Note 39 — VII SYMBOLS OF THE MESSIAH: THE LAMB AND THE CROSS THE CHRISTIAN JESUS I THE PAULINE JESUS

Such a man as Paul, who had been educated in the school of Gamaliel as a teacher of the Law of the strict Pharisaical sort, could not indeed calmly look on while the heathen belief in Adonis, which he must surely, even in his native city of Tarsus, have despised as a blasphemous superstition, was uniting itself, in the new religious sects, with the Jewish conceptions. “Cursed is he who is hung upon the tree,” so it stood written in the Law;39 and the ceremony of the purification—at which one criminal was hung, amid the insults of the people, as the scapegoat of the old year, while another was set free as Mordecai, and driven with regal honours through the city, being revered as representative of the new year—must have been in his eyes only another proof of the disgrace of the tree, and of the blasphemous character of a belief that honoured in the hanged man the divine Saviour of the world, the Messiah expected by the Jews. Then on a sudden there came over him as it were enlightenment. What if the festivals of the Syrian Adonis, of the Phrygian Attis, and so on, really treated of the self-sacrifice of a God who laid down his life for the world? The guiltless martyrdom of an upright man as expiatory means to the justification of his people was also not unknown to the adherents of the Law since the days of the Maccabean martyrs. The “suffering servant of God,” as Isaiah had portrayed him, suggests as quite probable the idea that, just as among the heathen peoples, in Israel also an individual might renew the life of all others by his voluntary sacrifice. Might it not be true, as the adherents of the Jesus-religions maintained, that the Messiah was really a “servant of God,” and had already accomplished the work of redemption by his own voluntary death? According to the heathen view, the people were atoned for by the vicarious sacrifice of their God, and that “justification” of all in the sight of the Godhead took place which the pious Pharisee expected from the strict fulfilment of the Jewish Law. And yet, when Paul compared the “righteousness” actually achieved by himself and others with the ideal of righteousness for which they strove, as it was required in the Law, then terror at the greatness of the contrast between the ideal and the reality must have seized him; and at the same time he might well have despaired of the divine righteousness, which required of the people the fulfilment of the Law, which weighed the people down with the thought of the imminent end of the world, and which, through the very nature of its commands, excluded the possibility of the Messiah meeting on his arrival, as he should have done, with a “righteous” people. Were those who expected the sanctification of humanity not from the fulfilment of the Law, but immediately, through an infusion of God himself, really so much in the wrong? It was not unusual among the heathen peoples for a man to be sacrificed, in the place of the Deity, as a symbolical representative; although already at the time of Paul it was the custom to represent the self-sacrificing God only by an effigy, instead of a real man. The important point, however, was not this, but the idea which lay at the foundation of this divine self-sacrifice. And this was not affected by the victim’s being a criminal, who was killed in the rôle of the guiltless and upright man, and by the voluntariness of his death being completely fictitious. Might it not also be, as the believers in Jesus asserted, that the Messiah was not still to be expected, and that only on the ground of human righteousness; but that rather he had already appeared, and had already accomplished the righteousness unattainable by the individual through his shameful death and his glorious resurrection?