Note 30 — Chapter III · ROOTS OF THE MYTH

That Galilean or other Jews or semi-Jews, always in a partly hostile relation to priests, scribes, and Pharisees, should in an age of chronic war, disaster and revolution, maintain an old private sacrament, with a subordinate worship of a Hero-God Jesus whose body and blood had once literally and now symbolically brought salvation, is not an unlikely but a likely hypothesis. The gospels themselves indicate an attitude of demotic hostility alike to the king, the priests, the scribes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees. It is not pretended that before and apart from Jesus there was no such hostility, and that he generated it by his teaching. In a united community such hostility could not be so generated. It was there to start with. If then cults of Dionysos and Attis and Adonis, the annually dying and suffering demigods, could openly subsist in the Hellenistic world alongside of the State cults of Zeus and the other chief Gods, a secret cult of a Hero-God Jesus could subsist in some part of Jewry, with its survivals of rural paganism and its many contacts and mixtures with Samaritan schism and Hellenistic culture. Yet further, if the popular needs of the Hellenistic world could elicit and maintain a multitude of private religious associations, each with its own sacramental meal,30 the same needs could elicit and maintain them elsewhere.