On the view here taken, there was at Jerusalem, at some time in the first century, a small group of Jesuist “apostles” among whom the chief may have been named James, John, and Cephas. They may have been members of a ritual group of twelve, who may have styled themselves Brothers of the Lord; but that group in no way answered to the Twelve of the gospels. Of the apostle class the number was indefinite. Besides the apostles, further, there would seem to have been an indefinite number of “prophets,” indicative of a cult of somewhat long standing. The adherents believed in a non-historic Jesus, the “Servant” of the Jewish God, somehow evolved out of the remote Jesus-God who is reduced to human status in the Old Testament as Joshua. And their central secret rite consisted in a symbolic sacrament, evolved out of an ancient sacrament of human sacrifice, in which the victim had been the representative of the God, sacrificed to the God, in the fashion of a hundred primitive cults. This rite had within living memory, if not still at the time from which we start, been accompanied by an annual popular rite in which a selected person—probably a criminal released for the purpose—was treated as a temporary king, then derided, and then either in mock show or in actual fact executed, under the name of Jesus Barabbas, “the Son of the Father.”

Of this ancient cult there were inferribly many scattered centres outside of Judea, including probably some in Samaria, the special region of the celebration of the Hero-God Joshua. There was one such group in Ephesus; and probably another at Alexandria, and another at Antioch; Jews of the Dispersion having possibly taken the cult with them. But the cult outside Jewry may have had non-Jewish roots, though it merged with Jewish elements. So long as the Temple at Jerusalem lasted, the small cult counted for very little; and it was probably after the fall of Jerusalem71 that its leaders added to their machinery the rite of baptism, which the synoptic gospels treat as a specialty of the movement of John the Baptist. Him they represent as a “forerunner” of the Christ, who under divine inspiration recognizes the Messianic claims of Jesus. All this is plainly unhistorical, even on the assumption of the historicity of Jesus.72 Whatever may be the historic facts as to John the Baptist, who is a very dubious figure,73 the marked divergence between the synoptics and the fourth gospel on the subject of baptism74 show that that rite was not originally Jesuist, but was adopted by the Jesuists as a means of popular appeal.

The recognition of this fact is a test of the critical good faith of those who profess to found on the synoptics for a history of the beginnings of the Jesuist cult. Canon Robinson75 treats as unquestionably historical one of the contradictory statements in John iv, 1–2, of which the first affirms that Jesus baptized abundantly, while the second, an evidently interpolated parenthesis, asserts that only the disciples baptized, not Jesus. Though this interpolation hinges on the first dictum, the Canon accepts it to the exclusion of that, its basis. But the original writer could not have put the proposition thus had he believed it. What he affirmed was abundant baptizing by Jesus. Of this, however, the synoptics have no more hint than they have of baptizing by the disciples. On any possible view of the composition of the synoptics, it is inconceivable that they should omit all mention of baptizing by Jesus or the disciples if such a practice was affirmed in the early tradition. For them baptism is the institution of the Forerunner, who is mythically represented as hailing in Jesus his successor or supersessor, with no suggestion of a continuance of the rite. If there is to be any critical consistency in the biographical argument, it must at least recognize that baptism is non-Jesuine.

The embodiment of the rite of baptism on the basis of the Baptist’s alleged acclamation of Jesus as the Messiah, either carried with it or followed upon the claim that Jesus, hitherto regarded as a simple Saviour-God, was a Messiah. After the fall of Jerusalem, the old dream of an earthly Messiah who should restore the Kingdom of Judah or Israel76 was shattered for the vast majority of Jews. Even in the Assumption of Moses, in the main the work of a Quietist Pharisee, written in Hebrew probably between 7 and 29 of the first century,77 there is a virtual abandonment of Messianism, the task of overthrowing the Gentiles being assigned to “the Most High.”78 In the composite Apocalypse of Baruch, written in Hebrew, mainly by Pharisaic Jews, in the latter half of the first century, probably as an implicit polemic against early Jesuism,79 we see the effect of the catastrophe. In the sections written before the fall of Jerusalem, the hope of a Messianic Kingdom is proclaimed; in those written later there is either at most a hope of a Messianic Kingdom without a Messiah or a complete abandonment of mundane expectations.80 What the Jesuist movement did was to develop, outside of Jewry,81 the earlier notion of a Messiah “concealed,” pre-appointed, and coming from heaven to effect the consummation of all things earthly.82

Such Messianism may have either preceded or proceeded-on an adoption of the rite of baptism. Given a resort to Messianism by the Jesuists after the fall of Jerusalem, the alleged testimony of the Baptist to Jesus as the Appointed One might be the first step; and the resort to the baptismal rite would follow on the myth that Jesus had been actually baptized by John. In Acts, i, 5, Jesus is in effect made to represent John’s baptism with water as superseded by a baptism in the Holy Ghost.83 In the Pauline epistles we have trace of a conflict over this as over other Judaic practices, Paul being made to declare (1 Cor. i, 17) that “Christ sent me not to baptize but to preach the gospel,” though he admits having baptized a few.84 All that is clear is that the Jesuists were not primarily baptizers; that they began to baptize “in the name of Jesus Christ,”85 with a formula of the Holy Ghost and fire, but really in the traditional manner with water; and that long afterwards they feigned that the Founder had prescribed baptism with a trinitarian formula.86

Thus far, the local movement was not only Jewish but Judaic. It may or may not have been before the fall of Jerusalem that a Jesuist “apostle” named Paul conceived the idea of creating by propaganda a new Judæo-Jesuist movement appealing to Gentiles. Such an idea is not the invention of Paul or any other Jesuist; the idea of a Messianic Kingdom in which the Gentiles should be saved is found in the Jewish Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written in Hebrew by a Pharisee between the years 109 and 106 B.C.87 But, thus made current, it might well be adopted by Jesuists. The reason for supposing this to have begun before the year 70 is not merely the tradition to that effect but the fact that in none of the epistles do we have any trace of that “gospel of the Kingdom” which in the synoptics is posited as the evangel of Jesus. That evangel, which is a simple duplication of the alleged evangel of the Baptist, and which we have seen to be wholly mythical, being devoid of possible historic content,88 is part of the apparatus of the retrospective Messianic claim. But the Pauline Epistles, even as they show no knowledge of the name Nazareth, or Nazaræan, or Nazarene, or of any gospel teaching, also show no concern over a “gospel of the Kingdom.” Whether or not, then, they are wholly pseudepigraphic, they suggest that a Paulinism of some kind was an early feature in the Jesuist evolution.

According to the Acts, Paul’s name was originally Saul, though no such avowal is ever made in the epistles. The purpose of the statement seems to be to strengthen the case as to his Jewish nationality, which is affirmed in the epistles, as is the item that he had been a murderous persecutor of the early Jesuists. All this suggests a late manipulation of the traditions of an early strife. To claim that the Gentilizing apostle had been a Jew born and bred would be as natural on the Gentilizing side as to allege that the typically Judaic Peter had denied his Lord; while the charge of persecuting the infant church would be a not less natural invention of the Judaic Christians who accepted the tradition that Paul had been a Pharisee and a pupil of Gamaliel. In point of fact we find the Ebionites, the typical Judaic Jesuists, knowing him simply as “Paul of Tarsus” in their version of the Acts or in a previous document upon which that founded.89 And many Jewish scholars have declared that they cannot conceive the Pauline epistles to have been written by a Rabbinically trained Jew.90 This does not preclude the possibility that the original Paul, of whose “few very short epistles” personally penned91 we have probably nothing left that is identifiable,92 may have been such a Jew, but the presumption is to the contrary.

On the face of the case, nothing was more natural than that the Jesuist movement should appeal to civilized Gentiles. Judaism itself did so, striving much after proselytes. The question was whether the Jesuist proselytes should be made on a strictly Judaic basis. Now, even if the fall of Jerusalem had not given the impetus to a severance of the cult from the dominating religion, the sacred domicile being gone, it is obvious that an abandonment of such a Jewish bar as circumcision would give the developing cult a great advantage over the other in propaganda among Gentiles. Circumcision must have been a highly repellent detail for Hellenistic Gentiles in general; and a gospel which dispensed with it would have a new chance of making headway. And such a severance certainly took place, though we can put no reliance on the chronology of the Acts.93 Paul94 remains a doubtfully dated figure, because the chronology of the whole cult is problematic.

But we can broadly distinguish between a “Petrine” and a “Pauline” Christism. In the Acts (ii, 22–40), which clearly embodies earlier lore, prior to that of the gospels, the Jesus Christ preached by Peter is not represented as a saving sacrifice. As little is he a Teacher, though he is a doer of “mighty works and wonders and signs.” If we were to apply the biographical method, the presentment might be held to indicate the Talmudic Jesus. Only after his resurrection “God hath made him both Lord and Christ”—that is, Messiah; and the Jewish hearers are invited to “repent” and be “baptized ... in the name of Jesus Christ unto the remission of your sins.” Peter’s Jesus, like him of the Teaching, is the “Servant” of God, not his Son. And there is no mention of a sacrament, though there is noted a “breaking of bread at home” (42, 46) recalling the “broken” (bread) of the Didachê. The sacrament, then, was apparently a secret rite for the Jewish group.

The speeches, of course, are quite unhistorical: we can but take them as embodying a traditional “Petrine” teaching with later matter. Thus we have baptism figuring as a Jesuist rite, whereas in the synoptics, as we have seen, there had been no such thing. The story of Peter being brought to the pro-Gentile view is pure ecclesiastical myth, probably posterior to the Pauline epistles, which are ignored but counteracted in so far as they posit strife between Pauline and Petrine propaganda. Peter and Paul alike are made to teach that “it behoved the Christ to suffer” (iii, 18; xvii, 3), even as they duplicate their miracles, their escapes, and their sufferings. But while Peter is pretended to have accepted Gentilism, it is Paul who acts on the principle; and he it is who is first represented as fighting pagan polytheism, notably at Ephesus (xix, 26). At Athens, in a plainly fictitious speech, he is made to expound the “unknown God” of an Athenian agnostic cult in terms of Jewish opposition to image-worship, indicating Jesus merely as “a man” raised by God from the dead to judge the world at the judgment day. It is after this episode that he is made to tell the Jews of Corinth he will “henceforth go unto the Gentiles.” Nevertheless he is made to go on preaching to the Jews. The narrative as a whole is plainly factitious: all we can hope to do is to detect some of its historic data.

Two things must be kept clearly and constantly in view: first, that what we understand by a literary and a historical conscience simply did not exist in the early Christian environment; second, that in all probability the Acts, which to start with would be a blend of tradition and fiction, is much manipulated during a long period. We are not entitled to assume that an “original” writer duplicated the careers of Peter and Paul for purposes of edification. One or more may have wrought one narrative, and a later hand or hands may have systematically interpolated the other.95 We are to remember further that it was an age in which most Christians, assimilating the eschatology of the Persians and the Jews—the spontaneous dream of crushed peoples—expected the speedy end of the world, and did their thinking on that basis. In such a state of mind, critical thought could not exist save as a small element in religious polemic.

Let us then see what we reach on the hypothesis that early Jesuism even in the first century, and possibly even before the fall of Jerusalem, was running in two different channels—one movement adhering to Jewish usage, making Jesus the Servant of God, and conceiving him as a God-gifted Healer whose death raised him to the status of the Messiah, the promised Christ or Anointed One who should either close the earthly scene or bring about a new God-ruled era for the Jews. For the holders of this view, the Kingdom of God was coming. Jesus was ere long to come in the clouds in great glory and inaugurate the new life. To ask for clear conceptions on such a matter from such minds would be idle. There were none. The one idea connected with the mythical evangel was that Jews should repent and prepare for the new life. To that elusive minimum the latest biographical analysis, assuming the historicity, reduces the “ministry” of the gospel Jesus.96 The rest is all post-apostolic accretion. On the other hand, the Petrine Jesus has proved his mission for his devotees, first and last, by miracles, and by his resurrection—things which the biographical school rejects as imaginary.

Upon this movement there enters an innovator, Paul of Tarsus. Round him, as round Peter, there are clouds of myth. That he was originally Saul, a Pharisee, a pupil of Gamaliel; that he began as a bitter persecutor of the Jesuists; and that he was converted by a supernatural vision, become common data for the church. That the charge of persecution was a Judaic figment, on the other hand, is perhaps as likely as that the story of Peter’s denial of his Master was a Gentile figment. We are in a world of purposive fiction. But the broad divergence of doctrine seems to underlie all the fables. Saul, on the later view, changes his Jewish name to the Grecian Paul when he plans to make the Jesus-cult non-Jewish, using the tactic of monotheism against pagan polytheism in general, in the very act of adding a Son-God to the Jewish Father-God, as so many Son-Gods had been added to Father-Gods throughout religious history. To the early Jewish Jesuists, the notion of the Son had been given by the old cult of sacrifice, with its Jesus the Son—an idea obscurely but certainly present, as we have seen, in the lore of the Talmudists.

Clearly it was the Pauline movement that made of Christism a “viable” world religion. As an unorganized Saviour-cult it would have died out like others. As a phase of Judaism, it could have had no Jewish permanence, simply because its Messianism was a matter of looking daily for an “end of the world” that did not come. After two centuries of waiting, the Jews would have had as clear a right to pronounce Jesus a “false Messiah” as they had in the case of Barcochab or any other before or since. The mere belief in a future life, at one time excluded from their Sacred Books, had become the common faith, only the aristocratic Sadducees (probably not all of them) rejecting it. On that side, Jesuism gave them nothing. Well might Paul “turn to the Gentiles”—albeit not under the circumstances theologically imagined for him in the book of Acts.

Even for the Gentiles, Jesuism was but one of many competing cults, offering similar attractions. In the religions of Adonis, Attis, Isis and Osiris, Dionysos, Mithra, and the Syrian Marnas (“the Lord, a variant of Adonis = Adonai, one of the Jews’ exoteric names for Yahweh”), a resplendent ever-youthful God who had died to rise again was sacramentally adored, mourned for, and rejoiced over, by devotees just as absorbed in their faith as were the Jesuists. With vague pretences of biographical knowledge, to which nobody now attaches any credence, they were as sure of the historicity of their Vegetation-Gods and Sun-Gods as the Christists were of the actuality of theirs. Had a Frazer of the second century told them that their Adonis and Attis were but abstractions of the annual sacrificial victim of old time, they would have told him, in the manner of Festus (not yet obsolete), that much learning had made him mad. They “knew” that their Redeemer had lived, died, and risen again. The unbelief of philosophers, or of scoffers like Lucian, affected them no more than scientific and critical unbelief to-day disturbs the majority of unthinking Christians. The busy sacrificial and devotional life of Hierapolis would be as little affected by Lucian’s tranquil exhibition of it as the life at Lourdes has been by Zola’s novel. On that side, we can very easily understand the past by the present.

So little psychic or intellectual difference was there between Jesuism and the other “isms” that Paul’s propaganda made no measurable sensation in the colluvies of the Roman empire. As Renan avows, even on the assumption of the genuineness of the Epistles, he was the missioner of a number of small conventicles, all convinced that they alone were the “true Church of God upon earth.” It is an error of perspective to ascribe extraordinary faculty to the missionary who either converted or “stablished” such believers; and it is plainly unnecessary to assume in his case any abnormal sincerity or persuasiveness. If we were to estimate him in terms of the records we should describe him either as a halluciné or as a fanatic who had shed Christian blood in his Judaic stage and never in the least learned humility on that score, his phrases of contrition being balanced by the fiercest asperities towards all who withstood him in his Christian stage. But we have no right to draw a portrait of “Paul,” who is left to us a composite of literary figments testifying only to the previous activity of a propagandist so-named.

One conclusion, however, holds alike whether or not we accept any of the epistles as genuine: or rather, the more we lean on the epistles the more it holds: Paul had no concern about the life, teachings, or “personality” of his Jesus.97 His Jesus, be it said once more, is a speechless abstraction. One of the strangest fallacies in the procedure of the biographical school is the assumption that the acceptance of the epistles as genuine involves the admission of the historicity of the Founder. In actual fact, it was a belief in the substantial genuineness of the main epistles that first strengthened the present writer in his first surmises of the non-historicity of the entire gospel record; just as a perception of the historical situation broadly set forth in Judges confirms doubt as to the historicity of the record of the Hexateuch. The two will not consist. On the other hand, Van Manen, who had previously been troubled about the historicity of Jesus, was positively set at rest on that score when he reached the conclusion that all the Paulines were supposititious. This happened simply because he had scientifically covered the field only on the Pauline side: had he applied equivalent tests to the gospels, he would have reached there too a verdict of fabrication. There is strictly no absolute sequitur in such a case. The myth-theory is neither made nor marred by the rejection of the Paulines.

Even those who cannot realize the indifference of “Paul” to all personal records of his Jesus—or, recognizing it, are content to explain it away by formulas—must see on consideration that belief in a Saviour God no more needed biographical basis in the case of Paul than in the case of the priests of Mithra, who, it may be noted, had a strong centre at Tarsus.98 There is a certain plausibility in the argument that only a great personality could have made possible the belief in the Resurrection story—though that too is fallacy—but there is no plausibility in inferring that a conception of a personality he had never personally known was needed to impel Paul to his evangel, which is simply one of future salvation by divine sacrifice for all who believe. That is the substitution made by Gentile Christism for the miscarrying Messianism of the Petrine doctrine. It was probably the normal doctrine of many pagan cults—Mithraism for one, which for three hundred years, by common consent, was the outstanding rival of Christianity in the Roman empire.99 It was, then, no specialty of dogma that ultimately determined the success of the one and the disappearance of the other. It was a concatenation of real or “external” causes, not a peculiarity of mere belief.