Note 1 — Chapter II · PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS

lacks all confirmation, defies the texts, How is it, we ask, that humanity has pored over the Synoptic Gospels for nearly two thousand years, and discerned in them the portraiture at least of a man of flesh and blood, who can be imaged as such in statuary and painting? Even if it were conceded, as I said above, that the Gospel representation of Jesus is an imaginary portrait, like that of William Tell or John Inglesant, still, who, that is not mad, will deny that there exist in it multiple human traits, fictions may be of a novelist, yet indisputably there? Mr. Smith’s hardy denial of them can only lead his readers to suspect him of paradox. Moreover, the champions of traditional orthodoxy have had in the past every reason to side with Professor Smith in his attempted elimination of all human traits and characteristics. Yet in recent years they have been constrained to admit that in Luke and John the human elements, far from creeping in, show signs of creeping out. “The received notion,” adds Professor Smith, “that in the early Marcan narratives the Jesus is distinctly human, and that the process of deification is fulfilled in John, is precisely the reverse of the truth.” Once more we rub our eyes. In Mark Jesus is little more than that most familiar of old Jewish figures, an earthly herald of the imminent kingdom of heaven; late and little by little he is recognized by his followers as himself the Messiah whose advent he formerly heralded. As yet he is neither divine nor the incarnation of a pre-existent quasi-divine Logos or angel. In John, on the other hand, Jesus has emerged from the purely Jewish phase of being Messiah, or servant of God (which is all that Lord or Son of God1 implies in Mark’s opening verses). He has become the eternal Logos or Reason, essentially divine and from the beginning with God. and rests on an obsolete and absurd allegorization of themHere obviously we are well on our way to a deification of Jesus and an elimination of human traits; and the writer is so conscious of this that he goes out of his way to call our attention to the fact that Jesus was after all a man of flesh and blood, with human parents and real brethren who disbelieved in him. He was evidently conscious that the superimposition on the man Jesus of the Logos scheme, and the reflection back into the human life of Jesus of the heavenly rôle which Paul ascribed to him qua raised by the Spirit from the dead, was already influencing certain believers (called Docetes) to believe that his human life and actions were illusions, seen and heard indeed, as we see and hear a man speak and act in a dream, but not objective and real. To guard against this John proclaims that he was made flesh. Nevertheless, he goes half way with the Docetes in that he rewrites all the conversations of Jesus, abolishes the homely parable, and substitutes his own theosophic lucubrations. He also emphasizes the miraculous aspect of Jesus, inventing new miracles more grandiose than any in previous gospels, but of a kind, as he imagines, to symbolize his conceptions of sin and death. He is careful to eliminate the demonological stories. They were as much of a stumbling-block to John as we have seen them to be to Mr. W. B. Smith. We must, therefore, perforce accuse the latter of putting a hypothesis that from the outset is a paradox. The documents contradict him on every page.