Note 19 — Chapter VIII · SUPPLEMENTARY MYTH

All this is ostensibly “sun-myth.” And we are asked by Dr. Conybeare to believe, on the strength of one late and palpable interpolation in Mark, which has no other word concerning the childhood, parentage, or birthplace of Jesus, its Son of God, that his mother Mary was a well-known figure in Nazareth about the year 30, and that it is merely she who is made to play the mythic part in Matthew about a century later. The simple use of common-sense, even by a reader who has not studied comparative mythology, will reveal the improbability of such a development; and Dr. Conybeare, who vehemently denies, for other purposes, that the early Christians in Palestine could have any knowledge of pagan myths, is the last person who could consistently affirm it. But when we realize that under the shell of official Judaism there subsisted in Palestine as everywhere else the folk-lore of the past;19 when we remember the “weeping for Tammuz” at Jerusalem and the location of the birth of Adonis in the very stable-cave of the Christ-legend at Bethlehem, we can quite rationally conceive how, once the Jesus-myth was well re-established, old pre-Judaic elements of it came to the front, and found from the later gospel-compilers a welcome they could not have had in the Judaizing days.20