§ 3 The Mystery-Drama
That there was an actual mystery-drama behind the gospel tragedy is revealed by the document itself, which is demonstrably not primarily a narrative at all, but a drama transcribed, with a minimum of necessary elucidation. Only the habit of reading with uncritical reverence can conceal from a student the dramatic bareness and brevity of the record in the synoptics—a record which in the fourth gospel is grafted, without any real development, on a protracted discourse that only artificially suggests circumstantial reality. Chapter xiii is as it were inserted in the middle of that discourse; and chapter xiv proceeds as from the end of chapter xii. The original document cannot have had the story of the tragedy in this form. At the close of chapter xiv the “Arise, let us go hence,” is a slight artifice to suggest action where there is none. Only at chapter xviii is the action resumed; and it is as bare and formal as in the synoptics. Broadly speaking, the action is something superadded. A long discourse has been wrapped round the first section, but without altering its compressed character. The synoptics know nothing of the Johannine discourses: the Johannine document knows no more of a historic episode than do the synoptics: it can only invent monologues.
Reading the synoptic account, we find a series of separate scenes, with the barest possible explanatory connection and introduction. The treason of Judas, in itself a myth,60 is announced beforehand in three sentences, with no sign of reflection on the meaninglessness of the situation posited. A mystico-mythical episode of a message from the Master to one who is to prepare the passover meal comes next. In Matthew the message is to “such a man”—undescribed: in Mark, a man carrying a pitcher of water is to be seen and followed, and “wheresoever he shall enter in” the message is to be delivered to “the goodman of the house,” and the room will be shown ready. To read biography in this, or to ascribe a “primitive” trustworthiness to the Marcan story, is to cast out criticism.
But the Supper itself is presented with the same ceremonial effect; the whole content being the mention of the betrayal and the dogmatic meaning of the ritual. In Mark, the whole episode of the Supper occupies eight sentences: in Matthew, where Judas puts his question and gets his answer, ten. After the singing of a hymn, the scene changes instantly to the Mount of Olives. No reason is assigned for the going out into the night: it is taken for granted that the Divine One is going to his death, of his own will and prevision. Either we believe this, making him a God, or we recognize a myth. Biography it cannot be. And drama it clearly is.
On the Mount, there is another brief dialogue, committing Peter and the other disciples—a wholly hostile presentment. Again the scene changes to Gethsemane, where the three selected disciples with whom Jesus withdraws actually sleep while he utters the prayer set down. There was thus no one to hear it. Any biographical theory which is concerned to respect verisimilitude must here recognize something else than narrative, and will presumably posit invention. But why should invention take this peculiar form? If the object was to impeach the disciples—and they certainly are impeached—is it not an impossibly crude device to tell of their sleeping throughout the prayer and its repetition, leaving open the retort: “You report the words of the prayer: from whom did you get them if not from those disciples, who must have heard them?” But if we suppose the scene first presented dramatically, no perplexity or counter-sense is involved. The impeachment is effectual; the episode is seen; and no one is concerned, in presence of a drama, to ask how certain words came to be known to have been spoken by any personage. It is the reduction to narrative form that betrays the dramatic source. And when we find in both Matthew and Mark, which clearly embody the same original document, this sequence:
And again he came, and found them sleeping... and they wist not what to answer him [nothing has been said]. And he cometh the third time, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: it is enough; the hour is come: behold, the son of man is betrayed.... Arise now...,
the documentary crux, which the biographical school makes vainly violent attempts to solve, is at once solved when we realize that in the transcription two speeches have accidentally been combined. The drama must have gone thus:—
The disciples still asleep.
Enter Jesus.
Jes. Sleep on now and take your rest. [Exit.
Enter Jesus. (Disciples still asleep.)
Jes. It is enough: the hour is come, etc.
The transcriber, missing an exit and an enter, has simply run two speeches together; and the gospel copyists have faithfully followed their copy, putting “they wist not what to answer him” in the wrong place. In an original narrative the combination could not happen. In the transcription of the copy of a play it could easily happen. We find instances in the printing of the plays of Shakespeare and other early dramatists.
[One antagonist of the mystery-play theory, making no attempt to rebut the above solution, denies that it can be applied to the midnight trial before the priests, elders, and scribes. Of this trial M. Loisy recognizes the impossibility: pronouncing that, sans doute, the asserted search for witnesses by night never took place. But, says the objector61:—
(1) It may be incredible history; but it is impossible drama. I defy Mr. Robertson to say how it could have been represented on the stage, or why it should have been given a place in a drama at all. And he is searching for evidence of drama.
(2) The incident exists only in Mr. Robertson’s imagination. The Greek phrase in Mk. xiv, 55, is the regular phrase for sifting evidence, and does not imply or suggest any hunting up of witnesses throughout Jerusalem.
We have here three propositions:—
1. The midnight search for witnesses is impossible in drama.
2. It is impossible to give a reason why it should have been put in a drama.
3. The record does not say that it took place.
The first is at once annihilated by briefly dramatizing the alleged procedure:—
Priest (or other official, to officials). Go and bring the witnesses to convict this fellow. [Exeunt Officials.
Priest consults with his fellows. Enter Officials with a witness. Exeunt Officials.
Witness is examined: the evidence is confused.
Enter Officials with another witness. Exeunt.
Witness is examined: evidence conflicts with that already given.
(And so with a series of witnesses.)
Enter Officials with two more witnesses.
Witnesses, examined, testify, with some contradictions in detail, “This man said”—etc.
High Priest (standing). Answerest thou nothing? etc.
Where is the difficulty? It is precisely in drama, and in drama alone, that the impossible narrative can pass as possible. Action on the stage is always telescoped: time is always more or less ignored, because the selected action must go on continuously. Again and again in Shakespeare (or rather in pseudo-Shakespeare) we find irrelevant and futile scenes interposed to create the semblance of a time interval; but in Othello and Measure for Measure, to name no other plays, the action is impossibly telescoped. The explanation is that in the psychology of the theatre time is disregarded, save by the most critical. The simple-minded audience of devotees which witnessed the Christist mystery-play would never ask “How did they hunt up those witnesses in Jerusalem at midnight?” Solvitur ambulando, so to speak: they saw the trial. It is when the play is transmuted to dead narrative, wherein a number of questions and answers are reduced to a few bald statements, that the impossibility obtrudes itself.
Our critic defies us to explain how such a trial came to be put in a drama. It is hard to see why he is puzzled. The general object of the whole tragedy is to show Jesus as the victim, first, of the priests, elders, and scribes—the Jewish ecclesiastical order, whose hostility to Jesus is a constant datum of the gospels. At this stage the mystery-play has become a Gentile-Christian performance, in which even the Jewish disciples play a poor part, while the official class are the mainspring of the tragedy. How could the priests be more effectively impeached than by exhibiting them as producing plainly suborned evidence to convict Jesus? Lord Tennyson, in our time, put a bad freethinker in a bad play to discredit freethinking. And he had non-canonical as well as canonical precedents. The apocryphal “Acts of Pilate” appears to follow a drama in which a great many gospel episodes were dramatized as well as the trial.62
As for the critic’s assertion that a midnight search for witnesses is not posited in the narrative, it is again impossible to follow his reasoning. If the ἐζήτουν... μαρτυρίαν of Mark means “sifted evidence,” the ἐζήτουν ψευδομαρτυρίαν of Matthew means “sifted false evidence.” The theory of “sifting” is impossible. I have had the curiosity to examine ten translations—Latin, German, modern Greek, Italian, French, and English, without finding that one translator has ever dreamt of it. All agree with the current English rendering, which means sought [false] testimony, because no other rendering is possible. The record goes on, in Mark:—
... and found it [i. e. the required evidence] not. For many bare false witness against him and their witness agreed not together. And there stood up certain, and bare false witness against him.... And not even so did their witness agree together. And the high priest stood up....
According to the new theory, the prosecution “sifted evidence” which “stood up,” as did the high priest.
Defending his thesis, the exegete argues63 that the “evidence” was not written but oral; that is to say, the authorities had collected witnesses during the day and had then kept them till midnight or later without ascertaining what evidence they were able to give. The narratives neither say nor hint anything of the kind; whereas if such had been supposed to be the fact it would have been the natural thing to say so.
But the thing alleged is unnatural. On the one hand we are asked to believe that the authorities had before sunset collected a number of witnesses, when they could not have any certainty of making the arrest; on the other hand we are to believe that with all this extraordinary fore-planning they had not taken the normal precaution of ascertaining what the witnesses could say. In the transcribed drama as it stands, the authorities are represented as knaves; in the interpretation before us, framed to save the credit of the narrative, they are represented as childishly foolish. The narrative as we have it defies its vindicators. It tells that witnesses were sent for; and only in a drama, in which time-conditions are ignored, could such a fiction have been resorted to.] #/
The story is equally dramatic to the close. Everything is scenic, detached, episodic: it is left to Luke (who elaborates the Supper scene; gives a positive command of Jesus for the future celebration where the previous documents merely show the rite as it was practised; puts the denial of Peter before the trial; and drops the whole procedure of the witnesses) to interpose the episode of the daughters of Jerusalem between the Roman trial and the crucifixion; and even that is parenthetic and dramatic, as are the burial and the seeking; whereafter, in Mark, the gospel abruptly ends. The rest is supplementary documentation. How much of that may have been dramatized, it is impossible to say. That there had been evolution in the mystery-play is involved in our conception of it. It began with the simple Sacrament, at a remote period, the Sacrament itself being evolved from a primitive and savage to a symbolic form, the God being probably first represented, as in kindred rites,64 by his sacrificial priest; and later by the victim.65 It is after the primitive and localized cult seeks the status of a world-religion that the ritual developes into a quasi-history; and we can see conflicting influences in that. One writer causes Jesus to be buffeted and mocked at the Jewish trial, as if to counterbalance the derision in the Roman trial; even as Luke interposes a third trial before Herod, to make sure that the guilt should ultimately lie with the Jewish government. In the action as in the doctrine, the Gentile influence finally predominates.
The important point to note in the documentary evolution is that the mystery-play remained a secret representation for some time after written gospels were current. To begin with, all the mystery-plays of the age were on the same footing of secrecy. What takes place finally in the Jesuist cult is a simple adding-on of the mystery-play to the gospels. It was not for nothing that the school of B. Weiss, seeking to expiscate a “Primitive Gospel” from the synoptics, made it end before the Tragedy. This was what they were bound to do by their documentary tests; and the common objection that such an ending is very improbable—a difficulty avowed by Weiss and weakly sought to be solved by some of the school—is seen in the light of the myth-theory to be a difficulty only for those who assume not merely the historicity of a Jesus but the historicity of the whole tragedy story down to the resurrection. Once it is realized that that story is a dramatic development of an originally simple myth of sacrificial death, the documentary difficulty disappears.
[It should not be necessary to point out the absolute falsity of the assertion of Dr. Conybeare (Histor. Christ, p. 49) that in my theory “The Christian Gospels... are a transcript of the annually performed ritual drama, just as Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare are transcripts of Shakespeare’s plays.” In Pagan Christs (p. 201) it is expressly argued that “the Mystery Play is an addition to a previously existing document.... The transcriber has been able to add to the previous gospel the matter of the mystery-play; and there he loyally stops.” And it is repeatedly pointed out that the transcription has been made with the minimum of necessary narrative connection. Thus the parallel with Lamb’s Tales is false even as regards the matter posited as constituting the play; while the assertion that the whole of the gospel is represented as a transcription of a play is pure fabrication. And this mere falsification of the theory passes with traditionalist critics as a confutation.]
Some account, indeed, the Jesuists must have given of the death of their God or Son-God when they reached the stage of systematic propaganda; and this was in all likelihood a bare statement such as we have in the Epistles, that he was put to a humiliating death and rose again. It is very likely that accounts of the manner of the death varied in the first written accounts, as they certainly would in the traditions or rituals current at various points; and we may grant to the documentary critics that various versions may have attached to early forms or sources of Mark and Matthew. A general statement that Jesus was the “Son of the Father,” and that he had been put to death with ignominy, would elicit, as has been above argued, the objection that “Jesus Barabbas” was certainly no divine personage. The Barabbas story, then, explaining away that objection, is a comparatively late development, of which, accordingly, we find not a single trace in the Acts or the Epistles. But similarly the Supper is not described in the Acts or the Epistles apart from the plainly interpolated account in First Corinthians. And at the outset the Supper would be emphatically secret matter, not to be written down.
Whatever conclusion, then, was given to the earlier gospel or gospels, it did not include that. As little would it give the Agony, or the trials before the Sanhedrim and before Pilate, throwing the guilt of the tragedy on the Jews, or the episodes disparaging the apostles. Judas is in all likelihood primarily a figure of a Gentile form of the play, being just Judaios, a Jew,66 created by Gentile or Samaritan animus. What inferribly happened was a dramatic development, by Gentile hands, of a primarily simple mystery drama, consisting of the Supper, the death, and the resurrection, into the play as it now stands transcribed in the synoptics, with the Betrayal, the Agony, the Denial, the Trials, and the dramatic touches in the crucifixion scene.
The school of Weiss, then, on our theory, reached by comparatively consistent methods of documentary criticism a relatively sound conclusion. The earlier forms of the gospel certainly had not the present conclusion; and whatever simple conclusions they had were bound to be superseded when the complete mystery play was transcribed—the very transcription being a reason for their disappearance. At some point, probably by reason of the Christian reaction against all pagan procedure, the play, which in its present form must always have been special to a town or towns, was dropped, and though the tendency was to keep the Eucharist an advanced rite for initiates, and withhold it from catechumens,67 the reduction of the Tragedy to narrative form became a necessity for purposes of propaganda. Without it, the gospels were inadequate to their purposes; and it supplied the needed confutation of the charge that Jesus was simply a victim in the Barabbas rite.
This said, we have still to face the main problem of the evolution of the Jesus-cult into a world-religion in which the God Sacrificed to the God becomes also the Messiah of the Jews and the Teacher of those who believe in him. And the tracing of that evolution must obviously be difficult. The process of extracting true out of false history is always so; and where the concocted history and its contingent literature are the main documents, we can in the nature of things reach only general conceptions. But general conceptions are attainable; and we must frame them as scientifically as we can.
Notes
1 1 Cor. x, 21. I say “Paul” as I say “Matthew” or “John,” for brevity’s sake, not at all as accepting the ascriptions of the books. Van Manen’s thesis that all the Epistles of “Paul” are pseudepigraphic is probably very near the truth.
2 The retention of “devils” in the Revised Version, with “Gr. demons” only in the margin, is an abuse. For the Greeks, there were good daimons as well as bad; and “demon” is not the real equivalent of “daimon.”
3 C.M. 179, note.
4 Cp. Athenæus, vi, 26–27; Schömann, Griechische Alterthümer, 3te Aufl. ii, 418–19; Foucart, Des associations religieuses, 50–52; Miss Harrison, Themis, p. 154; Menzies, History of Religion, p. 292.
5 P.C. 194 sq., 306; C.M. 381, note.
6 G.B. ix, 374 sq.
7 On the points enumerated under heads 4–7 see Schürer, Jewish People in the Time of Christ, Eng. tr. Div. II, i, 11–36. In regard to my former specification of such influences (P.C. 204), Dr. Conybeare alleges (p. 49) that I “hint” that the Jesuist mystery-play was performed “in the temples (sic) built by Herod at Damascus and Jericho, and in the theatres of the Greek town at Gadara.” This cannot be regarded as one of Dr. Conybeare’s hallucinations: it is one of his random falsifications. No “hint” of the kind was ever given. The mystery-play is always represented by me as secretly performed.
8 Cp. Ezra and Nehemiah.
9 P.C. 168 sq.
10 Schürer, as cited, iii, 225.
11 Thus Dr. Conybeare, constantly. Upon his view, the Essenes can never have existed.
12 Schürer, as cited, i, 3–4.
13 Cp. Gunkel, Zum Verständnis des N.T., as cited, p. 20.
14 The later documentists in such cases substituted an angel; but that was certainly not the early idea. See C.M. 112; Etheridge, Targums on the Pentateuch, i, 1862, p. 5.
17 P.C. 162.
18 P.C. 321.
19 E.g. the Biblical accounts of the adoption of Canaanite Gods by Israelites who married Canaanite women.
20 E.g. the special adoption of Greek deities by Romans, apart from the political practice of enrolling deities of conquered States in the Roman Pantheon.
21 S.H.F. i, 44–45.
22 S.H.F. i, 48–49.
23 C.M. 35, and note.
24 See many details in C.M., pp. 52–57.
25 Refs. in P.C. 51, note 6. Dr. Conybeare (pp. 29, 30) meets such conclusions of scholars (Stade, Winckler, Sayce, etc.) by excluding them from his list of “serious Semitic scholars.”
28 Heb. vii, 3. Cp. v, 6, 10; vii, 11, 17.
29 P.C. 179.
30 E.S. 115; Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, p. 291 sq.
31 Or Jehoshua—the Hebrew name of which Iesous is the Greek equivalent.
32 P.C. 163.
33 The miracle of hastening the sun’s setting is in Homer (Il. xviii, 239) assigned to Hêrê, the chief Goddess.
34 P.C. 220.
35 Josh. v, 13–15 is clearly late. In ch. xxiv the angel is not mentioned.
36 P.C. 314, 315.
37 Etheridge, The Targums on the Pentateuch, 1862, p. 5.
38 The Samaritans have a late book ascribing to him many feats not given in the Jewish records. Concerning this Professor Drews wrote (Christ Myth, p. 57, note):—“The Samaritan Book of Joshua (Chronicon Samaritanum, published 1848) was written in Arabic during the thirteenth century in Egypt, and is based upon an old work compiled in the third century B.C.” Dr. Conybeare (Hist. Christ, p. 33) declares the last statement to be “founded on pure ignorance,” adding: “and the Encyclopædia Biblica declares it to be a medieval production of no value to anyone except the student of the Samaritan sect under Moslem rule.” Be it observed (1) that Dr. Drews had actually described the book as a medieval production; (2), that his whole point was that it was legendary, not historical; and (3) that the Ency. Bib. article, which bears out both propositions, uses no such language as Dr. Conybeare ascribes to it after the word “production,” and says nothing whatever on the hypothesis that the book is founded on a compilation of the third century B.C. That hypothesis, framed by Hebraists, is one upon which Dr. Conybeare has not the slightest right to an opinion. Dr. A. E. Cowley, in the Encyc. Brit., describes the book as derived from “sources of various dates.” That being so, Dr. Conybeare, who as usual has wholly failed to understand what he is attacking, has never touched the position, which is that Joshua legends so flourished among the Samaritans that they are preserved in a medieval book—unless he means to allege that the legends are of medieval invention, a proposition which, indeed, would fitly consummate his excursion.
39 Yeho-shua = “Yah [or Yeho] is welfare.”
40 Cp. Josh. v, 2–10.
41 Canon Charles, The Book of Jubilees, 1902, p. 9, note 29.
42 This thesis was substantially put by me in the first edition of Pagan Christs (1903). Dr. Conybeare, who appears incapable of accuracy in such matters, ascribes the Joshua theory (Hist. Christ, pp. 32, 35) and the special hypothesis that Joshua was mythically the son of Miriam, to Professor Smith, who never broached either. His pretext is a passage in the preface to the second edition of Christianity and Mythology, which he perverts in defiance of the context. On this basis he proceeds to charge “imitation.” Aspersion in Dr. Conybeare’s polemic is usually thus independent of fact.
43 Historical Christ, p. 17.
44 Id. pp. 8–9.
45 Neither is it put by Prof. Drews, who merely cites (above, p. 41, note) from Niemojewski, without endorsing it, an “astral” theory of Jesus and Pilate. Dr. Conybeare appears incapable of giving a true account of anything he antagonizes, whether in politics or in religion. Elsewhere Drews speaks of astral elements in the Christ story; but so do those adherents of the biographical school who recognize the zodiacal source of the Woman-and-Child myth in Revelation.
46 At another point (p. 87, note) Dr. Conybeare triumphantly cites Winckler as saying that “the humanization of the Joshua myth was complete when the book of Joshua was compiled.” This grants the whole case. “Humanization” tells of previous deity; and just as Achilles remained a God after being presented in the Iliad, Joshua was “human” only for those whose sole lore concerning him was that of the Hexateuch.
47 Der vorchristliche Jesus, p. 1 sq.
48 Mk. v, 27; Lk. xxiv, 19; Acts xviii, 25; xxviii, 31.
49 Perhaps an exception should be made of Dr. Conybeare, who believes Jesus to have been a “successful exorcist” (M.M.M. p. 142). This writer sees no difficulty in the fact that in Mark Jesus is no exorcist at Nazareth, and refuses to work wonders.
50 P.C. 164.
55 Origins of Christianity, ed. 1914, p. 27.
56 Found in the Alexandrian and Vatican codices, and preferred by Lachmann, Tregelles, and Westcott and Hort.
57 τὸ δεύτερον. The R.V. puts “afterward” in the text, with “Gr. the second time” in the margin. Mr. Whittaker reads “afterward” also, after “the second time”—apparently by oversight.
58 Deane, Pseudepigrapha, 1891, p. 312.
59 Josh. xxiv, 31, in Septuagint.
60 C.M. 352.
61 Art. by H. G. Wood in The Cambridge Magazine, Jan. 20, 1917, p. 216.
62 P.C. 202.
63 Cambridge Magazine, Feb. 3, 1917, p. 289.
64 G.B. v, 45 sq., 223; P.C. 364, 373–4.
65 P.C. 112 sq., 131 sq., 140, 142, 144, 352, 362–4, 368.
66 C.M. 354. I find that Volkmar (there cited) had in one of his later works put the theory that the traitor, whom he held to be an invention of the later Paulinists, would be named Juda as typifying Judaism. The myth-theory is not necessarily committed to the whole of this thesis, but the objections of Brandt (Die evang. Gesch. pp. 15–18) seem to me invalid. He always reasons on the presupposition of a central historicity, and argues as if Mark could not have been interpolated at the points where Judas is named.
67 C.M. 208, notes.