Note 2 — Chapter II · PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS

Why should the robber chief Joshua have been selected as prototype of Jesus? A thesis that begins by flying in the face of the documents demands paradoxical arguments for its support; and the pages of all three writers teem with them. Of a Jesus that is God from the first it is perhaps natural to ask—anyhow our authors have asked it of themselves—which God was he? And the accident of his bearing the name Jesus—he might just as well have been called Jacob or Sadoc or Manasseh, or what not—suggests Joshua to them, for Joshua is the Hebrew name which in the LXX was Grecized as Iesouē, and later as Iesous. That in the Old Testament Joshua is depicted as a cut-throat and leader of brigands, very remote in his principles and practice from the Jesus of the Gospels, counts for nothing. The late Dr. Winckler, who saw sun and moon myths rising like exhalations all around him wherever he looked in ancient history and mythology,2 has suggested that Joseph was originally a solar hero. Ergo, Joshua was one too. Ergo, there was a Hebrew secret society in Jerusalem in the period B.C. 150–A.D. 50 who worshipped the Sun-God-Saviour Joshua. Ergo, the Gospels are a sustained parable of this Sun-god. Thus are empty, wild, and unsubstantiated hypotheses piled one on top of the other, like Pelion on Ossa. Not a scintilla of evidence is adduced for any one of them. First one is advanced, and its truth assumed. The next is propped on it, et sic ad infinitum.