Note 59 — Chapter III · ROOTS OF THE MYTH

It matters not whether the writer was or was not a confident Christian: Judaic by upbringing or tuition he certainly was; and his identification of Jesus the Christ with Joshua is one more of the proofs that for many Jews Joshua had a quasi-divine status, as was fitting for a personage who “made the sun stand still.” Taken collectively, the proofs cannot be overridden or explained away. Joshua was for the Jews of the Hellenistic period the actual founder of the rite of circumcision:59 that is to say, mythologically, he was the God of the rite. But still more weighty is the evidence that his name lived on as that of the God-victim of a kindred rite; and it is on that basis that there was founded the rite which is for Christianity what circumcision had been for Judaism. Circumcision is a rite of redemption, the giving of a symbolic part of the body to “redeem” the whole—a surrogate for the Passover sacrifice of the first-born, developed into a racial theocratic rite. It is significant that the Saviour-God of this rite becomes the Saviour-God of the rite offered in place of that of the Passover, whereby the primordial human sacrifice is re-typified in that of the deity who once for all dies for all. It is upon such roots of pre-historic religion that the world-religions grow.