VII PAULINISM AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION (continued 2)

This hypothesis is unable to recognise any unique character in Paul. What Dieterich and Reitzenstein claim for him, it finds already completely realised in the primitive community. The result is that Maurenbrecher hardly knows what to make of him, and emphasises his Jewish side much more strongly than his Graeco-Oriental aspect.

The solution of the problem worked out by Gunkel and Maurenbrecher is not based purely on Comparative Religion, but, as the latter writer justly points out, is a kind of synthesis between the views of liberal theology and that of its opponents. The fundamental idea comes from the latter; but in agreement with the former the existence of a historical Jesus is retained.

The retention of this remnant of critical history is, however, unnecessary and illogical. If the origin of Christianity essentially depends on the intermixture of an Oriental belief in a redeemer with the Jewish expectation of the Messiah, and, given a contact and interpenetration between the two, must necessarily have arisen, it is not obvious why the rôle of a historical Jesus should be—or whether it can be—retained in connexion with it.

In Gunkel and Maurenbrecher it is only a stop-gap, which is brought into a wholly external connexion with the growth of the new religion. They retain His coming as the phenomenon by which the contact of the two religious worlds is set up, but not as a fructifying element.

[pg 234]

There is no obvious reason for continuing to take into account this by no means indispensable auxiliary force. If the Oriental belief in a redeemer and the Jewish Messianic hope were inherently adapted to one another, and destined to produce by their fruitful union a new religion, then, after all, any kind of impulse, even a mere train of thought, might have set the process in motion. The assumption of the existence and the death of the Galilaean Rabbi becomes superfluous if once it ceases to supply the efficient cause for the arising of Christianity. Since Comparative Religion finds the latter in the mutual interpenetration of Jewish and Graeco-Oriental elements, it can get along just as well with myth as with the questionable history of the Synoptists. Such is the teaching of William Benjamin Smith,¹⁹¹ and Arthur Drews.

Both these writers make a rather extravagant use of the privilege of standing outside the ranks of scientific theology. Their imagination leaps with playful elegance over obstacles of fact and enables them to discover everywhere the pre-Christian Jesus whom their soul desires, even in places where an ordinary intelligence can find no trace of him.

Smith takes it for granted that the “Naasenes, whose origin goes back to the most remote antiquity, worshipped a Jesus as a divinity.” How Christianity grew out of this cult he does not tell us, but consoles us with the promise of later revelations. In the preface he betrays the fact that he is now only publishing “the first quarter of the evidence which he has collected,” and intends to go on quietly collecting and arranging his material “until [pg 235] the whole irresistible host can take the field together,” and further, that it is not the—inevitable—victory which is his main concern, but the stimulus imparted to others.

Drews¹⁹² does not play the amateur quite so completely, but endeavours on the basis of his belief in the pre-Christian Jesus to present a coherent picture of the way in which Christianity arose; and he makes Paul its creator. “The Jesus-faith,” so runs his thesis, “had long existed in numerous Mandaean sects in Western Asia, in many respects distinct from one another, before the belief in the Jesus-religion acquired a fixed form and its adherents became conscious of their religious differentia and their independence of the official Jewish religion.” This ancient faith first meets us as a new religion in the letters ascribed to Paul. The citizen of Tarsus, trained as a Pharisee, heard of a sect-god named Jesus, and brought this conception into connexion with the belief in the death and resurrection of Adonis and the thought of the suffering “servant of the Lord” in Isaiah liii., and thus arrived at the idea that a god had appeared in human form, and had by his death and resurrection become the Redeemer, and had enabled men “to become God.” This was the birth-hour of Christianity. For a historic personality, “to serve, so to speak, as the living model for the God-man,” there was no need in order to produce this Jesus-religion, which then entered on its world-wide career of victory.

Drews’ thesis is not merely a curiosity; it indicates the natural limit at which the hypothesis advanced by the advocates of Comparative Religion, when left to its own momentum, finally comes to rest.

Paulinism, in the judgment of the adherents of this much-vaunted method, is to be regarded as a synthesis between primitive Christianity and the conceptions current in the Mystery-religions. If this be taken as the starting-point, it is necessary to proceed to the conclusion—since the synthesis cannot be conceived as [pg 236] accomplished by an individual—that Christianity itself is a product of syncretism. And if the constitutive factor in the new faith is seen in the combination of the Jewish Messianic expectation with a Graeco-Oriental belief in a redeemer-god who dies and rises again, the assumption of the existence of a historic Jesus who was not Himself touched by Hellenic ideas becomes a worthless subsidiary hypothesis. It becomes quite a natural step to leave it on one side and to regard the synthesis as either developing gradually, by an impersonal process, or as coming to birth in the brain of the author of the Pauline Epistles, who thus becomes the creator of early Christianity. Drews is justified in appealing to Gunkel, and asserting that he is only offering his ideas with a logically necessary correction.

Of course, every further logical step in this direction involves further sacrifice of historical understanding and an increasing necessity to indulge in imaginary constructions. But all these consequences are already present in germ in the mere assertion that Paul is to be understood from the Mystery-religions, even though those who maintain this view do not want to proceed any further than the facts which have to be explained seem to them to warrant. As between the students of Comparative Religion and Drews the relation is similar to that between the legitimate and illegitimate Tübingen schools. Here, too, the alternative lies between “scientific and inconsistent, and consistent and unscientific.” That means that an absolute antinomy appears between the logic of the attempted solution and that of the data of fact; which is as much as to say that the problem has been wrongly grasped, and that this way, whether it be followed for a certain distance only, or right to the end, can never lead to the goal of a satisfactory solution.

[pg 237]