Chapter VII · THE ALLEGED CONSENSUS OF SCHOLARS

Such is the historical impasse at which open-minded students find themselves when they would finally frame a reasoned conception of the origin of the Christian religion. The documentary analysis having yielded results which absolutely repel the accepted tradition, however denuded of supernaturalism, we are driven to seek a solution which shall be compatible with the data. And some of us, after spending many years in shaping a sequence which should retain the figure of the Founder and his twelve disciples, have found ourselves forced step by step to the conclusion that these are all alike products of myth, intelligible and explicable only as such. And when, in absolute loyalty to all the clues, with no foregone conclusions to support—unless the rejection of supernaturalism be counted such—we tentatively frame for ourselves a hypothesis of a remote origin in a sacramental cult of human sacrifice, with a probable Jesus-God for its centre in Palestine, we are not surprised at being met by the kind of explosion that has met every step in the disintegration of traditional beliefs from Copernicus to Darwin. The compendious Mr. Sinclair, who makes no pretension to have read any of the works setting forth the new theories, thus describes them:—

That tirade has seemed to me worth preserving. It is perhaps a monition to scholars, whose function is something higher than vituperation, to note how their inadequacies are sought to be eked out by zeal without either scholarship or judgment, and, finally, without intellectual sincerity. The publicist who alternately tells the unread that they ought to accept the verdict of scholars, and that it is “better still” to “support” that verdict by unaided “imagination and common sense,” has given us once for all his moral measure.

Dismissing him as having served his turn in illustrating compendiously the temper which survives in Unitarian as in Trinitarian traditionalism, we may conclude this preliminary survey with a comment on the proposition that we should take the “verdict of scholars.” It has been put by men, themselves scholars in other fields, whom to bracket with Mr. Sinclair would be an impertinence. But I have always been puzzled by their attitude. They proceed upon three assumptions, which are all alike delusions. The first is that there is a consensus of scholars on the details of this problem. The second is that the professional scholars have a command of a quite recondite knowledge as regards the central issue. The third is that there is such a thing as professional expertise in the diagnosis of Gods, Demigods, and real Founders in religious history. Once more, the nature of the problem has not been realized.

M. Friedmann, Onkelos und Akylas, 1896, still holds fast to the traditional opinion that even Ezra had an Aramaic version of the Tora. In this he is mistaken.

H. Laible, in Dalman-Laible’s Jesus Christ in the Talmud, etc., incorrectly refers it [the phrase “bastard of a wedded wife”] to Jesus. The discussion treats merely of the definition of the term “bastard.”

Adequate proof for all three parts of this assertion [A. Neubauer’s as to the use of Aramaic in parts of Palestine] is awanting.

F. Blass ... characterizes as Aramaisms idioms which in some cases are equally good Hebraisms, and in others are pure Hebraisms and not Aramaisms at all.

P. W. Schmiedel ... does not succeed in reaching any really tenable separation of Aramaisms and Hebraisms.

Resch entirely abandons the region of what is linguistically admissible.... And the statement of the same writer that this ... “belongs very specially to the epic style of narration in the Old Testament” is incomprehensible.

The idioms discussed above ... show at once the incorrectness of Schmiedel’s contention that the narrative style of the Gospels and the Acts is the best witness of the Greek that was spoken among the Jews. The fact is that the narrative sections of the Synoptists have more Hebrew features than the discourses of Jesus communicated by them.

Such a book as Wünsche’s Neue Beiträge, by reason of quite superficial and inaccurate assertions and faulty translations, must even be characterized as directly misleading and confusing.

The want of due precaution in the use made of [the Jerusalem Targums of the Pentateuch] by J. T. Marshall is one of the things which were bound to render his efforts to reproduce the “Aramaic Gospel” a failure.

Harnack supposes it to be an ancient Jewish conception that “everything of genuine value which successively appears upon earth has its existence in heaven—i.e., it exists with God—meaning in the cognition of God, and therefore really.” But this idea must be pronounced thoroughly un-Jewish, at all events un-Palestinian, although the medieval Kabbala certainly harbours notions of this sort.

Holtzmann ... thereby evinces merely his own ignorance of Jewish legal processes.

Especially must his [R. H. Charles’s] attempts at retranslation [of the Assumptio Mosis] be pronounced almost throughout a failure.

[Even in the pertinent observations of Wellhausen and Nestle] we feel the absence of a careful separation of Hebrew and Aramaic possibilities.... He [Wellhausen] must be reminded that the Jewish literature to this day is still mainly composed in Hebrew.

the actual discourses of Jesus in no way give the impression that He had grown up in rural solitude and seclusion. It is true only that He, like the Galileans generally in that region, would have little contact with literary erudition.

If Professor Dalman cannot see that the proposition in the first sentence is extremely disturbing to the traditional belief in its Unitarian form, and that the second is a mere petitio principii which cannot save the situation, other people can see it. His scholarship gives him no “eminent domain” over logic; and it does not require a knowledge of Aramaic to detect the weakness of his reasoning. Fifty experts in Aramaic carry no weight for a thinking man on such a non-linguistic issue; and he who defers to them as if they did is but throwing away his birthright. When again Dalman writes (p. 60) that “Peter must have appeared (Acts x, 24) from a very early date as a preacher in the Greek language,” he again raises an insoluble problem for the traditionalists of all schools, and his scholarly status is quite irrelevant to that.

When, yet again, he writes (p. 71) that “what is firmly established is only the fact that Jesus spoke in Aramaic to the Jews,” his mastery of Aramaic has nothing to do with the case. He is merely taking for granted the historicity of the main tradition; and until he faces the problems he has ignored (having, as he may fairly claim, been occupied with others), and repelled the criticisms which that tradition incurs, his vote on the unconsidered issue has no more value to a rational judgment than any other. I have seldom read a scholarly treatise more satisfying than his within its special field, or more provocative of astonishment at the extent to which specialism can close men’s eyes to the problems which overlap or underlie theirs.

And that is the consideration that has to be realized by those who talk of scholarship (meaning simply what is called New Testament scholarship) settling a historical problem which turns upon anthropology, mythology, hierology, psychology, and literary and historical science in general. On these sides the scholars in question, “Wir Gelehrten vom Fach,” as the German specialists call themselves in the German manner, are not experts at all, not even amateurs, inasmuch as they have never even realized that those other sciences are involved. They have fallen into the rôle of the pedant, properly so-called, who presumes to regulate life by inapplicable knowledge. And even those who are wholly free of this presumptuous pedantry, the sober, courteous, and sane scholars like Professor Schmiedel, whose candour enables him to contribute a preface to such a book as Professor W. B. Smith’s Der vorchristliche Jesus, to whose thesis he does not assent—even these, as we have seen, can fail to realize the scope of the problem to the discussion of which they have contributed.

Deeply learned men, in the latter case, went on for generations solemnly re-writing history in the terms of the re-arranged documents, when all the while the history was historic myth—perceptible as such to a Zulu who had lived in a desert. And when the Zulu’s teacher proved the case by simple arithmetic, he met at the hands alike of pedants and of pietists a volley of malignant vituperation, the “religious” expert Maurice excelling many of the most orthodox in the virulence of his scorn; while the pontifical Arnold, from the Olympian height of his amateurism, severely lectured Colenso for not having written in Latin.

Before the end of the nineteenth century the very school which we are asked to regard as endowed with quasi-papal powers in matters of historical criticism was declared by one of its leading representatives in Germany to have been on a wrong track for fifty years. In the words of Professor Blass:—

And Blass, who dates Luke 56 or 60, goes on:—

Has that confessedly untrustworthy guide of laymen, scientific theology, after so many errors committed during fifty years, now of a sudden become a trustworthy one? Or have we good reason to mistrust it as much, or even more than we had before? In ordinary life no sane person would follow a guide who confessed to having grossly misled him during the whole former part of the journey. Evidently that guide was either utterly ignorant of the way, or he had some views and aims of his own, of which the traveller was unaware, and he cannot be assumed now to have acquired a full knowledge, or to have laid those views and aims wholly aside.

Of course, it is not by philology that Blass has reached the standpoint from which he can contemn the professional theologians. He is really on the same ground as they, making the same primary assumptions of historicity: the only difference is that while they, following the same historical tradition, yet scruple to accept prophecies as having been actually made at the time assigned to them, and feel bound to date the prophecy after the event, the consistent philologist recognizes no such obligation in the present instance, and puts a rather adroit but very unscholarly argument on the subject, with which we shall have to deal later. But for those to whom the exact dating of the Gospels is a subsidiary problem, his argument has only a subsidiary interest; and the fact that he unquestioningly agrees with his flouted theological colleagues in accepting the historicity of Jesus gives no importance to their consensus.

If, as he says, they are in the mass utterly untrustworthy guides on any historical issue (an extravagance to which, as a layman, I do not subscribe), their agreement can be of no value to him where he and they coincide. After telling Harnack that men who have confessedly been astray for fifty years have no right to expect to be listened to, he makes much of Harnack’s support as to the historicity of the Acts—a course which will not impose upon thoughtful readers. All the while, of course, Professor Blass is simply applying a revised historical criticism to a single issue or set of issues, and even if he chance to be right on these he has set up no new historical method. No more than the others has he recognized the central historical problem; and he must be well aware that that reversion to tradition announced by Harnack, and at this point acquiesced in by him, cannot for a moment be maintained as a general critical principle in regard to the New Testament any more than in regard to the Old. All that he can claim is that many theologians have confessedly blundered seriously on historical problems. But that is quite enough to justify us in admonishing the mere middlemen and the experts alike to change the tone of absurd assurance with which they meet further innovations of historical theory.