Note 116 — II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

The Synoptic Gospels leave open the question whether they treat of a man made God or of a God made man. The foregoing account has shown that the Jesus of the Gospels is to be understood only as a God made man. The story of his life, as presented in the Gospels, is the rendering into history of a primitive religious myth. Most of the great heroes of the legend, which passes as historical, are similar incarnate Gods—such as Jason, Hercules, Achilles, Theseus, Perseus, Siegfried, &c.; in these we have nothing but the old Aryan sun—champion in the struggle against the powers of darkness and of death. That primitive Gods in the view of a later age should become men, without, however, ceasing to be clothed with the glamour of the deity, is to such an extent the ordinary process, that the reverse, the elevation of men to Gods, is as a rule only found in the earliest stages of human civilisation, or in periods of moral and social decay, when fawning servility and worthless flattery fashion a prominent man, either during his life or after his death, into a divine being. Even the so-called “Bible Story” contains numerous examples of such God made men: the patriarchs, Joseph, Joshua, Samson, Esther, Mordecai, Haman, Simon Magus, the magician Elymas, &c., were originally pure Gods, and in the description of their lives old Semitic star-myths and sun-myths obtained a historical garb. If we cannot doubt that Moses, the founder of the old covenant, was a fictitious figure, and that his “history” was invented by the priests at Jerusalem only for the purpose of sanctioning and basing on his authority the law of the priests named after him; if for this end the whole history of Israel was falsified, and the final event in the religious development of Israel, i.e., the giving of the Law, was placed at the beginning—why cannot what was possible with Moses have been repeated in the case of Jesus? Why may not also the founder of the new covenant as an historical person belong entirely to pious legend? According to Herodotus,116 the Greeks also changed an old Phœnician God, Hercules, for national reasons, into a native hero, the son of Amphitryon, and incorporated him in their own sphere of ideas. Let us consider how strong the impulse was, especially among Orientals, to make history of purely internal experiences and ideas. To carry historical matter into the sphere of myth, and to conceive myth as history, is, as is shown by the investigations of Winckler, Schrader, Jensen, &c., for the Orientals such a matter of course, that, as regards the accounts in the Old Testament, it is hardly possible to distinguish their genuinely “historical nucleus” from its quasi-historical covering. And it is more especially the Semitic thought of antiquity which proves to be completely unable to distinguish mythical phantasy from real event! It is, indeed, too often said that the Semite produced and possessed no mythology of his own, as Renan asserted; and no doubt at all is possible that they could not preserve as such and deal with the mythical figures and events whencesoever they derived them, but always tended to translate them into human form and to associate them with definite places and times. “The God of the Semites is associated with place and object, he is a Genius loci,” says Winckler.117 But if ever a myth required to be clothed in the garment of place and the metaphysical ideas contained in it to be separated into a series of historical events, it was certainly the myth of the God sacrificing himself for humanity, who sojourned among men in human form, suffered with the rest of men and died, returning, after victoriously overcoming the dark powers of death, to the divine seat whence he set out.