Chapter IV · THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

§ 1. The Primary Impulsion

On the other hand, we have in the Nazarean sect or fraternity a movement which added both directly and indirectly to the Jesuist evolution. In the so-called Primitive Gospel, as expiscated by the school of B. Weiss from the synoptics, there is no mention of Nazareth, and neither the epithet “Nazarene” nor “Nazarite” for Jesus. All three names are wholly absent from the Epistles, as from the Apocalypse: Jesus never has a cognomen after we pass the Acts. The inference is irresistible that first the epithet “Nazarean,” and later the story about Nazareth, were additions to a primary cult in which Jesus had no birth-location, any more than he had human parents.

But it is difficult to connect such a derivation of an important section of the early Jesuist movement with the thesis that Jesuism at its historic outset was essentially a monotheistic crusade. On this side we seem to face an old sect for whom, as for the adherents of the early sacrament, Jesus was a secondary or subordinate divine personage. Standing at an early Hebraic standpoint, the Nazaræans would have no part in the monotheistic universalism of the later prophets. The early Hebrews had believed in a Hebrew God, recognizing that other peoples also had theirs. How or when had the Nazaræans transcended that standpoint?

In the absence of any elucidation, the very ably argued thesis of Professor Smith as to the name “Nazaræan” seems broadly out of keeping with the thesis that a monotheistic fervour was a main and primary element in the development of the Christian cult; and that Jesus was conceived by his Jewish devotees in general as “the One God.” This would have meant the simple dethroning of Yahweh, a kind of procedure seen only in such myths as that of Zeus and Saturn, where one racial cult superseded another. But the main form of Christianity was always Yahwistic, even when Paul in the Acts is made to proclaim to the Athenians an “unknown God”—an idea really derived from Athens. Only for a few, and these non-Jews, can “the Jesus” originally have been the One God; unless in so far as the use of the name “the Lord” may for some unlettered Jews have identified Jesus with Yahweh, who was so styled. The Ebionites denied his divinity all along. The later Nazareans were Messianists who did not any more than the Jews seem to conceive that the Messiah was Yahweh.

Rather we seem bound to infer that Christianity made headway by assimilating pagan ideas and usages on a basis of Judaic organization. It is ultimately organization that conserves cults; and the vital factor in the Christian case is the adaptation of the model set by the Jewish synagogues and their central supervision. Of course even organization cannot avert brute conquest; and the organized pagan cults in the towns of the Empire went down ultimately before Christian violence as the Christian went down before violence in Persia in the age of the Sassanides. But Christian organization, improving upon Jewish, with no adequate rivalry on the pagan side, developed the situation in which Constantine saw fit to imperialize the cultus, as the one best fitted to become that of the State.

How then did the organization begin and grow? The data point insistently to a special group in Jerusalem; and behind the myth of the gospels we have historical and documentary ground for a hypothesis which can account for that as for the other myth-elements.

§ 2. The Silence of Josephus

A careful criticism will recognize a difficulty as to this section. In § 2, as in the Life, “three sects” are specified; and the concluding section has the air of a late addition. Seeing, however, that the sect of Judas is stated to have begun to give trouble in the procuratorship of Gessius Florus, when Josephus was in his twenties, it is quite intelligible that he should say nothing of it when naming the sects who existed in his boyhood, and that he should treat it in a subsidiary way in his fuller account of them in the Antiquities. It is not so clear why he should in the first section of that chapter call Judas “a Gaulanite, of a city whose name was Gamala,” and in the final section call him “Judas the Galilean.” There was a Gamala in Gaulanitis and another in Galilee. But the discrepancy is soluble on the view that the sixth section was added some time after the composition of the book. There seems no adequate ground for counting it spurious.

On what theory, then, are we to explain the total silence of Josephus as to the existence of the sect of Jesus of Nazareth, if there be any historical truth in the gospel story? It is of no avail to suggest that he would ignore it by reason of his Judaic hostility to Christism. He is hostile to the sect of Judas the Galilean. There is nothing in all his work to suggest that he would have omitted to name any noticeable sect with a definite and outstanding doctrine because he disliked it. He seems much more likely, in that case, to have described and disparaged or denounced it.

And here emerges the hypothesis that he did disparage or denounce the Christian sect in some passage which has been deleted by Christian copyists, perhaps in the very place now filled by the spurious paragraph, where an account of Jesuism as a calamity to Judaism would have been relevant in the context. This suggestion is nearly as plausible as that of Chwolson, who would reckon the existing paragraph a description of a Jewish calamity, is absurd. And it is the possibility of this hypothesis that alone averts an absolute verdict of non-historicity against the gospel story in terms of the silence of Josephus. The biographical school may take refuge, at this point, in the claim that the Christian forger, whose passage was clearly unknown to Origen, perhaps eliminated by his fraud a historic testimony to the historicity of Jesus, and also an account of the sect of Nazaræans.

1. Banos is probably the historical original of the gospel figure of John the Baptist.

3. The “historical Jesus” of the siege, who is “meek” and venerated as a prophet and martyr, being combined with the “Mosaic Jesus” of Galilee, a disciple of Judas of Galilee, who resisted the Roman rule and helped to precipitate the war, the memory of the “sect” of Judas the Gaulanite or Galilean, who began the anti-Roman trouble, is also transmuted into a myth of a sect of Jesus of Galilee, who has fishermen for disciples, is followed by poor Galileans, is betrayed by one companion and deserted by the rest, and is represented finally as dying under Pontius Pilate, though at that time there had been no Jesuine movement.

4. The Christian movement, thus mythically grounded, grows up after the fall of the Temple. Paul’s “the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost” (1 Thess. ii, 16) tells of the destruction of the Temple, as does Hebrews xii, 24–28; xiii, 12–14.

This theory of the construction of the myth out of historical elements in Josephus is obviously speculative in a high degree; and as the construction fails to account for either the central rite or the central myth of the crucifixion it must be pronounced inadequate to the data. On the other hand, the author developes the negative case from the silence of Josephus as to the gospel Jesus with an irresistible force; and though none of his solutions is founded-on in the constructive theory now elaborated, it may be that some of them are partly valid. The fact that he confuses Jesus the robber captain who was betrayed, and whose companions deserted him, with Jesus the “Mosaic” magistrate of Tiberias, who was followed by sailors and poor people, and was “an innovator beyond everybody else,” does not exclude the argument that traits of one or the other, or of the Jesus of the siege, may have entered into the gospel mosaic.

§ 3. The Myth of the Twelve Apostles

And he goeth up into the mountain, and calleth unto him whom he himself would: and they went unto him. And he appointed twelve, that they might be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach, and to have authority to cast out devils.

And the lists converge. Levi has now disappeared from Mark’s record, and we have instead “James the son of Alphæus,” but with Matthew in also. The lists of the first two synoptics have been harmonized. In Luke, where only three are at first called, after a miracle (v, 1–11), the twelve are also summarily chosen on a mountain; and here the list varies: Levi, who has been separately called (v, 27) as in Mark, disappears here also in favour of “James of Alphæus”; but there is no Thaddæus, and there are two Judases, one being “of James,” which may mean either son or brother. And this Judas remains on the list in the Acts. Candid criticism cannot affirm that we have here the semblance of veridical biography. The calling of the twelve has been imposed upon an earlier narrative, with an arbitrary list, which is later varied. The calling of the fishermen, to begin with, is a symbolical act, as is the calling of a tax-gatherer. The calling of the twelve is a more complicated matter.

In searching for the roots of a pre-Christian Jesus-cult in Palestine, we have noted the probability that it centred in a rite of twelve participants, with the “Anointed One,” the representative of the God, and anciently the actual victim, as celebrating priest. The Anointed One is “the Christ”; and the Christ, on the hypothesis, is Jesus Son of the Father. The twelve, as in the case of the early Jesus-cult at Ephesus, form as it were “the Church.” A body of twelve, then, who might term themselves “Brethren of the Lord,” may well have been one of the starting-points of Jewish Jesuism.

But the first two synoptics, clearly, started with a group of only four disciples, to which a fifth was added; and in John (i, 35–49) the five are made up at once, in a still more supernatural manner than in the synoptics, two being taken from the following of John the Baptist. Then, still more abruptly than in the synoptics, we have the completion (vi, 70):—“Did not I choose you the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” It would be idle to say merely that the twelve are suddenly imposed on the narrative, leaving a biographical five: the five are just as evidently given unhistorically, for some special reason, mythical or other.

Following the documents, we find the later traces equally unveridical. Matthew is introduced in the Acts as being chosen to make up the number of the twelve, on the death of Judas; but never again is such a process mentioned; and Matthew plays no part in the further narrative. And of course the cult was interdicted from further maintenance of the number as soon as it was settled that the twelve were to sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, which had apparently been done in an early Judaic form of the Apocalypse before it was intimated in the gospels. Even in the Epistles, however, there is no real trace of an active group of twelve. The number is mentioned only in a passage (1 Cor. xv, 5) where there is interpolation upon interpolation, for after the statement that the risen Jesus appeared “then to the twelve” there shortly follows “then to all the apostles,” that is, on the traditionist assumption, to the twelve again—the exclusion of Judas not being recognized. The first-cited clause could be interpolated in order to insert the number; the second could not have been inserted if the other were already there.

§ 4. The Process of Propaganda

On the view here taken, there was at Jerusalem, at some time in the first century, a small group of Jesuist “apostles” among whom the chief may have been named James, John, and Cephas. They may have been members of a ritual group of twelve, who may have styled themselves Brothers of the Lord; but that group in no way answered to the Twelve of the gospels. Of the apostle class the number was indefinite. Besides the apostles, further, there would seem to have been an indefinite number of “prophets,” indicative of a cult of somewhat long standing. The adherents believed in a non-historic Jesus, the “Servant” of the Jewish God, somehow evolved out of the remote Jesus-God who is reduced to human status in the Old Testament as Joshua. And their central secret rite consisted in a symbolic sacrament, evolved out of an ancient sacrament of human sacrifice, in which the victim had been the representative of the God, sacrificed to the God, in the fashion of a hundred primitive cults. This rite had within living memory, if not still at the time from which we start, been accompanied by an annual popular rite in which a selected person—probably a criminal released for the purpose—was treated as a temporary king, then derided, and then either in mock show or in actual fact executed, under the name of Jesus Barabbas, “the Son of the Father.”

But we can broadly distinguish between a “Petrine” and a “Pauline” Christism. In the Acts (ii, 22–40), which clearly embodies earlier lore, prior to that of the gospels, the Jesus Christ preached by Peter is not represented as a saving sacrifice. As little is he a Teacher, though he is a doer of “mighty works and wonders and signs.” If we were to apply the biographical method, the presentment might be held to indicate the Talmudic Jesus. Only after his resurrection “God hath made him both Lord and Christ”—that is, Messiah; and the Jewish hearers are invited to “repent” and be “baptized ... in the name of Jesus Christ unto the remission of your sins.” Peter’s Jesus, like him of the Teaching, is the “Servant” of God, not his Son. And there is no mention of a sacrament, though there is noted a “breaking of bread at home” (42, 46) recalling the “broken” (bread) of the Didachê. The sacrament, then, was apparently a secret rite for the Jewish group.

The speeches, of course, are quite unhistorical: we can but take them as embodying a traditional “Petrine” teaching with later matter. Thus we have baptism figuring as a Jesuist rite, whereas in the synoptics, as we have seen, there had been no such thing. The story of Peter being brought to the pro-Gentile view is pure ecclesiastical myth, probably posterior to the Pauline epistles, which are ignored but counteracted in so far as they posit strife between Pauline and Petrine propaganda. Peter and Paul alike are made to teach that “it behoved the Christ to suffer” (iii, 18; xvii, 3), even as they duplicate their miracles, their escapes, and their sufferings. But while Peter is pretended to have accepted Gentilism, it is Paul who acts on the principle; and he it is who is first represented as fighting pagan polytheism, notably at Ephesus (xix, 26). At Athens, in a plainly fictitious speech, he is made to expound the “unknown God” of an Athenian agnostic cult in terms of Jewish opposition to image-worship, indicating Jesus merely as “a man” raised by God from the dead to judge the world at the judgment day. It is after this episode that he is made to tell the Jews of Corinth he will “henceforth go unto the Gentiles.” Nevertheless he is made to go on preaching to the Jews. The narrative as a whole is plainly factitious: all we can hope to do is to detect some of its historic data.

Upon this movement there enters an innovator, Paul of Tarsus. Round him, as round Peter, there are clouds of myth. That he was originally Saul, a Pharisee, a pupil of Gamaliel; that he began as a bitter persecutor of the Jesuists; and that he was converted by a supernatural vision, become common data for the church. That the charge of persecution was a Judaic figment, on the other hand, is perhaps as likely as that the story of Peter’s denial of his Master was a Gentile figment. We are in a world of purposive fiction. But the broad divergence of doctrine seems to underlie all the fables. Saul, on the later view, changes his Jewish name to the Grecian Paul when he plans to make the Jesus-cult non-Jewish, using the tactic of monotheism against pagan polytheism in general, in the very act of adding a Son-God to the Jewish Father-God, as so many Son-Gods had been added to Father-Gods throughout religious history. To the early Jewish Jesuists, the notion of the Son had been given by the old cult of sacrifice, with its Jesus the Son—an idea obscurely but certainly present, as we have seen, in the lore of the Talmudists.

Clearly it was the Pauline movement that made of Christism a “viable” world religion. As an unorganized Saviour-cult it would have died out like others. As a phase of Judaism, it could have had no Jewish permanence, simply because its Messianism was a matter of looking daily for an “end of the world” that did not come. After two centuries of waiting, the Jews would have had as clear a right to pronounce Jesus a “false Messiah” as they had in the case of Barcochab or any other before or since. The mere belief in a future life, at one time excluded from their Sacred Books, had become the common faith, only the aristocratic Sadducees (probably not all of them) rejecting it. On that side, Jesuism gave them nothing. Well might Paul “turn to the Gentiles”—albeit not under the circumstances theologically imagined for him in the book of Acts.

Even for the Gentiles, Jesuism was but one of many competing cults, offering similar attractions. In the religions of Adonis, Attis, Isis and Osiris, Dionysos, Mithra, and the Syrian Marnas (“the Lord, a variant of Adonis = Adonai, one of the Jews’ exoteric names for Yahweh”), a resplendent ever-youthful God who had died to rise again was sacramentally adored, mourned for, and rejoiced over, by devotees just as absorbed in their faith as were the Jesuists. With vague pretences of biographical knowledge, to which nobody now attaches any credence, they were as sure of the historicity of their Vegetation-Gods and Sun-Gods as the Christists were of the actuality of theirs. Had a Frazer of the second century told them that their Adonis and Attis were but abstractions of the annual sacrificial victim of old time, they would have told him, in the manner of Festus (not yet obsolete), that much learning had made him mad. They “knew” that their Redeemer had lived, died, and risen again. The unbelief of philosophers, or of scoffers like Lucian, affected them no more than scientific and critical unbelief to-day disturbs the majority of unthinking Christians. The busy sacrificial and devotional life of Hierapolis would be as little affected by Lucian’s tranquil exhibition of it as the life at Lourdes has been by Zola’s novel. On that side, we can very easily understand the past by the present.

So little psychic or intellectual difference was there between Jesuism and the other “isms” that Paul’s propaganda made no measurable sensation in the colluvies of the Roman empire. As Renan avows, even on the assumption of the genuineness of the Epistles, he was the missioner of a number of small conventicles, all convinced that they alone were the “true Church of God upon earth.” It is an error of perspective to ascribe extraordinary faculty to the missionary who either converted or “stablished” such believers; and it is plainly unnecessary to assume in his case any abnormal sincerity or persuasiveness. If we were to estimate him in terms of the records we should describe him either as a halluciné or as a fanatic who had shed Christian blood in his Judaic stage and never in the least learned humility on that score, his phrases of contrition being balanced by the fiercest asperities towards all who withstood him in his Christian stage. But we have no right to draw a portrait of “Paul,” who is left to us a composite of literary figments testifying only to the previous activity of a propagandist so-named.

§ 5. Real Determinants

The more we study comparatively the fortunes of the Christian and the rival cults, the more difficult it is to conceive that it made headway in virtue of sheer monotheism. If we assume that Judaism had made its proselytes in the pagan world by reason of the appeal made by its monotheism to the more thoughtful minds, we are bound to infer that Christism was on that side rather at a disadvantage, inasmuch as it was really adding a new deity, with a “Holy Spirit” superadded, to the God of the Jews.

In the Romanized world, Judaism had never a really great success of proselytism, just because the more cultured had their own monotheism, and had in Greek literature something more satisfactory than the Hebraic, with its barbaric basis of racialism and its apparatus of circumcision, synagogues and Sabbaths. The proselytes were made in general among the less cultured—not the populace, but the serious men of religious predilections, who were the more impressed by the Sacred Books as rendered in the Septuagint because they were not at home in the higher literature of Greece. And if Judaism could not sweep the Roman empire in virtue of monotheism, Christism could not, especially while it lacked sacred books of its own.

Professor Smith’s thesis of a rapid monotheistic triumph is partly founded on his own vivid interpretation of many of the gospel stories of cast-out demons and diseases as a symbolism for successes against polytheism. And his symbolistic interpretation, which is at first sight apt to seem arbitrary, is really important at many points, accounting as it does convincingly for a number of gospel stories. But if we are to assume that all the gospel stories of casting out devils, curing lepers, healing the lame, and giving sight to the blind, were composed with a symbolic intent, we shall still be left asking on what grounds the Name of Jesus made any popular appeal before and after the symbolizing gospels were compiled.

Of two positions, then, we must choose one. Either the miracle-stories of the gospels, and by consequence those of the Acts, were as such otiose inventions for an audience which, on the view under discussion, would have been much more responsive to an explicit claim of triumph over polytheistic beliefs, the thing they are said to have been most deeply concerned about, or the miracle stories in general were meant as miracle-stories, only some later symbolists seeking to impose a symbolic sense on the records along with the Gnostic conception that the Christ had spoken in allegories which the people were not meant to understand. This later manipulation undoubtedly did take place. The parable of the Rich One, as Professor Smith convincingly shows, is an allegory of Jew and Gentile—the Rich One being Israel. But it is not by such manipulation that cults are made popular, congregations collected, and revenue secured. And it was on these practical lines that Christianity was “stablished.”

The factors which made this one Eastern cult gradually gain ground, and finally hold its ground, as against the many rival cults, were—

1. The system of ecclesiæ, modelled at once on the Jewish synagogue and the pagan collegia.

2. The practice of mutual help, making the churches Friendly Societies—again an assimilation of common pagan practice.

3. The colligation of the churches, primarily by means of a new sacred literature of gospels and epistles, and secondarily by a system of centralized government, partly modelled on the imperial system.

4. The backing of the new Christian Sacred Books by the Jewish Sacred Books, giving an ancient Eastern background and basis for the faith in a world in which Eastern religious elements were progressively overriding the Western, which had in comparison no documentary basis.

6. It was the wide ramification and popular importance of the Christian system that at length made it worth the while of the emperor to cease persecuting it as a partly anti-imperial organization and to turn it into an imperial instrument by making it the religion of the State.

To explain the process as the morally deserved success of a religion superior from the start, in virtue of the superiority of its nominal Founder, would be to adhere to pre-scientific conceptions of causation, akin to the geocentric assumption in astronomy. Hierology ultimately merges in sociology, as mythology and anthropology (in the English limitation of the term) merge in hierology; and sociology is a study of the reaction of environments as well as of the action of institutions and doctrines. The Christian success was finally achieved by the assimilation of all manner of pagan modes of attraction on the side of creed, and the absolute ultimate subordination of the specialties of early Christian ethic to the business of political adaptation.

And to all attempts to obscure the problem by figuring Christianity as a continuously beneficent and purifying force it is sufficient here to answer that it is in strict fact a religious variant which survived in a decaying civilization, a politically and socially decaying world; that it lent itself to that decay; and that it did less than nothing to avert it.

Where superior hostile power efficiently fought it, it was suppressed just as it suppressed the organized cults of paganism and some (not all) of its own heretical sects. Its further survival, which does not here properly concern us, was but a matter of the renewed “triumph” of an organized over unorganized religions, and of the adoption of that organization by the new barbaric States as before by the declining Roman empire.