In the ancient history of religions, as in the ancient history of nations, the first account given of origins is almost always a myth. A divine or worshipful founder is craved by the primitive imagination no less for cults and institutions, tribes and polities, than for the forms of life and the universe itself; and history, like science, may roughly be said to begin only when that craving for first causes has been discredited, or controlled, by the later arising instinct of exact observation. Such a check or control tends to be set up by the presence of intelligently hostile forces, as in the case of the religion of Mohammed, whose teaching warred with and was warred on by rival faiths from the first, and whose own written and definite doctrine forbade his apotheosis. Some of the early Christian sects, which went far towards setting up independent cults, had their origins similarly defined by the pressure of criticism from the main body. But even in some such cases, notably in that of the Manichæan movement, the myth-making process has partly eluded hostile scrutiny;1 and earlier growths incurred much less of critical inquiry. Before the Christian system had taken organised historic form, in virtue of having come into the heritage of literary and political method embodied in the Greco-Roman civilization, it is rarely possible to trust the record of any cult’s beginnings, even where it professes to derive from a non-supernatural teacher; so ungoverned is the myth-making instinct in the absence of persistent criticism. Buddha, Zoroaster, and Moses are only less obviously mythical figures than Krishna, Herakles, and Osiris. Of the Christian cult it can at best be said that it takes its rise on the border-land between the historical and the unhistorical, since any rational defence of it to-day admits that in the story of its origins there is at least an element of sheer myth.

The oldest documents of the cult are ostensibly the Epistles of Paul; and concerning these there are initial perplexities, some being more or less clearly spurious—that is, very different from or much later in character than the rest—while all of the others show signs of interpolation. Taken as they stand, however, they reveal a remarkable ignorance of the greater part of the narratives in the gospels, and of the whole body of the teachings there ascribed to Jesus. In three respects only do the Pauline writings give any support to the histories later accepted by the Christian Church. They habitually speak of Jesus as crucified, and as having risen from the dead; they contain one account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper, in agreement with the gospel account; and they make one mention of “the twelve.” But the two latter allusions occur in passages (1 Cor. xi and xv) which have plain marks of interpolation; and when they are withdrawn the Pauline letters tell only of a cult, Jewish in origin, in which a crucified Jesus—called the Messiah or Christos or Anointed One—figures as a saving sacrifice, but counts for absolutely nothing as a teacher or even as a wonder-worker. Yet he is a God or Demigod who has risen from the dead. A eucharist or religious meal is celebrated in his name, but no mention is made of any teaching uttered by the founder. And nothing in the epistles enables us even to date them independently of the gospel narratives, which they so strangely fail to confirm. Thus the case stands with the New Testament very much as with the Old. As the Book of Judges reveals a state of Hebrew life quite incompatible with that described in the Pentateuch as having preceded it, so do the epistles of Paul reveal a stage of Christist propaganda incompatible with any such prior development as is set forth in the gospel. And the reasonable conclusion in the two cases seems to be the same: that the documents setting forth the prior developments are, as they now stand, not only later in composition but substantially fictitious, even where they do not tell of supernatural events. The only tenable alternative is the hypothesis of two separate movements of Christism, which ignored or discredited each other.

What needs to be explained in both cases is the way in which the later narratives came to be compiled. Within a hundred years from the date commonly assigned to the Crucifixion, there are Gentile traces of a Jesuist or Christist movement deriving from Jewry, and possessing a gospel or memoir as well as some of the Pauline and other epistles, both spurious and genuine; but the gospel then current is seen to have contained some matter not preserved in the canonical four, and to have lacked much that those contain. Of those traces the earliest are found in one epistle of Clement called Bishop of Rome (fl. about 100), which, whether genuine or not, is ancient, and in the older form of the epistles ascribed to the Martyr Ignatius (d. about 115?) of which the same may be said. About the middle of the second century the writings of Justin Martyr tell of a Christist memoir, but show no knowledge of the Pauline epistles. All alike tell of a spreading cult, with a theology not yet coherently dogmatic, founding mainly on a crucified Jesus, faith in whom ensures salvation.

Like the letters of Paul, those ascribed to Clement and Ignatius tell of schisms and bitter strifes in the churches: that is the constant note of Christian history from first to last. As to rites, we have but a bare mention of the eucharist and of baptism; the story of the founder’s parentage is still unknown to the makers of documents, and his miracles are as unheard of as most of his teachings. There is nothing in Clement, or in the older Ignatian epistles, or in that ascribed to Polycarp (circa 150), or in that of Barnabas (same period), to show knowledge of the existing gospels of Luke or John; a solitary parallel to Luke being rather a proof that the passage echoed had been taken from some earlier document; and the gospel actually cited as late as Justin is certainly not identical with either Mark or Matthew. Even from Paul there is hardly any quotation; and Clement, who mentions or is made to mention his epistles to the Corinthians, pens a long passage in praise of love which has no quotation from the apostle’s famous chapter on that head, though it would have seemed made for his purpose. In view of their lax way of quoting the Old Testament we may infer that the early Fathers or forgers had few manuscripts; and it is plain that they set no such store by Christian documents as they did by the Jewish; but the fact remains that they fail to vouch for much even of those Pauline epistles which commonly rank as incontestable. At times, as in the Pauline use of the word ektroma (1 Cor. xv, 8), which occurs in a similar phrase in one of the Ignatian epistles, there is reason to suspect that the “apostolic” writing has been interpolated in imitation of the “post-apostolic.” In the latter the expression is appropriate; in the former it is not.

It does not indeed follow that documents or chapters not quoted or utilized by the Fathers were in their day non-existent. The letters of Paul, supposing them to be genuine, would in any case be only gradually made common property. All the evidence goes to show that the early Christians were for the most part drawn from the illiterate classes; and the age of abundant manuscripts would begin only with the age of educated converts. But what is inconceivable is that one so placed as Paul should never once cite the teachings of the founder, if such teachings were current in his day in any shape; and what is extremely improbable is that one so placed as Clement, or one forging or interpolating in his name, should possess Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians as it now stands, and yet should barely mention it in a letter to the same church dealing with almost the same problems. In the first case, we are almost forced to conclude that the gospel narratives were non-existent for the writer or writers of the Pauline epistles up to the point of the two interpolations which allege an accepted tradition; and, in the second, that the Pauline epistles themselves are nowhere to be taken as certainly genuine.2 Such irremovable doubt is the Nemesis of the early Christian habits of forgery and fiction.

There emerges, however, the residual fact that Paul ranked in the second century as a historical and natural personage, in whose name it was worth while to forge. For Paul’s period, again, Jesus was possibly a historical personage, since he was not declared to be supernaturally born, though credited with a supernatural resurrection. Broadly speaking, the age of an early Christian document is found to be in the ratio of its narrative bareness, its lack of biographical myth, its want of relation to the existing gospels. As between the shorter and the longer form of the Ignatian epistles, the question of priority is at once settled by the frequent citations from the gospels and from Paul in the latter, and the lack of them in the former. But all the documents alike appear to point to a movement which remotely took its rise among the Jews long before the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70, and subsisted in Jewry long afterwards; and, as the Jewish environment lacked many of the forces of change present in the Gentile, it is to the Jewish form of the cult that we must first look if we would trace its growth.