Читать книгу The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory - J. M. Robertson - Страница 11

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Separately considered, the Crucifixion in the gospel story is as impossible as the Entry. The cross, we are told, was headed with an inscription: “This is the King of the Jews.” Sir J. G. Frazer74 and M. Salomon Reinach75 concur in recognizing that if the victim had really been executed on the charge of making such a claim, no Roman governor would have dared so to endorse it.76 The argument is that only by turning the execution into a celebration of a popular rite could the procedure have been made officially acceptable. But to extract such an explanation from the record is simply to stultify it as such. If there really occurred such a manipulation of the death-scene of an adored Teacher, how could the narrators possibly fail to say as much? We are asked by the biographical school to believe that the Crucifixion was made a farce-tragedy by treating the Teacher as the victim in a well-known rite of human sacrifice, and also to believe that the devotees who preserved the record, knowing this fact, chose to say nothing about it, preferring to represent the procedure as a unique incident.

It might perhaps be argued, on the biographical view, that the Roman soldiers, who are held to have been Asiatics, chose to improvise a version of a sacrificial rite which was unknown to the Jesuists, and that the latter simply reported the episode without understanding it, interpreting it from their prophets in their own way. But if the record be historical it is incredible that in a cult which is claimed to have made many adherents throughout the Roman Empire in east and west in a generation or two, it should not quickly have become known that the procedure of the Crucifixion was a copy of popular eastern and western rites of human sacrifice. If there had taken place what the hypothesis suggests, there was a purposive suppression. That is to say, the credibility of the narrative is at this point vitally impeached by a supporter of the biographical theory, which expressly rests on the narrative as regards non-miraculous data.

And while on the one hand it is in effect charged with the gravest suppressio veri, on the other it is charged, equally in the name of the biographical view, with something more than suggestio falsi, with absolute fiction. M. Loisy does not merely dismiss the Barabbas story as unhistorical, offering no explanation of its strange presence: he comes critically to the conclusion that Jesus on the cross uttered no word, whether of despair, entreaty, or resignation. We need not ask what kind of credit M. Loisy can ask for a record which he thus so gravely discredits. The scientific question is, Upon what grounds can he demur to the extension of a myth-theory to which he thus contributes? If the record admittedly invented utterances for the Teacher on the cross, why should not the whole be an invention? In particular, why should not the trial before Pilate and the inscription on the cross be inventions?

The inscription on the cross, we see, is for the great anthropologist of the school impossible save as part of a simulated ritual. M. Loisy, supporting the same general thesis, declares that “to say Jesus was not condemned to death as king of the Jews, that is to say, as Messiah, on his own avowal, amounts to saying [autant vaut soutenir] that he never existed.”77 It is even so; and the supporter of the myth-theory is thus doubly justified. The loyal induction is, not that in any rite of human sacrifice exactly such a label was affixed to the gibbet, but that probably some label was, and that the gospel framers (or one of them) “invented” a label which stated their claim for Jesus as Messiah. It was a fairly skilful thing to do, representing the label as a Roman mockery, and thereby making it an appeal to every Jew.78 It is indeed conceivable that Roman soldiers taking part, once in a way, in the rite of Jesus Barabbas, may have turned that to a purpose of contempt by labelling the poor mock-king as the king of the Jews. But such an episode would not be the enactment of the scene described in the record. It would merely be a hint for it, the acceptance of which was but an additional item of fiction.

That the Crucifixion, as described, is a normal act of ritual human sacrifice, is even more true than it is shown to be by the parallels of the Sacæa and the Saturnalia. The scourging, the royal robe, the mock crown, were all parts of those rituals, which thus conform in parody to the ritual of the mythic sacrifice of Ieoud, son of Kronos, probably parodied in the ritual for the victim sacrificed to Kronos at Rhodes. But so are the drink of wine and myrrh, the leg-breaking, and the piercing with the spear. The crown is a feature of all ancient sacrifice, in all parts of the world. Crowns of flowers were normal in the case of human victims, in India, in Mexico, in Greece, and among the North-American Indians, as in ordinary animal sacrifice among the Greeks, Romans, and Semites. But even the crown of thorns had a special religious vogue in Egypt, procured as such crowns were from thorn-trees near Abydos whose branches curled into garland-form. Prometheus the Saviour, too, receives from Zeus a crown of osiers; and his worshippers wore crowns in his honour.79 Either some such special motive or the common practice in the popular rite will account for the record.

And these items of the mock-king ritual exclude the argument which might possibly be brought from the fact that in the ancient world, as among primitives in general, all executions, as such, tend to assume the sacrificial form. The condemned criminal is “devoted,” sacer, taboo, even as is the simply sacrificed victim, becoming the appanage of the God as is the God’s representative who is sacrificed to the God.80 It might therefore be argued that a man condemned on purely political grounds could be treated as a sacrificial victim. But there is no instance of the criminal executed as such being treated as the mock-king. A criminal might be turned to that account, but that would be by special arrangement: executed simply as a criminal, he would not be crowned and royally robed. These details were features of specific sacrifices: executions were only generically sacrificial, and were of course in no way honorary. In the gospel story, the two thieves are neither mocked, robed, nor crowned. They are not “Sons of the Father,” or deputies of the King.