Note 81 — II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

Is not Robertson perhaps right after all in considering the whole statement of the last fate of Jesus to be the rewriting of a dramatic Mystery-play, which among the Gentile Christians of the larger cities followed the sacramental meal on Easter Day? We know what a great rôle was played by dramatic representations in numerous cults of antiquity, and how they came into especial use in connection with the veneration of the suffering and rising God-redeemers. Thus in Egypt the passion, death, and resurrection of Osiris and the birth of Horus; at Eleusis the searching and lamentation of Demeter for her lost Persephone and the birth of Iacchus; at Lernæ in Argolis and many other places the fate of Dionysus (Zagreus); in Sicyon the suffering of Adrastos, who threw himself on to the funeral pyre of his father Hercules; at Amyclæ the passing away of Nature and its new life in the fate of Hyacinth: these were celebrated in festal pageants and scenic representations, to say nothing of the feasts of the death and resurrection of Mithras, Attis, and Adonis. Certainly Matthew’s account, xx.–xxviii. (with the exception of verses 11–15 in the last chapter), with its connected sequence of events, which could not possibly have actually followed each other like this—Supper, Gethsemane, betrayal, passion, Peter’s denial, the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection—throughout gives one the impression of a chain of isolated dramatic scenes. And the close of the Gospel agrees very well with this conception, for the parting words and exhortations of Jesus to his people are a very suitable ending to a drama.81