the worth and value of pagan mythology and religious dramas, to pagan art and statuary. if we adopt the mythico-symbolical method, they can have been nothing else. its sponsors might surely condescend to explain the alchemy by which the ascertained rites and beliefs of early christians were distilled from these antecedents. the effect and the cause are so entirely disparate, so devoid of any organic connection, that we would fain see the evolution worked out a little more clearly. at one end of it we have a hurly-burly of pagan myths, at the other an army of christian apologists inveighing against everything pagan and martyred for doing so, all within a space of sixty or seventy years. i only hope the orthodox will be gratified to learn that their scriptures are a thousandfold more wonderful and unique than they appeared to be when they were merely inspired by the holy spirit. for verbal inspiration is not, as regards its miraculous quality, in the same field with mythico-symbolism. verily we have discovered a new literary genus, unexampled in the history of mankind. you rake together a thousand irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked up at random from every age, race, and clime; you get a “christist” to throw them into a sack and shake them up; you open it, and out come the gospels. in all the annals of the bacon-shakesperians we have seen nothing like it. [96]
1 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. ↑
2 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. ↑
3 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.” ↑
4 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. ↑
