Note 8 — Chapter VI · THE ART OF CRITICISM

In the same manner, as we know from Origen (Com. in Evang. Ioannis, tom. xiii, 27), the Samaritans had a Messiah named Dositheos, who rose from the dead, and professed himself to be the Messiah of prophecy. His sect survived in the third century, as also his books, which, as Origen says, were full of “myth” about him to the effect that he had not tasted of death, but was somewhere or other still alive. By all the rules of criticism as used by Mr. Robertson and his friends, we must deny that Dositheos ever lived. The idea of a human hero being an angel or divine power made flesh was common among Jews, and in their apocryph, “The Prayer of Jacob” (see Origen, op. cit., tom. ii, 25), that worthy represented himself as such in the very language of Paul and of the Fourth Gospel: “I who spoke to you, I, Jacob and Israel, am an angel of God and a primeval spirit, as Abraham and Isaak were created in advance of all creatures. But I, Jacob, … called Israel by God, a man seeing God, because I am first-born of all living beings made alive by God.” We also learn that Uriel was sent forth by God to herald Jacob’s descent upon earth, where he “tabernacled among men.” Jacob declares himself to be “archangel of the power of God, and arch-captain among the sons of God, Israel the foremost minister of the Presence.” Paul, we observe, did not need to go outside Judaism for his conceptions of Jesus, nor Justin Martyr either, who regularly speaks of Jesus as an archangel. So also among the pagans. In Augustus Cæsar his contemporaries loved to detect one of the great gods of Olympus just descended to earth in the semblance of a man. He was the god Mercury or some other god incarnate. His birth was a god’s descent to earth in order to expiate the sins of the Romans. Thus Horace, Odes, I, 2, v. 29: Cui dabit partes scelus expiandi Juppiter, and cp. v. 45: Serus in cœlum redeas—“Mayest thou be late in returning to heaven.” ↑