Note 11 — Chapter I · THE BEGINNINGS

Judaic manipulation, however, was not lacking. Though Jesus is born of a virgin, it is in the manner of Jewish theosophy; for the “Spirit of God” broods over Mary as it had done on the germinal deep in Genesis. Having been a Jewish Saviour before he was a Gentile or Samaritan Christ, Jesus had further to satisfy as many as possible of the Jewish Messianic requirements. He must be of the line of David, and born at Bethlehem; but inasmuch as Jewish tradition expected both a Messiah Ben-David and a Messiah Ben-Joseph—the latter being apparently a Samaritan requirement11—he was made Ben-David by royal descent, and Ben-Joseph through his putative father. Yet again, there being Messianists who denied the necessity that the Anointed One should descend from David, there was inserted in the gospels a story in which Jesus repudiates such descent; the two opposed theories being thus alike harboured, without discomfort and without explanation. In the same fashion the ascetics of the movement made the Son of Man poor and homeless, while the anti-ascetics made him a wine-drinker, ready to sit at meat with publicans and sinners. For the Jews, too, he had to raise the “widow’s son” as did Elijah and Elisha in the Old Testament story—a Hebrew variant of the (pictured?) Gentile myth of the raising of the dead Attis or Adonis, or the dead child Horos or Dionysos, further reproduced in the resurrection of the Christ himself; and there had to be at his birth a massacre of the innocents, as in the myth of Moses and in the Arab myths of the births of Abraham and Daniel. Yet again, he had to figure in his crucifixion as bearing the insignia of royalty, like the sacrificed “only-begotten son” of the Semitic God El, and the sacrificed God-man of the Babylonian feast of Sacæa.12 It may be that Barabbas, “the son of the father,” is a survival of the same conception and the same ritual usage, similarly imposed on a narrative of which no part is historical.