Note 2 — Chapter V · SCHMIEDEL AND DEROGATORY MYTH

Elsewhere I have examined Professor Schmiedel’s thesis in detail.2 Here it may suffice to point out (1) as aforesaid, that the argument from derogatory treatment is not in the least a proof that in an ancient narrative a personage is not regarded as superhuman; (2) that a suffering Messiah was expressly formulated in Jewish literature in the pre-Christian period;3 and (3) that there are extremely strong grounds for inferring purposive invention—of that naïf kind which marks the whole mass of early hierology—in the very episodes upon which he founds. The first concrete details of the Founder’s propaganda in Mark, as we have seen, exhibit him as clashing with the Judaic environment. In later episodes he clashes with it yet further. The “derogatory” episodes exhibit him as clashing with his personal environment, his family and kin, concerning whom there has been no mention whatever at the outset, where we should expect to find it. All this is in line with the anti-Judaic element of the Gospel. If at early stages in the larger Jesuine movement there were reasons why the Founder should be represented as detaching himself from the Mosaic law; as being misunderstood and deserted by his disciples; and as disparaging even the listening Jewish multitude (concerning whom Mark, iv, 10 sq., makes him say that “unto them that are without, all things are done in parables, that seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest haply they should turn again, and it should be forgiven them”), is there anything unlikely in his being inventively represented as meeting antipathetic treatment from his family?4 At a time when so-called “brothers of the Lord” ostensibly claimed authority in the Judæo-Gentile community, an invented tale of original domestic hostility to the Teacher would be as likely as the presence of authorities so styled is unlikely on the assumption that the story in Mark was all along current. The very fact that allusions to the family of the Lord suddenly appear in a record which had introduced him as a heavenly messenger, without mention of home or kindred or preparation, tells wholly against the originality of the later details, which in the case of the naming of “the carpenter” and his mother have a polemic purpose.5