Chapter XVIII · THE PAULINE PROBLEM

Assuredly there is much to be done before the myth theory can be reduced to a definitive scientific form. It is to be hoped that, free as it is from perverting commitments, it may be developed rather more rapidly than the “liberal” theory of the human Christ, which has been on the stocks for over a hundred years without securing any higher measure of unanimity than exists among the Christian sects. But it can have no rapid acceptance. Questions of myth analogies—always open to the perverse handling of men who cannot or will not see that in mythology and anthropology claims of analogy are not claims of derivation—are apt to be obscure at best; and the establishment of the hypothesis of a pre-Christian Jesus cult has been admitted from the outset to be difficult. And the sociological history of the rise of Christianity, to which the myth question is but preparatory, has still to be written.

In this direction too there may be complications. Pastor Kalthoff’s very important treatise on The Rise of Christianity puts the theory that the Church began as a communistic body; and Karl Kautsky, in his Der Ursprung des Christenthums (1908), has vigorously developed that conception. It has some strong grounds, and it is beset by very serious difficulties, which Kautsky, I think, has not met. When he denies that there were Hellenistic experiments and propagandas which in a later period could have set some Christian enthusiasts upon inventing a communistic beginning for the Church, he seems to ignore his own argument from the Epistle of James, and evidence which he could have found in Kalthoff. But unless the communistic theory (adumbrated long ago in De Quincey’s rash thesis that the Essenes were the first Christians) is pressed as giving the whole origin of Christianity, it remains a part rather of the sociological problem than of the hierological inquiry. And I do not think that Kalthoff, had he lived, would have so pressed it. He saw, I think, that there is a primary religious factor and problem, and that the other is secondary. There was a sacramental cult before there could be any communism. When the origin of the cult is made fairly clear the question of communism may be settled. But the Acts is a very dubious basis for a historical theory, and the Epistle of James tells rather of Ebionism than of communism. The history of the Ebionites and the Nazarenes, which for me was one of the points of reversion to a myth theory, seems to be the true starting point for the history of the Church.