Читать книгу The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory - J. M. Robertson - Страница 10

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It is needless for the defender of the biographical theory to interject a protest that the Barabbas story is only one item in the case. The other items will all be dealt with in turn: that has been put in the front because of its crucial significance. Incidentally it may be further noted that the myth-theory explains the plainly unhistorical item of “the thirty pieces of silver,” confusedly explained from “the prophet Jeremy” as “the price of him that was priced, whom [certain] of the children of Israel did price” (Mt. xxvii, 9). The reference is really to Zechariah (xi, 12, 13).

The story of the Betrayal is fiction on the very face of the narrative, Judas being employed to point out a personage of declared notoriety, about whose movements there had been no secrecy.50 Judas is demonstrably a somewhat late figure in the gospel legend, coming from the later Mystery Drama, not from the rite on which it was built. But, whatever may be the solution of the cryptogram about the potter’s field and the thirty pieces of silver in Zechariah, or the historic fact about Aceldama, one thing is clear: “the price of him that was priced,” in Matthew, tells of the usage of paying a price for sacrificial victims.

It does not follow that a price was regularly paid in the case of the Jesus Barabbas rite, though the record actually insists on the item by way of the Judas story: what is clear is that a memory of bought victims subsisted after the fall of Jerusalem. It is not unlikely that “Aceldama” was a field where sacrificial victims were either slain or buried, or both. A passage in the Kalika Purana suggests the procedure, and the probable significance of Golgotha, the “place of skulls.” In the Hindu rite, the human victim was immolated “at a cemetery or holy place,” upon which the sacrificer was not to look; and the head was presented in “the place of skulls, sacred to Bhoiruvu” (God of Fear). This could be in a special temple, or in a part of the cemetery, “or on a mountain.”51

At this point a warning must be given against the confusion set up by the habitual assumption that “something of the kind” occurred under Pontius Pilate. It is only on the biographical theory that that date is valid. Pontius Pilate is simply a figure in the later Mystery Drama, originally chosen, probably, because of his notoriety as a shedder of Jewish blood.52 We are not bound to prove that at his date the usage of ritual human sacrifice, real or pretended, survived at Jerusalem, though it may have done, as it survived at Rhodes in the time of Porphyry in the form, perhaps, of a Semitic mystery drama.53

It is the assumption of the historicity of the Crucifixion that partly disarms the theorem of Sir J. G. Frazer as to a coincidence of Jewish sacrificial rites.54 Noting that the details of the Crucifixion closely conform to those of a human sacrifice sometimes practised in the Christian era in connection with the Roman Saturnalia, and also to those of a real or mock rite connected with the Babylonian feast of the Sacæa, he resorts to the alternative hypotheses (a) that the analogous Jewish feast of Purim, imported from Babylon after the Return, and also involving either a real or a mock crucifixion, chanced to coincide with the actual crucifixion of the gospel Jesus; or that (b) Christian tradition “shifted the date of the crucifixion by a month or so” to connect it with the Passover. As the official Purim rite, though cognate with that of the Passover, cannot well have been allowed to coincide with it, the theory of coincidence is barred; and the theorist is assured by an expert colleague that “all that we hear of the Passion is only explicable by the Passover festival,” and that “without the background of the festival all that we know of the Crucifixion and of what led up to it is totally unintelligible.”55

When, however, the unhistorical character of the gospel narrative is realized, such difficulties disappear. The intention was certainly to connect the Crucifixion with the Passover (in which the paschal lamb—symbolizing Isaac—was customarily dressed in the form of a cross56); and in the fourth gospel Jesus becomes an actual Passover sacrifice. But the narrative is simply a reduction to historic form of the procedure of a customary ritual sacrifice, habitual usages of human sacrifice being represented as expedients of a single Roman execution. With the exact seasonal date of the Jesus Barabbas rite which here motived the gospel legend, the myth-theory is not primarily concerned, though it has secondary interest. It was probably a Spring Festival, and at the same time a New Year Festival, the period of the vernal equinox having been both in east and west the time of the New Year before that was placed after the winter solstice. It is thus highly likely that there were analogous sacrificial festivals at Yule and at Easter, one celebrating the new-birth of the sun and the other the revival of vegetation. The Sacæa festival may or may not have been identical with that known from the monuments to have been called the Zakmuk57 (New Year): either way, the features may have been the same. There was in Judea, further, a hieratic year as well as a civil, a Lesser Passover as well as the greater.58 The myth-theory does not depend on an agreed date, though the myth fixes on an astronomical date, itself constantly varying in the calendar.

What leaps to the eyes is that the gospel legend preserves two separated features of the festival of a Sacrificed Mock-King, which as incidents in the life of the Teacher are wholly incompatible, and which the biographical theory cannot reasonably explain—the acclaimed and welcomed Entry into Jerusalem and within a week the demand of the city multitude for the crucifixion. The Entry is an elaboration of several myth elements, but it contains the item of the acclaimed ride of the quasi-king, mounted on an ass (or two asses). If the biographical school would but consider historical probabilities, they would realize that the story as told cannot be historical, with or without the strange antithesis of the multitude’s speedy demand for the prophet’s death. Such a triumphal entry, for such a person as the gospel Jesus, could not spontaneously have taken place: it must have been planned; and, if arranged with such an effect as the record describes, it would have given Pilate very sufficient ground for intervention without waiting for a complaint from the priests. Taken as history, it is wholly irreconcilable with the “Crucify him” ascribed to a multitude whose support of Jesus had been affirmed the day before; and accordingly M. Loisy, accepting the Entry, rejects the latter episode. Strauss, hesitating to go, “as has latterly often been done,” the length of rejecting the Entry on the ass as wholly mythical, finds it very much so;59 and Brandt incidentally dismisses it as “under the strongest suspicion of being framed upon Old Testament motives from beginning to end.”60

Thus the biographical school itself proffers a myth-theory, without indicating an explanatory motive for the positing of a contradiction. But when we realize that an acclamation of a quasi-king riding on an ass was actually part of the ritual in a sacrificial rite in which he was to be crucified, the two clashing elements in the legend are at once explained in the full myth-theory. Their separate handling and development was, just as intelligibly, part of the process of gospel-making, the creation of an ideal Jesus. But seeing that in the Sacæa festival the mock-king had a five days’ reign between his start and his death,61 the original ritual gave the interval which in the gospel story is filled with the acts of the Teaching God. Five days is the accepted traditional interval from Palm Sunday to Crucifixion Day.

[Even for the item of the two asses in Matthew there is a myth-explanation. Many writers of the biographical school, who compensate themselves for their difficulties by ascribing a peculiarly crass stupidity to the apostles and evangelists at every opportunity, decide that the narrator or interpolator posited the two asses, an ass and its colt, because he found in Zechariah a Messianic prediction so phrased,62 and did not understand that the Hebraic idiom simply meant “an ass.” Yet one member of the school, Dr. Conybeare, fiercely denounces myth-theorists for claiming to understand Jewish symbolism better than the Jews did. Either principle serves the turn. When Tertullian says that Jesus is the Divine Fish because fishes were parthenogenetically born, and Jesus was born again in the waters of the Jordan, Dr. Conybeare is sure of the wisdom of Tertullian. This thesis, first found in Tertullian, is to decide the question, to the exclusion of any reflection on the fact that the Sun at Easter had before the Christian era passed from the sign Aries to the sign Pisces in the zodiac. But when Matthew reads Zechariah’s two asses as meaning two asses, Matthew is to be dismissed as a Jew who did not understand the commonest Hebrew idiom.

The simple fact that the Septuagint does not give the duplication, putting only “a young colt,” will serve to indicate to any careful reader that the evangelist or interpolator was following the Hebrew, and therefore is to be presumed to have known something of Hebrew idiom. And the just critical inference is that both passages had regard to the zodiacal figure of the Two Asses for the sign Cancer, from which we have the myth of Bacchus riding on two asses.63 Further, it is probable that the similar passage in the Song of Jacob64 has also a zodiacal basis. These details, which Dr. Conybeare absolutely withholds from his readers, indicate the mythological induction put by the present writer. In an unconstruable sentence, Dr. Conybeare appears to argue65 that to secure any consideration for such a thesis we must “prove that the earliest Christians, who were Jews, must have been familiar with the rare legend of Bacchus crossing a marsh on two asses,” and “with the rare representation of the zodiacal sign Cancer as an ass and its foal.”

How the critic knows that the legend was rare at the beginning of the Christian era he does not reveal; any more than he gives his justification for calling the Asses sign rare in the face of the statement of Lactantius that the Greeks call the sign of Cancer “(the) Asses.” This reference was given by me, as also the item that the sign of the Ass and Foal is Babylonian. It was thus very likely to be known in the Semitic world. Yet Dr. Conybeare obliviously informs us that “it is next to impossible” that it should be known to “the earliest Christians,” when all the while he is arguing that Matthew was not the gospel of “the earliest Christians.” It is in perfect keeping with this chaotic procedure that he first oracularly refers me to Hyginus, whose version of the myth of Bacchus and the asses I had actually cited and quoted; and then, discovering that I had done so, yet leaving his written exhortation unaltered, he announces that “by Mr. Robertson’s own admission, Bacchus never rode on two asses at all.” It is difficult to be sure whether Dr. Conybeare does or does not believe in the historicity of Bacchus, as he does in that of Jesus; but seeing that Lactantius, as cited by me, expressly declares that the two asses (= Cancer) carried Bacchus over the marsh, and that Dr. Conybeare had already recognized that such a myth existed, his absurd conclusion can be set down only to his habitual incoherence.

I have dealt in detail with his futile criticism at this point by way of putting the reader on his guard against the method of bluster. Comparative mythology is a difficult and thorny field, but it has to be explored; and Dr. Conybeare, whose study of the subject seems to have begun in the year of the issue of his book,66 does not even discern the nature of its problems. He avowedly supposes that totems are Gods; and he argues that the Jewish and Hellenistic world in the age of Augustus was at the mythopœic stage of the Australian aborigines of to-day. Of the phenomena of iconographic myth he is evidently quite ignorant; and his dithyramb on the sun myth tells of nothing but obsolete debate on the question. And it is in this connection that he informs his antagonists, in his now celebrated academic manner, that they are “a back number.”

It has only to be added that as regards the documentary problem, in this connection, Dr. Conybeare is equally distracted. It is far from certain that at this point Mark’s “colt” is not a “rectification” of an original which Matthew accepted. The assumption—negatived by themselves—that Mark and Matthew as we have them are both primary forms, Matthew always following and elaborating Mark, is one of the loose hypotheses which such critics when it suits them take for certainties. But the question of priority of form does not affect the fundamental issue. One of the suggestions put by me which Dr. Conybeare has carefully withheld from his readers—if, indeed, he ever really sees what is before him—is that the item of the single ass or colt is probably a myth with another basis. “An ass tied” appears to have been an Egyptian symbol pointing to a solar date or a zodiacal or other myth,67 and this symbol, which is found in the Song of Jacob, is the form put upon the Mark story by Justin Martyr. That the other symbol had a long Christian vogue is indicated first by the fact that there actually exists a Gnostic gem showing an ass suckling its foal, with the figure of the crab (Cancer) above, and the inscription D.N. IHV. XPS., DEI FILIUS = Dominus Noster Jesu (?) Christus, Son of God;68 and, secondly, by the mention of the ass and foal in the third Sermon of St. Proclus (5th c.).69 These details also Dr. Conybeare withholds from his readers, for the purposes of his polemic.

That we are dealing with a conflict of symbolisms will probably be the inference of those who will face the facts. But Dr. Conybeare, who is here in good company, is quite satisfied that behind the Mark story of Jesus riding in a noisy procession on an unbroken colt we have unquestionable history. There must be no nonsense about two asses; but for him the story of the unbroken colt raises no difficulty. He further simplifies the problem by summarizing Mark as telling that “an insignificant triumphal demonstration is organized for him [Jesus] as he enters the sacred city on an ass”;70 and by explaining that “there was no other way of entering Jerusalem unless you went on foot.”71 The “insignificant” is held to be sufficient to dispose of the problem of the Roman Governor’s entire indifference to a Messianic movement. Thus functions the biographic method, in the hands of our academician.

All the while, the item of the foal is, on his own interpretation, a specified fulfilment of a prophecy, only in this case the prophecy is in his opinion rightly understood, whereas in the two-ass story it was misunderstood. By his own method, the critic is committed to the position that the phrase “whereon no man ever yet sat” is myth.72 For serious critics in general, this is sufficient to put in doubt the whole story. For our critic, a story of a triumphal procession, with an unbroken colt, is simply resolved into one of an “insignificant procession,” with an ordinary donkey. Thus, under the pretence of extracting history from a given document, the document is simply manipulated at will to suit a presupposition. On this plan, the twelve labours of Herakles are simply history exaggerated, and any one can make any Life of Herakles out of it at his pleasure. We must not say that Una rode on a lion, but we may infer that she rode on a small yellow pony. It is the method of the early German deistic rationalists, according to which the story of Jesus walking on the water is saved by the explanation that he was walking on the shore.]

Part of the demonstration of the myth-theory, again, lies in the fact that the first act of Jesus after his entry is to “cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrow the tables of the money-changers, and the seats of them that sold the doves.” That this should have been accomplished without resistance seemed to Origen so astonishing that he pronounced it among the greatest miracles of Jesus,73 adding the skeptical comment—“if it really happened.” The myth-theory may here claim the support of Origen.

Strauss could find no ground for rejecting the story as myth upon his method of finding myth-motives only in the Old Testament. If he had lived in our day he would probably have agreed that the episode is singled out of the kinds of exploit which were permitted to the victim in the Sacæa and the Saturnalia and such primitive sacrificial festivals in general, and turned to a doctrinal account. Such liberties as are described, all falling short of sacrilege, are among those which could normally take place. It is by way of anti-Judaism that the episode is utilized in the synoptics.

In the fourth gospel, where so many matters are turned to new account, and so much new doctrine introduced, the purification is put with symbolic purpose at the outset of the Messiah’s career, in a visit to Jerusalem of which the synoptics know nothing; and in this myth Jesus makes “a scourge of small cords” to effect his purpose. That later item was probably suggested by the effigy of the Egyptian Saviour God Osiris, who bears a scourge as the God of retribution. In the synoptics there is no symbol: the story is simply employed as part of the superadded didactic machinery which alternately exhibits the full development of the Messiah and the unfitness of the “Jewish dispensation” to continue. Inferribly, the story of the fig-tree is in the same case, signifying the condemnation of the Jewish cult, though here there may be a concrete motive of which we have lost the clue. But it is significant that while the gospel record could not possibly assign to the holy Messiah such a general course as was followed by the licensed sacrificial victim, it follows the story of his Entry with that of one markedly disorderly act; whereafter he goes to lodge in Bethany (Mt. xxi, 17) at a house which later is indicated as that of a leper (xxvi, 6). There his head is anointed by a woman; who in Luke, in a differently placed episode (vii, 37), becomes “a sinner.” Is not this another echo from the obscure tragedy of the sacrificial victim, who was anointed for his doom?