The Jesus Problem: A restatement of the myth theory

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFATORY NOTE

THE JESUS PROBLEM

Chapter I

THE APPROACH

Chapter II

THE CENTRAL MYTH

- 1. The Ground of Conflict

- 2. The Sacrificial Rite

- 3. Contingent Elements

- 4. The Mock-King Ritual

- 5. Doctrinal Additions

- 6. Minor Ritual and Myth Elements

- 7. The Cross

- 8. The Suffering Messiah

- 9. The Rock Tomb

- 10. The Resurrection

Chapter III

ROOTS OF THE MYTH

- 1. Historical Data

- 2. Prototypes

- 3. The Mystery-Drama

Chapter IV

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

- 1. The Primary Impulsion

- 2. The Silence of Josephus

- 3. The Myth of the Twelve Apostles

- 4. The Process of Propaganda

- 5. Real Determinants

Chapter V

ORGANIZATION AND ECONOMICS

- 1. The Economic Side

- 2. Organization

Chapter VI

EARLY BOOK-MAKING

-1. The Didachê

- 2. The Apocalypse

- 3. Epistles

Chapter VII

GOSPEL-MAKING

- 1. Tradition

- 2. Schmiedel’s Tests

- 3. Tendential Tests

- 4. Historic Summary

Chapter VIII

SUPPLEMENTARY MYTH

- 1. Myths of Healing

- 2. Birth-Myths

- 3. Minor Myths

Chapter IX

CONCLUSION

Appendix A

THE TEACHING OF THE TWELVE APOSTLES

Appendix B

THE MYTH OF SIMON MAGUS

title

THE JESUS PROBLEM: A RESTATEMENT OF THE MYTHTHEORY

J. M. ROBERTSON

First digital edition 2016 by Anna Ruggieri

PREFATORY NOTE

Most of the propositions in mythology and anthropology in this book are founded on bodies of evidence given in the larger works of the author. It seemed fitting, therefore, to refer to those works instead of repeating hundreds of references there given. Readers concerned to investigate the issues are thus invited and enabled to do so. For brevity’s sake,Christianity and Mythologyis cited asC.M.;Pagan ChristsasP.C.; and theShort Historiesof Christianity and Freethought asS.H.C.andS.H.F.respectively. In the first three cases the references are to the second editions; in the last case, to the third.The Evolution of Statesis cited asE.S.Another work often referred to is Sir J. G. Frazer’s great thesaurus,The Golden Bough, which is cited asG.B.,the references being to the last edition. Other new references are given in the usual way. TheEcce Deusof Professor W. B. Smith is cited in the English edition.

Passages in brackets, in unleaded type, may be passed at a first perusal by readers concerned mainly to follow the constructive theory. Such passages deal controversially with counter-polemic.

THE JESUS PROBLEM. CHAPTER I - THE APPROACH

As was explained in the preamble toThe Historical Jesus(1916), that work was offered as prolegomena to a concise restatement of the theory that the Gospel Jesus is a mythical construction. That theory had been discursively expounded by the writer in two large volumes,Christianity and MythologyandPagan Christs, and summarily inA Short History of Christianity, the argument in the two former combining a negative criticism of the New Testament narrative with an exposition of the myth-evidence. Criticism having in large part taken the form of a denial that the records were unhistorical, it was necessary to clearthe ground by showing that all the various attempts of the past generation to find in the gospels a historical residuum have entirely failed to meet critical tests. Those attempts, conflicting as they do with each other, and collapsing as they do in themselves, give undesigned support to the conclusion that the gospel story is without historic basis.

It remains to restate with equal brevity the myth-theory which, long ago propounded on a very narrow basis, has latterly been re-developed in the light of modern mythology and anthropology, and has in recent years found rapidly increasing acceptance. Inevitably the different lines of approach have involved varieties of speculation; Professors Drews and W. B. Smith have ably and independently developed the theoryin various ways; and a conspectus and restatement has become necessary for the sake of the theory itself no less than for the sake of those readers who call for a condensed statement.

This in turn is in itself tentative. If the progressive analysis of thesubject matter from the point of view of its historicity has meant a century and a half of debate and an immense special literature, it is not to be supposed that the theory which negates the fundamental assumptions of that literature can be fully developed and established in one lifetime, at the hands of a few writers. The problem What really happened? is in fact a far wider one for the advocate of the myth-theory than for the critic who undertakes to extract a biography from the documents. In its firstform, as propounded by Dupuis and Volney, the myth-theory was confined simply to certain parallelisms between Christian and Pagan myth, and to the astronomical basis of a number of these. From this standpoint the actual historic inception of the cult waslittle considered. Strauss, again, developed with great power and precision the view that most of the detail in the gospel narrative is myth construction on the lines of Jewish prophecy and dogma. But Strauss never fully accepted the myth-theory, having always assumed the existence of a teacher as a nucleus for the whole. As apart from the continuators of Dupuis and Volney, it was Bruno Bauer who, setting out with the purpose of extracting a biography from the gospels, and finding no standing ground, firstpropounded a myth-theory from that point of view.

His construction, being the substantially arbitrary one of a hypothetical evangelist who created a myth and thereby founded the cultus, naturally made no headway; and its artificiality strengthened the hands of those who claimed to work inductively on the documents. It was by reason of a similar failure to find a historic footing where he had at first taken it for granted that the present writer was gradually led, on lines of comparative hierology and comparative mythology and anthropology, tothe conception of the evolution of the Jesus-cult from the roots of a pre-Christian one. The fact that this view has been independently reached by such a student as Professor W. B. Smith, who approached the problem from within rather than by way of the comparative method, seems in itself a very important confirmation.

What is now to be done is to revise the general theory in the light of further study as well as of the highly important expositions of it by ProfessorSmith and other scholars. An attempt is now definitely made not merely to combine concisely the evidence for a pre-Christian Jesus-cult, but to show how that historically grew into Christianity, thus substituting a defensible historical view for a mythicnarrative of beginnings. And this, of course, is a heavy undertaking.

The question, What do you put in its place? is often addressed to the destructive critic of a belief, not with any philosophic perception of the fact that complete removal is effectedonly by putting a tested or tenable judgment in place of an untested or untenable one, but with a sense of injury, as if a false belief were a personal possession, for the removal of which there must be compensation. In point of fact, the destructive process is rarely attempted without a coincident process of substitution. Even to say that a particular text is spurious is to say that some one forged or inserted it where it is, for a purpose. That concept is something in its place. Some Comtists, again,are wont to commit the contradiction of affirming that no belief is really destroyed without replacement, and, in the next breath, of condemning rationalists who destroy without replacing. Both propositions cannot stand.

If it be meant merely to insist that explanation is replacement, and that explanation is a necessary part of a successful or complete process of destruction, the answer is that it is hardly possible even to attempt to cancel a belief without putting a different belief in its place; andthat it is nearly always by way of positing a new belief that an old one is assailed. The old charge against rationalism, of destroying without building up, is historically quite false. Almost invariably, the innovator has offered a new doctrine or conception in place of the old. True, it might not be ostensibly an equivalent, for the believer who wanted an equivalent in kind. An exploded God-idea is not for me replaceable by another God-idea: the only rational replacement is a substitution of a reasoned for an authoritarian cosmology and ethic. But in the way of reasoned replacements the innovators have been only too quick, in general, to formulate new conceptions, new creeds. They have really been too eager to build afresh, and many untenable formulasand hypotheses are the consequences.

These very attempts, naturally, are constantly made the objects of still more hasty counter-attack. Every form of the myth-theory with which I am acquainted, whatever its defects, has been the result of much labour, and even if astray can be fairly pronounced hasty only in the sense that it proves to be inadequate. It is not so with most of the counter-criticism. The reader may rest assured that it is not possible for any exposition of the new theory to be as hastyas is usually its rejection.1Professional theologians who cast that epithet are in general recognizably men who believed their hereditary creed before they were able to think, and have at no later stage made good the first inevitable omission.

Myth-theories, sound or unsound, are the attempts of students who find the record incredible as history to think out, in the light of the documents and of comparative mythology and hierology, theprocess by which it came to be produced; and even as all myth is but aform of traditionary error, so any attempt to trace its growth runs the risk of error. It is one thing to show, for instance, that the Pentateuch cannot have been written by Moses, seen to be a non-historical figure: it is another thing to settle how thebooks were really made. In such cases, the something in the place of the tradition is to be ascertained only after long and patient investigation and counter-criticism. So with the investigation of the fabulous history of early Rome. After several scholars had set forth grounded doubts, the problem was ably and systematically handled by the French freethinker Louis de Beaufort in 1738. Early in the nineteenth century, Niebuhr, confidently undertaking with the help of God to get at the truth, and falsely disparaging Beaufort’s work as wholly sceptical, effected a reconstruction which has since been found to be in large measure unsound, though long acquiesced in by English students.2In such matters there is really no finality. If well-documented history must in every age be rewritten, no less inevitable is the re-writing of that which is reached only by processes of inference. And the gospel problem is the hardest of all. Still more than in the case of the Pentateuch problem, many revisions will probably be needed before a generally satisfactory solution is reached.

There is nothing for it but to trace and retrace, consider and reconsider, the inferrible historic process. Met as he is by alternate charges of reckless iconoclasm and hasty construction,the proper course for the holder of the myth-theory is to repeat with dispassionate vigilance both of his processes—to show first that the progressive effort to extract from the gospels a tenable biography has ended in complete critical collapse, revealingonly a tissue of myth; and then to attempt to indicate how the pseudo-history came to be compiled: in other words, how the myth arose. Such has been my procedure in the preceding volume and in this.

It may of course be argued that the previous negativecriticism of the gospel record is indecisive; that the avowal of Loisy: If the trial and condemnation of Jesus, as pretended Messiah, could be put in doubt, we should have no ground for affirming the existence of the Christ, does not commit other inquirers, or that the historicity of the trial story has not really been exploded; that the nullity of the alleged Evangel has not been established; or that the complete destruction of previous biographical theories claimed by Schweitzer for himself and Wrede has not been accomplished. The answer is that these issues are not re-opened in the following chapters. They were carefully handled in the previous volume, to which I have seen no attempt at a comprehensive and reasoned answer.

[The latest attack I have seen comes from a former antagonist, who appears to lay his main complaint against the book on the ground that it omits to noticethetheory of the synoptic problem which appears in every modern text-book, that is, the two-documents hypothesis. And thereemerges this indictment:—

As the theory has a vital bearing on the relative values of different strata of tradition, Mr. Robertson cannot afford to ignore it. If we apply to himself the crude principle he applies to Paul and the evangelists, to wit, that if they don’t mention a thing they don’t know it, we must assume that Mr. Robertson is still ignorant of the very elements of the problem he is professing to solve. Since he has no clear or tenable view of the documents and their relations to one another, he obviously cannot answer the historical questions they raise.3... Presumably he omits to mention it because he does not see its significance.4

Before coming to the main matter, it is necessary to elucidate the charge as to a crude principle applied toPaul and the evangelists. The principle really applied was this, that if Paul in all his writings, apart from two interpolated passages, shows no real knowledge whatever of the gospels, and no knowledge whatever either of the life or the teachings of Jesus as there recorded, we are compelled to infer either that these details were not in any form known to Paul, or that, if he knew them, he did not believe them. It is not a matter of his not knowing athing: that is the sophism of the critic; it is a matter of his not knowinganything on the subject. And so with the synoptics and the fourth gospel. When one side relates something vital to the record, of which the other side shows no knowledge whatever5—as, for instance, great miracles—we are bound to infer that the silent side, when it is the earlier record, either did not know or did not believe the story. Or, again, when John alleges that the disciples baptized freely and the synoptics make no mention of it, it is clear that we cannot suppose them, inthe alleged circumstances, to have been ignorant of such a fact; while, if they are supposed to have known it and yet to have kept silence, their credit as historians is gravely shaken. The principle, in fact, is that of critical common-sense; and the critic’s version of it is a forensic perversion.

On the next issue, it is perhaps well to explain to the lay reader that the two-documents hypothesis is simply what Schmiedel—with a very justifiable implication—named theso-calledtheory of two sources,a mere aspect of the borrowing hypothesis which constitutes the main substance of the bulk of the documentary discussion of the gospels in the last century, and which is simply the most obvious way of attempting to explain the documentary phenomena. It dates from Papias. As the critic asseverates, it isthetheory of the text-books in general. And for themainpurposes of historic comprehension, it is neither here nor there. The theory of two sources cannot possibly cover all the data, even from the biographical point of view. The effect of Schmiedel’s article—a model of critical honesty and general good sense which his successors might usefully strive to copy in those regards—is to show that the hypothesis is quite inadequate even as adocumentarytheory;and from the point of view of the rational student it is simply neutral to the vital question, What really did happen, in the main? He who has realized that the Entry, the Betrayal, the Last Supper, the Agony, the Trials, and the Crucifixion, are all as mythical as the Resurrection, is notat that pointconcerned with the dispute as to priority among the gospels, or any sections of them.Nodocumentary hypothesis can possibly make the myth true.

At the vital point, in fact, the two-documents hypothesis isnot even ostensibly applicable: the synoptic narrative isoneprimary narrative, subjected to minor modifications. It is admitted by Harnack to have been absent from Q, theLogoisource held to have been drawn upon by Matthew and Luke. And that one narrative, as I have argued, is not in origin a gospel narrative at all, but the simple transcript of a mystery-drama, with almost the minimum of necessary narrative insertion. If the exegete could bring himself to contemplate rationallymyhypothesis, he might find his documentary labours lightened.6

It is doubtless true that the determination of the earlier as against the later form of a minor narrative episode, or of a teaching, is often essential to the framing of a true notion as to its mode of entrance; and such determination I have attempted many times. But the notion that historicity is a matter of priority of documents is, as Schmiedel sees, the fallacy of fallacies. Prisoned in that presupposition, exegetes defending the record achieve inevitably the very failure they impute: they are ignorant of the very elements of the problem they are professing to solve—that is, the problem of what really happened. They cannot realize the conditions under which the gospels were compiled. They construct what they think a clearortenable view of the documents by the process of evading the considerations which make ituntenable or inadequate, and then demand that their documentary formula shall be met by onein pari materia. The answer to them is that their psychological as well as their historical assumptions are false. Things did not happen in that way. And two versions of a palpable myth do not make for its historicity. There are two or more versions of most myths.

The indictment before us, in short, is an illustration of the mode of theological fence discussed above. You undertake to show that the most alert presentments of a given historical conception fail to stand critical tests, and you are met with the reply: We are not concerned to discuss the presentments you deal with, which are not generally accepted: we demand that you discuss instead the documentary theory which in those presentments is treated as obsolete. If you do not do this, you show you are incompetent. When on the other hand the critical significance of an older theory is indicated, the reply is made that that theory is obsolete. One theory is too new, another is too old, for discussion. All the while, the theory founded-on for the defence is really the oldest of all. It was in fact the obvious inadequacy of the familiar documentary hypothesis that dictated our discussion of more up-to-date theories, as it had elicited these. If our exegete’s favourite hypothesis had had any power of satisfying independent students, we should not have had such treatises as those of the Rev. Dr. Wright and Dr. Flinders Petrie, or the searching analysis and commentary of M. Loisy, to say nothing of the vigorous Dr. Blass.

In dealing with such writers, and particularly in following the real procedure of M. Loisy on the main issues of historical fact, I took what seemed to me the candid controversial course. To resort instead to a mere exposure of the obvious insufficiency of the two-documents hypothesis would be like arguing as if Genesis were the only alternative to the Darwinian theory. Dr. Wright’s oral hypothesis is a vivid and interesting revival of what, as I pointed out, had long ago been the predominant view.7Our exegete nevertheless affirms that I regard it as something new in England. To the lay reader I would again explain the situation thushandled. Theological discussion on the gospels has moved in cycles, by reason of the invariable presupposition as to historicity, which was a main factor in the partial failure of the mythical theory as introduced by Strauss. As I expressly stated, the oral hypothesis was before Strauss well established. Then ensued the age-long discussion of documentary hypotheses. At the close of the nineteenth century we find Schmiedel saying:

Lastly, scholars are alsobeginning to rememberthat the evangelists did not need to draw their material from books alone, but that from youth up they were acquainted with it from oral narration and could easily commit it to writing precisely in this form in either case—whether they had it before them in no written form, or whether they had it in different written form. In this matter, again, we are beginning to be on our guard against the error of supposing that in the synoptical problem we have to reckon merely with given quantities, or with such as can be easily ascertained.8

If I had written that, I should doubtless be told that I regarded the oral hypothesis as new. Dr. Schmiedel, it is to be hoped, may escape the aspersive method of my critic. In point of fact, a return tothe oral hypothesis was inevitable in view of the insufficiency of the other. Unfortunately it has been made on the old and fatal presupposition of the historicity of the myth; but, as made by Dr. Wright, it seemed well worth critical consideration. My critic disparages that and other propaganda as commanding nolargemeasure of assent anywhere. My testimony, I fear, will not help Dr. Wright; but I will say that I found him an honest and extremely interesting writer, admirably free from theological malice, and above all exhibiting a thoroughly independent hold of his thesis. What amount of assent he has secured is an irrelevant issue. I can only say that I found him very readable. The scholarly and intellectual status of Dr. Flinders Petrie, again, is suchas perhaps to make it unnecessary to say—as against similar disparagement in his case—that a thesis seriously and vigorously embraced by him as superseding the older documentary and oral hypotheses alike, seemed to me well entitled to consideration.]

Theexamination of the recent positions of independent writers seeking to construct a documentary theory has, I think, sufficed to safeguard the honest lay student of the myth-theory against the kind of spurious rebuttal set up by those who, themselves innocent of all original research, pretend that the fundamental historicity of the gospels is established by a consensus of scholarship. There is no consensus of scholarship. I observe that M. Loisy, to whom I devoted special study, is journalistically disparaged by the Very Rev. Dean Inge. That disparagement—which, I also observe, I have the undeserved honour to share—will not impose upon serious students, who will realize that Dean Inge, himself transparently unorthodox, has no resource in such matters but todisparage all who labour with any measure of rational purpose to put concrete conclusions where church dignitaries inevitably prefer to maintain rhetorical mystification. For the purposes of serious students, M. Loisy is an important investigator, Dean Inge a negligible essayist.

It is true that one of the positions I discussed—that of the school of Weiss—is not new. But in that case the reason for selection was not merely that it was one of the efforts to reach something less neutral than the two-documents hypothesis, but that it is in substance the position of some of the most recent and most virulent English critics of the myth-theory. It is in fact the gist of the polemic of Dr. Conybeare. I have shown, accordingly, that the thesis of a primary biography is psychologically absurd in itself; and, further, that like all the other documentary hypotheses it has been left high and dry by the latest German exegetes, who, expressly assuming the historicity of a Jesus, and founding on the gospels for their case, reduce these to a minimum of tradition at which M. Loisy must stand aghast. It is in England, in short, that the biographical school, as represented by Dean Inge and Dr. Conybeare, is seen to be most entirely out of touch with the movement of rationalcriticism.

It is in England, too, that we find the most uncritical reliance put upon the impression of a personality said to be set up by the gospels. This argument is still used without any attempt at psychological self-analysis, any effort to find outwhat an impression is worth. A generation or two ago, exactly the same position was taken up in regard to the fourth gospel: both the Arnolds, for instance, were confident that the vision of Jesus there given was peculiarly real. Critical study has sinceforced all save the sworn traditionalists and