Note 6 — Chapter I · HISTORICAL METHOD

Mr. Robertson disdains any critical and comparative study of the Gospels, and insists on regarding them as coeval and independent documents. Everything inside the covers of the New Testament is for him, as for the Sunday-school teacher, on one dead level of importance. All textual criticism has passed over his head. He has never learned to look in Mark for the original form of a statement which Luke or Matthew copied out, and in transferring them to their Gospels scrupled not to alter or modify. Accordingly, to suit the exigencies of his theory that the Gospels are an allegory of a Sun-god’s exploits, he here claims to find the original text not in Mark, but in Matthew; as if a transcript and paraphrase could possibly be prior to, and more authoritative than, the text transcribed and brodé. Accordingly, he writes (p. 339) as follows: “In Mark xi and Luke xix, 30, the two asses become one …. In the Fourth Gospel, again, we have simply the colt.” And yet by all rules of textual criticism and of common sense the underlying and original text is Mark xi, 1–7. In it the disciples merely bring a colt which they had found tied at a door. The author of the Gospel called of Matthew, eager to discern in every incident, no matter how commonplace, which he found in Mark, a fulfilment of some prophecy, or another, drags in a tag of Zechariah: “Behold, the King cometh to thee, meek, and riding on an ass and upon a colt, the foal of an ass.” Then, to make the story told of Jesus run on all fours with the prophecy, he writes that the disciples “brought the ass and the colt, and put on them their garments, and he (Jesus) sat on them.” He was unacquainted with Hebrew idiom, and so not aware that the words, “a colt the foal of an ass,” are no more than a rhetorical reduplication6 of an ass. There was, then, but one animal in the original form of the story, and, as the French say, it saute aux yeux that the importation of two is due to the influence of the prophecy on the mind of the transcriber. Why, therefore, go out of the way to attribute the tale to the influence of a legend of Bacchus, so multiplying empty hypotheses? Mr. Robertson, with hopeless perversity, takes Dr. Percy Gardner to task for repeating what he calls “the fallacious explanation, that ‘an ass and the foal of an ass’ represents a Greek misconception of the Hebrew way of saying ‘an ass,’ as if Hebrews in every-day life lay under a special spell of verbal absurdity.”7 Jewish abhorrence of Pagan mythsBut did Hebrews in every-day life mould their ideas of the promised Messiah on out-of-the-way legends of Bacchus? Were they likely to fashion a tale of a Messianic triumph out of Gentile myths? Do we not know from a hundred sources that the Jews of that age, and the Christians who were in this matter their pupils, abhorred everything that savoured of Paganism. They were the last people in the world to construct a life of the Messiah out of the myths of Bacchus, and Hermes, and Osiris, and Heracles, and the fifty other heathen gods and heroes whom Mr. Robertson rolls up into what he calls the “composite myth” of the Gospels. But let us return to his criticism of Dr. Gardner. Why, it may be asked, was it à priori more absurd of Matthew to turn one ass into two in deference to Hebrew prophecy, than for Hebrews to set their Messiah riding into the holy city on two asses in deference to a myth of Bacchus crossing a marsh on two of them? Is it not Mr. Robertson, rather than Robertson on Drs. Gardner and CarpenterDr. Gardner, who here lies under a special spell of absurdity? “A glance at the story of Bacchus,” writes Mr. Robertson, “crossing a marsh on two asses … would have shown him that he was dealing with a zodiacal myth.” The boot is on the other foot. Had Mr. Robertson chosen to glance at the Poeticon Astronomicon of Hyginus, a late and somewhat worthless Latin author, who is the authority for this particular tale of Bacchus, he would have read (ii, 23) how Liber (i.e., Dionysus) was on his way to get an oracle at Dodona which might restore his lost sanity: Sed cum venisset ad quandam paludem magnam, quam transire non posset, de quibusdam duobus asellis obviis factis dicitur unum deprehendisse eorum, et ita esse transvectus, ut omnino aquam non tetigerit.