Читать книгу The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory - J. M. Robertson - Страница 13

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In the later myth the robbers, as it happens, are made to embody certain features of sacrificial ritual. We are told in the fourth gospel that the Jews “asked of Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away,”—“that the bodies should not remain on the cross upon the sabbath, for the day of that sabbath was a high day.” Accordingly the soldiers break the legs of the two thieves, “but when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs.” The implication is that the men’s legs were to be broken by way of killing them—a patently untrue suggestion.88 The spear-thrust which “howbeit” was given to Jesus would have been the way of killing the others if they were alive: breaking the legs was a brutality which would not ensure death.

The explanation is that both leg-breaking and spearing were features of sacrificial rites. It may have been by way of purposive contrast to the former procedure that in the priestly ritual89 of the passover it is enacted that no bone of the (unspecified) victim shall be broken. The breaking of the leg-bones in human sacrifice was one of the horrible expedients of the primitive world for securing the apparent willingness of the victim: it is to be found alike in Dravidian and in African sacrifice.90 An alternative method, which tended to supersede the other, was that of drugging or intoxication, of which we find still more widespread evidence. In ancient Jerusalem, we find the practice transferred to ordinary execution on the cross, the humane women making a practice of giving a narcotic potion of wine and incense to the victim.91 Thus associated with the deaths of ordinary criminals, it suggested to some of the Jesuist myth-makers a ground for specializing the record.

In the first two gospels, a drink is offered to Jesus on the cross—wine92 mingled with gall, in Matthew; wine mingled with myrrh in Mark—“but he received it not”; this, in Matthew, after tasting. The Marcan form is probably the first, as it describes the customary narcotic: the idea is to indicate that in the case of the divine victim no artifice was needed to secure an apparent acquiescence: he was a voluntary sufferer. “Gall,” in Matthew, may have reference to pagan mysteries in which a drink of gall figured.93 In Luke, vinegar is ostensibly offered as part of the derision. In John, no drink is mentioned till the end, when the dying victim says, “I thirst.” Having partaken of “a sponge full of the vinegar upon hyssop,” he says, “It is finished,” and dies. In Matthew, this act of compassion takes a simpler form, the sponge of vinegar being given on the utterance of the despairing cry, while other bystanders jeer: in Mark, the giver of the sponge also jeers.

It is needless to debate long over the priorities of such details: as regards the drink of vinegar, all alike have regard to Psalm lxix, 21: “They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” For that reason, the wine-and-myrrh item is probably primordial: it tells of the sacrificial rite; and the drink of vinegar is a doctrinal addition; even as the rejection of the narcotic is doctrinal. For the variations which distinguish each narrative from the others, there is no reasonable explanation on the biographical view: if devoted onlookers could not preserve the truth at such a point, where could they be trusted? The mythical interpretation alone makes all intelligible.

The fourth gospel, with its tale of the leg-breaking, supplies the strongest ground for surmising the occasional occurrence of a triple rite, in which the lesser victims were treated as sacrificed slaves normally have been in African and other human sacrifice, while the central victim was put on another footing. The express enactment in regard to the mysterious paschal sacrifice suggests that bone-breaking took place in others. In all likelihood, the original paschal sacrifice was that of a human victim of specially high grade: the substitution of the lamb was part of the process of civilization indicated in the myth of Abraham and Isaac. And if the knowledge of the death-rite of Jesus Barabbas could subsist in the first century or later, knowledge of an early triple rite could subsist also. But this remains open to doubt, though at several points the fourth gospel specially emphasizes the historical derivation of the cult from a sacrament of blood sacrifice.

Nowhere else is the literal basis of the symbol of “body and blood” so insisted upon. Its writers had present to their minds an actual ritual in which the eating of the body of a Sacrificed God, first actually, then symbolically, was of cardinal importance. The later myth puts new stress on the conception, as if it had been felt that the earlier was not sufficiently explicit; and it makes the Jewish high-priest lay down the doctrine of human sacrifice from the Judaic side.94 It is in this atmosphere of sacrificial ideas that we get the item of the piercing of the divine victim with a spear. The detail is turned specially to the account of the Johannine doctrine of resurrection by putting what passed in popular physiology for a certain proof of death—the issuing of “blood and water.”95 But here again we find both a Hebrew motive96 and a pagan motive for the detail. In the sacrifice of the sacred slave of the Moon-Goddess among the primitive Albanians, the victim was allowed the customary year of luxury and licence, and was finally anointed and slain by being pierced to the heart with a sacred lance through the side. And there are other eastern analogues.97

It is the fourth gospel, finally, that introduces the “garment without seam,” combining a Hebraic with a pagan motive. In order to fulfil a “prophecy” held to be Messianic,98 the synoptics make the soldiers cast lots for the garments of Jesus. The fourth gospel specifies a simple allotment of the garments in general, as if they could have been numerous enough to go round the soldiery, but limits the act of “casting lots” to the chiton, the under garment. Thus the soldiers both “divide the raiment” and cast lots for the “vesture.” The making of this “without seam” is at once an assimilation of Jesus to the high-priest and an assimilation of the Slain God to the Sun-God and other deities.99 A special chiton was woven for Apollo in Sparta; as a peplos or shawl was woven for Hêrê at Elis. And this in turn had for the pre-Christian pagans mystic meanings as symbolizing the indivisible solar robe of universal light, ascribed to Osiris; the partless robe of Ahura Mazda; Pan’s coat of many colours, and yet other notions. Always the story is itemized in terms of myth, of ritual, of symbol, of doctrine, never in terms of real biography.