§ 10 The Resurrection
If a suffering Messiah was arguable for the Jews, his resurrection after death was a matter of course. The biographical theory, that the greatness of the Founder’s personality led his followers to believe that he must rise again, is historically as unwarrantable as any part of the biographical case. The death and resurrection of the Saviour-God was an outstanding feature of all the most popular cults of the near East; Osiris, Herakles, Dionysos, Attis, Adonis, Mithra, all died to rise again; and a ritual of burial, mourning, resurrection, and rejoicing was common to several. On any view such rituals were established in other contemporary cults; and it is this fact that makes it worth while in this inquiry to glance at a myth which is now abandoned by all save the traditionally orthodox.
On the uncritical assumption that nothing but pure Judaism could exist in Jewry in the age of the Herods, the notion of a dying and re-arising Hero-God was impossible among Jews save as a result of a stroke of new constructive faith. That simple negative position ignores not only the commonness of the belief in immortality among Jews (the Pharisees all held it) before the Christian era, but the special Jewish beliefs in the “translation” of Moses and Elijah, and the story of Saul, the witch of Endor, and the spirit of Samuel. The very belief that the risen Elias was to be the forerunner of the Messiah was a lead to the belief that the Messiah himself might come after a resurrection.
But it is practically certain that a liturgical resurrection was or had been practised in contemporary cults which had at one time enacted an annual sacrifice of the representative of the God, abstracted in myth as the death of the God himself. And in our own time the survival of an analogous practice has been noted in India. At the installation of the Rajahs of Keonjhur it was anciently the practice for the Rajah to slay a victim: latterly there is a mock-slaying, whereupon the mock-victim disappears. “He must not be seen for three days; then he presents himself to the Rajah as miraculously restored to life.”133
Notes
1 Jesus, by William Renton. Pub. by author, Keswick, 1879.
2 Rep. by R.P.A. 1907.
3 The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels, 1916.
4 E. g. He takes as applying to Jesus (p. 377) a remark applied expressly and solely to the myth of Herakles.
5 Work cited, p. 10.
6 Second Leben Jesu, § 91 (3te Aufl. p. 569).
7 See refs. in Drews, The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, Eng. trans. p. 23.
8 As cited, p. 572.
9 Jesus and Israel, Eng. tr., pp. viii, ix, 29.
10 Putnams, 1912. I had not met with this work when I chose my own title, The Historical Jesus, else I should have framed another.
11 Work cited, pp. 335–353.
12 Williams and Norgate, 1895.
13 Work cited, p. 420.
14 Id. p. 17, etc.
15 The Historic Jesus, p. vii.
16 In this connection he puts the theory—derived from the celebrated Herr Chamberlain—that Jesus was not a Jew but an “Amorite.”
17 H.J. chs. xvii and xix.
18 H.J. 199. On this compare The Four Gospels as Historical Records, chs. vi–xiii.
19 Canon Cheetham, Hulsean Lectures on The Mysteries, 1897, p. 115.
20 “The primitive idea of the sacrificial meal, namely, that it is by participation in the blood of the god that the spirit of the god enters into his worshipper.”—Prof. Jevons, Introd. to the Hist. of Religion, 1896, p. 291. “Originally the death of the god was nothing else than the death of the theanthropic victim.”—Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 1889, p. 394.
21 Jésus et la tradition évangélique, 1910, p. 106.
22 H.J. 202–3.
23 Loisy, p. 171.
24 See refs. in H.J. 171; others in G.B. ix. 420 n. An overwhelming case for the reading “Jesus (the) Barabbas” is established by E. B. Nicholson, The Gospel according to the Hebrews, 1879, pp. 141–2.
25 Mr. Lester translates “Son of a Teacher,” but this (adopted by Brandt) is an evasive rendering. He thinks the story, even if true, had no connection with the condemnation of Jesus.
26 Cp. Nicholson, as cited, p. 142.
27 G.B. ix, 418; P.C. 146.
28 G.B. ix, 419.
29 Id. iv, ch. vi; P.C. 124.
30 P.C. 152, 64; G.B. iv (Pt. III, The Dying God), 170 sq.
31 P.C. 161. Cp. Turner, Samoa, 1884, 274–5; G.B. iv, ch. vi.
32 P.C. 137, 161, 186; G.B. iv (Pt. III), 166.
33 Macrobius, Saturnalia, i, 7. Cp. Varro, cit. by Lactantius, Div. Inst. i, 21.
34 G.B. iv, 14 sq., 46 sq., x, 1 sq.
35 Cp. Ward’s View of the Religion of the Hindoos, 5th ed. 1863, p. 92.
36 See P.C. 105 sq. as to the various motives of human sacrifice.
37 Livy, viii, 9, 10; Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, 166; P.C., 138.
38 Cp. Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, 1867, i, 366; P.C. 121.
39 Robertson Smith, Semites, 391; F. B. Jevons, Introd. to Hist. of Religion, pp. 274–93.
40 P.C. 363.
41 Id. 108 sq.
42 Cp. G.B. Pt. III, The Dying God (vol. iv), 166 n., 214 sq.; P.C. 116–117, 140.
43 P.C. 364–8.
44 Cp. Kalisch, as cited; G.B., as last cited; Ps. 106, etc.
45 P.C. 158 sq. Hebrews, ix, 7, 25, suggests a cryptic meaning for the sacrifice of atonement.
46 As to Hebrew private sacraments, see P.C. 168 sq.
47 P.C. 166. I do not find that Mr. R. T. Herford deals with this matter in his valuable work on Christianity in Talmud and Midrash, 1903.
48 See below, p. 104, as to the inferrible early forms of the propaganda of the crucifixion.
49 Mr. Joseph McCabe (Sources of Gospel Morality, p. 21) argues against the myth-theory that the early Rabbis never question the historicity of Jesus. But it is extremely likely that early Rabbis did use the Barabbas argument before the gospel story was framed. In an age destitute of historical literature and of critical method or practice, it sufficed to turn their flank.
50 C.M. 352, § 21, and refs. A fair “biographical” inference would be that the betrayed Jesus had been an obscure person, not publicly known. This inference, however, is never drawn.
51 Ward’s View of the Religion of the Hindoos, 5th ed. 1863, p. 91.
52 Cp. Prof. Drews, The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, Eng. tr. p. 54 sq., for Niemojewski’s theory that Pilate = the constellation Orion, pilatus, the javelin-bearer. This theory is not endorsed by Drews.
53 P.C. 137.
54 G.B. ix, 412 sq.
55 G.B. ix, 415, note.
56 Justin Martyr, Dial. with Trypho, c. 40.
57 G.B. ix, 357 sq.
58 P.C. 146; G.B. ix, 359.
59 Second Leben Jesu, § 83.
60 Die evang. Geschichte, p. 156.
61 G.B. Pt. III (vol. iv), 113–114.
62 “Upon an ass and [even in R.V.] upon a colt, the foal of an ass,” Zech. ix, 9. I should explain that in denying that such “tautologies” were normal in the Old Testament I had in view narrative passages.
63 C.M. 338–341.
65 The Historical Christ, p. 22.
66 See p. 19, note, ref. to M. Durkheim. M. Durkheim is one of the greatest of anthropologists; he is not a mythologist at all.
67 C.M. 340.
68 Id. 341.
69 Id. 218, note.
70 Work cited, p. 14.
71 Id. p. 76.
72 See his Myth, Magic, and Morals, 2nd ed. p. 302.
73 Comm. in Joh. x, 16, cited by Strauss. See his first Life of Jesus, Pt. II, ch. vii, § 88, for the views of the commentators on the episode.
74 G.B. ix, 417.
75 Cultes, mythes, et religions, i, 338.
76 In John, the high priest is actually made to remonstrate from a Jewish point of view, by way of enforcing the Christian conclusion.
77 Jésus et la tradition, p. 76.
78 There might be involved, again, a reminiscence of the crucifixion of the last independent king of the Jews, Antigonus, by Mark Antony. C.M. 364.
79 C.M. 365.
80 P.C. 130 sq., 363. Cp. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 391; Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 55, citing Pliny, H.N. xviii, iii, 12.
81 Apology and Acts of Apollonius, etc., ed. by F. C. Conybeare, 1894, p. 270. Here Dr. Conybeare momentarily appears as a myth-theorist.
82 Id. p. 258.
83 P.C. 115.
84 The Christ Myth, Eng. trans. pp. 65–68.
85 Cp. Cheyne, Introd. to Isaiah, 1895, pp. 304–5, as to Ewald’s theory that Jeremiah may have been meant.
86 So to be estimated whether he be “the” Deutero-Isaiah or a song-writer whose work has been incorporated. Cp. Cheyne, as cited, and his art. Isaiah in Encyc. Bib.
87 The terms “Christists” and “Jesuists” are, it need hardly be said, used for the sake of exactitude. The term “early Christians” would often convey a different and misleading idea. There were Jesuists and Christists before the “Christian” movement arose. Dr. Conybeare pronounces such terms “jargon” (Histor. Christ, p. 94). In the next line he illustrates the delicacy of his own academic taste by the terms “tag-rag and bobtail.” Such slang abounds in his book, and this particular phrase recurs (p. 183).
88 It is interesting to note that in the Gospel of Peter one of the malefactors is represented as speaking to the Jews in defence of Jesus, whereupon they break his legs in vengeance.
89 Ex. xii, 46; Num. ix, 12. Cp. Ps. xxxiv, 20.
90 P.C. 113, 155.
91 Granum turis in poculo vini, ut alienetur mens ejus. Talmud, tract. Sanhedrin.
92 Vinegar in the Alexandrian Codex.
93 C.M. 367.
95 See the whole question minutely discussed in Strauss, Pt. III, ch. iv, § 134.
97 P.C. 125–6.
98 Ps. xxii, 18. The citation in Mt. xxvii, 35 (omitted in R.V.) is a late interpolation, found in the Codex Sangallensis.
99 C.M. 380.
100 C.M. 364.
101 C.M. 369 sq.; P.C. 150 sq.
102 P.C. 319.
103 P.C. 151, 368, note.
104 P.C. 113, top. The preceding hypothesis with regard to the Meriah post is an error. Mr. H. G. Wood informs me he has learned from the Museum authorities at Madras that the apparent cross-bar was really a projection, representing the head of an elephant, to the trunk of which the victim was tied.
105 P.C. App. A.
106 C.M. 376.
107 P.C. 196.
110 De Dea Syria, 59.
111 C.M. 373.
112 P.C. 371.
113 P.C. 157.
114 C.M. 375.
115 Id. 377.
116 P.C. 166. Cp. Drews, Christ Myth, 42.
117 Judge T. L. Strange, Contributions, etc., 1881. “The Portraiture and Mission of Jesus,” p. 6.
118 Cp. Charles, introd. to The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, 1908, p. xvi, as to John Hyrcanus.
119 Cp. Charles, The Apocalypse of Baruch, 1896, pp. 52–53, notes. The Messiah, in the view there discussed, was to have been “concealed”—another cue for the evangelists.
120 H.J. 153 sq.
121 P.C. 304–6, 316–18; C.M. 331 and note.
122 Conybeare, Historical Christ, p. 19.
123 Col. Conder, The City of Jerusalem, 1909, p. 3, citing Rix.
124 Id. p. 9.
125 Id. p. 10; Eusebius, Life of Constantine, iii, 42.
126 Conder, p. 13.
127 Walter Menzies, Notes of a Holiday Excursion, 1897, p. 89.
128 Work cited, pp. 154–5.
129 Id. p. 156.
130 Id. p. 140.
131 “Il est à supposer,” are M. Loisy’s words. Jésus et la trad. évang., p. 107.
132 Myth, Magic, and Morals, 2nd edit. p. 297.
133 G.B. iv, 56. Cp. 154.