Читать книгу The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory - J. M. Robertson - Страница 8

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For the purposes of this inquiry, all miracles, strictly so-called, are out of discussion. This does not mean that the myth-theory of Jesus is an outcome of atheistic philosophy. One of the most brilliant of modern books on Jesus is the work of an avowed atheist,1 who accepted substantially the whole of the non-supernatural presentment of Jesus in the gospels, taking it to be a bad biography, and subjecting the doctrine to keen but sympathetic criticism. This writer, dismissing miracles as outside debate, had a conviction of the historicity of Jesus which was in no way affected by a knowledge of modern documentary criticism. On the other hand, Professor Arthur Drews, author of The Christ Myth, expressly claims to urge the myth-theory in the interest of theistic religion. Of course he too dismisses miracles as outside discussion.

Those who are still concerned to discuss them, and to affirm such beliefs as those of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, should turn their attention to the well-known work of the late W. R. Cassels, Supernatural Religion,2 in which the whole supernaturalist case, in its double aspect of “revelation” and miracles, is examined with an abundance of learning, patience, and candour. Disparaged in its day by professional orthodox scholars, that treatise has so completely done its special work in the general criticism of supernaturalist faith that, however common orthodoxy may still be, the matter is now little debated among instructed men. Those who still hold the orthodox position, therefore, are not here addressed. Our inquiry invites the attention only of those who, abandoning the supernaturalist basis of the Christian creed, seek to retain (it may be as the ground for a transformed “Christianity”) (1) the human personality which they believe to have underlain the admitted myths of the record, and (2) the teachings—or some of them—ascribed to the God-Man of the Gospels. The problem is one of historical criticism, and does not turn upon theism or atheism. The historicity of Jesus is maintained not only by “Christians” of various degrees of heterodoxy but by some professed rationalists; by critics eminent for judicial temper, as by Professor Schmiedel of Zürich; and on the other hand by Dr. F. C. Conybeare.

These critics agree in regarding Jesus as a natural man, naturally born, and it is to them that we must reply. When an orthodox Christian like the Rev. Dr. T. J. Thorburn, holding by the Annunciation and the Virgin Birth, sets himself to rebut the myth-theory3 by scouting myth analogies, it would be idle to argue with him. A writer who can believe he has evidence for a story of human parthenogenesis has no conception of evidence in common with us. It is accordingly needless to point out that he constantly and absurdly misunderstands the myth argument;4 that he discusses Evemerism without knowing what it means;5 and that he merely juggles with such cruces as the stories of the Transfiguration and the Ascension. From one at his standpoint we can expect nothing else; and to those whom his exposition satisfies no myth-theory can appeal. When he resorts to the device of denying “spiritual insight” to those who accept scientific tests, he merely exemplifies the normal procedure of orthodox incompetence. The religious reasoner who flouts reason usually certificates and betrays himself in that inexpensive fashion. Our argument is addressed to those who profess to apply to Biblical matters the principles of historical criticism.

The biographical school, as one may inoffensively term the variously minded champions of the historicity of the record, abandon the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection as impossibilities. That is to say, they accept the myth-theory as regards those two cardinal items of the Christian legend. They also in general recognize that the fourth gospel, in so far as it differs vitally from the synoptics, is in the main a process of myth-making. But, clinging to the alleged substratum, most members of the school adhere to the fundamental historicity of the Crucifixion. Here they stand with Strauss, who found in the execution of Jesus by Pontius Pilate a solid historical fact. Strauss is generally explicit as to his reasons for accepting and rejecting; and while he resolves into myth at least nine-tenths of the gospel narratives, finding them mere inventions to “fulfil” supposed Old Testament predictions, he finds the testimony of Tacitus unquestionable as to the execution.6

Now, the Annals of Tacitus is itself a questioned document; but even if we take it as unquestionable it is admittedly only a late statement of a narrative already made current by the Christists, the Annals being commonly dated about 120 C.E. Either Tacitus was founding on a Roman record of the Crucifixion or he was merely saying what Christists said as to the origin of their sect. If the latter, he supplies no historical basis. On the other hand, the unlikelihood of there being a Roman record of executions in Palestine ninety years before is so great that no Christian advocate now appears to affirm it. Tacitus in fact gives no sign of consulting official records,7 his only traceable sources being previous historians, notably Suetonius. Thus Strauss’s express ground for accepting the execution of a “Christ” by Pontius Pilate is really illusory; and when we further find him pronouncing that the Barabbas episode must be held fundamentally historical because it is “so firmly rooted in the early Christian tradition,”8 we are again compelled to reject his test. As we shall see, the Barabbas episode is unintelligible as history, but highly intelligible as myth. At the very outset, then, unverified assumptions are seen to be made by the biographical school as to what may confidently be taken as historical, even when, as in the case of Strauss, they affirm an abundance of myth.

Where Strauss was rash, later rationalistic writers have been more so. My old friend, the English translator of Jules Soury’s early work on Jesus, took for granted that behind legendary heroes in general there is always a nucleus of fact; but Soury, after postulating a large part of the gospel story as veridical, gave up a number of his own items.9 As soon as he began to apply criticism, they were seen to be arbitrary assumptions. Equally arbitrary is the assumption of “some basis,” made upon no scientific principle.

The biographical school in general adhere at least to the trial and condemnation before Pilate, though many abandon as fiction the trial before the Sanhedrim, which indeed was abandoned as long ago as the third gospel, in favour of an equally fictitious trial before Herod. As is seen by M. Loisy, the trial before Pilate is for the historical critic the keystone of the tragedy story. If that goes, there remains only a highly composite body of teaching, with no identifiable historical personality to which to attach it.

But even as regards the trials there is wide divergence among the biographical school. For instance, Mr. Charles Stanley Lester, an ex-clergyman of Milwaukee, in his interesting work The Historic Jesus,10 entirely rejects the Sanhedrim trial, and likewise the gospel account of the Pilate trial, but finds “probable history” in the view that the priests privately persuaded Pilate to condemn Jesus on their accusation without any trial.11 Again, the anonymous author of The Four Gospels as Historical Records,12 an eminently keen, searching, and candid critic, rejects alike the Judas story, the trial before the Sanhedrim, and the trial before Pilate,13 as he does most of the other items of the gospel history, yet throughout seems to take for granted the historicity of the “Great Teacher,” the “Master,” never even raising that issue save in protesting that he has absolutely nothing to say against him.14 So completely does he destroy the whole narrative, indeed, that he can hardly be said to maintain the thesis of historicity, but he never calls it in question: he merely destroys the biography. Mr. Lester, on the other hand, confidently rejects a hundred details as myth, claiming that he presents the gospels “relieved of the drapery of mythology and set free from all dogmatic fictions”;15 and yet no less confidently affirms a hundred “undoubted” things, in a manner that almost outgoes M. Loisy.

If, faced by such procedures, the critical reader asks upon what grounds the historical personality is accepted, he gets from the able anonymous writer no answer, and from Mr. Lester, in effect, only the answer that the teachings which appeal to him in the gospels are self-certified as coming from the “Jesus” in whom he believes, while the others are dismissed by him as inconsistent with his conception. As a rule, the negative criticism is soundly reasoned; the constructive is purely arbitrary. Yet Mr. Lester is an amiable and—apart from his quaint animosity towards “the Semitic mind”16—a temperate critic, warmly concerned for historic truth and loyally opposed to all kinds of priestcraft, ancient and modern. What we must ask from such critics is that they should bring to bear on their biographical assumption the same critical method that they bring to bear on the multitude of details which strike them as obviously unhistorical. Rejecting miracles and self-contradictory narrative, they affirm a miraculous and self-contradictory Person. That conception too must be analysed.

The Jesus of the Gospels is at once a Messiah (with no definite mission as such), a Saviour God with whom the indefinite Messiah coalesces, and a Teaching God who coalesces with both. The biographical school, in the mass, posit a human Teacher, round whose teaching a Messianic conception combined with a doctrine of salvation by blood sacrifice has nucleated. If in this tissue there cannot be inserted the historical detail of the trial before Pilate, there is nothing left but the quasi-mythical detail of the crucifixion as an ostensible historical basis for the Messianic and other teaching, so much of which is alien to the early cult, so much of which is critically to be assigned to previous and contemporary Jewish sources, and so much to later Jesuist editors and compilers. Those laymen who are content to pick out of the gospels certain teachings, such as the Sermon on the Mount, and call these “Christianity,” have not realized how completely documentary analysis has disintegrated the teachings into pre-Jesuine Jewish and post-Jesuine Gentile matter. The latest professional analysis, as we have seen, leaves no Jesuine “Teaching” save an eschatology, a doctrine of “last things,” coming from a visionary Messiah with no political or social message.17 The bulk of the biographical school, on the other hand, cling diversely to “something” in the Teaching which shall be somehow commensurate with the “impression” made by the life and death of the Teacher, which, from Renan onwards, they regard as the real genesis of the myth of the Resurrection and the consequent cult.

Having shown, then, the cogent critical reasons for dismissing the entire record of the triple episode of the Supper, the Agony, and the Trials, as unhistorical,18 it concerns us to show (1) that the whole is intelligible only as myth, and (2) how the myth probably arose. The sequence culminates in the Crucifixion, which, with the Sacrament, is for the rational hierologist as for the orthodox theologian the centre of Christianity. Equally the biographical school are committed to maintaining the historicity of the event, without which they cannot explain the rise of the cult. If then the myth-theory is to stand, it must show that the central narrative belongs to the realm of myth.