Chapter VII · GOSPEL-MAKING

§ 1. Tradition

On this view, “Matthew” in one of his versions deliberately omitted (1) the remarkable story of the woman taken in adultery; (2) the remarkable story that “the mother of the Lord and his brethren” proposed to him that they should all go and be baptized by John, whereupon he asked “Wherein have I sinned?” but added: “except perchance this very thing that I have said in ignorance,” and went accordingly; (3) the statement that at baptism Jesus saw the dove “entering into him”; (4) the further item that “the entire fountain of the Holy Spirit descended and rested upon him,” addressing him as “My son”; and (5) Jesus’ use of the phrase, “My mother, the Holy Spirit.” Such a hypothesis, if accepted, deprives of all meaning the notion of an “author” of a document. The only fair inference is that a Greek translation of the Hebrew gospel was one of the sources of the present Matthew, and that either (a) many of its details have been rejected, or (b) that many of the preserved fragments were additions to the original.

On bases so laid, there accrue a multitude of expletions, stones added to the cairn, as: episodes favouring this or that view of the proper Messianic heredity; of the Messiah’s ascetic or non-ascetic character; of his attitude for or against Samaritans; of his thaumaturgic principles; of the universality or selectness of the salvation he brings; of his attitude towards the Roman power, towards divorce, towards the Scribes and Pharisees, and so on. Up to the point of the establishment of something like a Canon, the longer the cult lasted, the greater would be the variety of the teaching. Different views of the descent and character of the Messiah, put forward by Davidists and non-Davidists, Nazarites and non-Nazarites, Jews and Samaritans, would all tend to find currency, and all would tend to find a place in the scroll of some group, whence they could ill be ousted by any “Catholic” movement. Still later, definitely anti-Jewish matter is grafted piecemeal by Gentile adherents: the “good Samaritan” is an impeachment of Jewish character; and the legendary apostles are progressively belittled—notably so in the mystery play which finally supersedes the earlier accounts of the Tragedy.

That such a general process actually took place is of necessity admitted by the biographical school, their problem consisting in delimiting the amount of tradition which they can plausibly claim as genuine. From the point of that delimitation they posit a process of doctrinal and other myth-making. The decision now claimed is that there is no point of scientific delimitation, and that the process which they carry forward from an arbitrarily fixed point must logically be carried backwards.

§ 2. Schmiedel’s Tests

An unbiassed criticism will of course recognize that the “Jesus wept” may be an interpolation, for it is admitted that the Greek words rendered “groaned in the spirit” may mean “was moved with indignation in the spirit”; and, yet again, Martha is represented (xi, 22) as avowing the belief that “even now” Jesus can raise Lazarus by the power of God. Nay, the whole story may be an addition, not from the pen of the writer who makes Jesus God. But equally the incongruities in Mark may come of interpolation. A fair inference from the characteristics of that document is that parts of it, notably the first dozen paragraphs, represent a condensation of previously current matter, while others are as plainly expansive; and even if these diversely motived sections be from the same hand, interpolations might be made in either.

Three questions are involved, from the mythological point of view: first, whether actual believers in an alleged divinity could represent him as flouted, humiliated, or temporarily powerless; second, whether the Ebionitic view of Jesus can be accounted for otherwise than as the persistence of a proto-Christian view, arising among the immediate adherents of a man Jesus; third, whether in the second century Jesuists of Ebionitic views could invent, and insert in the gospels, sayings of or concerning Jesus which were meant to countervail the belief in his divinity.

As regards the Demigods in particular it belongs to the very nature of the case that they should be at times specially thwarted and reviled by mortals, since it is their fate to die, albeit to rise again. If, then, sayings were once invented which fastened human limitations upon the Divine One for the Jesuists, there was nothing in the psychology of worshippers on their intellectual plane that should make them pronounce such sayings forgeries. As we have seen, even in the fourth gospel, which puts the Divine One higher than ever, he is made, on Professor Schmiedel’s own view, to weep for sheer chagrin.

§ 3. Tendential Tests

On the other hand there would be non-Jewish Jesuists who valued the Sacrament as they and others valued those of Paganism, counting on magical benefits from it (as “Catholics” in general did for many centuries), but making light of the Jewish future life. The one thing in common was the primordial sacrament, at once Jewish and non-Jewish. For Jews it would easily connect with the belief in immortality, already much connected with Messianism; for Gentiles who accepted the former belief, it would be still more easily connected with a doctrine of future individual salvation. All is broadly intelligible on the myth-theory. On the biographical theory, the Jesuists of the Didachê are as inexplicable as the Gentile Jesuists who denied a future life, or the Docetists who denied that Jesus had come in the flesh.

Given such Jewish Jesuists, and given Docetism, the invention of sayings and episodes in which Jesus is thwarted or flouted, or disavows Godhood, is perfectly simple. Why Professor Schmiedel should raise the question of “wickedness” in this connection I cannot divine. On his own showing, the invention of sayings and episodes was normal among the Christists in general; and it affected all of the synoptics. Does he impute “wickedness” to the author of the fourth gospel, whom he represents as inventing discourses and episodes systematically? The Ebionites and Docetists had as much right to invent as any one else; and once their inventions were current, they stood a fair chance of being embodied in a gospel or gospels by reason of the general incapacity of the Christists for critical reflection.

But it is important here to note the point, insisted on by Professor W. B. Smith, that most of Professor Schmiedel’s “pillar” texts could be framed with no thought of lowering the status of Jesus, while some, on the contrary, betray the motive of discrediting the Jews. The story of Jesus’ people (οἱ παρ’ αὐτοῦ, not “friends” as in our versions) saying “He is beside himself” (Mk. iii, 21), is simply a Gentile intimation that even among his own kin or associates he was treated as a madman. The idea is exactly the same as that of the story in the fourth gospel, that “the Jews” said he “had a devil” and was a Samaritan. Similarly “tendential” is the avowal (Mk. vi, 5) that at Nazareth the wonder-worker “could do no mighty work ... and he marvelled because of their unbelief.” Healing in other texts is declared to depend on faith; and to call the people of Nazareth unbelievers was either to explain why Jesus of Nazareth there had no following or to emphasize the point that the Jews had rejected the Lord. Such a doctrine, again, as that of Mt. xii, 31, that blasphemy against the Son of Man was pardonable, was perfectly natural at a stage at which the cult was seeking eagerly for converts. Had not Peter, in the legend, denied his Lord with curses, and Paul persecuted the Church to the death?

In other cases, the bearing of Professor Schmiedel’s texts is so much a matter of arbitrary interpretation that the debate is otiose; and in yet others there are insoluble questions of text corruption. The thesis that any text “could not have been invented,” and must infer the existence of a teacher regarded as mortal, is so infirm in logic that it is not surprising to find it regarded with bitter dislike by the orthodox, transparently honest as is Professor Schmiedel’s use of it.

After generations of expectation, the early eschatology of the Church became a burden to its conductors, inasmuch as expectation of the end of the world made for disorder, and neglect of industry; and Second Thessalonians was written to explain away previous predictions of imminent ending. After the whole mass of such prediction had been falsified by ages of continuance, there was still no critical reaction, simply because religious belief excludes the practice of radical criticism. To this day, orthodoxy has no rational account to give of the pervading doctrine of the New Testament as to the speedy end of the world. The biographical school finds in it a measure of support for its belief in a real Jesus, who shared the delusions of his age. But as that explanation equally applies to all men in the period, it gives the biographical view no standing as against the myth-theory. Christian prophets spoke for “the Lord” just as Jewish prophets did before them.

The biographical school cannot have it both ways. The very fact that they have to oust so many passages on the score of incompatibility is the complete answer to the plea of “genuine because unsuitable to the purposes of the propaganda.” The fact that a multitude of contradictions are left standing proves simply that when once an awkward passage was installed it was nearly impossible to get rid of it; because some copies were always left which retained it; and in the stage of increasing respect for the written word it was generally restored. The “Jesus” before Barabbas was at last ejected only because everybody recoiled from it. Predictions were not so easily dropped.

On the page on which he claims that Jesus’ prediction of his Second Coming could not have been invented, Professor Schmiedel avows that various passages in Mt. xxiv really belong to “a small composition, perhaps Jewish, on the signs of the end of the world, written shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70.” If the one set of passages are borrowed, why not the other? Was it unlikely that Jewish eschatologists should predict the coming of the Son of Man at the near end of the world, and that Jesuists should put the prediction in the mouth of their Lord and make him say it of himself? The à priori negative is quite untenable.

While, then, the argument from unsuitableness is logically barred for the biographical school by their own frequent rejection of passages on the score of incompatibility, no aspect or portion of the New Testament supplies a conclusive argument against the mythological view. The whole constitutes an intelligible set of growths from the point of view of the myth-theory; and from no other is the medley explicable. A biographical theory, having posited a Messiah whose Messianic claim is a mystery, a Teacher whose alleged teachings are a mass of conflicting tendencies, and whose disciples admittedly have no Messianic gospel till after his inexplicable execution, following on an impossible trial, may make the assumption that by way of popular myth he was then fortuitously deified by Messianist Jews, and later transformed by other Jews into a Saviour for Gentiles; but the biographical theory cannot even pretend to account for the Apocalypse and the Didachê; and it has to renounce its own ground principle of “personality” in order to assimilate the Epistles. On critical principles, assent must go to the theory which explains things, reducing the otherwise inexplicable to a natural evolution on the known lines and bases of hierology.

§ 4. Historic Summary

We may now bring together in one outline the series of inductive hypotheses by which we seek to recover the natural evolution of the historic cult.

1. A primitive Semitic sacramental cult, whose sacrament centres in a slain Saviour-God, a Jesus, who has assimilated to an abstraction of the victim annually sacrificed to him—as in the case of the cults of Adonis and Attis, both also Asiatic. Of the sacrificial rite, which in the historic cult is embodied in the Last Supper and the dramatized story of the Passion, the memory was preserved in particular by a Jewish rite of Jesus Barabbas, Jesus the Son of the Father, in which a victim goes through a mock coronation, ending latterly, perhaps, in a mock-execution, where once there had been an actual human sacrifice.

2. This cult, with its sacrament, existed sporadically in various parts of Asia Minor, whence it spread to Greece and Egypt. Its forms would vary, and under Jewish control the sacrificial sacrament tended to be reduced to a Eucharist or thankoffering in which the “body and blood” are only vaguely, if at all, reminiscent of the Divine One’s death. As a God can always be developed indefinitely out of a God-Name, and personal Gods are historically but conceptual aggregates shaped round names or functions, the adherents of this could proselytize like others. When the Temple of Jerusalem fell in the year 70, the adherents of the cult there had a new opportunity and motive, which some of them actively embraced, to cut loose from the Judaic basis and proclaim a religion of universal scope, freed from Judaic trammels and claims. Economic motives played a considerable part in the process.

3. The first tendency of the new Jewish promoters had been to develop the Saviour-God of the sacramental rite (which they may at this stage have adopted in its “pagan” form, now taken as canonical) into a Messiah who was to “come again,” introducing the Jewish “kingdom of heaven.” At a later stage they adopted the rite of baptism, traditionally associated with John, whom they represented as a Forerunner of the Messiah who had met, baptized, and acclaimed him, playing the part assigned by Jewish prophecy to Elias.

4. As time passed on, such a cult would of necessity die out among Jews, in default of the promised “Second Coming.” The connection of the idea of salvation with a future life for all believers, Jew or Gentile, gave it a new and larger lease of life throughout the Roman Empire, in every part of which there were Asiatics. But the Jewish doctrine of the Second Coming remained part of the developed teaching.

5. Further machinery was accordingly necessary to spread and sustain the cult; and this was spontaneously provided by (a) developments of the early and simple propagandist organization, and (b) provision for the needs of the poor, who among the Gentiles as among the Jews were the natural adherents of a faith promising the speedy closing of the earthly scene. Richer sympathizers won esteem by giving their aid; but the poor, as always, helped each other. The propaganda included the services of travelling “prophets,” and “apostles” who would be the natural compilers and inventors of Jesuine lore. The administrative organization, framed on Hellenistic lines, put more and more power in the hands of the bishop, whose interest it was to develop his diocese. At first the “prophets” and “apostles” were strictly peripatetic, being called upon to avoid the appearance of mercenariness. In course of time they were enabled to settle down, being systematically provided for.

6. Under the hands of this organization grew up the Christian Sacred Books, which gave the cult its footing as against, or rather alongside of, the Jewish, which in the circumstances had an irresistible and indispensable prestige. Thus on the literary side the Jewish influence overlaid the non-Jewish, assimilating the outside elements of scattered Jesuism. The earliest literature is Jewish, as in the case of the Didachê, or a Jewish-Jesuist manipulation of outside Semitic matter, as in the Apocalypse. On these foundations are laid “Christian” strata.

7. The Didachê (“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles of the Lord”) was primarily a brief manual of monotheistic and moral instruction used by the Twelve Apostles of the Jewish High Priest. To this, Jesuist matter was gradually added. The result was that “Twelve Apostles” became part of the Christian tradition; and they had ultimately to be imposed on the gospel record, which obviously had not originally that item.

8. The Epistles represent a polemic development, perhaps on the basis of a few short Paulines. That of James, which has no specific “Christian” colour, represents Judaic resistance, in the Ebionite temper of “voluntary poverty,” to the Gentilizing movement. The Paulines carry on doctrinal debate and construction against the Judaistic influence. The synoptic gospels, which in their present forms were developing about the same time, reflect those struggles primarily in anti-Samaritan and pro-Samaritan pronouncements, both ascribed to Jesus. Primarily the gospels are Judaic, and the Gentilizing movement had naturally not employed them. Paul is made in effect to disclaim their aid. In time they are adopted and partly turned to anti-Judaic ends.

9. The chief Gentile achievement in the matter is the development of the primitive sacrament-motive and ritual (fundamentally dramatic) into the mystery-play which is transcribed in the closing chapters of Matthew and Mark. Previous accounts of the foundation of the Sacrament and the death of the Lord are now superseded by a vivid though dramatically brief narrative in which the Jewish people are collectively saddled with the guilt of his death and the Roman government is crudely and impossibly exonerated. The apostles in general are made to play a poor part; one plays an impossible rôle of betrayer; and the legendary Judaizing apostle is made to deny his Master. The whole story is thoroughly unhistorical, from the triumphal Entry to the quasi-regal crucifixion; but it embodied the main ritual features of the traditional human sacrifice, and, there being simply no biographical record to compete with it, it held its ground. The mystery-play in its complete form was inferribly developed and played in a Gentile city; and its transcription probably coincided with its cessation as a drama. But the Sacrament was long a quasi-secret rite.

10. The picture drawn in the Acts, in which Peter and Paul alike “turn to the Gentiles”—Peter taking the initiative—is the work of a late and discreet redactor, bent on reconciling Jewish and Gentile factors. It is a highly factitious account of early Christism; but it preserves traces of the early state of things, in which no Jesuine teaching was pretended to be current, and the cult is seen to exist in a scattered form independently of the central propaganda. It evidently had a footing in Samaria. The synoptics themselves reveal the absence of baptism from the early procedure of the cult. Only in the latest of the four canonical gospels is it pretended that either Jesus or his disciples had baptized.

Such, in outline, is our working hypothesis. As explained at the outset, it is not supposed that so complex a problem can in so brief a space and time be conclusively solved; and criticism will doubtless involve modification when criticism is scientifically applied. To such scientific criticism the production of a complete outline may be an aid; previous debate, even when rational in temper, having been spent on some of the “trees” without regard to the “wood” in general. All that is claimed for the complete hypothesis is that it is at all points inductively reached, and that for that reason it squares better with the whole facts than any form of the biographical theory—including the highly attenuated “eschatological” form in which Jesus is conceived solely as a proclaimer of “the last things.” That thesis, indeed, reduces the biographical theory to complete nullity by leaving the mass of the record without any explanation save the mythical one, which suffices equally to account for eschatology.