Chapter XX · THE GROUND CLEARED FOR THE MYTH THEORY

The issue as between Schweitzer and Wrede comes to this. Wrede sees that the Messiahship is a creation following upon the belief in the resurrection, and only uncritically deducible from the documents. For him, Jesus is a Teacher who was made into a Messiah by his followers after his death, the Gospels being manipulated to conceal the fact that he made no Messianic claims. Schweitzer sees that the Teaching Jesus is a documentary construction; and that, unless the Crucified One had some Messianic idea, the Gospel story as a whole crumbles to nothing. And he asks:—

It is to be feared that neither the scholars nor the laity will accept either of Dr. Schweitzer’s alternatives, and that the nature of his own prestidigitatory solution may tend somewhat to weaken the effect of his indictment of the kaleidoscopic process which has hitherto passed as a solution among the experts. Dr. Schweitzer seems to realize all absurdities save his own. None the less, he has done a critical service in arguing down all the rest, though even in his final verdict he exhibits symptoms of the “sacred disease,” the theologian’s malady of self-contradiction:—

He passes by our time and returns to his own....

The historical foundation of Christianity as built up by rationalistic, by liberal, and by modern theology no longer exists; but that does not mean that Christianity has lost its historical foundation....

“Loves me, loves me not,” as the little girls say in counting the flower petals. We seem entitled to suggest in the interests of simple science, as distinguished from Germanic Kultur, that temperament might perhaps usefully be left out of the debate; and that the question of what Jesus stands for may be left over till we have settled whether the film presented to us by Dr. Schweitzer can stand between us and a scientific criticism which assents to all of his verdict save the reservation in favour of his own thesis.

Meantime, let us not seem to suggest that the English handling of the historical problem during the nineteenth century has been any more scientific than the German. Hennell’s treatment of it was but a simplification of Strauss’s; and Thomas Scott’s Life of Jesus was but an honest attempt to solidify Renan. In the early part of the nineteenth century little was achieved beyond the indispensable weakening of the reign of superstition by critical propaganda. In early Victorian England, where Freethought had been left to unprofessional freelances, still liable to brutal prosecution, an anonymous attempt was made to carry the matter further in a curious book entitled “The Existence of Christ Disproved by Irresistible Evidence, in a Series of Letters by a German Jew.” It bears no date, but seems to have been published between 1841 and 1849, appearing serially in thirty penny weekly numbers, printed in Birmingham, and published in London by Hetherington. As Hetherington, who died in 1849, was imprisoned in 1840 for the “blasphemous libel” of publishing Haslam’s Letters to the Clergy, but not earlier or later on any similar charge, he would seem to have been allowed to publish this without molestation.

About the author I have no information. He writes English fluently and idiomatically, and had read Strauss in the original. But though he presses against Hennell the argument from the case of Apollos, latterly developed by Professor W. B. Smith with such scholarly skill, the book as a whole has little persuasive power. The author is one of the violent and vehement men who alone, in the day of persecution, were likely to hazard such a thesis; and he does it with an amount of vociferation much in excess of his critical effort or his knowledge. It made, and could make, no impression whatever on the educated world; and I never met any Freethinker who had seen or heard of it.

It is in another spirit, and in the light of a far greater accumulation of evidence than was available in the first half of the last century, that the mythical theory has been restated in our day. In particular it proceeds upon a treasury of anthropological lore which was lacking to Bruno Bauer, as it was to Ghillany, who was so much better fitted than Bauer to profit by such light. As knowledge of the past gradually arranges itself into science, and the malice of religious resistance recedes from point to point before the sapping process of culture, the temper of the whole debate undergoes a transmutation. After a generation in which a Lyell could only in privacy avow his views as to the antiquity of man, came that in which Tylor, without polemic, could establish an anthropological method that was to mean the reduction of all religious phenomena, on a new line, to the status of natural phenomena. And even the malice of the bigoted faithful, which will subsist while the faith endures, falls into its place as one of these, equally with the malice of the conventional theorists who meet the exposure of their untenable positions with aspersion in defect of argument.

But the fact that a recent German exegete has been found capable of facing the problem in a spirit of scientific candour and good temper, and with something of the old-time detachment which made Rosenkranz marvel at Carlyle’s tone towards Diderot, may be a promise of a more general resort to civilized controversial methods. In any case, the fact that a trained New Testament critic, undertaking to establish the historicity of Jesus, has affirmed the scientific failure of all the preceding attempts, and offered a historic residuum which few will think worth an hour’s consideration, seems a sufficient demonstration that the mythical theory is the real battleground of the future.

On the other hand, as it happens, that very suggestion as to King Khent points afresh to the myth theory as the solution of the Gospel problem. Nothing emerges oftener in Sir James’s great survey than the ancient connection between kingship and liability to sacrifice. It will not avail to close off that connection by claiming King Khent as a potentate of an age after that of sacrificed kings. The sacrificial past would still have to be taken into account in explaining the deification of King Khent. And it is just an analogous process that is suggested in our theory of the Jesus myth. A long series of slain Jesuses, ritually put to death at an annual sacrament “for the sins of many,” is the ultimate anthropological ground given for the special cultus out of which grew the mythical biography of the Gospels.

And if Sir James remains satisfied with his charge that in putting such a theory we “flatter the vanity of the vulgar,” we may be permitted to ask him which line of propaganda is likeliest to appeal to the multitude. Let him, in his turn, be on his guard against the vulgarity which seeks support in science from popular prejudice. As to his pronouncement that the theory which he so inexpensively attacks “will find no favour with the philosophic historian,” one must just point out that it does not lie with him to draw up the conclusions of philosophic history outside of his own great department, or even, for that matter, in that department. His own historical generalizations, when they seek to pass from the strictly anthropological to the sociological status, will often really not bear the slightest critical analysis. They express at times an entire failure to realize the nature of a historical process, offering as they do mere chance speculations which patently conflict with the whole mass of the evidence he has himself collected. It is not an isolated opinion that by such abortive attempts at “philosophic history” he has tended to lessen the usefulness even of that collection, for which all students are his grateful debtors. In short, he would do well to turn from his ill-timed incursion into dogmatics to the relevant problem which he has forced upon so many of his readers—namely, What has become of his mythological maxim that the ritual precedes the myth?

While the professed mythologist rejects the application of the myth theory to the current religion in the name of “philosophic history,” students ostensibly more concerned about religion reject the historicity theory in the name of their religious ideals, finding in the myth theory the vindication of these. Thus Professor Drews has from the first connected the argument of his Das Christusmythe with a claim to regenerate religion by freeing it from anthropomorphism; and I have seen other theistic pronouncements to the same effect; to say nothing of the declarations of scholarly Churchmen that for them the Jesus of the Gospels is a God or nothing, and that for them the historicity argument has no religious value. Such positions seem to me, equation for equation, very sufficiently to balance the bias of Sir James Frazer. For my own part, I am content to maintain the theory in the name of science, and it is by scientific tests that I invite the reader to try it.