The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions

The problem of the historicity of the Jesus of the Gospels has been discussed by me in large sections of two bulky books, which in other sections deal with matters only indirectly connected with this, while even the sections directly devoted to the problem cover a good deal of mythological and anthropological ground which not many readers may care to master. The “myth theory” developed in them, therefore, may not be readily grasped even by open-minded readers; and the champions of tradition, of whatever school, have a happy hunting-ground for desultory misrepresentation and mystification. It has been felt to be expedient, therefore, by disinterested readers as well as by me, to put the problem in a clearer form and in a more concise compass. The process ought to involve some logical improvement, as the mythological investigation made in Christianity and Mythology had been carried out independently of the anthropological inquiry made in Pagan Christs, and the theory evolved may well require unification. In particular, the element of Jewish mythology [xii]calls for fuller development. And the highly important developments of the myth theory by Professor Drews and Professor W. B. Smith have to be considered with a view to co-ordination.

To such a re-statement, however, certain preliminary steps are necessary. The ground needs to be cleared (1) of à priori notions as to the subject matter; (2) of mistaken opinions as to a supposed “consensus of critics”; and (3) of uncritical assumptions as to the character of the Gospel narratives.

Writers who have not gone very deeply into problems of normal history, however they may have specialized in the Biblical, are still wont to assert that the historicity of non-supernatural data in the Sacred Books is on all fours with that of the subject matter of “profane” history. Indeed it is still common to hear it claimed that the Resurrection is as well “attested” as the assassination of Julius Cæsar, or even better. In exactly the same tone and spirit did the traditionalists of a previous generation assert that the stoppage of the sun and moon in the interest of Joshua was better attested than any equally ancient historical narrative. Those who have decided to abandon the supernatural reduce the claim, of course, to the historicity of the Trial and Crucifixion; but as to these they confidently repeat the old formulas. Yet in point of fact they have made no such critical scrutiny of [xiii]even these items as historians have long been used to make, with destructive results, into many episodes of ancient history—for instance, the battle of Thermopylæ and the founding of the Spartan constitution by Lycurgus. Men who affect to dismiss the myth theory as an ungrounded speculation are all the while taking for granted the historicity of a record which is a mere tissue of incredibilities.

It has been justly remarked that serious risk of error is set up even by the long-current claim of naturalist critics to “treat the Bible like any other book.” Even in their meaning the phrase should have run: “like any other Sacred Book of antiquity”; inasmuch as critical tests and methods are called for in the scrutiny of such books which do not apply in the case of others. But inasmuch, further, as the Christian Sacred Books form a problem by themselves, a kind of scrutiny which in the case of other books of cult-history might substantially reveal all the facts may here easily fail to do so.

The unsuspecting student, coming to a narrative in which supernatural details are mingled with “natural,” decides simply to reject the former and take as history what is left. It is the method of the amateur mythologists of ancient Greece, derided by Socrates, and chronically resuscitated in all ages by men seeking short cuts to certitude where they have no right to any. If the narrative of the Trial [xiv]and Crucifixion, thus handled, is found to be still incredible in point of time-arrangement, the adaptor meets the difficulty by reducing the time-arrangement to probability and presenting the twice redacted result as “incontestable” history. All this, as will be shown in the following pages, is merely a begging of the question. A scientific analysis points to a quite different solution, which the naïf “historical” student has never considered.

He is still kept in countenance, it is true, by “specialists” of the highest standing. The average “liberal” theologian still employs the explanatory method of Toland; and anthropologists still offer him support. Thus Sir James Frazer, by far the most learned collector of mytho-anthropological lore in his age, positively refuses to apply to the history of the Christian cult his own express rule of mythology—formulated before him1 but independently reiterated by him—that “all peoples have invented myths to explain why they observed certain customs,” and that a graphic myth to explain a rite is presumptively “a simple transcript of a ceremony”; which is the equivalent of the doctrine of Robertson Smith, that “in almost every case the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth,” and of the doctrine of K. O. Müller that “the mythus sprang from the [xv]worship, and not the worship from the mythus.” What justification Sir James can give for his refusal to act on his own principles is of course a matter for full and careful consideration. But at least the fact that he has to justify the refusal to apply in a most important case one of the best-established generalizations of comparative mythology is not in this case a recommendation of the principle of authority to scientific readers.

General phrases, then, as to how religions must have originated in the personal impression made by a Founder are not only unscientific presuppositions but are flatly contradictory, in this connection, of a rule scientifically reached in the disinterested study of ancient hierology in general.

It is a delusion, again, to suppose, as do some scholarly men, that there is such a consensus of view among New Testament scholars as to put out of court any theory that cancels the traditionalist assumption of historicity which is the one position that most of them have in common. As we shall see, the latest expert scholarship, professionally recognized as such, makes a clean sweep of their whole work; but they themselves, by their insoluble divisions, had already discredited it. Any careful collection of their views will show that the innumerable and vital divergences of principle and method of the various schools, and their constant [xvi]and emphatic disparagement of each other’s conclusions, point rather to the need for a radically different theory and method. A theory, therefore, which cancels their conflicts by showing that all the data are reducible to order only when their primary assumption is abandoned, is entitled to the open-minded attention of men who profess loyalty to the spirit of science.

There is need, thirdly, to bring home even to many readers who profess such loyalty, the need for a really critical study of the Gospels. I have been blamed by some critics because, having found that sixty years’ work on the documents by New Testament scholars yielded no clear light on the problem of origins, I chose to approach that by way (1) of mythology, (2) of extra-evangelical literature and sect-history, and (3) of anthropology. The question of the order and composition of the Gospels, in the view of these critics, should be the first stage in the inquiry.

Now, for the main purposes of the myth-theory, the results reached by such an investigator as Professor Schmiedel were quite sufficient; and though at many points textual questions had to be considered, it seemed really not worth while to discuss in detail the quasi-historical results claimed by the exegetes. But it has become apparent that a number of readers who claim to be “emancipated” [xvii]have let themselves be put off with descriptions of the Gospel-history when they ought to have read it attentively for themselves. A confident traditionalist, dealt with hereinafter, writes of the “pretentious futilities into which we so readily drop when we talk about them [the Gospels] instead of reading them.” The justice of the observation is unconsciously but abundantly illustrated by himself; and he certainly proves the need for inducing professed students to read with their eyes open.

Early in 1914 there was published a work on The Historical Christ, by Dr. F. C. Conybeare, in which, as against the myth hypothesis, which he vituperatively assailed, a simple perusal of the Gospel of Mark (procurable, as he pointed out, for one penny) was confidently prescribed as the decisive antidote to all doubts of the historicity of the central figure. The positions put were the conventional ones of the “liberal” school. No note was taken of the later professional criticism which, without accepting the myth-theory, shatters the whole fabric of current historicity doctrine. But that is relatively a small matter. In the course of his treatise, Dr. Conybeare asserted three times over, with further embellishments, that in the Gospel of Mark Jesus is “presented quite naturally as the son of Joseph and his wife Mary, and we learn quite incidentally the names of his brothers [xviii]and sisters.” Dr. Conybeare’s printers’ proofs, he stated, had been read for him by Professor A. C. Clark. I saw, I think, fully twenty newspaper notices of the book; and in not a single one was there any recognition of the gross and thrice-repeated blunder above italicized, to modify the chorus of uncritical assent. A professed Rationalist repeated and endorsed Dr. Conybeare’s assertion. Needless to say, not only did Dr. Conybeare not mention that Joseph is never named in Mark, he never once alluded to the fact that in the same Gospel Mary is presented as not the mother of Jesus; and the brothers and sisters, by implication, as not his brothers and sisters.

When aggressive scholars and confident reviewers thus alike reveal that they have not read the Gospels with the amount of attention supposed to be bestowed on them by an intelligent Sunday-school teacher, it is evidently inadvisable to take for granted any general critical preparation even among rationalistic readers. Before men can realize the need for a new theoretic interpretation of the whole, they must be invited to note the vital incongruities (as apart from miracle stories) in each Gospel singly, as the lay Freethinkers of an earlier generation did without pretending to be scholars.

Those Rationalists are ill-advised who suppose that, in virtue of having listened to latter-day publicists [xix]who profess to extract a non-supernatural “religion” from the supernaturalisms of the past, they have reached a higher and truer standpoint than that of the men who made sheer truth their standard and their ideal. Really scholarly and scrupulous advocates of theism are as zealous to expose the historical truth as the men who put that first and foremost; it is the ethical sentimentalists who put the question of historic truth on one side. The fact that some men of scientific training in other fields join at times in such complacent constructions does not alter the fact that they are non-scientific. The personal equation even of a man of science is not science. On these as on other sides of the intellectual life, “opinion of store is cause of want,” as Bacon has it.

Some of us who in our teens critically read the sacred books first and foremost to clear our minds on the general question of supernaturalism, and then proceeded to try, with the help of the documentary scholars, to trace the history of religion as matter of anthropology and sociology, had the experience of being told by Professor Huxley, whose own work we had followed, that we were still at the standpoint of Voltaire. Later we had the edification of seeing Huxley expatiate upon topics which had long been stale for Secularist audiences, and laboriously impugn the story of the Flood and [xx]the miracle of the Gadarene swine in discursive debate with Gladstone, even making scientific mistakes in the former connection.

In view of it all, it seems still a sound discipline to treat all opinions as for ever open to revision, and at the same time to doubt whether the acceptance of any popular formula will place us in a position to disparage unreservedly all our critical predecessors. If we find reason to dismiss as inadequate the conclusions of many scholars of the past, orthodox and heterodox, we are not thereby entitled to speak of the best of them otherwise than as powerful minds and strenuous toilers, hampered by some of their erroneous assumptions in the task of relieving their fellows of the burden of others.

It is precisely the habituation of the professional scholars to working in a special groove that has so retarded the progress of New Testament criticism. The re-discussion of the historicity question that has followed upon the modern exposition of the myth-theory has involved the reiteration by the historicity school of a set of elementary claims from the long-discredited interpolation in Josephus and the pagan “testimonies” of Suetonius and Tacitus; and Professor W. B. Smith has had to meet these with a detailed rebuttal such as used to be made—of course with less care and fullness—on the ordinary English Secularist platform forty or even seventy [xxi]years ago. Less advanced scholars once more begin to recognize the nullity of the argument from the famous passage in the Annals of Tacitus,2 which was clear to so many unpretending freethinkers in the past; and to other Gelehrten vom Fach it has to be again pointed out that the impulsore Chresto of Suetonius, so far from testifying to the presence of a Christian multitude at Rome under Nero—a thing so incompatible with their own records—is rather a datum for the myth-theory, inasmuch as it posits a cult of a Chrēstos or Christos out of all connection with the “Christian” movement.

The passage in Josephus was given up long ago by hundreds of orthodox scholars as a palpable interpolation, proved as such by the total silence in regard to it of early Fathers who would have rejoiced to cite it if it had been in existence. The device of supposing it to be a Christian modification of a different testimony by Josephus is a resort of despair, which evades altogether the fact of the rupture of context made by the passage—a feature only less salient in the paragraph of Tacitus. But even if there were no reason to suspect the latter item of being a late echo from Sulpicius Severus, who [xxii]is assumed to have copied it, nothing can be proved from it for the historicity of the Gospel Jesus, inasmuch as it does but set forth from a hostile standpoint the ordinary Christian account of the beginnings of the cult. Those who at this time of day found upon such data are further from an appreciation of the evidential problem than were their orthodox predecessors who debated the issue with Freethinkers half a century ago.

I have thought it well, then, to precede a restatement of the “myth-theory” with a critical survey in which a number of preliminary questions of scientific method and critical ethic are pressed upon those who would deal with the main problem aright; and a certain amount of controversy with other critical schools is indulged in by way of making plain the radical weakness of all the conventional positions. The negative criticism, certainly, will not establish in advance the positive theory: that must meet the ordeal of criticism like every other. But the preliminary discussion may at once serve to free from waste polemic the constructive argument and guard readers against bringing to that a delusive light from false assumptions.

A recent and more notorious exhibition of “critical method” by Dr. Conybeare has satisfied me that it is needless to offer any further systematic exposure of the nullity of his treatise, with which [xxiii]I had dealt at some length in The Literary Guide. His memorable attack upon the Foreign Secretary, and his still more memorable retractation, may enable some of his laudatory reviewers to realize the kind of temper and the kind of scrutiny he brings to bear upon documents and theories that kindle his passions. All that was relevant in his constructive process was really extracted, with misconceptions and blunders and exaggerations, from the works of a few scholars of standing who, however inconclusive their work might be, set him a controversial example which he was unable to follow. In dealing with them, I have the relief of no longer dealing with him. As to the constructive argument from comparative mythology, anthropology, and hierology, attacked by him and others with apparently no grasp of the principles of any of these sciences, objections may be best dealt with incidentally where they arise in the restatement of the case.

For the rest, I can conceive that some will say the second year of the World War is no time for the discussion even of a great problem of religious history. I answer that the War has actually been made the pretext for endless religious discussions of the most futile kind, ranging between medieval miracle-mongering and the lowest forms of journalistic charlatanism, with chronic debates on theism [xxiv]and on the military value of faith and prayer. The newspaper discussions on theism, in particular, reveal a degree of philosophic naïveté on the theistic side which seems to indicate that that view of the universe has of late years been abandoned by most men capable of understanding the logical problem. When dispute plays thus uselessly at the bidding of emotion there must be some seniors, or others withheld from war service, who in workless hours would as lief face soberly an inquiry which digs towards the roots of the organized religion of Europe. If the end of the search should be the conviction that that system took shape as naturally as any other cult of the ancient world, and that the sacrosanct records of its origin are but products of the mythopœic faculty of man, the time of war, with its soul-shaking challenge to the sense of reality, may not be the most unfit for the experience. [1]