Chapter II · PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS

Is Mark’s Gospel a religious romance? I can imagine some people arguing that Mark’s Gospel might be a religious novel, of which the scene is laid in Jerusalem and Galilee among Jews; that it was by a literary artifice impregnated with Jewish ideas; that the references to Sadducees and Pharisees were introduced as appropriate to the age and clime; that the old Jewish Scriptures are for the same reason acknowledged by all the actors and interlocutors as holy writ; that demonological beliefs were thrown in as being characteristic of Palestinian society of the time the writer purported to write about; that it is of the nature of a literary trick that the peculiar Messianic and Apocalyptic beliefs and aspirations rife among Jews of the period B.C. 50–A.D. 160 and later, are made to colour the narrative from beginning to end. All these elements of verisimilitude, I say, taken singly or together, do not of necessity exclude the hypothesis that it may be one of the most skilfully constructed historical novels ever written. Have we not, it may be urged, in the Recognitions or Itinerary of Saint Clement, in the Acts of Thomas, in the story of Paul and Thecla, similar compositions?

Certainly not in the way assumed by Drews and Robertson, In view of what we know of the dates and diffusion of the Gospels, of their literary connections with one another, and of the reappearance of their chief personæ dramatis in the Pauline letters, such a hypothesis is of course wildly improbable, yet not utterly absurd. We have to assume in the writer a knowledge of the Messianic movement among the Jews, a familiarity with their demonological beliefs and practices, with their sects, and so forth; and it is all readily assumable. In the Greek novel of Chariton we have an example of such an historical romance, the scene being laid in Syracuse and Asia Minor shortly after the close of the Peloponnesian war. But such romances are not cult documents of a parabolic or allegorical kind, as the Gospels are supposed by these writers to be. They do not bring a divine being down from Olympus, and pretend all through that he was a man who was born, lived, and died on the cross in a particular place and at a particular date. We have no other example of documents whose authors, by way of honouring a God up in heaven who never made any epiphany on earth nor ever underwent incarnation, made a man of him, and concocted an elaborate earthly record of him. Why did they do it? What was the object of the “Jesuists” and “Christists” in hoaxing their own and all subsequent generations and in building up a lasting cult and Church on what they knew were fables?

whose hypothesis is self-destructive, In the Homeric hymns and other religious documents not only of the Greeks, but of the Hindoos, we have no doubt histories of the gods written by their votaries; but in these hymns they put down what they believed, they did not of set design falsify the legend of the god, and describe his birth and parentage, when they knew he never had any; his ministrations and teaching career, when he never ministered or taught; his persecution by enemies and his death, when he was never persecuted and never died. Or are we to suppose that all these things were related in the Sun-god Joshua legend? No, reply Messrs. Drews and Robertson. For the stories told in the Gospels are all modelled on pagan or astral myths; the persons who move in their pages are the gods and demigods of Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Hindoo legends. Clearly the Saviour-God Joshua had no legend or story of his own, or it would not be necessary to pad him out with the furniture and appurtenances of Osiris, Dionysus, Serapis, Æsculapius, and who knows what other gods besides. And—strangest feature of all—it is Jews, men circumcised, propagandists of Jewish monotheism, who, in the interests of “a Judaic cult” (p. 348), go rummaging in all the dustbins of paganism, in order to construct a legend or allegory of their god. Why could they not rest content with him as they found him in their ancient tradition?

and irreconcilable with ascertained history of Judaism The Gospels, like any other ancient document, have to be accounted for. They did not engender themselves, like a mushroom, nor drop out of heaven ready written. I have admitted as possible, though wild and extravagant, the hypothesis of their being a Messianic romance, which subsequently came to be mistaken for sober history; and there are of course plenty of legendary incidents in their pages. But such a hypothesis need not be discussed. It is not that of these three authors, and would not suit them. They insist on seeing in them so many manifestoes of the secret sect of Jews who worshipped a god Joshua. For Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson the Gospels describe a “Jesuine” mystery play evolved “from a Palestinian rite of human sacrifice in which the annual victim was ‘Jesus the Son of the Father.’ ” There is no trace in Jewish antiquity of any such rite in epochs which even remotely preceded Christianity, nor is the survival of such a rite of human sacrifice even thinkable in Jerusalem, where the “Christists” laid their plot. And why should they eke out their plot with a thousand scraps of pagan mythology?

Prof. Smith’s hypothesis of a mythical Jesus mythically humanized in a monotheistic propaganda, I was taught in my childhood to venerate the Gospels; but I never knew before what really wonderful documents they are. Let us, however, turn to Professor W. B. Smith, who does not pile on paganism so profusely as his friends, nor exactly insist on a pagan basis for the Gospels. His hypothesis in brief is identical with theirs, for he insists that Jesus the man never existed at all. Jesus is, in Professor Smith’s phrase, “a humanized God”; in the diction of Messrs. Drews and Robertson, a myth. Professor Smith allows (Ecce Deus, p. 78) that the mere “fact that a myth, or several myths, may be found associated with the name of an individual by no means relegates that individual into the class of the unhistorical.” That is good sense, and so is the admission which follows, that “we may often explain the legends from the presence of the historical personality, independently known to be historic.” But in regard to Jesus alone among the figures of the past he, like his friends, rules out both considerations. The common starting-point of all three writers is that the earliest Gospel narratives do not “describe any human character at all; on the contrary, the individuality in question is distinctly divine and not human, in the earliest portrayal. As time goes on it is true that certain human elements do creep in, particularly in Luke and John …. In Mark there is really no man at all; the Jesus is God, or at least essentially divine, throughout. He wears only a transparent garment of flesh. Mark historizes only.”

Why make him the central figure of a monotheistic cult? What, asks Professor Smith (Ecce Deus, p. 67), was the active principle of Christianity? What its germ? “The monotheistic impulse,” he answers, “the instinct for unity that lies at the heart of all grand philosophy and all noble religion.” Again, p. 45: “What was the essence of this originally secret Jesus cult, that was expressed in such guarded parabolic terms as made it unintelligible to the multitude?… It was a protest against idolatry; it was a Crusade for monotheism.”

The earliest Christianity was no monotheistic propaganda This is, no doubt, true of Christianity when we pass outside the Gospels. It is only not true of them, because on their every page Jewish monotheism is presupposed. Why are no warnings against polytheism put into the mouth of Jesus? Why is not a single precept of the Sermon on the Mount directed against idolatry? Surely because we are moving in a Jewish atmosphere in which such warnings were unnecessary. The horizon is purely Jewish, either of Jerusalem as we know it in the pages of Josephus or of certain Galilean circles in which even a knowledge of Greek seems not to have existed before the third century. The very proximity of Greek cities there seems to have confirmed the Jewish peasant of that region in his preference of Aramaic idiom, just as the native of Bohemia to-day turns his back on you if you address him in the detested German tongue.

If so, how could they devote themselves to pagan mystery plays? What I want to know is how it came about that a society of which Jerusalem was the focus, and of which the nucleus and propagandists were Jews and Judaizers, could have been given over to the cult of a solar god, and how they could celebrate mystery plays and dramas in honour of that god; how they can have manufactured that god into “a composite myth” (p. 336), and constructed in his honour a religious system that was “a patchwork of a hundred suggestions drawn from pagan art and ritual usage.” For such, we are told (p. 305), was “the Christian system.”

Robertson admits that Jews could never borrow from pagan rituals in that age We are far better acquainted with Jewish belief and ritual during the period B.C. 400–A.D. 100 than we are with that of the pagans. The content of the Greek mysteries is an enigma to our best Hellenists; we know next to nothing of the inside of Mithraism; for the oriental cults of the late Roman republic and early empire we are lamentably deficient in writings that might exhibit to us the arcana of their worship and the texture of their beliefs. Not so with Judaism. Here we have the prophets, old and late; for the two centuries B.C. we have the apocrypha, including the Maccabean books; we have the so-called Books of Enoch, of Jubilees, of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Fourth Ezra, Baruch, Sirach, and many others. We have the voluminous works of Philo and Josephus for the first century of our era; we have the Babylonian and other Talmuds preserving to us a wealth of Jewish tradition and teaching of the first and second centuries. Here let Mr. Robertson speak. As regards the Lord’s Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount, he insists (p. 415 foll.) that they were inspired by parallel passages in the Talmud and the Apocrypha, and he argues with perfect good sense for the priority of the Talmud in these words: “It is hardly necessary to remark here that the Talmudic parallels to any part of the Sermon on the Mount cannot conceivably have been borrowed from the Christian gospels; they would as soon have borrowed from the rituals of the pagans.”

Yet affirms that Christists, indistinguishable from Jews, did so borrow wholesale And yet he asks us to believe that a nucleus of Jews, hidden in Jerusalem, the heart of Judaism, a sect whose apostles were Judaizers and vehement defenders of circumcision—all this he admits—were, as late as the last half of the first century, maintaining among themselves in secret a highly eclectic pagan cult; that they evolved “a gospel myth from scenes in pagan art” (p. 327); that they took a sort of modern archæological interest in pagan art and sculpture, and derived thence most of their literary motifs; that the figure of Jesus is an alloy of Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis, Krishna, Æsculapius, and fifty other ancient gods and demigods, with the all-important “Sun-God-Saviour Joshua, son of Miriam”; that the story of Peter rests on “a pagan basis of myth” (p. 340); that Maria is the true and original form of the Hebrew Miriam, and is the same name as Myrrha and Moira (μοῖρα), etc., etc.

The central idea of a God Joshua a figment of Robertson’s fancy Such are the mutually destructive arguments on the strength of which we are to adopt his thesis of the unhistoricity of Jesus. His books, like those of Dr. Drews, are a welter of contradictory statements, unreconciled and irreconcilable. Nevertheless, they reiterate them in volume after volume, like orthodox Christians reiterating articles of faith and dogmas too sacred to be discussed. Who ever heard before them of a Jewish cult of a Sun-God-Saviour Joshua? Such a cult must have been long extinct when the book of Joshua was written. Who ever heard of this Sun-god having for his mother a Miriam, until Mr. Robertson discovered a late Persian gloss to the effect that Joshua, son of Nun, had a mother of the name? Even if this tradition were not so utterly worthless as it is, it would prove nothing about the Sun-god. On the basis of such gratuitous fancies we are asked to dismiss Jesus as a myth. It does not even explain the birth legends of the ChristiansIt does not even help us to understand how the myths of the Virgin Birth arose. Since when, I would like to know, did we need such evidence against that legend? If I thought that the rebuttal of it depended on such evidence, I should be inclined to become a good Papist and embrace it. It is enough for me to have ascertained, by a comparison of texts and by a study of early Christian documents, that it is a late accretion on the traditions of Jesus of Nazareth. That is the real evidence, if any be wanted, against it. Mr. Robertson admits that the first two chapters of Luke which are supposed—perhaps wrongly—to embody this legend are “a late fabulous introduction.” Again he writes (p. 189): “Only the late Third Gospel tells the story (of Luke i and ii); the narrative (of the Birth) in Matthew, added late as it was to the original composition, which obviously began at what is now the third chapter, has no hint of the taxing.”

Evidence of the Protevangelion This is good sense, and I am indebted to him for pointing out that so loosely was the myth compacted that in the Protevangelion (c. 17) the statement is that it was decreed “that all should be enrolled who were in Bethlehem of Judæa,” not all Jews over the entire world.

Robertson assumes the antiquity of the legend merely to suit his theory Surely all this implies that the legend of the miraculous birth was no part of the earliest tradition about Jesus. Nevertheless, it is so important for Mr. Robertson’s thesis (that Jesus was a mythical personage) that he should from the first have had a mythical mother, that he insists on treating the whole of Christian tradition, early or late, as a solid block, and argues steadily that the Virgin Birth legend was an integral part of it from the beginning. Jesus was a myth; as such he must have had a myth for a mother. Now a virgin mother is half-way to being a mythical one. Therefore Mary was a virgin, and must from the beginning have been regarded as such by the “Christists.” Such are the steps of his reasoning.

The “Christists” at once extravagantly pagan and extravagantly monotheist and Jewish I have adduced in the preceding pages a selection of the mythological equations of Mr. Robertson and Dr. Drews in order that my readers may realize how faint a resemblance between stories justifies, in their minds, a derivation or borrowing of one from the other. Nor do they ever ask themselves how Jewish “Christists” were likely to come in contact with out-of-the-way legends of Bacchus or Dionysus, of Hermes, of old Pelasgic deities, of Cybele and Attis and Isis, Osiris and Horus, of Helena Dendrites, of Krishna, of Janus, of sundry ancient vegetation-gods (for they are up to the newest lights), of Apollonius of Tyana, of Æsculapius, of Herakles and Oceanus, of Saoshyant and other old Persian gods and heroes, of Buddha and his kith and kin, of the Eleusinian and other ancient mysteries. Prick them with a pin, and out gushes this lore in a copious flood; and every item of it is supposed to have filled the heads of the polymath authors of the Christian Gospels. Every syllable of these Gospels, every character in them, is symbolic of one or another of these gods and heroes. Hear, O Israel: “Christians borrowed myths of all kinds from Paganism” (Christianity and Mythology, p. xii). And we are pompously assured (p. xxii, op. cit.) that this new “mythic” system is, “in general, more ‘positive,’ more inductive, less à priori, more obedient to scientific canons, than that of the previous critics known to me [i.e., to Mr. Robertson] who have reached similar anti-traditional results. It substitutes an anthropological basis, in terms of the concrete phenomena of mythology, for a pseudo-philosophical presupposition.” Heaven help the new science of anthropology!