Note 3 — Chapter II · PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS

Robertson and Drews allow the Jesuists to have been mainly Jewish in cult and feeling Messrs. Robertson and Drews concede that the original stock of Christianity was Jewish. Thus we read in Christianity and Mythology (p. 415) that the Lord’s Prayer derives “from pre-Christian Jewish lore, and, like parts of the Sermon (on the Mount), from an actually current Jewish document.” The same writer admits (p. 338) the existence of “Judaic sections of the early Church.” When he talks (p. 337) of the tale of the anointing of Jesus in Matthew xxvi, 6–13, and parallel passages, being “in all probability a late addendum” to the “primitive gospel” of Bernhard Weiss’s theory, “made after the movement had become pronouncedly Gentile,” he presupposes that, to start with anyhow, the movement was mainly Jewish. He admits that in the first six paragraphs of the early Christian document entitled the Didaché we have a purely Jewish teaching document, “which the Jesuist sect adopted in the first or second century.” He cannot furthermore contest the fact that the Jesuists “took over the Jewish Scriptures as their sacred book; that they inherited the Jewish passover and the Paschal lamb, which is still slain in Eastern churches; that the leaders of the secret sect in Jerusalem upheld the Jewish rite of circumcision against Paul.”3 All this is inconceivable if the society was not in the main and originally one of Hebrews. When he goes on to argue that the Gospels are the manifesto of a cult of an old Sun-god Joshua, son of a mythic Miriam, he at least admits that the early “Christists” selected from ancient Jewish superstition, and not from pagan myth, the central figure of their cult, and that they chose for their deity a successor and satellite of Moses with a Hebrew lady for his mother. We may take it for granted, then, that the parent society out of which the Christian Church arose was profoundly and radically Jewish; and Mr. Robertson frankly admits as much when he affirms that “it was a Judaic cult that preached circumcision,” and that “its apostles with whom Paul was in contact were of a Judaizing description.” Here is common ground between myself and him.