Note 47 — Chapter III · ROOTS OF THE MYTH

Finally, we have seen that a rite of “Jesus the Son,” otherwise known as the “Week of the Son,” was actually specified by the Talmudists of the period of the fall of the Temple. Taken with the item of the name Jesus Barabbas, “Jesus the Son of the Father,” and the five-days’ duration of the ritual of the sacrificed Mock-King, it completes a body of Jewish evidence for the pre-Christian currency of the name Jesus as a cult-name of some kind. It is now possible to see at once the force of the primary thesis of Professor W. B. Smith47 that the phrase τὰ περὶ τοῦ Ἰησοῦ, “the things concerning the Jesus,” in the Gospels and the Acts,48 tells of a body of Jesus-lore of some kind prior to the gospel story; and also the significance of the fact that the narrative of the Acts represents the new apostle as finding Jesus-worshippers, albeit in small numbers, wherever he went.