The issue as between Schweitzer and Wrede comes to this. Wrede sees that the Messiahship is a creation following upon the belief in the resurrection, and only uncritically deducible from the documents. For him, Jesus is a Teacher who was made into a Messiah by his followers after his death, the Gospels being manipulated to conceal the fact that he made no Messianic claims. Schweitzer sees that the Teaching Jesus is a documentary construction; and that, unless the Crucified One had some Messianic idea, the Gospel story as a whole crumbles to nothing. And he asks:—
But how did the appearance of the risen Jesus suddenly become for them [the disciples] a proof of His Messiahship and the basis of their eschatology? That Wrede fails to explain, and so makes this “event” an “historical” miracle which in reality is harder to believe than the supernatural event.1
So be it: Wrede’s thesis is here, after all, part of the common content of the “liberal” ideal, which cannot stand. But how does his critic make good the converse of a would-be Messiah who was no Teacher, but yet had disciples, and was finally crucified for making a secret Messianic claim? The answer is too naïve to be guessed. Accepting, in defiance of every suggestion of common sense, the story of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Dr. Schweitzer decides that “the episode was Messianic for Jesus, but not Messianic for the people.” With no authority save the documents which at this point he radically and recklessly alters, he decides that the multitude had hailed Jesus “as the Prophet, as Elias,” whatever the texts may say; and Jesus, feeling he was the Messiah, “played with his Messianic self-consciousness” all the while. Why, then, was he put to death? Simply because Judas betrayed his secret to the priests! Dr. Schweitzer can see well enough the futility of the betrayal story as it stands, inasmuch as Judas is paid to do what was not required—identifying a well-known public figure. But rather than admit myth here he will invent a better story for himself, and we get this: Jesus had dropped Messianic hints to his disciples, and Judas sold the information. And all the while none of the other disciples knew this, though at the trial the priests went among the people and induced them “not to agree to the Procurator’s proposal. How? By telling them why He was condemned; by revealing to them the Messianic secret. That makes him at once from a prophet worthy of honour into a deluded enthusiast and blasphemer.”2
“In the name of the Prophet, figs!” Dr. Schweitzer has, he believes, saved the character of “the mob of Jerusalem” at last; and by what a device! By assuming that to claim to be the Messiah was to blaspheme, which it certainly was not;3 and by assuming that the mob who had (on Schweitzer’s view) acclaimed an Elias would be struck dumb with horror on being told that Elias claimed to be the Messiah. The secret of this psychosis is in Dr. Schweitzer’s sole possession, as is the explanation of the total absence of his statement from all the literature produced by the generation which, on his assumption, knew all about the case. And this is what is left after a survey of the German exegesis “from Reimarus to Wrede.”
It is to be feared that neither the scholars nor the laity will accept either of Dr. Schweitzer’s alternatives, and that the nature of his own prestidigitatory solution may tend somewhat to weaken the effect of his indictment of the kaleidoscopic process which has hitherto passed as a solution among the experts. Dr. Schweitzer seems to realize all absurdities save his own. None the less, he has done a critical service in arguing down all the rest, though even in his final verdict he exhibits symptoms of the “sacred disease,” the theologian’s malady of self-contradiction:—
The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism,4 endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb....
He passes by our time and returns to his own....
The historical foundation of Christianity as built up by rationalistic, by liberal, and by modern theology no longer exists; but that does not mean that Christianity has lost its historical foundation....
Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our time also5....
“Loves me, loves me not,” as the little girls say in counting the flower petals. We seem entitled to suggest in the interests of simple science, as distinguished from Germanic Kultur, that temperament might perhaps usefully be left out of the debate; and that the question of what Jesus stands for may be left over till we have settled whether the film presented to us by Dr. Schweitzer can stand between us and a scientific criticism which assents to all of his verdict save the reservation in favour of his own thesis.
Meantime, let us not seem to suggest that the English handling of the historical problem during the nineteenth century has been any more scientific than the German. Hennell’s treatment of it was but a simplification of Strauss’s; and Thomas Scott’s Life of Jesus was but an honest attempt to solidify Renan. In the early part of the nineteenth century little was achieved beyond the indispensable weakening of the reign of superstition by critical propaganda. In early Victorian England, where Freethought had been left to unprofessional freelances, still liable to brutal prosecution, an anonymous attempt was made to carry the matter further in a curious book entitled “The Existence of Christ Disproved by Irresistible Evidence, in a Series of Letters by a German Jew.” It bears no date, but seems to have been published between 1841 and 1849, appearing serially in thirty penny weekly numbers, printed in Birmingham, and published in London by Hetherington. As Hetherington, who died in 1849, was imprisoned in 1840 for the “blasphemous libel” of publishing Haslam’s Letters to the Clergy, but not earlier or later on any similar charge, he would seem to have been allowed to publish this without molestation.
About the author I have no information. He writes English fluently and idiomatically, and had read Strauss in the original. But though he presses against Hennell the argument from the case of Apollos, latterly developed by Professor W. B. Smith with such scholarly skill, the book as a whole has little persuasive power. The author is one of the violent and vehement men who alone, in the day of persecution, were likely to hazard such a thesis; and he does it with an amount of vociferation much in excess of his critical effort or his knowledge. It made, and could make, no impression whatever on the educated world; and I never met any Freethinker who had seen or heard of it.
It is in another spirit, and in the light of a far greater accumulation of evidence than was available in the first half of the last century, that the mythical theory has been restated in our day. In particular it proceeds upon a treasury of anthropological lore which was lacking to Bruno Bauer, as it was to Ghillany, who was so much better fitted than Bauer to profit by such light. As knowledge of the past gradually arranges itself into science, and the malice of religious resistance recedes from point to point before the sapping process of culture, the temper of the whole debate undergoes a transmutation. After a generation in which a Lyell could only in privacy avow his views as to the antiquity of man, came that in which Tylor, without polemic, could establish an anthropological method that was to mean the reduction of all religious phenomena, on a new line, to the status of natural phenomena. And even the malice of the bigoted faithful, which will subsist while the faith endures, falls into its place as one of these, equally with the malice of the conventional theorists who meet the exposure of their untenable positions with aspersion in defect of argument.
But the fact that a recent German exegete has been found capable of facing the problem in a spirit of scientific candour and good temper, and with something of the old-time detachment which made Rosenkranz marvel at Carlyle’s tone towards Diderot, may be a promise of a more general resort to civilized controversial methods. In any case, the fact that a trained New Testament critic, undertaking to establish the historicity of Jesus, has affirmed the scientific failure of all the preceding attempts, and offered a historic residuum which few will think worth an hour’s consideration, seems a sufficient demonstration that the mythical theory is the real battleground of the future.
In that connection it is interesting to note that Sir J. G. Frazer, who has so warmly contended that, as history cannot be explained “without the influence of great men,” we must accept the historicity of Jesus,6 latterly propounds a tentative theory of a historic original for Osiris, whom he supposes to have been perhaps evolved from the idealized personality of an ancient King Khent, buried at Abydos.7 It is a mere suggestion, and it at once evokes the reminder that, on the theorist’s own general principles, King Khent may be regarded as having been theocratically identified with the already existing God. However that may be, the hypothesis does nothing to save Sir James’s irrelevant plea about the operation of “great men” and “extraordinary minds” in the founding of all religions, for he does not suggest that King Khent’s career in any way resembled the myth of Osiris, or that he first taught the things Osiris is said to have taught. So that, in the case of Osiris as of Jesus, the required great men and extraordinary minds may still, in the terms of the claim, be inserted at any point rather than in the personage named or suggested as Founder.8 If we agree to call the compiler of the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of the Kingdom and the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan great men and extraordinary minds, Sir James’s very simple argument is turned. And we should still be left asking who were the historic founders of the cults of Zeus and Brahma and Attis and Adonis, Dionysos and Herakles and Krishna and Aphrodite and Artemis.
On the other hand, as it happens, that very suggestion as to King Khent points afresh to the myth theory as the solution of the Gospel problem. Nothing emerges oftener in Sir James’s great survey than the ancient connection between kingship and liability to sacrifice. It will not avail to close off that connection by claiming King Khent as a potentate of an age after that of sacrificed kings. The sacrificial past would still have to be taken into account in explaining the deification of King Khent. And it is just an analogous process that is suggested in our theory of the Jesus myth. A long series of slain Jesuses, ritually put to death at an annual sacrament “for the sins of many,” is the ultimate anthropological ground given for the special cultus out of which grew the mythical biography of the Gospels.
And if Sir James remains satisfied with his charge that in putting such a theory we “flatter the vanity of the vulgar,” we may be permitted to ask him which line of propaganda is likeliest to appeal to the multitude. Let him, in his turn, be on his guard against the vulgarity which seeks support in science from popular prejudice. As to his pronouncement that the theory which he so inexpensively attacks “will find no favour with the philosophic historian,” one must just point out that it does not lie with him to draw up the conclusions of philosophic history outside of his own great department, or even, for that matter, in that department. His own historical generalizations, when they seek to pass from the strictly anthropological to the sociological status, will often really not bear the slightest critical analysis. They express at times an entire failure to realize the nature of a historical process, offering as they do mere chance speculations which patently conflict with the whole mass of the evidence he has himself collected. It is not an isolated opinion that by such abortive attempts at “philosophic history” he has tended to lessen the usefulness even of that collection, for which all students are his grateful debtors. In short, he would do well to turn from his ill-timed incursion into dogmatics to the relevant problem which he has forced upon so many of his readers—namely, What has become of his mythological maxim that the ritual precedes the myth?
While the professed mythologist rejects the application of the myth theory to the current religion in the name of “philosophic history,” students ostensibly more concerned about religion reject the historicity theory in the name of their religious ideals, finding in the myth theory the vindication of these. Thus Professor Drews has from the first connected the argument of his Das Christusmythe with a claim to regenerate religion by freeing it from anthropomorphism; and I have seen other theistic pronouncements to the same effect; to say nothing of the declarations of scholarly Churchmen that for them the Jesus of the Gospels is a God or nothing, and that for them the historicity argument has no religious value. Such positions seem to me, equation for equation, very sufficiently to balance the bias of Sir James Frazer. For my own part, I am content to maintain the theory in the name of science, and it is by scientific tests that I invite the reader to try it.
3 Compare Dalman, The Words of Jesus, p. 313. ↑
4 I.e., the old German “rationalism” so-called, the theological method of compromise with reason. ↑
6 Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 3rd ed. (vols. v and vi of 3rd ed. of The Golden Bough) i, 312, note. See the passage discussed in Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 281. ↑
7 Adonis, Attis, Osiris, as cited, ii, 19 sq., and pref. to vol. i. ↑
8 Compare Prof. W. B. Smith’s criticism of the “great man” theory as put by Von Soden—Ecce Deus, p. 9 sq. ↑
Enough has now been said to make it clear to the open-minded reader that the myth-theory is no wanton challenge to belief in a clear and credible historical narrative. It is not the advocates of the myth-theory who have raised the issue. The trouble began with the attempts of the believers to solve their own difficulties. Before the rise of criticism so-called we find them hating and burning each other in their quarrels over the meaning of their central sacrament. As soon as criticism began to work on the problem of the miracles and the contradictions in the narratives of these, they set themselves to frame “Harmonies” of the Gospels which only brought into clearer relief their discordance. After the spread of scientific views had shaken the belief in miracles, they set themselves, still as believers, to frame explanatory Lives of Jesus in which miracles were dissolved into hallucinations or natural episodes misunderstood; and, as before, no two explanations coincided. A “consensus of scholars” has never existed.
It was after a whole generation of German scholars had laboured to extract a historical Jesus from the Gospel mosaic that Strauss produced his powerful and sustained argument to show that most of the separate episodes which they had arbitrarily striven to reduce to history were but operations of the mythopœic faculty, proceeding upon the mass of Jewish prophecy and legend under the impulse of the Messianic idea. Strauss was no wanton caviller, but a great critic, forced to his work by the failure of a multitude of Gelehrten vom Fach to extract a credible result from what they admitted to be, as it stood, a history in large part incredible.
Strauss, in turn, believing at once in a residual historical Jesus and in the perfect sufficiency of a mere ideal personage as a standard for men’s lives and a basis for their churches, left but a new enigma to his successors. He had stripped the nominal Founder of a mass of mythic accretions, but, attempting no new portrait, left him undeniably more shadowy than before. Later “liberal” criticism, tacitly accepting Strauss’s negations, set itself anew to extract from the Gospels, by a process of more or less conscientious documentary analysis, the “real” Jesus whom the critics and he agreed to have existed. Renan undertook to do as much in his famous “romance”; and German critics, who so characterized his work, produced for their part only much duller romances, devoid of Renan’s wistful artistic charm. And, as before, every “biographer” in turn demurred to the results of the others.
It is the result of the utter inadequacy of all these attempts to solve the historical problem, and of the ever-growing sense of the inadequacy of a mere legendary construction to form a code for human life and a basis for a cosmic philosophy, that independent inquirers in various countries have set about finding out the real historical process of the rise of Christianity, dismissing the worn-out convention. Small-minded conservatives at once exclaim, and will doubtless go on saying, that those who thus explain away the “historical Jesus,” are moved by their antipathy to Christianity, and to theism in general. The assertion is childishly false. One of the leading exponents of the myth-theory gives his theism—or pantheism—as the primary inspiration of his work. The present writer, as he has more than once explained, began by way of writing a sociological history of the rise of Christianity on the foundation of a historical Jesus with twelve disciples—this long after coming to a completely naturalistic view of religion, which excluded theism. From such a point of view there was no à priori objection whatever to a historical Jesus. At one time he sketched a hypothesis of several successive Jesuses. The intangibility of any historical Jesus was the conclusion slowly forced by a long attempt to clear the historical starting-point, supposed to be irreducible.
Since that discovery was reached, the discrediting of the conventional view has been carried to the verge of nihilism by men who still posit a historical Jesus, but critically eliminate nearly every accepted detail, leaving only a choice between two shadowy and elusive historical concepts, even less tenable than those they reject. In the works of Schweitzer and Wrede, there is literally more direct and detailed destruction of Gospel-myth than had been attempted by almost any advocate of the myth-theory who had preceded them; though, as we have seen, it is not difficult to carry the process further. In the name of the historicity claim, they have gone on eliminating one by one myth elements where the myth-theorists had been content to recognize myth in mass. He who would re-establish the historical Jesus has to combat, first and foremost, the latest scientific champions of the belief in the historicity.
Those English critics who, like Dr. Conybeare, have declaimed so loudly of a consensus of critics and of historical common-sense on the side of a “historical Christ,” are simply fulminating from the standpoint of the German “liberalism” of thirty years ago. Nine-tenths of what they violently affirm has been definitely and destructively rejected by the latest German representatives of the critical class, in the very name of the defence of the historicity of Jesus. Orthodox Germans, on the other hand, have been pointing out that the “liberal” view is no longer “modern,” the really modern criticism having shown that the Gospel-figure is a God-figure or nothing. Vainly they hope to reinforce orthodoxy by the operations of a strict critical method.1 Our English “liberal-conservatives,” all the while, are fighting with obsolete (German) weapons, and in total ignorance of the real course of the campaign in recent years.
In such circumstances, those of us who did our thinking for ourselves, without waiting for new German leads, have perhaps some right to appeal anew to readers to do the same. There is no race quarrel involved. But perhaps those students in the English-speaking countries who in the past have been wont to follow the German leads of the generation before their own, may now realize that they were unduly diffident, and proceed to make that use of their own faculties which Germans were always making from time to time.