Chapter VIII — Supplementary Myth
§ 1 Myths of Healing
It is significant that the later myth-making of the synoptics is partly by way of reversion to the folk-lore in which the myth had risen, partly by way of meeting non-Jewish Messianic requirements, partly by way of Gentilism, partly by way of concessions to the Gnosticism or occultism whose pretensions in the second century exercised so strong a pressure on the Church. As Professor Smith points out, the story in Mark (xiv, 51–52) of the youth who at the betrayal fled naked, leaving his linen cloth in the hands of the captors,1 is a crude provision for the Docetic theory that the real Christ did not suffer. Cerinthus taught that “at last Christ departed from Jesus, and that then Jesus suffered and rose again, while Christ remained impassible, inasmuch as he was a spiritual being.”2
In this connection there arises for us the problem, stressed by Professor Smith, as to the significance of the stories of wholesale healing and casting out of devils. His thesis is that they were an occult way of conveying the claim that Jesus by preaching monotheism had cast out in Galilee the diseases and corruptions of polytheism, pagan deities being “devils” for the Jew. And in view of the repeated assertion, on Gnostic lines, that Jesus declared his teaching to be made purposely occult, so as not to be understood by the people, we cannot deny the possibility that some of the stories of healing may have been so intended. Professor Smith, as I understand him, argues3 that a straightforward claim of wholesale overthrowing of paganism would have offended the Roman Government; and that the claim was put by metaphor to avoid that. The difficulty arises that if the metaphor was not understood by Gentiles it missed its mark with them; while if they did understand it their susceptibilities would be particularly wounded by the metaphors of leprosy and blindness and “devils.” And there is the further difficulty that, as Professor Smith notes, the stories of casting out devils relate solely to half-heathen Galilee, while, as he also notes, there is no ultimate trace of Jesuism there.4 Why then should an allegory of casting out polytheism have been framed concerning Galilee?
On any view, it can hardly be doubted that the stories of healing made their popular appeal as simple miracles. Professor Schmiedel’s argument that the claim of Jesus (Mt. xi, 5; Lk. vii, 22) to heal blindness and lameness and leprosy, and to raise the dead, must be understood in a spiritual sense, seems to me a complete failure. He contends that if it be taken literally the final claim that “the poor have the gospel preached to them” is an anti-climax. But if we take the miracle-claims to be merely spiritual, the anti-climax is absolute; for the proposition then runs that the blind, the lame, the leprous, and the spiritually dead have the gospel preached to them, and the poor have the gospel preached to them also. On the other hand, there is no real anti-climax on a literal interpretation. Plainly, the provision of good tidings for the merely poor, the most numerous suffering class of all, was the one thing that could be said to be done for them. It could not be pretended that they had been made wealthy. Thus a “pillar-text” falls, and we are left committed to the literal interpretation as against both Professor Smith and Professor Schmiedel. Both, however, will probably agree that most readers always took the literal view.5