Note 3 — Chapter VI · THE ART OF CRITICISM

Mr. Robertson accepts the historicity of Jesus after allAfter hundreds of pages devoted to the task of evaporating Jesus into a Solar or Vegetation-god, and all the personages we meet in the Gospels into zodiacal signs or pagan demigods, Mr. Robertson, as we have noticed above, finds himself, after all, confronted with the same personages in Paul’s Epistles. There they are too real even for Mr. Robertson to dissipate them into cloud-forms, and too numerous to be cut out wholesale. He feels that, if all Paul’s allusions to the crucified Jesus are to be got rid of as interpolations, then no Pauline Epistles will remain. He cuts out, indeed, all he can, but there is a residuum of reality. To identify Paul’s Jesus with the Jesus of the Gospels is too humdrum and obvious a course for him. So common-sense and commonplace a scheme does not suit his subtle intelligence; moreover, such an identification would upset the hundreds of pages in which he has proved that Jesus of Nazareth and all his accessories are literary symbols employed by the Jewish “Jesuists” to disguise their pagan art and myths. Accordingly, he asks us to believe that Paul’s Jesus is a certain Jesus Ben Pandira, stoned to death a hundred years earlier. This Jesus is a vague figure fished up out of the Talmud; but, on examination, we found Mr. Robertson’s choice of him as an alias for Paul’s Jesus to be most unfortunate, for competent Talmudic scholars are agreed that Jesus Ben Pandira in the Talmud was no other than Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels. Jesus most unkindly insists on being in at his own death,3 in spite of all Mr. Robertson can say or do; and his house of cards is crowned with the discovery that the apostles whom Paul knew—not being identical with the signs of the Zodiac, like those of the Gospels—were no other than the twelve apostles of the Jewish High Priest, and that they were the authors of the lately-discovered “Teaching of the Apostles.” He is very contemptuous for other early Christian books which affect apostolic authorship in their titles, but falls a ready victim to the relatively late and anonymous editor of this “teaching,” who to give it vogue entitled it “The Teaching of the Lord by the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles.” “The Jesuist sect,” he writes (p. 345), “founded on it (the Didaché) the Christian myth of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus.” Everywhere else in his books he has argued that the “myth” in question was founded on the signs of the Zodiac. Why give up at the eleventh hour the astral explanation for an utterly different one? I may add that in the body of the Didaché the Twelve are nowhere alluded to; that it must be a much later document than the Gospels and Paulines, since it quotes them in scores of passages; and that the interpolation of the title, with a reference to the Twelve Apostles, was a literary trick scarcely older than the fourth century, long before which age the Pauline account of the resurrection was cited by a score of Christian writers. Lastly, we are fain to inquire of Mr. Robertson with whom he identifies “the Lord” of the above title—with the Jewish High Priest, or with Jesus Ben Pandira, or with the Sun-God-Saviour Joshua.