Note 6 — Chapter VI · THE ART OF CRITICISM

In accordance with this postulate of esoterism and cult secrecy among the pre-Christian Nazarenes, who subsequently revealed themselves to the world as the Christian Church, though even then they “maintained for generations the secrecy6 of their Jesus cult,” the Gospels, as I said, are an allegory or a charade. Their prima facie meaning is never the true one, never more than symbolic of a moral and spiritual undersense such as old allegorists like Philo and Origen loved to discover in the Bible. Thus, as we saw above, when Jesus is reported to have cast out of the Jews who thronged around him devils of blindness, deafness, lameness, leprosy, death, what is really intended is that he argued pagans out of their polytheism. “It was spiritual maladies, and only spiritual, that he was healing” (p. 38). We ask of Mr. Smith, why was so much mystification necessary? We are only told that “it was in the main a prudential measure, well enough justified, but intended to be only temporary” (p. 39). What exact risks they were to shun which the sect kept itself secret, and only spake in far-fetched allegory, Mr. Smith does not inform us. Is he, too, afraid of being regarded as a “tell-tale” (p. 48)?