Note 45 — II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

It was not, however, merely the general frame and outlines of the “history” of Jesus which had been determined in the Messiah-faith, in the idea of a divine spirit sent from God, of the “Son of Man” of Daniel and the Jewish Apocalyptics, &c., not merely that this vague idea was filled out with new content through the Redeemer-worship of the neighbouring heathen peoples. Besides this, many of the individual traits of the Jesus-figure were present, some in heathen mythology, some in the Old Testament; and they were taken thence and worked into the evangelical representation. There is, for instance, the story of the twelve-year old Jesus in the Temple. “Who would have invented this story?” asks Jeremias. “Nevertheless,” he thinks it “probable” that in this Luke was thinking of Philo’s description of the life of Moses; he calls to mind that Plutarch gives us a quite similar statement concerning Alexander, whose life was consciously decorated with all the traits of the Oriental King-redeemer.45 Perhaps, however, the account comes from a Buddhist origin. The account of the temptation of Jesus also sounds very much like the temptation of Buddha, so far as it is not derived from the temptation of Zarathustra by Ahriman46 or the temptation of Moses by the devil, of which the Rabbis told,47 while Jesus is said to have entered upon his ministry in his thirtieth year,48 because at that age the Levite was fitted for his sacred office.49 Till then (i.e., till his baptism) we learn nothing of Jesus’ life. Similarly Isa. liii. 2, jumps from the early youth of the Servant of God (“He grew up as a tender plant, as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness, is despised and rejected of men”) straight to his passion and death; while the Gospels attempt to fill in the interval from Jesus’ baptism up to his passion by painting in further so-called Messianic passages from the Old Testament and Words of Jesus. We know how the early Christians liked to rediscover their faith in the Scriptures and see it predicted, and with what zeal they consequently studied the Old Testament and altered the “history” of their Jesus to make it agree with those predictions, thus rendering it valuable as corroboration of their own notions. In this connection it has been shown above how the “ride of the beardless one” influenced the collection of the tribute and his direct attack on the shopkeepers and money-changers in the evangelical account of Jesus’ advent to the Temple at Jerusalem.50 But the more detailed development of this scene is determined by Zech. ix. 9, Mal. iii. 1–3, and Isa. i. 10 sqq., and the words placed in Jesus’ mouth on this occasion are taken from Isa. lvi. 7 and Jer. vii. 1 sqq., so that this “most important” event in Jesus’ life can lay no claim to historical actuality.51