Note 4 — Chapter II · PAGAN MYSTERY PLAYS

A receipt for the concoction of a gospel And what end, we may ask, had the “Jesuists” and “Christists” (to use Mr. Robertson’s jargon) in view, when they dressed up all this tagrag and bobtail of pagan myth, art, and ritual, and disguised it under the form of a tale of Messianic Judaism? For that and nothing else is, on this theory, the basis and essence of the Gospels. Was it their aim to honour paganism or to honour Jewish monotheism, when they concocted a “Christ cult” which is “a synthesis of the two most popular pagan myth-motives,4 with some Judaic elements as nucleus and some explicit ethical teaching superadded” (p. 34). We must perforce suppose that the Gospels were a covert tribute to the worth and value of Pagan mythology and religious dramas, to pagan art and statuary. If we adopt the mythico-symbolical method, they can have been nothing else. Its sponsors might surely condescend to explain the alchemy by which the ascertained rites and beliefs of early Christians were distilled from these antecedents. The effect and the cause are so entirely disparate, so devoid of any organic connection, that we would fain see the evolution worked out a little more clearly. At one end of it we have a hurly-burly of pagan myths, at the other an army of Christian apologists inveighing against everything pagan and martyred for doing so, all within a space of sixty or seventy years. I only hope the orthodox will be gratified to learn that their Scriptures are a thousandfold more wonderful and unique than they appeared to be when they were merely inspired by the Holy Spirit. For verbal inspiration is not, as regards its miraculous quality, in the same field with mythico-symbolism. Verily we have discovered a new literary genus, unexampled in the history of mankind. You rake together a thousand irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked up at random from every age, race, and clime; you get a “Christist” to throw them into a sack and shake them up; you open it, and out come the Gospels. In all the annals of the Bacon-Shakesperians we have seen nothing like it.