Note 6 — Chapter XX · THE GROUND CLEARED FOR THE MYTH THEORY

In that connection it is interesting to note that Sir J. G. Frazer, who has so warmly contended that, as history cannot be explained “without the influence of great men,” we must accept the historicity of Jesus,6 latterly propounds a tentative theory of a historic original for Osiris, whom he supposes to have been perhaps evolved from the idealized personality of an ancient King Khent, buried at Abydos.7 It is a mere suggestion, and it at once evokes the reminder that, on the theorist’s own general principles, King Khent may be regarded as having been theocratically identified with the already existing God. However that may be, the hypothesis does nothing to save Sir James’s irrelevant plea about the operation of “great men” and “extraordinary minds” in the founding of all religions, for he does not suggest that King Khent’s career in any way resembled the myth of Osiris, or that he first taught the things Osiris is said to have taught. So that, in the case of Osiris as of Jesus, the required great men and extraordinary minds may still, in the terms of the claim, be inserted at any point rather than in the personage named or suggested as Founder.8 If we agree to call the compiler of the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of the Kingdom and the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan great men and extraordinary minds, Sir James’s very simple argument is turned. And we should still be left asking who were the historic founders of the cults of Zeus and Brahma and Attis and Adonis, Dionysos and Herakles and Krishna and Aphrodite and Artemis.