Solomon and Solomonic Literature

It is possible that the genealogies of Jesus started from no other basis than Hebrews vii. 14: “It is clear beforehand that our Lord hath arisen out of Judah.”1 Yet nothing could be more subversive of the Epistle than a claim of any hereditary authority or advantage for Jesus.

The author of the Epistle, if he ever heard the phrase “Son of David,” avoided it, for David is here in the background, and in a quotation from one of his Psalms his name is passed over, with the vague words, “one hath testified somewhere, saying,” etc. It is an essential part of the writer’s argument that Christ is “without genealogy” of that kind. To some it was no doubt grateful to be told that Jesus was not of the priestly tribe, not of that “apostolic succession,” so to say; but it was more important to convince the conservative that their sacred history sanctioned faith in a high priest approved as such not by carnal descent, but by his sinlessness and by his resurrection. But it was not agreeable to any Jewish party to suppose that the new dominion was to be altogether in the heavens, or detached from the Solomonic Golden Age for whose return they were hoping. The writer therefore connects Jesus with a “first-born” forerunner, namely, with Melchizedek, concerning whom he “has many things to say, and hard of interpretation.” So Christian commentators have to this day found what he does say, and Melchizedek is not surrounded by any dogmatic fence that can turn a new hypothesis into a trespass.

The Epistle applies to Jesus lines from Psalm cx.:

But in this anonymous Psalm there is reason to believe that Melchizedek is not a proper name at all. It is admittedly a combination of malki’-tzedek, “king of justice,” and in the Jewish Family Bible (Deusch) the above lines are translated, “Thou art my priest for ever, my king in righteousness, by my word.” The Septuagint, regularly followed by the Epistle to the Hebrews, has Melchizedek in this Psalm cx., which was also messianized by the LXX. in its very first line, “The Lord said unto my Lord,” Κυρίος being the word for Lord in both cases, whereas in the original the words are different (“Jahveh declared to my Adonai”). And it is notable that Matthew xxii. whose Hebraic character is so marked, and Mark xii., both make Jesus follow the Septuagint in quoting these words.

In both of these Gospels the incident is evidently, in Mark clumsily, interpolated, and it would appear to have belonged to some legend of the Infancy, such as that of the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, where it occurs naturally:

It is probable that this anecdote had floated down from an early period when the notion of a royal descent of Jesus had not arisen.

Obviously a tremendous question arises here as to how a story should be found in Genesis xiv. about Melchizedek, which as a proper name really occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible,2 and the mystery is increased by the absence of any allusion to such a personage in Jesus Ben Sira’s enumeration of “famous men” (Ecclus. xliv.), or elsewhere. It almost looks as if Jesus Ben Sira had not read, or else had cancelled as spurious, the strange passage in Genesis—which is as follows:

Professor Max Müller, in his third lecture on the “Science of Religion,” gives some useful information concerning this peculiar name, “El-Elyôn,” after consulting his contemporaries at Oxford and in Germany:

“One of the oldest names of the deity among the ancestors of the Semitic nations was El. It meant Strong. It occurs in the Babylonian inscriptions as Ilu, God, and in the very name of Bab-il, the gate or temple of Il.... The same El was worshipped at Byblus by the Phœnicians, and he was called there the Son of Heaven and Earth. His father was the son of Eliun, the most high God, who had been killed by wild animals. The Son of Eliun, who succeeded him, was dethroned, and at last slain by his own son, El, whom Philo identifies with the Greek Kronos, and represents as the presiding deity of the planet Saturn.... Elyôn, which, in Hebrew, means the Highest is used in the Old Testament as a predicate of God.... It occurs in the Phœnician cosmogony as Eliun, the highest God, the Father of Heaven, who was the father of El.”

According to Sanchunvaton (Euseb. Prœp. i. 10) the Phœnicians called God Ελιοῦν.

The combination El Elyôn occurs in but two chapters in the Bible,—Genesis xiv. and Psalm lxxviii. (The Revisers translate it in Genesis, “God Most High,” but in the Psalm (verse 35), “Most High God.”) That the name was imported from the earlier into the later chapter is suggested by a similar association of each with the idea of purchase or redemption: “God Most High, purchaser of heaven and earth” (Genesis), “God Most High, their redeemer” (Psalm). But which is the earlier? Probably the Psalm; for it is a long résumé of the traditional history of Israel, but contains no allusion to Abraham. Had its unique name, “El Elyôn,” been derived from any such traditional source surely some mention of Abraham would have been made.

The Psalm is Elohistic. Possibly the Phœnician name for God, Elioun, was used in order to set “El” above it. Or it may be that as Solomon had been declared “Elyôn of Kings” (Psalm lxxxix. 27) it was important to recall that he at the same time said, “My Elohim,” and to place “El” before his title. This conjecture is warranted by the fact that in both of the Psalms, and in the corresponding passages, God is spoken of as a “Rock.” There are other resemblances between the two Psalms, one very striking:

Psalm lxxviii. 70—“He chose David also, his servant, and took him from the sheepfolds.”

Psalm lxxxix. 19, 20—“I have raised one elected out of the people; I have discovered David, my servant.”

The Psalm in which the Septuagint personalises malki’-tzedek (cx.) into “Melchizedek” is a fragmentary little piece, with two incomprehensible verses at the end which seem to allude to some legend or folklore now lost. These verses (6 and 7) are incongruous with the preceding ones and must be detached, and perhaps verse 5 also, as this seems an anti-climax. These closing verses look as if they may have been added by some admirer of Joshua’s slaughter of kings, and it is probable that the legend of Joshua’s making his captains tread on the necks of the five kings (Joshua x.) was developed out of the opening verse of this Psalm:

The leader of these kings was Adonai-Zedek, who, like Melchizedek, was King of Jerusalem; they are certainly mythical relatives, their names meaning “Lord of Justice” and “King of Justice.” It is philologically impossible that any persons with those proper names could have existed in Jerusalem before the invasion of the Hebrews. And “Adonai-bezek,” the “radiant lord,” whose thumbs and toes Joshua cut off when he captured Jerusalem, is a transparent variant of Adonai-zedek.

When the city, originally named Jebus, began to be called Salem (see Psalm lxxvi. 2), the aboriginal people who continued to dwell there might naturally dream of their ancient kings, as the Welch and Bretons so long did of Arthur, “flower of kings,” and perhaps similarly expect their return to restore their ancient freedom; and it may have become a useful political device to find beyond the ugly legends of Joshua’s cruelty to their “just” and “shining” lords a prettier one, made out of an old song, of an earlier “King of Justice,” whose bread and wine Abraham had eaten, to whom he had paid tithes, whose deity, El Elyôn, the father of Israel had recognized as his own, and with whom he had made a treaty of salem, or peace,—Jebus thus becoming Jebus-Salem (Jerusalem).

Josephus records the legend as it was no doubt generally accepted among the Jews in the first century of our era: “Now, the King of Sodom met him (Abram) at a certain place which they called the King’s Dale, where Melchizedek, King of the City of Salem, received him. That name signifies the righteous king, and such he was without dispute, insomuch that on that account he was made the priest of God. However, they afterward called Salem Jerusalem.” (Antiq. Bk. i. ch. 10.)

Josephus is careful to identify Salem as Jerusalem, and in vi. ch. 10 of the same work states that the King’s Dale (identified as the Shaveh where Abraham met Melchizedek, Genesis xiv.) is “two furlongs distant from Jerusalem.” This carefulness may have been intended to distinguish Melchizedek’s Salem from the northern Shalem (Genesis xxxiii. 18), a place associated with Jacob, and apparently representing an attempt to set up a rival temple to that in Jerusalem. It was an old competition about tithes. Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek, King of Salem, but Jacob, after his vision at Bethel, recognized that as the “house of God,” and vowed to give to God a tenth of all that was given him (Genesis xxviii).3 This quarrel between rival towns and temples, trying each to draw all tithes to themselves, harmonized in the later legends of the Bible, need not detain us, but it is of importance to remark that the story of Abram meeting the King of Justice and Peace near Jerusalem, and establishing the sanctity of that city, corresponds with, and is counterbalanced by, Jacob’s meeting with angels, and wrestling with a mysterious “man,” who, it is hinted, was some form of God himself. This reply to the story of Abram suggests that at the time of that tithe controversy between Bethel and Sion Melchizedek was not thought of as a flesh-and-blood king or a mere man, but as a shadowy shape, evoked from actual conditions for certain purposes, and named in accordance with the history or traditions out of which the conditions and the aims were evolved.

In investigations of this kind, concerned with ages really prehistoric, it is necessary to remember at every step that our search is amid eras when words and names were at once counters of actual forces and factors of history. How serious a play on words may be even in historic times is illustrated by a Papacy founded on the double meaning of Peter—a man’s name and a rock,—and as we approach earlier epochs, whose issues and struggles have long passed away, and their once antagonistic leaders harmonised by pious legends, it is largely by the aid of words and names that we are enabled to reach even historic probabilities.

As to Melchizedek, my inference above stated, derived from the two tithe legends, that his supernatural character is reflected in that of the corresponding phantoms met by Jacob may not be generally accepted, but that he (Melchizedek) was so understood by the writer to the Hebrews can hardly be disputed. Melchizedek is there (Hebrews vii.) declared to have been “without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, being assimilated unto the Son of God.”

In the third century the Melchizedekian sect maintained that Melchizedek was not a man but a heavenly power superior to Jesus, and the Hieracites held similar views. Some eminent theologians have believed that Melchizedek was Christ himself. Most of the Christian theories concerning the mysterious king are virtual admissions that only the eye of faith can see in him any actual being at all. How then was this mythical being formed?4

1. A suitable nest for the Melchizedek Saga existed near Jerusalem, in a vale called the King’s Dale. It seems to have been a royal racing ground (Targum of Onkelos, Gen. xiv. 17) or hippodrome (lxx. xlviii. 7), and its name in Hebrew was Emek-ham-Melech.

2. In the ancient Psalm cx. 1 we have Adonai (Lord), and in verse 4 Melchi-Melech (or Moloch) king, combined with tsedek, justice.

3. Tzedek (Tsaydoc or Zadok), the priest who anointed Solomon to be king. Tsaydoc supplanted the legitimate High Priest Abiathar who had taken the side of the legitimate heir to David’s throne, Adonijah, supplanted by Solomon. The deprivation of Abiathar, and exaltation of Tsaydoc to be High Priest is said (1 Kings ii. 27) to have been in fulfillment of “the word of Jahveh, which he spake concerning the house of Eli in Shiloh.” The reference is to the sentence passed on Eli and his house, to which Abiathar belonged, when Jahveh said, “And I will raise me up a faithful priest, etc.,” (1 Sam. ii. 35). Faithful priests were called “sons of Zadok,” the phrase having apparently become proverbial (Ezek. xliv. 15).

4. In 1 Chron. iii. there appear, among the descendants of Solomon, “Amaziah, Azariah his son, Jotham his son.” In 1 Chron. vi. we find among descendants of Zadok, Ahimaaz, Azariah his son, Johanan his son. Johanan is also among Solomon’s descendants, and among the descendants of both Solomon and Zadok is Shallum,—written by Josephus Salloumos (Bk. x. ch. 8). Josephus also says that Zadok was the first High Priest of Solomon’s Temple. But Solomon himself, without the assistance of any priest, dedicated the Temple, offered the sacrifices on that occasion, and so continued: “three times in a year did Solomon offer burnt offerings and peace offerings upon the altar which he built to Jahveh.” (1 Kings ix. 25). These statements establish a probability that no such person as Zadok existed at all, and that the development of this personification of justice (zedek) into a priestly personage was due to an ecclesiastical necessity of introducing a priest among the provisions of Solomon for the temple. Zadok is thus a detachment from King Solomon of the priestly functions he had discharged in the temple, according to the book of Kings; and in 1 Chron. vi., where this personification is completed, the Solomonic family names are found, as above, recurring as descendants of the personification,—Zadok.

These names are the fossil remains of controversies with Shilonite and Samaritan pretensions, which ended in consecrating the throne and altar at Jerusalem, and they prove that the consecration was that of justice and peace. Of these the Wise Man was typical. Solomon was the model from whom all of these ideals were painted. His title, Adonai, and his equity (Psalm xlv. 7, 11) are combined in Adonizedek, his glory (Psalm xlv. 3, 4) is in Adonibezek; his high priesthood is allegorized in Zadok; and in “Melchizedek, King of Salem,” his supreme characters are summed up, “King of Justice, Prince of Peace.”

In a warlike age this peacefulness of a monarch was the great and supernatural phenomenon. It is the very central idea of the whole Solomonic legend. Solomon got his name from it, even the name with Jahveh in it (Jedediah) being set aside; he was preferred above David to build the temple, because David was a warrior; in building the temple the peace was not broken even by the noise of a hammer, the stones being all in shape, it seems by supernatural power, when taken from the quarry, so as to be noiselessly fitted together; he would not fight even those who were rending parts of his kingdom away. He was the hero of the Beatitudes,—the gentle one who inherited the earth, the one who hungered and thirsted for justice and was filled, the peacemaker called the Son of God. It was he who first said, If thine enemy hunger give him food, if he thirst give him drink. And all this was allegorized in Melchizedek, who, when his country was invaded, instead of joining the five kings who resisted, loved his enemy, gave the invader food and drink.

We thus find Solomon,—the glorious cosmopolitan and secularist, whose name Jahvism could not utter without a shudder,—distributed in fable, legend, psalm, through Hexateuch and Hagiographa, and finally transfigured into a type of divine and eternal Sonship. Thus he appears in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to which we now return.

In the Epistle to the Hebrews Christ is invested with the mystical robes of Solomon. To Christ are applied the words, “I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son,” quoted from Jahveh’s promise to David concerning Solomon (2 Sam. vii. 14). To Christ are twice applied the words, “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee,” quoted from Psalm ii. 7, admittedly Solomonic. From Psalm xlv., verses 6 and 7, ascriptions to Solomon, are applied to Christ in this Epistle. And Melchizedek is here declared to be “a great man,” “assimilated unto the Son of God.”

We may here recall the words of Josephus, a contemporary of our writer, who says that Melchizedek was made the priest of God on account of his righteousness (Ant., Bk. i. ch. 10). It may have been that there was a popular belief in the time of Josephus that Melchizedek received his ordination from Abram himself, but there is no doubt that the mysterious king’s priesthood was believed to rest upon his righteousness and above all his peacefulness.

With these preliminaries we may find the Epistle’s argument about Melchizedek less “hard of interpretation” than the writer says it is. After speaking of Abraham as having “obtained” the promise, not merely because it was God’s promise, but because he “patiently endured,” having argued that Christ, “though he was a Son, yet learned obedience by the things that he suffered”, this Epistle maintains (vi. 20) that this is the believer’s hope, whereby he enters within the veil, “whither as a forerunner Jesus entered for us, having become a high priest forever after the manner of Melchizedek.” (The sense of this is lost in the E. V. by rendering γενόμενος “made”: the argument is that though he was a Son of God even that could not make him a high priest; this he had to “become” by his own merits, uninheritable even from God, as was the case with Melchizedek.) “For this Melchizedek, being of Salem, priest of God Most High, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed him, to whom also Abraham divided a tenth part of all (being first by interpretation King of Righteousness, and next also King of Salem, that is Prince of Peace; being without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but assimilated (ἔχων ἀφωμοιωμένος) unto the Son of God), abideth a priest perpetually” (vii. 1–3).

The mystical clauses of verse 3 have for centuries been an unsolved enigma to exegetists; and Alford, after summing up the many conjectures as to their meaning, expresses his feeling that the writer had a thought which he did not intend us to comprehend! Probably, however, the writer was using language understood in his time, and which may be interpreted by comparison with expressions familiar in Jewish folklore. Some of these are preserved in the apocryphal gospels. Thus, in the Pseudo-Matthew, Levi, the teacher of Jesus, astounded by the Child’s learning, says, “I think he was born before the flood.” In the gospel of Thomas, the teacher Zacchæus says, “This child is not of earthly parents, he is able to subdue even fire. Perhaps he was begotten before the world was made.” These ideas, which correspond somewhat to the Teutonic superstition of the “changeling,” are traceable in the Fourth Gospel (viii. 56–59), where Jesus is stoned for saying, “Before Abraham was I am.”

It will be seen that by this early writer “to the Hebrews” Jesus was not thought of in connection with David, but bore Solomon’s preëminent title, King of Peace, and that conferred on him by the Queen of Sheba, King of Justice. In the “Wisdom of Solomon” the Prince of the Golden Age, historically associated with idolatrous shrines, had been rehabilitated, even apotheosized; he was now a sort of rival of Jesus in divine sonship. The writer of our Epistle therefore artistically, not to say artfully, utilizes a composite word made into a proper name under which Solomon’s combined royalty and priesthood, his peace and justice, had been detached from his personality and personified. The new exaltation of Solomon personally was thus ignored, while his essential glories, his wisdom, and his reclaimed virtues, were woven into the celestial mantle of mysterious Melchizedek, and through him passed to the shoulders of the risen Christ.

The Queen of Sheba certainly deserved her exaltation as the Hebrew Athena, and the homage paid to her by Jesus, for journeying so far simply to hear the wisdom of Solomon. In Jewish and Christian folklore are many miraculous tales about the Queen’s visit, but in the Biblical records, in the books of “Kings” and “Chronicles,” the only miracle is the entire absence of anything marvellous, magical, or even occult. The Queen was impressed by Solomon’s science, wisdom, the edifices he had built, the civilization he had brought about; they exchanged gifts, and she departed. It is a strangely rational history to find in any ancient annals.

The saying of Jesus cited by Clement of Alexandria, “He that hath marvelled shall reign,” uttered perhaps with a sigh, tells too faithfully how small has been the interest of grand people in the wisdom that is “clear, undefiled, plain.” They are represented rather by the beautiful and wealthy Marchioness in “Gil Blas,” whose favour was sought by the nobleman, the ecclesiastic, the philosopher, the dramatist, by all the brilliant people, but who set them all aside for an ape-like hunchback, with whom she passed many hours, to the wonder of all, until it was discovered that the repulsive creature was instructing her ladyship in cabalistic lore and magic.

There is much human pathos in this longing of mortals to attain to some kind of real and intimate perception beyond the phenomenal universe, and to some personal assurance of a future existence; but it has cost much to the true wisdom of this world. Some realization of this may have caused the sorrow of Jesus at Dalmanutha, as related in Mark. “The Pharisees came forth and began to question with him, seeking of him a sign from heaven, testing him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and saith, Why does this people seek a sign? I say plainly unto you no sign will be given them. And he left them, and reëntering the boat departed to the other side.”

They who now long to know the real mind of Jesus are often constrained to repeat his deep sigh when they find the most probable utterances ascribed to him perverted by the marvel-mongers, insomuch that to the protest just quoted Matthew adds a self-contradictory sentence about Jonah. That this unqualified repudiation by Jesus of miracles should have been preserved at all in Mark, a gospel full of miracles, is a guarantee of the genuineness of the incident, and of the comparative earliness of some parts of that gospel. The period of sophistication was not far advanced. Miracles require time to grow. But the deep sigh and the words of Jesus, taken in connection with the entire absence from the Epistles—the earliest New Testament documents—of any hint of a miracle wrought by him, is sufficient to bring us into the presence of a man totally different from the “Christ” of the four Gospels.1

Those who seek the real Jesus will find it the least part of their task to clear away the particular miracles ascribed to him; that is easy enough; the critical and difficult thing is to detach from the anecdotes and language connected with him every admixture derived from the belief in his resurrection. To do this completely is indeed impossible.

Paul, probably a contemporary of Jesus, knew well enough the vast difference between the man “Jesus” and the risen “Christ”; he insisted that the man should be ignored, and supplanted by the risen Christ, as revealed by private revelations received by himself after the resurrection. The student must now reverse that: he must ignore those post-resurrectional revelations if he would know Jesus “after the flesh”—that is, the real Jesus.

In an age when immortality is a familiar religious belief we can hardly realize the agitation, among a people to whom life after death was a vague, imported philosophy, excited by the belief that a man had been raised bodily from the grave. Immortality was no longer hypothesis. If to this belief be added the further conviction that this resurrection was preliminary to his speedy reappearance, and the world’s sudden transformation, a mental condition could not fail to arise in which any ethical or philosophical ideas he might have uttered while “in the flesh” must be thrown into the background, as of merely casual or temporary importance. Such is the state of mind reflected in the Pauline Epistles. In them is found no reference whatever to any moral instructions by Jesus. And when after some two generations had passed, and they who had expected while yet living to meet their returning Lord had died, those who had heard oral reports and legends concerning him and his teachings began to write the memoranda on which our Synoptical Gospels are based, it was too late to give these without adulterations from the apostolic ecstasy. His casual or playful remarks were by this time discoloured and distorted, and enormously swollen, as if under a solar microscope, by the overwhelming conceptions of a resurrection, an approaching advent, a subversion of all nationalities and institutions.

The most serious complication arises from the extent to which the pretended revelations of Paul have been built into the Gospels. The so-called “conversion of Paul” was really the conversion of Jesus. The facts can only be gathered from Paul’s letters, the book of “Acts” being hardly more historical than “Robinson Crusoe.” The account in “Acts” of Paul’s “conversion” is, however, of interest as indicating a purpose in its writers to raise Paul into a supernatural authority equivalent to that ascribed to Christ, in order that he might set aside the man Jesus. The story is a travesty of that related in the “Gospel According to the Hebrews,” concerning the baptism of Jesus: “And a voice out of the heaven saying, ‘Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased’: and again, ‘I have this day begotten thee.’ And straightway a great light shone around the place. And when John saw it he saith to him, ‘Who art thou, Lord?’” John fell down before Jesus as did Paul before Christ. “At midday, O King, I saw on the way a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about me, and them that journeyed with me. And when we were all fallen to the earth, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? It is hard for thee to kick against the goad.’ And I said, ‘Who art thou, Lord?’” (Precisely what John said to Jesus at the baptism.)

This story (Acts xxvi. 13–15), quite inconsistent with Paul’s letters, is throughout very ingenious. Besides associating Paul with the supernatural consecration of Jesus, it replies, by calling him Saul, to the Ebionite declaration that Paul had been a pagan, who had become a Jewish proselyte with the intention of marrying the High Priest’s daughter. There is no reason to suppose that Paul was ever called Saul during his life, and his salutation of two kinsmen in Rome with Latin names, Andronicus and Junias (Romans xvi. 7), renders it probable that he was not entirely if at all Hebrew. The sentence, “It is hard for thee to kick against the goad,” is a subtle answer to any who might think it curious that the story of the resurrection carried no conviction to Paul’s mind at the time of its occurrence by suggesting that in continuing his persecutions he was going against his real belief—kicking against the goad.

Paul, however, knows nothing of this theatrical conversion in his letters. But in severe competition with other “preëminent apostles,” who were preaching “another Christ” from his, he pronounces them accursed, supporting an authority above theirs by declaring that he had repeated interviews with the risen Christ, and on one occasion had been taken up into the third heaven and even into Paradise! The extremes to which Paul was driven by the opposing apostles are illustrated in his intimidation of dissenting converts by his pretence to an occult power of withering up the flesh of those whom he disapproves (1 Cor. v. 5). He tells Timothy of two men, Hymenœus and Alexander, whom he thus “delivered over to Satan” that “they may be taught not to blaspheme”—the blasphemy in this case being the belief (now become orthodoxy) that the dead were not sleeping in their graves but passed into heaven or hell at death. In the book of “Acts” (xiii.) this claim of Paul’s seems to have been developed into the Evil Eye (which he fastened on Bar Jesus, whose eyes thereon went out), and may perhaps account for the similar sinister power ascribed to some of the Popes.

In this story of Bar Jesus, Christ is associated with Paul in striking the learned man blind (xiii. 11), and the development of such a legend reveals the extent to which Jesus had been converted by Paul. In 1 Cor. ii. he presents a Christ whose body and blood, being not precisely discriminated in the sacramental bread and wine, had made some participants sickly and killed others, in addition to the damnation they had eaten and drank. He does not mention that any who communicated correctly had been physically benefited thereby; only the malignant powers appear to have had any utility for Paul.

That this menacing Christ may have been needed to intimidate converts and build up churches is probable; that such a being was nothing like Jesus in the flesh, but had to come by pretended posthumous revelation, as an awful potentate whose human flesh had been but a disguise, is certain. We need not, therefore, be surprised to find that nearly everything pharisaic, cruel, and ungentlemanly, ascribed to Jesus in the synoptical Gospels, is fabricated out of Paul’s Epistles. Paul compares rival apostles to the serpent that beguiled Eve (2 Cor. xi. 3, 4), and Christ calls his opponents offspring of vipers. The fourth Gospel, apostolic in spirit, degrades Jesus independently, but it also borrows from Paul. Paul personally delivered some over to Satan, and the intimation in John xiii. 27, “after the sop, then entered Satan into Judas,” accords well with what Paul says about the unworthy communicant eating and drinking damnation (1 Cor. xi. 29).

The Eucharist itself was probably Paul’s own adaptation of a Mithraic rite to Christian purposes. There is no reason to suppose that there was anything sanctimonious in the wine supper which Jesus took with his friends at the time of the Passover, and Paul’s testimony concerning the way it had been observed is against any over with you?”2 Had it been other than a pleasant Epiphanius from the Gospel according to the Hebrews show that he desired to draw his friends away from the sacrificial feature of the festival: “Where wilt thou that we prepare for the passover to eat?” ... “Have I desired with desire to eat this flesh, the passover with you?”3 Had it been other than a pleasant wine supper it could not in so short a time have become the jovial festival which Paul describes (1 Cor. xi. 20), nor, in order to reform it, would he have needed the pretence that he had received from Christ the special revelation of details of the Supper which he gives, and which the Gospels have followed. Having substituted a human for an animal sacrifice (“our passover also hath been sacrificed, Christ,” 1 Cor. v. 7), he restores precisely that sacrificial feature to which Jesus had objected; and in harmony with this goes on to show that human lives have been sacrificed to the majestic real presence (1 Cor. xi. 30). He had learned, perhaps by “pagan” experiences, what power such a sacrament might put into the priestly hand.4

It is Paul who first appointed Christ the judge of quick and dead (1 Tim. iv. 1). He describes to the Thessalonians (2 Thes. i.) “the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with the angels of his power in flaming fire, rendering vengeance to them that know not God,” and the “eternal destruction” of these. Hence, “I never knew you” becomes a formula of damnation put into the mouth of Christ. “I know you not” is the brutal reply of the bridegroom to the five virgins, whose lamps were not ready on the moment of his arrival. The picturesque incidents of this parable have caused its representation in pretty pictures, which blind many to its essential heartlessness. It is curious that it should be preserved in a Gospel which contains the words, “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.” The parable is fabricated out of 1 Thes. v., where Paul warns the converts that the Lord cometh as a thief in the night, that there will be no escape for those who then slumber, that they must not sleep like the rest, but watch, “for God hath appointed us not unto wrath.”

The Christian dogma of the unpardonable sin, substituted for the earlier idea of an unrepentable sin, was developed out of Paul’s fatalism. He writes, “For this cause God sendeth them a strong delusion that they should believe a lie” (2 Thes. ii). Although this is not connected in any Gospel with the inexpiable sin, we find its spirit animating the Paul-created Christ in Mark iv. 11: “Unto them that are without all these things are done in parables, that seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand: lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.” This is imported from Paul (Rom. xi. 7, 8): “That which Israel seeketh for, that he obtained not; but the elect obtained it and the rest were hardened; according as it is written, God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear, unto this very day.”

Whence came this Christ who, in the very chapter where Jesus warns men against hiding their lamp under a bushel, carefully hides his teaching under a parable for the express purpose of preventing some outsiders from being enlightened and obtaining forgiveness?

Jesus could not have said these things unless he plagiarized from Paul by anticipation. Deduct from the Gospels all that has been fabricated out of Paul (I have given only the more salient examples) and there will be found little or nothing morally revolting, nothing heartless. Superstitions abound, but so far as Jesus is concerned they are nearly all benevolent in their spirit.

But even after we have removed from the Gospels the immoralities of Paul and the pharisaisms so profound as to suggest the proselyte, after we have turned from his Christ to seek Jesus, we have yet to divest him of the sombre vestments of a supernatural being, who could not open his lips or perform any action but in relation to a resurrection and a heavenly office of which he could never have dreamed. Was he

Did he never laugh? Did he eat with sinners only to call them to repentance? Did he get the name of wine-bibber for his “salvationism,”—or was it because, like Omar Khayyám, he defied the sanctimonious and the puritanical by gathering with the intellectual, the scholarly, the Solomonic clubs?

To Paul we owe one credible item concerning Jesus, that he was originally wealthy (2 Cor. viii. 9), and as Paul mentioned this to inculcate liberality in contributors, it is not necessary to suppose that he alluded to his heavenly riches. At any rate, the few sayings that may be reasonably ascribed to Jesus are those of an educated gentleman, and strongly suggest his instruction in the college of Hillel, whose spirit remained there after his death, which occurred when Jesus was at least ten years old.

To a pagan who asked Hillel concerning the law, he answered: “That which you like not for yourself do not to thy neighbour, that is the whole law; the rest is but commentary.” It will be observed that Hillel humanizes the law laid down in Lev. xix. 18, where the Israelites are to love each his neighbour among “the children of thy people” as himself. Even Paul (Rom. xiii. 8, Gal. v. 14) quotes it for a rule among the believers, while hurling anathema on others. But Jesus is made (Matt. vii. 12) to inflate the rule into the impracticable form of “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them.” By which rule a wealthy Christian would give at least half his property to the first beggar, as he would wish the beggar to do to him were their situations reversed. This might be natural enough in a community hourly expecting the end of the world and their own instalment in palaces whose splendour would be proportioned to their poverty in this world. But when this delusion faded the rule reverted to what Hillel said, and no doubt Jesus also, as we find it in the second verse of “Didache,” the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. It is a principle laid down by Confucius, Buddha, and all the human “prophets,” and one followed by every gentleman, not to do to his neighbour what he would not like if done to himself. But it is removed out of human ethics and strained ad absurdum by the second-adventist version put into the mouth of Jesus by Matthew. I have dwelt on this as an illustration of how irrecoverably a man loses his manhood when he is made a God.

Irrecoverably! In the second Clementine Epistle (xii. 2) it is said, “For the Lord himself, having been asked by some one when his kingdom should come, said, When the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female.” Perhaps a humorous way of saying Never. Equally remote appears the prospect of recovering the man Jesus from his Christ-sepulchre. Even among rationalists there are probably but few who would not be scandalized by any thorough test such as Jesus is said, in the Nazarene Gospel, to have requested of his disciples after his resurrection, “Take, feel me, and see that I am not a bodiless demon!” Without blood, without passion, he remains without the experiences and faults that mould best men, as Shakespeare tells us; he so remains in the nerves where no longer in the intellect, insomuch that even many an agnostic would shudder if any heretic, taking his life in his hand, should maintain that Jesus had fallen in love, or was a married man, or had children.