Note 16 — VI THE SELF-OFFERING OF THE MESSIAH. THE SUPPER

There is not then the least occasion for assuming that according to original Christian views an exception to this mode of proceeding was made at the execution of Jesus. The only place in the Gospels where there is any mention of the “marks of the nails” (viz., John xx. 25) belongs, as does the whole Gospel, to a relatively later time, and appears, as does so much in John, as a mere strengthening and exaggeration of the original story. For example, Luke xxiv. 39, upon which John is based, does not speak at all of nail-marks, but merely of the marks of the wounds which the condemned must naturally have received as a consequence of being fastened to the stake. Accordingly the idea that Christ was “nailed” to the cross was in the earliest Christianity by no means the ruling one. Ambrose, for example, only speaks of the “cords” of the “cross” and the “ligatures of the passion” (“usque ad crucis laqueos ac retia passionis”),16 and consequently knew nothing of nails having been used in this case.17 If we consider that the “crucifixion” of Jesus corresponds to the hanging of Attis, Osiris, and so forth, and that the idea of the gibbeted gods of Nearer Asia called forth and fixed the Christian view; if we remember that Haman, the prototype of Jesus at the Purim feast, was also hanged upon a gallows,18 then it becomes doubly improbable that our present ideas on the matter correspond to the views of the early Christians. For although we have no direct picture of the hanging of those Gods, yet we possess representations of the execution of Marsyas by Apollo, in which the God has his rival hauled up on to a tree by ropes round his wrists, which have been bound together.19 But Marsyas, the inventor of the flute, the friend and guide of Cybele in the search for the lost Attis, is no other than the latter himself, or at any rate a personality very near akin to Attis.20 It is not difficult to conclude that Attis too, or the man who represented him in the rites, was hung in the same manner to the stake or tree-trunk and thus put to death. Thus it seems that originally the manner of death of the Jewish Messiah was imagined in the same way, and so the heathens too called the new God in scorn “the Hanged One.”