Chapter XII · FAILURE OF THE LOGIA THEORY
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To the open-minded reader it must be already plain that, unless we are to be led into mere chaos, there must at once be added to the statistical test either the proviso that given sayings may for the purposes of certain sections of the Church have been left out in certain Gospels, or that for the purposes of certain sections they may have been invented. And the moment such a concession is made, the primary assumption of necessary authenticity is destroyed. If the anti-Samaritan precept is the utterance of the Founder, the pro-Samaritan parable is not; or else the Founder was literally all things to all men. If either could be foisted on a gospel, anything could be; and the futile historical argument to save the prediction of the fall of Jerusalem—an argument proceeding, as we have seen, on a quite uncritical view of one uninvestigated and loosely described case—becomes doubly irrelevant. Dr. Petrie’s Nucleus of triple tradition contains the prophecy:—
The Son of Man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify him; and the third day he shall rise again.
We have come back to the fundamental issue between authoritarian supernaturalism and free reason. If the prediction of the betrayal, the trial, the scourging, the mocking, the crucifixion, and the resurrection is to stand, there need be no more discussion over miracles or anything else. “It is written,” and there an end. Biblical criticism has once more become blasphemy. If reason is to have any access to the matter, the prediction must fall as a fiction; and if the “exploded” argument from Savonarola is to be revived, it will have to be restricted to the case of the prediction to which it was so prudentially applied. But if one hopeless prophecy is to be dropped as post eventum, it is mere irrelevance to debate over another which is only in one selected and isolated aspect less hopeless, while as a whole it is equally so.
Savonarola’s prediction of the fall of Rome was one of many, motived by religion and invited by the absolute fact of previous invasions, of which the last had occurred only two years before. The one concrete detail in which it was “fulfilled” was simply a specification of a common feature in the warfare of the age. Another invasion of Italy was believed to be imminent, and actually took place in the year of the prophecy, without fulfilling that in any detail. The Gospel prophecy is Messianic, devoid of political motivation, accompanied by a whole apparatus of Christian eschatology, and backed by other predictions of pure miracle. The details of the siege and the sequel are as plainly supplied after the event as those of the betrayal, the mockery, the scourging, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. To hold by one set of predictions and abandon the other is mere critical trifling. Even orthodox critics give up the early chapters of Luke as late accretions. What kind of credit is it that is to be saved by making him the faithful chronicler of a real prophecy?
Apart from the sacramental rite, the whole body of the Teaching is but a mass of incompatibilities, telling of a dozen standpoints, legalism and anti-legalism, Judaism and Gentilism, Davidism and non-Davidism, asceticism and the contrary, a meek Messiah and one claiming to be greater than Solomon, a Teacher vetoing invective and one freely indulging in it, a popular and unexplained Gospel for the masses who are declared to be purposely excluded from comprehension of that very Gospel, whereof the esoteric explanations yield nothing that could apply to the alleged propaganda.
As the tradition stands, whether read with Unitarian or with Trinitarian assumptions, it is a mere mosaic of enigma and contradiction. If the Teacher never called himself the Son of God in a miraculous sense, how came the men for whom his word was law, and who in the terms of the thesis knew his life history and parentage if any one did, to call him so? In Dr. Petrie’s Nucleus, the triple tradition, the Founder does assure his disciples that “in the regeneration” he will sit in the throne of glory, and they on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes. What room is there for Gentilism here? And if downright miracle and miraculous prediction alike be given up as unhistorical, on what grounds can we give credence to this as a really delivered oracle?
On the other hand, no fundamental difficulty remains when we recognize that the whole Gospel record is the composite result of a process of making a life history for a God. The command of the Messiah to Peter to keep silence as to his Messianic character is quite intelligible as providing at once the claim by Jesus and an explanation of the fact that no such Messianic movement was historically recorded. The blank enigma of the early “popular” evangel is solved when we realize that there had been no such evangel; that the cult had really grown out of the ancient sacramental rite; that the growing movement had to evolve a quasi-biography when the God of the rite was to be developed into a Messiah; and that the Judaism of the old Messianic idea had to be transmuted into universalism when the cult came to a Gentile growth. All the contradictory texts fall (more or less clearly) into their orders as survivals of the divergent sects formed by the changing situation—or, let us say, of those changing needs of the widening cult which Dr. Petrie so arbitrarily makes a ground for the mere selection of dicta from a floating mass of written notes, but which may so much more rationally be taken as grounds for producing the required oracle.
Who can say how many other such Jewish books may not have furnished items for the compilers of the Gospels? The Sermon on the Mount we know is a Judaic compilation; and the “Slavonic Enoch” contains sets of beatitudes closely analogous to those of the Sermon. To the traditionalist these things are matters of profound perplexity; for the rational critic they are evidences for the naturalist conception of the rise of Christianity.