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AND The Myth of the Resurrection _BY W. A. CAMPBELL NEW YORK Peter Eckler Publishing Company 1927 Copyright, 1927; PETER ECKLER PUBLISHING CO. PRINTED IN THE U. 5. A. BY FREDERICK GUMBRECHT, BROOKLYN, N. Ye CONTENTS DIOSTHE JEWS) KID UbSUS (wt cee) Wins s 7 BT CIC Sent a rete Leas ak Gaye eue nn 57 PADDED Ue acy cr eae oe ees 59 Concerning the Millennium............... an OF THE MYTH OF THE RESURRECTION................-------- 63 Excerpt from the Gospel of Petev........ 68 Excerpt from Clement’s Epistle to COTINCHIANS eee een tages 41 TATA OT os le Wey eS aA ease dec ORY Ca po all iba cee Mente 96 Fwy Oev Ca Wah 7d ay Sale ly eins A Pe aN Neral ie iia 100 Phlegon’s Resurrection Story FMpay ates Ua hb cnn © Glance Alle dab Nplate aang Sylar) s ha eet li at 107 Dr. More on the Resurrection. DID THE JEWS KILL JESUS? Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2021 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/didjewskilljesusOOcamp DID THE JEWS KILL JESUS? I Oceans of tears and rivers of blood have washed the hard and stony road along which the Jew has groped his way through the lands of the earth during the centuries following the destruction of his Holy City and expulsion from his homeland. The causes of this persecution —the bitterest in history—are twofold: economic and racial, and religious. I shall not attempt to discuss the problem as to what per cent of this persecution has been due to sociological and economic causes, and what to religious (possibly they stand somewhere in the ratio of sixty to forty), but I shall try to answer this pertinent question: What historical 8 Dip THE Jews Kuti Jesus? justification is there for the charge on which Gentile religious hatred was for centuries based—namely, that the Jews put to death the Eternal God, manifested in the person of their countryman, Jesus of Nazareth? If the affairs of men were conducted on logical lines, then every Christian Church should have a form of blessing, to be recited at every service, on the Jew for the part which he played in the Drama of Salvation. Assuming that the Jews had committed the atrocious deed for which they have been hated and hounded, now these weary centuries, the question remains: If the Christian dogma is true, and Jesus was God come to re- deem by his blood the world from the fatal corruption of the first sin, were the Jews aught else than a blind tool in the hands of Providence? If such redemp- tion is the consummation of the divine plan, then it was ordered in the councils Dip THE Jews Kix Jesus? 9 of the Hternal (i.e. of Jesus himself) ; and far from hating the Jews for thus helping along the salvation of the whole world by the shedding of Jesus’s blood on Calvary—far from hating and perse- cuting—those who rejoice that the death of Jesus has taken from them all taint of sin and guilt, should turn with deep and humble gratitude to the Jews, but for whom such salvation had not been wrought. Such a suggestion is, of course, absurd, for logic plays a very small part in our lives. Indeed, only children are logical in their reasoning, because their lives have not been complicated by the thousand and one little grains of the sand of experience that destroy the smooth- running machinery of logical thought, which can work only in a vacuum. Now, in this inquiry there are not a few scholars and critics who would at once apply for a nolle prosequi, on the 10 Dip THE JEws Kivu Jesus? ground that as there is not sufficient evidence to prove that Jesus of Nazareth is an historical person, that he actually lived and taught, there is no occasion to proceed with an inquiry as to who was responsible for his death. If Bruno Bauer’s theory is accepted—a theory which is to-day ably represented and defended by Dutch Biblical scholars and by a growing number of French and German critics—the Jew is at once purged of the guilt of having put to death the Messiah and Saviour. The theory of Bruno Bauer and the critics of his school is, of course, that Christianity is the impersonal out- come of an alliance between Stoicism and the Hellenistic or Grecized Judaism that flourished at Alexandria, and that Jesus himself is the assumed and freely invented personal inearnation of that movement, whose history is contained in the Psalms and the Prophets.? 1. And, one might add, in Plato, who, in his Dip THE Jews Kitt Jesus? 11 The tendency of present-day Continen- tal scholarship, represented by such as Bultmann, Bertram, Schmidt, Lohmeyer, von Soden, is to interpret the gospel nar- ratives as ‘‘Cult-story’’ (Kulterzaehlung), projected as history by the creative Christian consciousness, under dogmatic, cultural, apologetic, and other impulses. Thus, while not openly and formally re- jecting the historicity of Jesus, they do so virtually and practically, retaining hardly a single incident or gospel datum, not even the Passion story, as historic. In England the most eminent exponent of this view of Christian origins is Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University. In his Five Stages of Greek Religion (Columbia University Press, 1925) Professor Murray advances the theory that Christianity 1s simply a Republic, described the Just Man as one “who will be scourged, tortured, imprisoned, blinded; last of all, when he has endured all this. he will be impaled (crucified) .” 12 Dip THE Jews Kavu Jesus? branch of Hellenic religious thought and culture grafted on a Hebrew stock. In America Dr. William Benjamin Smith, late of Tulane University, is protagonist for the non-historicity school. He ably maintains that Christianity was ‘‘his- torically natural and necessary—a three- century longs development, prolongation, spiritualization of a millenial tendence;’’ and that the original Jesus-cult was the worship of the One God under the person or aspect of Saviour or Healer. We must, however, dismiss the applica- tion for a nolle prosequm, and proceed with our inquiry as to who was responsible for Jesus’s death, on the ground that, at the present stage of historical criti- cism, the non-historicity of Jesus is far from being established, and we must, therefore, assume that he did live and die in the first century of our era. It is one thing, however, to admit the historicity of Jesus; it is quite another Dip THE Jews Kitt Jesus? 13 to admit that we have any very reliable biographical records of his life. In spite of the fact that Jesus is alleged to have worked great miracles, even the miracle of restoring the dead to life; in spite of the alleged fact that his birth was marked by one of the most heinous crimes in history—Herod’s murder of thousands of infants; in spite of the fact that all the circumstances attending his trial were most unusual—how unusual they were I hope to show later; in spite, too, of the fact that the most startling occurrences in nature took place at his cruciftxion,® 2. Josephus, who was at no pains to hide Herod’s crimes, knows nothing of the Massacre of the Infants, nor does any other historian. 8. Gibbon ironically remarked on “the supine in- attention of the pagan and philosophic world to the numerous and surprising miracles which were pre- sented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses ... Under the reign of Tiberius the whole earth, or at least a celebrated province of the Roman Empire, was involved in a preternatural darkness of three hours. [And a num- ber of dead saints left their graves and visited their 14 Dip THE Jews Kivi Jesus? and that he himself actually rose from the dead and lived on earth for either forty hours or forty days—all these al- leged facts notwithstanding, not a single historian or writer living at or shortly after the time Jesus is said to have moved about in Palestine preserves even his name.* From this we are forced—l see no escape from it—to conclude that friends in Jerusalem.] This happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the Elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects or received the earliest intelligence of the prodigies. Each of these philosophers, in a laborious work, has recorded ali the great phenomena of nature—earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses—which his indefatig- able curiosity could collect. Both the one and the other have omitted to mention [these the most extra- ordinary of all].” 4. The passage in Josephus mentioning Jesus is admitted to be an audacious and flagrant forgery by most serious scholars, orthodox and heterodox. Even the Benedictine editors of Origen surrendered the passage as spurious. (‘The celebrated passage of Josephus concerning Jesus Christ was not ex- tant in the age of Origen, or if extant it was con- sidered spurious and supposititious,” I, col. 1911.) Dip THE JEws Kit Jesus? ib the immediate influence exercised by Jesus upon his contemporaries could not have been so deep and great as we generally suppose from our acquaintance with the gospels. And from this fact we may con- clude further that no carefully prepared and sifted records of his doings were preserved by his personal followers or acquaintances. aking the most conserva- tive estimate possible of the date of com- position and final redaction of our gospels, it is clear that at least one generation intervened between those who first wrote down the events and those who could have been eye-witnesses of them. There are a great many circumstances which point to a much later date; but, as that problem is a vast and complicated one, we had better leave it severely alone, and con- centrate our attention on the documents as we now have them. (The reader must understand that all I have said is analo- gous to the general examination of wit- 16 Dip THE JEws Kitt Jesus? ‘nesses in a law court, with a view to dis- covering their reliability.) Now, then, let us glance at the four gospels. The first three, called the Syn- optics, are very different from the fourth, that of John. In its very introduction, the latter ‘betrays itself to be a philo- sophical reconstruction of the life of Jesus. Nor are the discrepancies in the related events less striking; situations and oc- currences, persons and places, are intro- duced, of which no other account makes mention. The scene of the fourth is not Galilee, but Judea, and more specially Jerusalem. The three excursions to Galilee are treated as mere episodes. Thus disappears the common stem of events on which the Synoptics are in the main agreed. Most of the miraculous deeds of the Synoptics are wanting. In this life of Jesus there are no lepers nor publicans and sinners; no anthologies of Dip THE Jews Kitty Jesus? 17 ethical precepts nor homely parables. Pro- fessor Burkitt goes so far as to express the pious hope that some of the utterances put into Jesus’s mouth by the author of the fourth gospel are not authentic! Most - serious, however, of the differences is that which makes Jesus die in the Syn- optics on the 15th day of the month Nisan, and in John’s account on the 14th day of Nisan—a change which is almost certainly the result of theological considerations, and one which no one would have had an interest to make before the famous con- troversy that raged long and bitterly in the churches of Asia over the proper time of celebrating Easter. In point of fact, the Synoptics make Jesus die on both the 14th and 15th of Nisan. Mark, in chap. xiv, relates that Jesus had partaken of the meal described on the day fixed for it by the law—that is to say, the 14th day of Nisan; he thus assumes the 15th to have been the day of the death; 18 Dip THE JEws KiLu Jesus? but in chap. xv, verse 42, he nevertheless writes: ‘‘And when even was now come, because it was the preparation, that is the ‘day before the Sabbath’’—from which it would appear that Jesus had been cruci- fied, not on the 15th day, but on the 14th! In Luke we have the same confusion. In John’s account, however, the 14th is con- sistently maintained. ‘“‘The three Synoptics call the day on which the verdict was found simply Prep- aration, that is to say, Friday, without in- dicating that it must have had a higher eharacter than the ordinary precursor of the Sabbath. This is strikingly in contrast with the manner in which other passages of the gospels (Luke, ii. ‘42% John, iv. 45;2 “ vi. 4, vil. 8, xxxvii. 11 and 56, xii. 12; Acts ul. 1, and especially Acts xii. 3) speak of the Jewish festivals and show deference to them.’’ (Hirsch: The Crucifixion, p. 51.) Dip THE Jews Kivu JzEsus? 19 II We have noted the very significant fact that, while Jesus is made to die on the 15th day of Nisan in the Synoptics, his death is fixed by the fourth gospel as the 14th of that month; the change being probably due to the tendency to make Jesus himself the Paschal Lamb of the world, instead of allowing him to eat the paschal meal. We need not linger over these and the hundred and one other details of difference patent to the most casual reader. Enough has, I trust, been said or indicated to establish the fact that in the four gospels we have not the ma- terial from which to make a biography of Jesus, aS we understand the word ‘‘bi- ography’’ to-day. It is tolerably certain that during the first two Christian cen- 20 Dip THE JEws Kitz Jesus? turies there did not exist any definite, authoritative, and historically verifiable tradition concerning the earthly career of the Christian Saviour-God, and that the N. T. documents underwent at that time an extensive process of redaction at the hands of many unknown editors whose interests were didactic and doctrinal rather than historical and biographical. As early as Paul’s own day—barely twenty years after Jesus’s death—there already existed another ‘‘gospel’’ which he (Paul) em- phatically repudiated. The student who is unwilling to proceed on the hypothesis that the primitive forms of the New Testament writings, or at least of the original doctrines and docu- ments, underwent extensive revision and modification before they were worked up into our present canonical scriptures, may as well abandon once for all.the problem of New Testament interpretation, for out- side this hypothesis there is no hope of Dip THE Jews Kirti Jesus? 21 understanding even the most obvious facts.” : It may be said therefore that most of \» the modern ‘‘biographers’’ of Jesus have | written novels spun on dogma, or pinned , to preconceived idealizations, but most’ emphatically not histories. ! Dr. Albert Schweitzer, one of the most learned and honest critics, says quite frankly in his Quest of the Historical Jesus (closing chapter headed ‘‘Results’’) : 4a. Dr. Paul Carus gives an example of how the gospels grew by accretion. “A Christian hears that when Socrates died he forgave his enemies. A pagan may have argued, ‘You see Socrates was nobler than Christ.’ But the Christian thinks: ‘Christ was the ideal man, therefore he can not have been outdone by Socrates; he too must have forgiven his enemies.’ The passage in Luke xxiii, 34, does not occur in the oldest manuscripts but was inserted comparatively late by a copyist who was somehow familiar with Plato’s Crito and had adopted this typically human argument. Once inserted, the passage remained a most highly appreciated verse in the gospel story, though no critical student of the New Testament will venture to regard it as historical.” (Monist, xxiv, 3, p. 388.) Ze Dip THE JEws Kivi Jesus? ‘““There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. ““The Jesus of Nazareth who came for- ward as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and died to give his work its final consecra- tion, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb. His wmage has not been destroyed from without: it has fallen to pieces...’’ (italies mine). Thus does a distinguished Christian scholar dispose of the fanciful ‘‘Lives”’ of Christ—from Renan’s at one end of the scale and Fr. Didon’s at the other to Mr. J. Middleton Murry’s—psychological ro- mances, most of them, utterly recalcitrant to the bulk of the gospel records! Having held a preliminary examination Dip THE Jews Kiti Jesus? 23 of our witnesses, let us proceed with our inquiry: Can it be proved that the Jews put Jesus to death, using Pilate as a tool for accomplishing their nefarious purpose? 24 Dip THE Jews Kixu Jesus? IIT Whenever a crime is committed the perpetrator of which is unknown, those charged with the business of discovering the criminal invariably attempt to estab- lish, above all, in whose interest the crime could have been committed. Cut prodest? is the guiding question for every trained penologist. Let us put the question and apply the principle in the case of the murder of Jesus. Who had in those times an interest in the removal of Jesus? Whom did he antagonize? Who was profited by his death? In whose eyes could his teach- ings and activities have been dangerous? These and many other kindred questions demand an answer. A distinguished Jewish scholar, Rabbi Dip THE Jews Kitty Jesus? 25 Dr. Emil G. Hirsch, in a lecture delivered before the Chicago Institute for Morals, Religion, and Letters, said :— ‘The supposition that Jesus’s religious opinions and practice clash with the Juda- ism of his time is clearly untenable. While it cannot be denied that the religious sus- ceptibilities of the people were strung to the highest tension, nothing, however, ap- pears even in those accounts of Jesus’s life that have come to us which would make it plausible that he taught or did aught which could have aroused religious opposition on the part even of the most punctilious among the Jews. He himself disclaims any intention of founding a new religion. As he is pictured in the gospels, especially according to Matthew, he is national in his sympathies to the core. He shares the national antipathy to the non-Jew; he would not throw pearls be- fore the swine or invite to the banquet 26 Dip THE Jews Kaitu Jesus? such as are not of his people while his own compatriots are hungering for the bread. ‘‘Salvation, according to him, is only for the Israclites. His position thus agrees, without the possibility of a modification, with the prevalent conceit of the ruling party in Judaism. For him, as for them, religion is coincident and co-extensive with nationality. He is far from disre- garding the law. He emphasizes his mis- sion as one come to fulfil but not to abolish it. The term ‘fulfil’ in this con- nection can only be understood if trans- lated back into its original Hebrew -or Aramaic. It certainly cannot have the bearing generally attributed to it by the current Christian theology. Fulfilment, in the sense in which Paul and the Church after him have taught it, is a concept altogether foreign to the thought-world of the Jew. The phrase attributed to the Nazarene cannot but be that which we Dip THE JEws Kitz Jesus? 27 find in the daily prayers as preserved up to the present day in the common ritual of the synagogue. ‘I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil,’ recalls to one familiar with Jewish liturgy the passage in which is voiced the petition for ‘under- standing to do and fulfil (L’quayem) all the words of the Torah.’ ‘‘The controversies in which Jesus is represented to have been engaged with the Pharisees and the Scribes reveal not even one single trait that would counte- nance the assumption of a departure on his part from the well-recognized princi- ples and standards of Jewish orthodox practice. His saying that the Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sab- bath is an echo of a well-known rabbinical contention: ‘The Sabbath is given in your charge; you are not given in its charge.’ That to save life and to help the sufferers the most rigid prohibition could be set aside on the Sabbath is a fact which none 28 Dip THE Jews Kitz Jesus? will deny who has never so superficial an acquaintance with Talmudical dialectics. The argument, thus, that on account of his peculiar religious doctrines or his dis- regard of the rights of the synagogue Jesus aroused the hostility of the Jews among whom he moved and lived, is not worthy of serious attention.’’ The moral doctrines, then, which Jesus taught according to the gospels could in no manner have aroused the suspicion, hatred, and violent opposition on the part of the Jews, whether learned or simple. His ethical teachings, which may be more than duplicated by passages of similar import in the rabbinical writings of the period,’ certainly do not of themselves 5. Dr. Joseph Klausner, of Jerusalem, in his recent work, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teachings (1925), says: “There is not one item of ethical teaching that cannot be paralleled in the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, or in the Talmudic and Midrashic literature of the period near to the Dip THE JEws KiILx Jesus? 29 furnish an explanation why either the gov- erning party or the mass of the people should have desired to remove the teacher of Nazareth. But, some one may say, does not the un- usually severe language always employed by Jesus to the Pharisees—serpents, gen- eration of vipers, whited sepulchres, ete.— indicate that he was sharply hostile to them; and is it not, therefore, highly prob- able that they more than reciprocated this hostility, and determined to do away with one who opposed them so strenuously? The most learned Jewish scholars, like Chwolson, have, however, expressed the greatest astonishment at the way in which the relation between Jesus and the Phari- sees is described in the gospels. Some de- tails of the gospel portrait of Jesus in- dicate that he was of one mind with the time of Jesus.” Dr. Klausner also quotes with ap- proval Wellhausen’s famous dictum: “The Pharisaic teaching comprised all of Jesus’s teaching, and very much more.” 30 Div THE JEws Kit Jesus? Pharisaic party. It would appear that he belonged to the moderate wing of the sect, who were unwilling to resort to violent measures to accomplish their liberation from foreign rule. Jesus would not have shared the aversion of the proud aristocracy of learning of the Pharisees toward the ignorant and un- learned masses; but this fact, even if more emphasized in conduct than in words, would surely not have constituted so flagrant a departure from Pharisaic standards as to account for the alleged bitter and unrelenting enmity towards him. Nor would Jesus’s claim to mes- sianic dignity have, per se, antago- nized the Pharisees, whose daily prayer was that the long-expected son of the house of David would appear to break the fetters of the Roman power. Indeed, in this respect it is the Sadducees who would have been alarmed.® These latter 6. The question of the relationships between Dip THE Jews Kitt Jesus? 31 had no reason to object to a continuation of Roman rule. Their privileges could not have been larger if Judea were once more independent. On the contrary, as the ex- pected king would not be of their rank and caste, and as the priestly Asmoneans had opened the flood-gates of opposition and distrust on the part of the Pharisees, it was the Sadducees who had most to fear from the ‘‘Puritan’’ party, the fa- natics of learning, the ‘‘party of progress”’ of their day—the men who stood for the middle-class against the conservative priesthood and reactionary nobility. Thus it was the Sadducees who had little use for messiahs. The gospels represent Jesus, however, as clashing with the Sadducees. solely on the question of the resurrection of the dead. Taken by and large, the passages-at- Pharisees and Sadducees is discussed with learning and lucidity by Edward Dujardin in his Sources of the Christian Tradition. (Watts, London.) 32 Dip THE Jews KIL. Jesus? arms between Jesus and his opponents are such that one hardly knows which is the more surprising: the unsoundness and evasiveness of some of Jesus’s replies, or the tameness and stupidity of the ‘‘Scribes and Pharisees’’ (referred to always as a class, never by name) in accepting or being confounded by them. Those who insist on the ‘‘absoluteness uniqueness’’ . and ‘‘incomparable personality’’ of Jesus would do well to compare his arguments in his conflicts with the Pharisees and others with the Socratic dialogues re- ported by Plato. Take the reply to those who inquired of Jesus whose son the Messiah was. The reply contains so glaring a fallacy that we are tempted to believe that the Phar- isees decided it was a waste of time to have any further discussion with a person who reasoned in this fashion. Or take the reply to the question as to whether it were lawful to pay taxes to Rome. It is Dip THE Jews Kiti Jesus? 33 such a tour de force of evasion of the plain issue that we should have no hesita- tion in condemning in unsparing terms any modern leader or teacher who answer- ed a like question on the lines of Jesus’s reply. Nevertheless, orthodox theologians expend a vast wealth of ingenuity in try- ing to convert all this feeble dialectic into words of profound and godlike wis- dom and spiritual depth and insight, while the neo-Unitarian school of Christ- ian apologist professes to find in these disputes words of ‘‘divine irony’’ and outstanding genius. In short, there is nothing whxtever in the gospels to justify the assumption that the opposition of the Jewish religious leaders to Jesus was analogous to the op- position of the Papacy to a Luther or a Savanarola. These and other considerations have led many scholars, Jewish and Christian, to conclude that the bitter hatred reported 34 Di THE Jews Kitt Jesus? in the gospels as existing between the Pharisees and the founder of Christianity is in reality a reflection of conditions which prevailed in the terrible time of the Bar- Kochba war of the second century, when Jews and Christians opposed each other in deadly enmity and made each other responsible for the judgment that had befallen them, when the very name of the followers of Jesus was hateful to the Jews, and when Jews and Christians alike were executed with fearful cruelty during the persecution under the Emperor Hadrian. (Lublinski.) These historical critics are also inclined to see in the reported charges of injustice, oppression, and blood guilti- ness made by Jesus against the Pharisees a reflection of certain passages in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the book of Wisdom. I would not say, however, that these conclusions are to be regarded as ‘‘the assured results’’ of scholarship and _his- torical research. Dip THE Jews Kit Jesus? 35 IV So far our inquiry has failed to provide us with an answer to the question: Who were profited, or believed themselves profited, by the death of Jesus? This is inevitable, for the simple reason that the biographical material which we possess in the Synoptics would scarcely fill a slen- der pamphlet. Outside of the last days of Jesus’s life, we have not, in all three Synoptic evangelists, the amount of more than two chapters of about fifty verses. each of strictly biographical material, be- sides about seven chapters of wonder- and miracle-stories and eight or nine chapters of sayings and teachings. This is all the material there is out of which the many ‘‘Lives’’ of Christ are constructed, and it. is not sufficient to enable us to arrive at 36 Dw THE Jews Kati Jesus? any certain knowledge as to why the Jewish rulers and people should have de- sired and compassed the death of Jesus. Before examining the legal aspect of Jesus’s trial somewhat in detail, I wish to call attention to the significant fact— the importance of which cannot he over- emphasized—that it is the motifs of shame, of ignominy, of mockery, and of Jewish contempt and hardness of heart and un- belief that are conspicuous in the story of the Passion. There are no motifs drawn from Jesus himself, his love, his heroism, his suffering, his supreme self-sacrifice for all mankind. It is as if the gospel- writers are concerned with one point only —the Jewish rejection of Jesus as Mes- siah. Their theme is not so much the love and goodness of God as the wicked- ness and hatred of the Jew! They record not the slightest trace of emotion on the part of the disciples over the death and Dip THE Jews Kiti Jesus? 37 suffering of their beloved master and friend. What clearer proof can one desire than this that the narrative was framed as a sort of dramatic-symbolic homily or ‘‘story with a purpose’’ on the Jews’ rejection of the Jesus-cult, and is not a straightforward historical account of facts? Let us now turn to the story of Jesus’s trial and execution and examine it a little more closely from the legal aspect. On the Sunday before the Passover Jesus enters Jerusalem acclaimed by the populace, who shout ‘‘Hosanna’’ and strew his path with palm leaves. It is possible that this incident in the gospel ‘‘biography’’ is a Midrashic’ actualization of an Old Testament verse and descrip- tion. The rabbinical books (so Dr. Hirsch, already quoted, assures us) ‘‘overflow 7. For a brief but satisfactory explanation of the Midrash, see Couchoud’s Enigma of Jesus. (Watts, London.) 38 Dip THE Jews KiLu Jesus? with similar textual applications, and in reading the chapters of this Christian ‘Haggadah’ one expects at every turn to meet the standing ‘this is what is writ.’ In fact, it is there. For the phrase ‘that it might be fulfilled’ is the equivalent of this rabbinical introduction to Biblical quotations. But, as we are told by our authors, the welcome extended to Jesus re- mained significant.’? On the eve of the Passover Jesus eats the Passover meal with his disciples; at its conclusion he re- tires to Gethsemane® to prepare himself for his great public appearance. LHarly on the 15th of Nisan he repairs to the temple to accomplish its cleansing.® A tumult ensues; he is captured along with 8. It has been suggested that all these accounts, right up to the crucifixion, are derived from an origi- nal mystery play in which the action is impossibly “telescoped,” as in Shakespeare’s Othello, etc. 9. Origen said that this incident was nothing short of a miracle, adding the sceptical comment (worthy of a Gibbon) : “That is, if it ever happened!” Dip THE Jews KiLu Jesus? 39 others. The priests lodge a complaint against him. Pilate investigates and dis- covers that he is a Galilean, a Messiah, whose home is the very cauldron of insub- ordination and revolt. Jesus appears not to deny his messianic pretensions. That is enough to seal his fate. ‘‘To the cross with him’’ is the summary order of the governor. The order is at once carried out. The Romans, probably at the in- stance of Caiaphas, crucify Jesus. At the instance of Caiaphas—why? Well, the Talmud preserves record of the fact that the sale of pigeons and the changing of money for sacrifical purposes was a mon- opoly of the family of Hannan, who is identified with the Annas of the N. T. and the Annanos of Josephus. Caiaphas was the son-in-law of this monopolist of the Temple bazaar. The practices in vogue there are the subject of comment by the rabbis. In breaking up this traffic carried 10. Jewish Antiquities, xx, 9, 2. 40 Dip THE JEws Kixu Jesus? on in or near the Temple, Jesus was thus brought into direct conflict with the most powerful friends of Rome. They were madly indignant at this meddling with their business privileges, and so they may have denounced Jesus to Pilate, doubtless mentioning the incident of his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the fervent demonstrations of the populace a few days before. This is enough for the Procurator, who at once decides that this new Messiah had better be got rid of as speedily as possible. According to the gospel narrative, how- ever, Jesus, who is acclaimed openly on Sunday in the streets of Jerusalem, has to be pointed out to the authorities by a traitor among his own disciples; and the mob which sang ‘‘Hosanna’’ on Sunday shouts ‘‘Crucify him’’ on Friday. The latter is not impossible, of course, for to shout ‘‘Hosanna”’ one day and ‘‘Crucify’’ the next is the way of mobs the world Dip THE Jews Kit Jesus? 41 over; and, further, the people who blessed: on Sunday were not necessarily those who cursed and reviled on Friday. But surely the circumstance of the assumed betrayal by Judas jeopardizes the account of a popular and public reception a few days before. The cynosure of all eyes on Sun- day, Jesus could not have lapsed into such utter obscurity that the despicable treach- ery of Judas—itself again a trait worked out simply in the fashion and method of the Midrash—had to be utilized to single him out from among his companions. “‘HWor Judas to have betrayed Jesus,’’ Karl Kautsky says, ‘‘is much the same as if the Berlin police were to pay a spy to point out to them the man named Bebel.”’ The whole story of the betrayal is prob- ably a late invention founded on the pas- sage in Isaiah LIII, 12, where it is said that the servant of God (the ebed Yahwe) ‘‘oave himself unto death.’’* Mr. J. M. 11. There is not, of course, the slightest vestige 42 Dip THE Jews Kitty Jesus? Robertson (Christianity and Mythology) has clearly shown that Judas is not an historical personality, but rather a rep- resentative of the Jewish people, hated by the Christians, who were believed to have caused the death of the Saviour. Let us turn to the trial scene. Ever since Judea passed definitely under Roman rule, the jus gladw, or the potestas gladu, the power over life and death, became the exclusive and unquestioned prerogative of the imperial legatus (of senatorial rank) and of the procurators. It has been as- of evidence that the Hebrew author of this “prophe- cy” had it in mind that the Eternal God would have a son by a virgin, or that Jahveh required the ser- vices of an emanation of himself to come down to earth and die on a cross in order to accomplish his (Jahveh’s) work of redemption. This crude, semi- barbarous conception of Incarnation has absolutely nothing in common with the noble poetic conception of a humanized deity and a deified humanity which belongs to the higher religious thought of the Jews and Hindus. The noble elevation of the one idea and the grotesqueness of the other are poles asunder. Dip THE Jews Kitt Jesus? 43 sumed that there were exceptions to this rule, and those who so assume have pointed to the incidents related of the trial of Jesus in support of their contention. That would be legitimate if we possessed any sort of confirmatory evidence of the trial of Jesus by any historian of the period, but in the absence of any such confirmation we must regard the trial as the very fact that needs proof—not quote it as proof! Even if the Sanhedrin had the power to pronounce sentences of death, a trial such as is pictured in the gospels is well nigh an impossibility, on the established principles of Jewish penal procedure. While the Jewish law had not abolished the death penalty, it had thrown such safeguards around the life of the accused as to render the infliction of the penalty extremely difficult. It may be well here to quote a further passage from Dr. Hirsch’s Lecture: ‘*So strong was the Jewish aversion to 44, Dip THE Jews Ka.y Jesus? capital punishment that a court which once in seven years pronounced the death sentence was branded as composed of murderers. Circumstantial evidence was not admitted. The confession of the accused was not sufficient to lead to his conviction; at least two witnesses had to testify to the facts; and, further- more, they had to prove that the defendant had been warned before the act of the consequences of his proposed or expected offence. The trial had to take place in a certain hall of the Temple in daytime, never at night. ‘‘If we believe the gospels, the court convened in the house of the high priest, and sat during the night. In matters af- fecting life and death the trial had to last two days, and one night always had to intervene in order to give the judges time for reflection, and thus keep open the pos- sibility of a change of their verdict in favor of the accused. The court was polled Dip THE Jews Kitt Jesus? 45 twice—once at the close of the first day, and the second time on the succeeding day; the younger members voting first, so as to guard against undue influence on them by the authority and weight of their elders. Those who on the first ballot had voted guilty were allowed to change on the second ballot, which took place on the next morning, their vote to not guilty. Those who had favored acquittal had not the privilege to alter their verdict. For this reason no trial could take place on the eve of a Sabbath or a festal day—a provision which is clearly violated if we accept the date of the first three gospels. Immediately on the finding of the final verdict the convicted culprit was led to execution. But such precautions were taken as looked even then for new evidence to acquit.’ It was before such a tribunal that Jesus would have been tried. Space will not permit of my going into further de- 46 Dip THE JEws Kitz JEsus? tails and showing how the ‘‘trial’’ (svc) as related by the gospels would in several other particulars have been the grossest violation of Jewish law and procedure.” It may be retorted, of course, that angry and infuriated courts and judges have time and again thrown their laws and rules of procedure to the winds, and passed unjust and unlawful sentences. If we could trace out any clear motive for the unprecedented hatred and anger of the court and of the mob, we should be ready to admit the force of that retort; but in its absence we can only conclude that the gospel narratives are not worthy of seri- ous consideration as a record of historical facts. 12. Mr. A. Taylor Innis, an eminent Scottish lawyer, has shown conclusively, in his Trial of Jesus, that the trial and condemnation were illegal not only from the point of view of Jewish but also of Roman jurisprudence. Mr. Innis inferred that both the Jewish and Roman authorities were guilty of a shameful judicial murder, without explaining the motives prompting their action. He overlooked Div THE JEws Kit Jesus? 47 The Synoptic accounts of the trial be- fore Pilate differ from John’s in that ac- cording to the former, Jesus’s evidence before the Governor is limited to two words (‘‘thou sayest’’) ;** while the latter reports a somewhat lengthier conversation between Pilate and his prisoner. If the Synoptic account is correct, it is difficult to understand on what ground the Gov- ernor concluded that Jesus was innocent of the charge laid against him. Further, the reported conduct of Pilate is a very strange anomaly. Pilate was a man accustomed to handle mobs. Accord- ing to Philo he was of a violent tem- the perfectly simple and natural explanation that the gospel narratives were unhistorical. 13. Such incidents as Jesus’s speechlessness at his trial (according to the Synoptic accounts), his sweating blood, cursing a tree, writing on the ground with his finger, etc., have led some psychiatrists to conclude that he suffered from one or more forms of nervous disorder,—a view shared, of course, by his parents, who bluntly declared that he was “beside himself.” 48 Dip THE Jews Kitt Jesus? perament, stubborn in the extreme, one who could never make up his mind to treat the Jews with justice and fair- play, let alone with decency and con- sideration (Legation to Caius, m. li, p. 590). Agrippa I charged him with venal- ity, violence, robberies, insulting behavior, intolerable cruelties, and continued exe- cutions of death sentences without previ- ous trials. There may be some exagger- ation here, for the Jews never forgave Pilate for wanting to use the Temple funds to build aqueducts to provide Jer- usalem with water. Josephus, however, more or less confirms this picture of Pilate; and even the Emperor Tiberius is credited with the remark, anent Pilate’s administration, that ‘‘a good shepherd tends his flock without cutting their throats!’’?’ And this is the man who is represented as bandying words with a despised mob over the life of one whom he pronounces a just man and an in- Di THE Jews Ki Jesus? 49 nocent, but to protect whom he takes no effective steps. Again, if only his consent was necessary to make the sentence of the Sanhedrin legal, it is surpassingly strange that he should have handed Jesus over to his own soldiers to execute. Death at the hands of the Jews would at least have been mercifully swift compared with the dreadful, long-drawn-out agony of death by the Roman method of crucifixion. 50 Dip THE JEws Kau JzEsus? V It is now coming into clearer and clearer evidence, and is admitted by conserva- tive scholars such as Harnack, that the ‘‘Primitive Gospel,’’ the ‘‘Sayings’’ or Q ‘source, the oldest form yet known of the gospel, did not contain any account of the Passion and Resurrection.** It calls 14. “The eminent French scholar Loisy, who though abandoning so much, yet holds to the his- toricity of Jesus, says, truly enough, that if this [the trial before Pilate] go the crucifixion becomes myth, and the historicity of Jesus goes with it. On the other hand, the eminent British scholar Cheyne, editor of the Encyclopedia Biblica told me in 1914 that he feared that the crucifixion would have to be abandoned. This seems astonishing: .. .”—Dr. Greenly, “The Historical Reality of Jesus,” in The Rationalist Annual for 1927, page 10 (Watts, London). This from the learned editor of the Ency. Bibl. is indeed astonishing. Small wonder the clergy affect to regard the Ency. Bibl. and its contributors with an air of superior contempt! Dip THE JEws Kity Jesus? 51 therefore for the utmost zeal and for al- most superhuman ingenuity and special pleading to reconcile such a fact with the historical authenticity of Passion week and its central feature of the crucifixion. -Another damning bit of evidence against ~ the authenticity of the gospel accounts of the central feature of Passion week is that of Ireneus, second-century bishop, apologist and martyr, a companion of the aged Polycarp who is reputed to have known the Apostle John and the elders of Asia. In his famous work Against Heresies he declares that Jesus lived to be an old man. The following is the notable passage: “He [Christ] came to save all through means of himself—all I say, who through him are born again to God—infants and children, and boys and youths, and old men. He therefore passed through every age; becoming an infant for infants, thus sanctifying infants; a child for children, a2 Dip THE Jews Kitz Jzsus? thus sanctifying those who are of this age. ... So likewise, he was an ola man for old men, that he might be a perfect master for all; not merely as respect the setting forth of the truth, but also as regards age; sanctifying at the same time the aged also, and becoming an example to them likewise.’’ (Book IV, Chap. XXII, sec. 4.) If, therefore, Jesus was crucified dur- ing the governorship of Pilate, the entire chronology of his life goes to the wall, and the fact is established beyond reasonable doubt that the gospel writers were completely ignorant of the alleged events and the conditions about which they profess to write. I have so far dealt only with the canonical gospels, but it may not be in- appropriate to refer here to an apocry- phal account of the central feature of Passion week. These apocryphal stories are of immense value for the light they Dip THE Jews Kitz Jesus? 5. throw on the psychology of the Primitive Church, and they show how in the absence of well-grounded historical data the most absurd and ridiculous fictions were ac- cepted and readily believed. I choose the Gospel of Nicodemus,* and quote the following from the account of the trial- scene under the heading of The Acts of Pilate: ‘‘And the Jews, seeing the bearing of the standards, how they were bent down and adored Jesus, cried out vehemently against the standard-bearers. And Pilate says to the Jews: ‘Do you not wonder how the tops of the standards were bent .down and adored Jesus?’ The Jews say to Pilate: ‘We saw how the _ standard- bearers bent down and adored him.’ And the procurator, having called the standard- bearers, says to them: ‘Why have you done this?’ They say to Pilate: ‘We are 15. Tischendorf ascribes this document to about the middle of the second century. 54 Dip THE Jews Kitt Jesus? Greeks and temple-slaves, and how could we adore him? and, assuredly, as we were holding them up, the tops bent down of their own accord, and adored him? Pilate says, ete. . .”’ In this account we have another type of dramatic work which may, in earlier times, and before the gospels took canon- ical rank as the official scriptures of the Church, have been a popular mode of dis- playing to the non-reading populace the leading incidents in the career of the Son of Man. There is nothing inherently im- probable in the hypothesis put forward by some scholars that, while old nature- plays were gradually transformed into religious dramas, and the Barabbas drama*® (described by Sir J.G. Frazer in his volume, on ‘‘The Scapegoat,’’ part 6 of The Golden Bough), or some other 16. See also essay entitled “Jesus Barabbas” by Mme. Couchoud and Stahl in Hibbert Journal, October, 1926 (Leroy Phillips, Boston). Dip THE Jews Kiti Jesus? 55 such drama, may have been current in Judea and Asia Minor, the arrest and tragedy of a real Jesus may have become associated with this transfigured mystery- play. Dio Cassius records the historic cruci- fixion, scourging, and subsequent slaying of Antigonus, the last Asmonean King of the Jews, by Mark Antony; and Philo tells a singular story of how, during the reign of Caligula, the populace of Alexan- dria insulted King Agrippa by taking a lunatic named (curiously enough) Karab- bas and dressing him as a mock king, paying him regal honors, and hailing him ‘‘Maris’’—the Syrian name for king.”” May not these historic incidents also have furnished part of the material out of which the purely dramatic gospel nar- ratives were composed? 17. Philo Judeus, Against Flaccus. See also Frazer’s Golden Bough, 2nd ed. iii, 191 ff. and Robertson’s Pagan Christs, pp. 186 ff. and 174 ff. 56 Dip THE Jews Kitt Jesus? We are thus led to conclude with Loisy that Jesus ‘‘suffered under Pontius Pi- late’’ as one of the many messianic agi- tators whom it was the policy of that procurator to put out of the way ‘‘with- out previous trials’’ as speedily as pos- sible, and that the Jews, as a people, had next to nothing to do with Jesus’s death. I therefore ask for the Jews a verdict of ‘‘Not guilty’’ of the charge of murder- ing Jesus, the Saviour-God of the Chris- tians; and I submit that the religious intolerance and persecution which have resulted from the mistaken belief, based on the gospels, that the Jews were guilty, form one of the most shameful pages of human history and a sorry comment on a gospel of love and forgiveness and brotherhood. Dip THE Jews Kix Jesus? 57 APPENDIX A Since the foregoing was written, an article entitled ‘‘The Person of Jesus in the Christian Faith’’ by Dr. K. C. Ander- son in The Monist for July, 1914, has come under my notice. The following ex- tract so strongly confirms my argument that I make no apology for quoting it:— ‘“‘The facts as shown by competent stu- dents of Jewish literature are that at the time when the trial and execution [of Jesus] are supposed to have taken place, none of the Jewish priests were judicial _ officers or members of the Sanhedrin; the Sanhedrin itself had no criminal juris- diction and did not sit in the only judg- ment hall where a death sentence could be pronounced; the provincial governors alone could condemn a man to death; the Roman 58 Dip THE Jews Kitt Jesus? procurator was not authorized to execute any judgment of a non-official court; 4 capital trial, according to Jewish law- court procedure, could not be consum- mated in one day, could not be held in the night, could not take place on Friday or the eve of a festal day; the death sentence was inflicted for no blasphemy except that of pronouncing the tabu name of Yahweh, for which stoning was the penalty; cruci- fixion was not a Jewish mode of executing condemned criminals; and measures were taken to make the execution of the victim as painless as possible by administering an anodyne to him’’ (p. 360). Dip THE JEws Kixy Jesus? 59 APPENDIX B Reference has been made in this essay to the Apocryphal Gospels. While a dis- cussion of these does not form part of the immediate subject-matter of this inquiry, namely, Did the Jews kill Jesus? still it may not be out of place to add a further comment on them. These writings afford us invaluable information about the mental atmosphere of the Early Church, and as such enable us to form judgment on the value of the first and second cent- ury Church writings. If it can be shown . that no absurdity was too great to be accepted by some of the earliest of the Fathers we may reasonably conclude that eapacity for historical accuracy and judgment did not form part of their and the gospel-makers’ intellectual equipment. 60 Dip THE Jews Kitt JEsus? In these circumstances, therefore, we may all the more confidently dismiss those highly colored and improbable and un- corroborated stories, written by some Rome-revering hand, of the part the Jews played in the death of the Christian Saviour-God. I have therefore selected a famous pas- sage from the non-canonical ‘‘Agrapha’’ or Words of Christ (derived from Frag- ments of Lost Documents) which Ireneus, referred to above, ascribes to Papias, who claimed that he had received this ‘‘word’’ of Christ’s from the Apostle John. If anything so fantastic and utterly irrational could be ascribed to an apostle of Jesus by so great a Church authority as Papias we need not be suprised at any irrational and absurd tradition surviving in an age when men believed what they wished to believe, and when there was no criticism to hold the balance between fact and fiction. The following is the passage :— Dip THE Jews Kivu Jesus? 61 CONCERNING THE MILLENNIUM The days will come in which vines shall grow, having each ten thousand branches, and in each branch ten thousand twigs, and in each true twig ten thousand shoots, and in every one of the shoots ten thousand clusters, and on every one of the clusters ten thousand grapes, and every grape when pressed will give five and twenty metretes of wine. And when any one of the saints shall lay hold of a cluster, another shall cry out, ‘‘I am a better cluster, take me; bless the Lord through me.’’ In like manner, a grain of wheat shall produce ten thousand ears, and every ear shall have ten thousand grains, and every grain shall yield ten pounds of clear, pure, fine flour; and apples, and seeds, and grass shall produce in similar proportions; and all animals feeding then only on the productions of the earth, shall become peaceable and 62 Dip THE Jews Kiiu JEsus? harmonious, and be in perfect subjection to man. And Judas the traitor, not be- lieving, and asking, ‘‘How shall such growths be accomplished by the Lord?’’ the Lord said: ‘‘They shall see who shall come to them. These, then, are the times mentioned by the prophet Isaiah, And the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf, and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.’’ (Ireneus, Against Heresies, V. 33.) [nls MYTH OF THE RESURRECTION THE MYTH OF THE RESUR- RECTION I The corner-stone of the Christian Church rests, we are told, on an empty grave. The whole fabric of historic Christianity is al- leged to be built on the fact that Jesus’s body rose from its tomb in Jerusalem, and that he was seen of his disciples for either about forty hours (according to one ac- count) or forty days (according to another account by the same writer). ‘‘If the res- urrection be merely a spiritual idea, then our religion has been founded upon an er- ror,’? says Dean Farrar,—although I question if any enlightened ante-Nicene 66 Tuer RESURRECTION MytTH Father of the Church would have endorsed that statement. That the Early Church had no definite, accurate, authoritative, or historically verifiable data or traditions concerning this alleged Central Fact of its Faith is evidenced by two main facts :— (a) Mark’s Gospel, according to the oldest manuscripts (the Vatican ‘‘B,’’ Sinaitic ‘‘Aleph,’’ Syriac, Armenian, etc.), closes at verse 8, chap.16, with the words, ‘<’ . . and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid of HERE ENDETH THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK.’”’ (the colophon being in red), and contains no account of the appearances or as- cension of Jesus. (6) There existed during the first two centuries of the Christian era a number of gospels which contain accounts of the THe REsuRRECTION Mytu 67 resurrection that are quite different from those of the canonical gospels, but which were then held in very high esteem. In these variations of text, and in these apocryphal gospels, we have a clear reflection of the variations of legend and rumor and belief which developed, con- flicted, died out, and revived among the Christians of the first and second centuries. One of the most highly esteemed of these apocryphal gospels was the Gospel or Recollections of Peter, which is the chief (but not the only) source of the leg- endary story of the resurrection which I here present. However worthless, as his- tory, these stories may be, they are none the less of incalculable value for the light they throw on the psychology of Primitive Christianity. In addition to the resur- rection story according to the Gospel of Peter, I also present an excerpt from the first Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, for the light it also throws 68 THe RESURRECTION MytH on the beliefs of the Primitive Church, and as a sample of late first-century apologetic. (The manuscript of the Gospel of Peter was discovered in 1886, in a cemetery at Akhmin, Upper Egypt, by the French archeological mission. Harnack assigns the first quarter of the second century as the probable date of composition.) EXCERPT FROM GOSPEL OF PETER, ETC. Translation by Robinson and Harrison But in the night in which the Lord’s Day was drawing on, as the soldiers kept guard two by two in a watch, there was a great voice in the heavens. And they saw the heavens opened, and two men descend from thence with great light, and approach the tomb. And that stone which was put at the door rolled of itself, and made way in part; and the tomb was opened, and both the young men entered it. When, therefore, the Tue REsuRRECTION MytTu 69 soldiers saw it, they awakened the centurion and the elders,—for they too were hard by keeping guard; and as they declared what things they had seen, again they see three men coming from the tomb and two of them supporting one, and a cross following them. And of the two, the head reached unto the heavens, but the head of him that was led by them overpassed the heavens. And they heard a voice from the heavens, saying, “Hast thou preached unto them that sleep?” And a response was heard from the cross, “Yea.” But those who were guarding the sepulchre saw not how he came forth from it.... Now very early upon the Lord’s Day, Mary, Martha, and Mary Magdalene, their friends being also with them, went to the sepulchre to anoint the body. ... Then they went and found the tomb opened, and coming near they looked in, and see a certain young man sitting in the midst of the tomb, beauti- ful and clothed in a robe exceeding bright, who also said to them, “Wherefore are ye come? Whom seek ye? Him that was cruci- . fied? He is risen and gone. But if ye believe not, look in and see the place where he lay, that he is not here; for he is risen and 70 THe RESURRECTION MytH gone away hither, whence he was sent.” [This account makes the resurrection and the ascension simultaneous.] Then the wo- men feared and fled..... Then the Lord appeared to them, and saith, “Why do ye weep? Cease to weep, for I am he whom ye seek. But let one of you go to your brethren, and say, ‘Come, the master hath risen from the dead.’ ” Then Martha went and told them. But they said to her, “What hast thou to do with us, O woman? He who is buried is dead, and it is not possible that he should be living.”” Then she went to the Lord, and said to him, “No one among them hath believed me that thou livest.” And he said, “Let another of you go to them, and say it to them again.” So Mary went and told them again, and they did not believe. She came back to the Lord and told him. Then the Lord said to Mary, “Let us all go to Them ae ie And the Lord went and found the dis- ciples within, and called to them. But they thought it was a phantom, and believed not that it was the Lord. And he said to them, “Why doubt ye yet and are unbelieving? Tue REsuRRECTION MytH 71 Why are ye disturbed, and thoughts ascend into your hearts? I am he that told you, so that on account of my flesh and my death and my resurrection ye should know that it is I. ... Take hold, handle me; and see that I am not an incorporeal spirit.” And straightway they touched him, and be- lieved, being convinced by his flesh and by his spirit. And they answered him, “We have indeed come to know that it is thee, in the flesh.” And they cast themselves on their faces, confessing their sins that they had been unbelieving. ... Afterwards he appeared to the eleven and upbraided them. . And they excused themselves, saying, “This age of iniquity and unbelief is under the power of Satan, who by means of un- clean spirits permitteth not the power of God to be perceived.” [The last two para- graphs are not derived from the Gospel of Peter. | EXCERPT FROM CLEMENT'S EPIS- TLE TO CORINTHIANS. Let us consider that wonderful sign of the resurrection, which takes place in eastern 72 THe RESURRECTION MytTHu lands. There is a certain bird which is called a phoenix. This is the only one of its kind, and lives five hundred years. And when the time of its dissolution draws near that it must die, it builds itself a nest of frankincense and myrrh, and other spices, into which when the time is fulfilled, it enters and dies. But as the flesh decays a certain kind of worm 1s produced, which, being nourished by the juices of the dead bird, bring forth feathers. Then when it has acquired strength it takes up that nest in which are the bones of its parent, and bearing’ these it passes from the land of Arabia into Egypt, to the city called Heli- opolis. And, in open day, flying in sight of all men, it places them on the altar of the sun, and having done this hastens back to its former abode. The priests then inspect the registers of the dates, and find that it has returned exactly as the five hundredth year was completed. I wish to direct attention to three points :— (a) The ‘‘Lost’’ Ending of Mark. One of the greatest literary problems of the New Tuer ReEsurrECTION MytH 73 Testament—the problem most closely bound up with the (so-called) central fact of Christianity—is: What is the matter with the gospel of Mark? Some- thing happened to it in the first or second century, and for ages thereafter it was left truncated in the middle of a sentence as indicated above. The Abbe Duchesne favors the theory that the dozen verses with which in our Bible the gospel of Mark is ended were written by Aristion. Readers of modern translations of the Bible, such as Moffat’s and Goodspeed’s, are acquainted with the quite different and much shorter appendix to the gospel in which we are simply told that the women reported what had hap- pened to those about Peter, to whom Jesus then appeared, and through whom he sent the message of salvation from east to west. What really happened? There are three possibilities: Perhaps Mark never finish- 74 Tue RESURRECTION MytTu ed his gospel, but left off at the point in- dicated above. Perhaps his original con- clusion has accidentally disappeared. Per- haps what he actually wrote was deliber- ately censored and destroyed, presumably because it was for some reason unsatis- factory to the authorities. The evidence in favor of the last named possibility is as follows: The earliest ac- count of the resurrection in Paul makes the event a series of apparitions. Mark’s account, in all probability the second oldest account, does the same. Luke and John both make the appearances real. In these later gospels Jesus is objective after the resurrection: he eats broiled fish in the former, while in the latter account the wounds in his side are handled by Thomas. Luke’s and John’s accounts leave no room for doubt: the evidence is objective and sensuous, not subjective. Now, the earliest Christian ‘‘heresy’’ was Docetism, the belief that Jesus was, Tue Resurrection Myts 75 even in life, a phantom; that his flesh and blood were not real; that his bodily func- tions were different from human ones, or were even non-existent; and that he did not really suffer and die, but only ap- peared to do so. To combat this heresy the first Epistle of John was written, and a dire curse (alas for the unfortunate precedent: possibly the most damnable in history!) pronounced upon those ‘‘her- etics’’ who doubted that Jesus had been actual flesh and blood. Consequently, if Mark had written, let us say, ... ‘‘for they were afraid of the apparition,’’ that last word would have been a red rag to those in authority who were combating the Docetic heresy, and so Mark’s end- ing would have had to go. Or if Mark had repeated Paul’s impression that the Galilean appearances were the same in kind as the one to himself on the Da- mascus road, that, too, would have lent color somewhat to the apparitional theory, 76 THe RESURRECTION MytH and consequently to Docetism, so that end- ing would also have had to go. Add to this the testimony of Jerome that ‘‘they copied things out of Luke wto Mark,’’ and the evidence becomes reasonably con- vineing that Mark’s original ending was deliberately censored,’ and both the longer and shorter appendices were added by later editors. (6) Both the canonical and apocryphal stories of the resurrection emphasize the fact that the disciples receive the news of Jesus’s resurrection with surprised incre- 1. For evidence to what extraordinary extent and infinite detail this manufacture of and tampering with documents was carried, see Norden’s Agnostos Theos (pp. 122-124). Cf. also Pfleiderer who writes: “It must be recognized that in respect of the re- casting of the history under theological influences, the whole of our Gospels stand in principle on the same footing. The distinction between Mark, the other two synoptics, and John is only relative—a distinction of degree corresponding to the different stages of theological reflection and the development of the ecclesiastical consciousness.” (Quoted by Schweitzer in his Quest, p. 312.) THE RESURRECTION MytH 77 dulity—‘‘idle tales,’’ they characterize the stories! And yet these same disciples had actually seen Lazarus and Jairus’s daugh- ter raised from the dead, they had con- versed with Moses and Elias on the oc- casion of the transfiguration, and one of them had even suggested the erection of booths to accommodate the resurrected prophets. They had also heard Jesus fore- tell his own death and resurrection in the most clear and deliberate manner. When the great news reaches them, however, they appear not to have the faintest recollection either of the foretelling or of the other resurrections which they had actually wit- nessed! The sceptical and hostile Jews, on the other hand, remember the prophecy quite well, and take the most elaborate precautions to prevent the disciples steal- ing Jesus’s body and saying he had risen, Really, is it credible? (c) The events connected with the cruci- 78 Tue REsuRRECTION MytH fixion, resurrection, appearances, and as- cension of Jesus are without doubt the most startling, the most transcendental, that are recorded as having taken place on this planet. A preternatural darkness of three hours (without an eclipse) and a terrible earthquake take place; several deceased saints quit their graves and appear to their friends in Jerusalem; Jesus himself rises from his tomb on the third day, and appears to and moves among his followers for forty days, instructing and ministering to them; finally, he ascends to ‘‘heaven’’ [sic] and a cloud receives him out of sight—And all these stupendous, dra- matic, and swift-moving events take place in an important and closely watched province of the Roman Empire, and in an enlightened age of wide-ranging and deep scientific and intellectual curiosity, and not one historian or writer of the period, or within a century after, records THe RESURRECTION MytH 79 a single word concerning them.—Not one syllable about these unparalleled marvels (resurrections are not everyday occur- rences to which one soon grows accus- tomed!) from Pliny the Elder (whose scientific curiosity cost him his life at Vesuvius), Pliny the Younger, Philo, Josephus (who mentions two other Jes- uses), Justus of Tiberias, Seneca, Tacitus, Dio Cassius, Suetonius, Socrates, Lucian, Marcus Aurelius ...! Is it credible? Many explanations have been offered for this utter silence on the part of en- lightened men who were most profoundly interested in religion, and, indeed, in what- ever of moment was transpiring in the Empire. Most of these, however, are so merely silly that their acceptance by men of common sense is little short of a minor miracle in its own way. 80 Tue REsuRRECTION MytH IT There is a tendency today to drag the marvels of modern science, physical and psychical, into the service of Christian apologetic. This kind of exegesis is, how- ever, unhistorical and unphilosophical in the extreme, and those who pursue it ap- pear to be without the capacity to ap- preciate the peculiar mental atmosphere of the early Roman Empire.? Those who adopt this line of apologetic forget that anyone who discovers the real cause of a miracle must necessarily, now that he has obtained a thorough insight into its true character, no longer regard it as a miracle—at least in the generally ac- cepted sense of the word. It is not 2. See Early Christianity by S. B. Slack (Con- stable, London), and Radical Views about the New Testament by Dr. von Eysinga (Watts, London). Tue REsuRRECTION MytTH 81 for a moment to be denied that in many cases remarkable episodes in the gospels may be explained by the analo- gy of those marvels of physical science and supernormal psychical phenomena of our own day, which are attracting so much attention. But only a super- ficial view can find in these comparisons a support for the credibilty of the gospel stories in the matter of miracles, and the miracle of the resurrection in particular. Mark’s gospel furnishes the most direct and convincing evidence that the gospel writers shared the crude superstitions of their contemporaries. With a few bold strokes this evangelist portrays vividly the benefits and advantages attending member- ship in the New Order. What are these? Of foremost significance 1s the victory secured over Satan and his evil demons. This was a well aimed shaft of emphasis and appeal in presenting the New Way to a gentile world yearning for supernatural 82 Tue RESURRECTION MytTH deliverance from the danger of demons and the fear of offended divinities. The twentieth-century reader will find this very hard to understand, for, while by no means free from pet superstitions— scientific and other—of his own, the edu- cated modern regards belief in demons and evil angelic powers as one of the most stupid and degraded of superstitions. One can hardly overestimate, however, the powerful appeal which Mark’s gospel was calculated to make to immense numbers of people in the Roman world. Herein they could learn that the Christian community claimed perfect immunity from the malign activities of demons, who had been worsted at the very outset in their encounters with the Christian God, Jesus. According to Mark the very first day of Jesus’s public activities was devoted almost exclusively to concrete demonstrations of his power over Satan and his unclean spirits. In- deed, Mark declares that the entire Gali- Tue Resurrection MytTH 83 lean ministry was devoted to healing the sick and ‘‘preaching and casting out demons.’ Again, modern apologists who urge that it would have been absolutely impossible for anyone in the Greco-Roman world to have ‘‘invented’’ the resurrection story have apparently never heard of Phlegon’s Book of Marvellous Things. Phlegon, the historiographer to the Em- peror Hadian, wrote an account (in the guise of a report made by a procurator) of the restoration to life of a dead girl, which in point of seeming verisimilitude and good faith, as well as picturesque detail, appears no less veridical than the gospel accounts of the resurrection. At the end of his account Phlegon makes his procurator write: ‘‘In addition to all this, if you decide that the Emperor must be made acquainted with this affair, let me know by letter. I could even send you some witnesses who were spectators of all 84 Tuer REsuRRECTION MytTH this!’’*> It is true that Phlegon’s story of a resurrection did not give rise to a new religion which was to supplant the religions of the Roman Empire, as Christ- ianity did, but the centrally real fact to note here is that such a story could be written by the historiographer and annalist of a second-century emperor, and be read by a cultivated pagan public. Whether the readers accepted it as a record of fact, or regarded it as a good story told with consummate art, is a matter of no importance. The fact remains that a cultured writer of the second century thought it worth while to write a story of a young girl who was miraculously re- stored to life. Doubtless some readers be- heved every word of it, while others took it for a clever ‘‘spoof,’’ done with great skill and artistry. Only a fool says: This miracle or that marvel is wmpossible: only the credulous 3. See Appendix B. THE ResuRRECTION MytTH 85 accept as fact stories of miracles and wonders for which there is not sufficient evidence. It is the business of historical research to submit the accounts of these to a rigid analysis, and to discover which wonderful cures, visions, appearances, etc., are supported by satisfactory his- torical evidence. For every one miracle which may be paralleled by the marvels of science there are a thousand and one which may be paralleled in the history of superstition and the wrong interpreta- tion of imperfectly observed facts,—as witness Clement’s ‘‘bird which is called a phoenix’? and Phlegon’s resurrection- tale! Further to illustrate this important point: Tradition abundantly testifies the beneficial effects experienced by patients who visited the shrine of the healing god, Asklepios, ‘‘saviour of all men.’’ The fame of this sanctuary was so _ wide- spread that people came thither from all 86 Tuer RESURRECTION MytTH parts of the Mediterranean world. Grate- ful convalescents left their crutches and canes and other paraphernalia of physical disability behind them as evidence of the deity’s curative power,—just as they leave them today at the grotto of the Lourdes, M. Coué’s, and Christian Science temples. Blindness, lameness, and para- lysis—all illnesses reported cured in the New Testament—were especially common maladies that seemed to have received successful treatment at Asklepios’s heal- ing shrine. One does not, however, deduce from these admitted facts the historicity of Asklepios, or the objectivity of his appearances to his devotees! The reader who wishes to compare the two main attitudes toward the problem of miracle—the rationalist and the Platonic dualist—should read Anatole France’s essay on ‘‘Miracles’’ in his Garden of Epicurus (Dodd, Mead, N.Y.) and Dr. P. HK. More’s The Christ of the New Tuer ResurRECTION Mytu 87 Testament (Princeton University Press). Anatole France says the last word for the rationalists, and says it with the learning and lucidity, irony and charm—the clarté and mesure—that no European writer since Renan has achieved. Dr. More (who re- jects the physical resurrection of Jesus) sets out earnestly and clearly the position of the Platonic dualist. 88 THe RESURRECTION MytTH Tit To sum up: During the past seventy- five years a courageous attempt, pro- foundly serious in aim and most thorough in method, has been made by European and American scholars and historians to reconstruct, out of what is recognized to be an accumulation of myth and legend, the true historical facts of the life of Jesus. The result of that patient and searching inquiry has been that such a person as the man Jesus, whose dim out- lines are seemingly restored by this long labor of research, may perhaps once have lived, but that this is not the Christ of Christian faith and worship and ‘‘experi- ence.’’ According to the working hypo- thesis of this New Testament criticism, the fictitious figure of the Christ develop- ed in spite of those actions and sayings Tuer RESURRECTION MytH 89 of Jesus which are held to be probably historical. And if after so many years of strenuous effort the attempt to locate the person of Jesus in history leaves us with a martyred idealist, a moralistic and somewhat revolutionary prophet, a teacher from whom we may derive present-day inspiration, though with some difficulty; and if, as we are told, the historical exis- tence of even this far-away figure is still open to serious question, why not abandon outright the search for historical facts so far as it concerns the life-story of Jesus, and treat the narratives as pure symbol—just as we treat the medieval legends about the miracles, appearances, revelations, etc., of the Virgin? It must be remembered that the Virgin- Symbol has left almost as deep an im- press on the literature, art and social history of Europe as the Christ-Symbol itself. Both symbols were doors of escape from the realities of the ‘‘material 90 Tue REsuRRECTION MytTH present’’ of the periods in which they were conceived. That complex movement known as the Renaissance was as authentic a departure —‘‘outbreak,’’ Pater calls it—of the human spirit as the Christian movement itself. Like Christianity, it laid open a new organ, initiated a new sense for the spirit of man; and coming as it did after that long night of densest darkness, the true Dark Age, its outbreak was as little to be expected as the outbreak of Christ- ianity. It did not, however, require a virgin birth, miracles, and a resurrection, nor indeed any single personality to launch the fifteenth-century movement. Why then should these be considered necessary for the first-century movement? ‘‘All religions,’’? says Walter Pater, ‘‘may be regarded as natural products; at least in their origin, their growth, and decay they have common laws, and are not to be isolated from the other movements THe ResurrEcTION MytH 91 of the human mind in the periods in which they respectively prevailed; they arise spontaneously out of the human mind, as expressions of the varying phases of its sentiment concerning the unseen world; every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.’’ That profound truth applies to the Christian religion as well as to all other religions. There is absolutely nothing remarkable in the fact that the Christians ascribed to their saviour the attributes which all the circum-Mediterranean peoples ascribed to their saviour-gods: a virgin-birth, the power to perform surprising miracles, a life of self-sacrifice for mankind, a martyr- death, a resurrection from the dead, and final apotheosis. Had they not done so, then we should have been justified in ex- claiming: Behold a miracle! Christianity, is not, therefore, a brand- new, miracle-launched religion, with an 92 Tue RESURRECTION MytTH empty grave and a resurrected body as the central facts of its faith; it is rather the ‘‘resultant’’ of all the forces, re- ligious, ethical, philosophical, political, sociological and economic, at play in the Judean-Greco-Roman world of the first century.* Alike the best and the worst features of Christianity are, as Mr. J. M. Robert- son truly says in his Christianity and Mythology, ‘‘clearly within the power of many nameless men of the ancient civi- lizations.° ‘To say this, however, is to say that the best, on its merits, 1s no such prodigy of wisdom or wsight as has been so com- monly asserted. During the Dark Ages, indeed, the Christian world seems to 4. See The Pleroma: an Essay on the Origin of Christianity by Dr. Paul Carus (Open Court, Chicago). 5. In this connection see also Joseph McCabe’s Sources of the Morality of the Gospels (Watts, London). Tue RESURRECTION MytTuH 93 present a relative paralysis of thinking, due largely to the very acceptance of the gospel as a super-human product; such acceptance, however, being primarily an outcome of the decay of the intellectual life which followed on a universal des- potism.”’ It is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of history that the men who fashioned the religion of the Western world were men who believed literally in gods begetting sons by virgins and in physical resurrec- tions and ascensions, and who regarded miracles and marvels as authentic mani- festations of divine power. Had Christianity allied itself with the nobler and purer elements in the re- ligious and ethical life of the first cent- ury,’ it is conceivable that it might not 5. The student who is seriously interested in the study of Christian origins and wishes to obtain a clear insight into the higher religious and ethical life and thought of the Greco-Roman world of the 94 Tuer RESURRECTION MyTH have developed the pronounced incivism towards the old imperial regime and its ideals, nor have developed, later, those religious factions and intolerances which helped to some extent to split the fabric of the Roman Empire. It is doubtless be- cause of this that Christianity did little or nothing to check the ‘‘decay of the in- tellectual life which followed on a univer- sal despotism,’’ and the consequent para- lysis of thinking which reached its nadir in the Dark Age, and for centuries made a shambles of Europe. first century must not fail to consult Gilbert Mur- ray’s Five Stages of Greek Religion (Columbia University Press, N. Y.). Tue ResurrRecTION MytH 95 APPENDIX A Dr. William Benjamin Smith, in his Der vorschristliche Jesus,’ (essay entitled “Anastasis’’), maintains that the doctrine of the physical resurrection did not form part of the preaching of Paul and Peter and other primitive propagandists of the Christian cult. It is his view, set out with infinite skill and learning, that the origi- nal application of the phrase ‘‘raised up Jesus’’ was later diverted to the resusci- tation of the Crucified one, when the story of the Dying God had become popular among the Gentile converts, and the ac- count of Passion week had intruded into 1. For a brief résumé of Dr. Smith’s views in his D. v. J., which has not been translated into English, see his essay, “The Critical Trilemma,” in the Monist, vol. xxiv, No. 3. 96 Tuer RESURRECTION MytTH the primitive gospel—-as Harnack admits it did. When Peter declared ‘‘therefore (David) being a prophet and knowing that with an oath God had sworn to him from the fruit of his loins to seat (one) on his throne, foreseeing spake of the anastasis of the Christ,’’ he obviously meant by anas- tasis the establishment, installation, setting- up of the Christ (on the throne of David), and not the resuscitation or raising from the dead. What conceivable sense, so argues Dr. Smith, would there have been in Peter’s saying that David, knowing God had promised to establish a lineal successor on his throne, foreseeing (the fulfilment), spake of the resurrection from the dead of the Christ! If, however, by anastasis the speaker meant establishment, and not resuscitation, all is in order and he is speaking rationally and intelligibly to his hearers: if not, his logie fails and Tue REesuRRECTION MytH 97 becomes hard or impossible for them to understand. It appears therefore that none of the three earliest New Testament ‘‘character- izations of Jesus’’—the phrase is Dr. Bacon’s—Paul’s Mark’s, or Q’s contained any account of the physical resurrection of Jesus’s body from its grave in Jeru- salem. Dean Inge has said of Paul, in another connection, that ‘‘there are some trans- formations of which the religious mind is ineapable.’’? I should be inclined to 2. The learned Catholic ecclesiastic and _his- torian, Monsignor Louis Duchesne, calls attention, in his Early History of the Church, to the amazing volte-face executed by “the author of the Epistle to the Romans [who] after having bid so decided and final a farewell to the Law of Moses once again feels its weight upon his rebellious shoulders, and submits to the ‘Yoke of the Law’” in the shape of the ritual purification in the Temple, after his dis- pute with the Jerusalem elders. He must be a bold man who would lay down dogmatically what was possible and what not possible to a man of Paul’s temperament! 98 THe RESURRECTION MytH say that the dean’s characteristically dog- matic assertion applies admirably here, if it applies at all. If there is one transfor- mation of which the religious mind does indeed appear well nigh incapable it is this that Paul, with his rigid monotheistic training as a rabbinical Jew and all that that training implies, could have dallied with the idea of a dying god-man rising bodily from a grave in Jerusalem and — ascending to heaven to occupy the posi- tion of pro-Jehovah. Is it not possible that Paul himself came to feel this, hence his shifting the centre of his theology from the resurrection to the crucifixion, and subsequently shifting it from both these to the incarnation? Crucifixions and resur- rections are the sort of events for which people are likely to ask for evidence: in- carnations belong to a more rarified meta- physical atmosphere. I am disposed to think that Paul fell back on the inear- nation appeal partly because it fitted in Tue RESURRECTION MytTH 99 somewhat more naturally with his own religious background as a strict rabbin- ical Jew, and partly because he may have found it increasingly difficulty to establish the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as historical events which had happened twenty years before. To the pious Jew the idea of a crucified and risen country- man of his occupying the position of pro- Jehovah would have been the worst of ‘‘stumbling-blocks.’’ To the cultivated Pagan the story might well appear to be the last word of ‘‘foolishness’’—one more fanciful religious cult hatched in the cult- breeding East. The incarnation appeal would however lack the more objection- able features of the other appeal, both to Jew and Gentile. 100 Tue RESURRECTION MyTH APPENDIX B PHLEGON’S RESURRECTION STORY Philinnion, daughter of Demostratos and of Kharito, though dead, secretly joins a guest of the family, Makhates. The nurse surprises them. ... She opens the door, enters the guestroom, and sees the young girl seated by Makhates. . . . She runs to the mother, and presses Kharito and De- mostratos to follow her and see their daughter. ... Kharito, when she heard this incredible account, was at first over- come by the gravity of the news, and was on the point of swooning. Then, the memory of her daughter supervening, she wept. Anyhow, she said that the nurse must be out of her mind, and bade her Tuz ResuRRECTION MytH 101 go away. But the nurse reproached her and said: ‘‘I am not mad nor have [I lost my wits.’? At length Kharito, half in- fluenced by the nurse’s insistence, half by curiosity to know the truth there was in all this, came to the door of the guest- chamber. ... The mother, gazing ear- nestly, thought to recognize the dress and outline of the face. As she had no means of verifying what she saw she went back to bed: she counted on rising early and surprising her daughter, or, if too late, on learning from Makhates, who would never lie when asked about such a matter. At the first light of day the young girl, whether at the bidding of some god, or by chance, withdrew, and disappointed her mother. The latter... embraced the knees of Makhates and ab- jured him to conceal nothing and not to distort the truth. He, touched, and anx- ious of heart, could scarcely speak. ‘ooTis she, ’tis Philinnion,’’ he said. 102 THe RESURRECTION My tH .. . And that they might not doubt his words be opened a coffer and drew from it what she had left behind: a gold ring which he had had of her, and a strip of stuff that she had forgotten to knot round her bosom on the preceding night. Kharito, seeing these manifest signs, gave a loud ery, tore her garments, snatched the bands from her head, flung herself on the ground, and for the second time fell into great lamentation. Seeing everyone in the house in great grief and weeping, as though they must shortly bury Kharito, Makhates set himself to console the mother, begged her to cease her laments, and prom- ised to show her her daughter did she return. ... When night fell and the hour approached when Philinnion was used to come to the man she loved, all waited her advent. She came. When she entered the chamber at the accustomed hour and when she was seated on the couch Makhates showed no surprise. ... He sent a slave Tue REsuRRECTION MytH 103 to summon Demostratos and Kharito. They came; and saw Philinnion. For the mo- ment they stood dumb, overwhelmed, thunderstruck by such a prodigious sight. Then with a loud outery they embraced their daughter. [Philinnion speaks to her father and mother, telling them that it was not without the divine will that she came thither.] She spoke and fell dead. Her body reposed visibly on the bed. The father and mother embraced her. There was great tumult and lamentation through- out the household at a spectacle so terrible and irreparable, at so incredible a happen- ing. The rumor of it spread quickly through the town and reached me. [This is the Procurator writing.] The same night I held back the crowd which flocked to the house, for I feared lest something extraordinary might be attempted on the making public of such startling tidings. That day the scene of events was crowded with the curious. When individual evi- 104 Tur RESURRECTION MytTH dence had been taken of all the circum- stances we agreed to go first of all to the tomb to satisfy ourselves if the corpse were in the coffin or whether it stood empty. When we had opened the vault where lay all the dead of this family we saw the other bodies stretched on their couch and the bones of those who had died long since. On the bed where Philinnion had been laid in her winding-sheet we found the guest’s iron ring and the golden cup she had received on the first day from Makhates. [This detail sounds quite as veridical as the folded linen napkin found in Jesus’s grave. | Surprised, surprised even to stupor, we went straightway to Demostratos and into the guest-chamber to see whether the body of the young girl were really there. Having seen it, stretched on the ground, we returned to the Assembly, for what had come abcut was a great and incredible thing. The Assembly being in a tumult, Tue REsuRRECTION Mytu 105 and as it was almost impossible to get anything done, Hyttos, who passes with us not only as an excellent divinator but also for a great augur, and who has deeply studied everything concerning the art of divination, rose and ordered that the corpse of the young girl should be in- humed outside the precincts. He ordered that Hermes of the underworld and the Erinnys be appeased. He prescribed puri- fication for each and all.... He par- ticularly laid upon me that I sacrificed — to the Emperor, to the Republic, to Hermes, to Zeus the Harbourer, and to Ares, and to do all with rigor. This he said, and we did what he ordained... . In addition to this if you decide that the Emperor must be made acquainted with this affair, let me know by letter. I could even send some witnesses who were spectators of all this. Farewell. [The above is taken from Anatole 106 THe RESURRECTION MytH France’s Note to his Bride of Corinth, English translation by Wilfred and Emilie Jackson. John Lane, London; Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.] Tue Resurrection MytH 107 APPENDIX C DR. MORE ON THE RESURRECTION In his Christ of the New Testament, Dr. Paul Elmer More writes :— ‘‘Hiven sympathetic readers of the Bible have felt constrained to explain this say- ing of Jesus about removing mountains by faith as a bit of Oriental exaggeration. Perhaps it is so; yet, after all, what is there in the words more than in the equally positive, though less concrete, statement: ‘All things are possible to him that believeth?’ And yet why should we suppose that Jesus did not intend what he said to be taken literally? Miracle of any sort or degree is merely an irruption into the realm of mechanical causes from that unseen other-world of the mind or 108 Tuer RESURRECTION MytTH spirit which obeys a law of its own. And if mind can effect any the least change in the field of material phenomena, why should we be appalled at those greater works of the spirit? It is a question of faith. Without faith in its power over the body the mind cannot cause our arm to raise or our foot to move, as we see in the impotence of an hypnotic patient. Why then, by an extension of faith, should not the spirit of man exercise unlimited control over its yielding environment? ...”’ (page 265.) Let us now turn to page 271, where Dr. More is discussing the miracle of the resurrection. ‘¢ . . Apart from these inconsistencies the narrative bears the unmistakable stamp of legendary invention. It is, for instance, impossible to form any clear conception of such a body as Jesus is represented as wearing, a body which passes through THe ResurRRECTION MytH 109 closed doors yet is palpable and can eat solid food. The Gospel story of the risen Christ, beautiful though it may be in some respects, lowers the spiritual life to a semi-materialism which has left an unfortunate trail in religion; it ought to be surrendered as pure superstition, or, at the least, be interpreted symbolically. Happily there are other ways of treating the resurrection.’’ It occurred to me that Dr. More had rather doubled on his tracks here, and so I took the liberty of taking him to task for his inconsistency. ‘“‘On your premises,’’ I wrote him, ‘‘(as set out on pages 265 to 266) it would appear that the act of raising one’s arm, saying ‘Come’ to a friend, the removal of a mountain, and the passing of a flesh-and-blood body, which takes food and drink, through a closed door, are, each in their own degree, the result 110 THe RESURRECTION MytH of faith. The last named act does not ap- pear to me, therefore, to be su genéris, but to belong to the same class as the others. If the spirit of man can, by ‘an extension of faith, exercise unlimited con- trol over its yielding environment,’ why should not the spirit of Jesus exercise unlimited control over its ‘environment’ of body?’’ To this Dr. More replied as follows :— ...1t is proper to ask, as you do, why, having granted so much to the miraculous or possible-miraculous, I should draw back at this particular event. I do not know that I can justify my seeming inconsist- ency. My feeling is that these (the Gos- pel) accounts of the palpable body rather confuse and merge together the spiritual and the material, whereas in the case of true miracles we see the dominance of the spiritual over the material.’’ Tue ResurrEcTION MytH 111 Thus does an eminent classicist and Christian scholar, who, on philosophical grounds, accepts miracles in general, re- ject belief in the resurrection of Jesus’s body, on the ground that it tends to ‘‘lower our conceptions of the other world,’’ and fosters a ‘‘semi-materialism which has left an unfortunate trail in religion.’’ Doubtless Anatole France would have smiled ironically if he had read Dr. More’s philosophical defense of miracle based on his dualistic premises, and had noted his sudden retreat from his own position which, philosophically, appeared so im- pregnable. Faced with the problem of the physical resurrection Anatole would simply say: ‘‘Hither it is not, or it is; if it is, it is a part of nature and there- fore natural;’’ and he would wave aside all discussion about the ‘‘concurrent oper- 112 Tue ResuRRECTION MyTH ation of two radically distinct orders of existence.’’ And all the wise ones would say: ‘‘Of course, Anatole France is no philosopher !”’ Date Due Bn 1 “a ce ee kK ok < te 3 a eS 2 4 2 + Fj AR 1 . : ., a5 ® * ‘i | a@ * 5 4q ~ 2. Is a5 - ee a ve 2 q 3 3 4 = 25 ‘ | Ae es A L BOOK SHOP Inc. Good BOOKS BOUGHT and SOLD 4 W. 125th st., N. Y- ©- HARLEM 7-GH47 OO iDEA | iil Will HM thet eteteeeeetererr canes " ++ haseeeeenaneel otrtete: is eaareseveserseasts sr3t) Hd nt is hosesese suse’ maneepriedyieie lie bry ; . M TIPIVEE 3453518 teemrberetoressae, ‘ tes Ptrrriete ehibedetases Lo.) 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