§ 2 Birth-Myths
And it was to the popular credulity that appeal was made by the stories of the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth, the Adoration by the Magi and the Shepherds, the stable, the manger,6 the menace of Herod, the massacre, and the flight.7 The question that here arises for the mythologist is whether the birth-myths had belonged to the early Jesus-myth at a stage before gospel-making commenced, and had at first been ignored, only to be embodied later. For suggesting that they had been connected with the early myth I have been told by Dr. Carpenter and Dr. Conybeare that I ignored the late acceptance of the Christmas Birthday by “the Church,” after I had expressly noted the late date of that acceptance. These critics, as usual, miss the whole problem.
Either the birth-stories were old lore in Syria (or elsewhere in the East)8 or they were not. If not, their imposition on the gospel story in the second century represents an assimilation of quite alien pagan matter, with the assent of the main body of Jewish Nazaræans, who accepted the opening chapters of the canonical Matthew. Of such an assent, no explanation can be given from the standpoint or standpoints of Dr. Conybeare and Dr. Carpenter. It would be a gratuitous capitulation to Gentilism in a Jewish atmosphere, and this without any sign on the Pauline side of a Gentile obtrusion of such matter.9 But if, on the other hand, we put the hypothesis that such matter had been connected in Syrian folk-lore with the old Jesus-myth, we at once find an explanation for the additions to the gospel-story and a new elucidation of the myth-theory. The spread of the Jesus cult would bring to the front the primitive myths connected with it which the reigning Judaic sentiment had at first kept out of sight as savouring of heathenism; and all Jesus-lore would have a progressive interest for converts. Judaism, in its redacted sacred books, admitted of quasi-supernatural births in such cases as those of Sarah and Hannah; but an absolute virgin birth, a commonplace in heathen mythology,10 had there no recognition. Yet the idea was as likely to survive in folk-lore in Syria as anywhere else; and as Judaism became more and more a hostile thing, Judaic views would tend in various ways to be set aside.
The hypothesis put by me is (1) that the certainly unhistorical Miriam of the Pentateuch is inferribly, like Moses and Joshua, an ancient deity; and that in old Palestinian myth she was the mother of Joshua. In the Pentateuch she is degraded, as part of the Evemeristic process of reducing the ancient popular Gods to human status. That process, which affects Goddesses as well as Gods in several ancient religions,11 was for the Hebrew priesthood a necessary rule. Polytheism was everywhere, in antiquity, and for the Yahwists it must be cast out. A late Persian tradition that Joshua was the son of Miriam12 accents the query whether there were no family relationships in the old Palestinian myths. That the birth in a stable, with a ritual of babe-worship at the winter or summer solstice, is very ancient both in the East and in the West, is the conclusion forced on the mythologist by a mass of evidence; and the location of the stable at Bethlehem in a cave connects the Christian myth yet further with a number of those of paganism.13 If the matter of the myth was ancient for Syria, why should not the names of the mother and the child be so?
The fashion in which the hypothesis is met by the more impassioned adherents of the biographical view is instructive. Dr. Conybeare, who thinks it inconceivable that “a myth” should be mistaken for “a man”—though that mistake is the gist of masses of mythology—finds no difficulty in conceiving that a real woman may be turned into a myth within a century. For him, the gospel “Mary” (Maria or Mariam) must be a real Jewess because in Mark (vi, 3) the people of Nazareth ask: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James, and Joses, and Judas, and Simon? and are not his sisters with us?” Any thoughtful reader, comparing such a suddenly projected passage with the opening chapters, realizes that it is on a wholly different plane of ideas; that no one “author” can have posited both; and that the later is part of a process of localization and debate, in connection with the thesis that the healer could “do no wonder-work” at home because of the unbelief of his own people. Furthermore, in Mark xv, 40, we have the group of women which includes “Mary the mother of James the Little and of Joses,” concerning whom we are told that when Jesus was in Galilee they “followed him, and ministered unto him.” How many Maries, then, were mothers of James and Joses? Evidently the Mary of the latter passage is not regarded by its writer as the mother of Jesus. Then the prior passage is the later in order of time, and alien to the other legends.
Our exegete, nevertheless, is not only at once dogmatically certain that he has found a real Jesus, son of Mary, but proceeds to assert, in three separate passages, that in Mark’s gospel Jesus is known as “the son of Joseph and Mary,” though Joseph is never mentioned in that gospel. It is of a piece with his instantaneous invention of a “genuine tradition” out of a modern hint, perverted. And it is this operator who, meeting with a list of analogies (so described) which suggest that “Miriam” and “Mariam” are variants of a Mother-Goddess name generally current through the East, becomes incoherent in explosive protest, and begins by informing me that the “original form of the name is not Maria but Miriam, which does not lend itself to [these] hardy equations.” As Miriam had been expressly named and discussed by me in the very first instance, the intimation tells only of the mental disconnection which is the general mark of this writer’s procedure.
The question, of course, is not philological at all; and not only was no philological “equation” ever hinted at, but the very passage attacked begins with the avowal that it is impossible to prove historical connections, and that what is in question is analogy of “name and epithets.” Nothing in philology is more speculative than the explanation of early names. Any one who has noted the discussion over “Moses,” and noted the diverging theories, from the Coptic “water-rescued” or “water-child” (mo-use) of Josephus and Philo and Jablonski and Deutsch to the Egyptian “child” (mes or mesu) of Lepsius and Dillmann, and the inference of an “abbreviation of a theophorous Egyptian name” drawn by Renan and Guthe, will see that there is small light to be had from “equations.” When “Miriam” is expertly described as “a distortion either of Merari [misri] or of Amramith,”14 the mythologist is moved to seek for other clues. The philology of Maria and Mariam is a hopeless problem.
Now, if the Moses legend is to be held Egyptian, the Miriam legend may well be so too; and in the items that the Egyptian princess who saves the child Moses is in a Jewish legend named Merris, and that one of the daughters of Ramses II is found to be named Meri,15 the analogy is worth noting. But the central mythological fact is that a Mother-Goddess, a “Madonna” nursing a child, is one of the commonest objects of ancient worship throughout Asia and North Africa.16 When, then, mothers of Gods born in caves, or Dying Demigods, are found bearing such names as Myrrha and Maia; when Maia is noted to have the meaning “nurse,” and Mylitta that of “the child-bearing one,” we are not only moved to surmise a Mother-Goddess-name of many variants, of which Miriam-Mariam is one, but to infer a wide diffusion of legends concerning such a goddess-type. Figures of such a goddess abounded throughout the East.17 That is, in brief, the mythological case at this point. Mary in the gospels, the virgin bearing a divine child, flying from danger, and bearing her child on a journey, in a cave, is the analogue of a dozen ancient myths of the Divine Child; the Menaced Child is common to the myths of Moses and Sargon, Krishna and Cyrus, Arthur and Herakles; the stable-ritual of the Adoration is prehistoric in India in connection with Krishna; the “manger” (a basket) belongs equally to the myths of Zeus, Hermes, Ion and Dionysos; and the threatening king is a myth-figure found alike in East and West.18
All this is ostensibly “sun-myth.” And we are asked by Dr. Conybeare to believe, on the strength of one late and palpable interpolation in Mark, which has no other word concerning the childhood, parentage, or birthplace of Jesus, its Son of God, that his mother Mary was a well-known figure in Nazareth about the year 30, and that it is merely she who is made to play the mythic part in Matthew about a century later. The simple use of common-sense, even by a reader who has not studied comparative mythology, will reveal the improbability of such a development; and Dr. Conybeare, who vehemently denies, for other purposes, that the early Christians in Palestine could have any knowledge of pagan myths, is the last person who could consistently affirm it. But when we realize that under the shell of official Judaism there subsisted in Palestine as everywhere else the folk-lore of the past;19 when we remember the “weeping for Tammuz” at Jerusalem and the location of the birth of Adonis in the very stable-cave of the Christ-legend at Bethlehem, we can quite rationally conceive how, once the Jesus-myth was well re-established, old pre-Judaic elements of it came to the front, and found from the later gospel-compilers a welcome they could not have had in the Judaizing days.20
The Joseph myth, again, is a very obvious construction. In Mark, which Dr. Conybeare repeatedly and shrilly declares to be the primary authority, Joseph is never once mentioned, though Dr. Conybeare, with the eye of imagination, finds that he is. In Matthew, he figures throughout the birth-story of the opening section, admittedly a late addition. In Luke, still later, he is still further developed, Mark’s “son of Mary” becoming (iv, 22) “the son of Joseph,” in a palpably late fiction. Any critical method worthy of the name would reckon with such plain marks of late fabrication. Joseph has been super-imposed on the myth for a reason; and the reason is that a Messiah “the Son of Joseph” was demanded from the Samaritan side as a Messiah the Son of David was demanded (albeit not universally) from the Judaic side.21 By naming Jesus’ earthly putative father Joseph, in the Davidic descent, both requirements were met, on lines of traditionalist psychology.
When this solution is met by the Unitarian thesis that the idea of a Messiah Ben Joseph is late in Judaism, and that it arose out of the gospel story, we can but appeal to the common-sense of the reader.22 For the Rabbis to set up such a formula on such a motive would be an inconceivable self-stultification. The lateness of Rabbinical discussion on the subject can be quite reasonably explained through its Samaritan origination. All the while, the Joseph story in the gospels belongs precisely to that late legend which the neo-Unitarian school is bound in consistency to reject as myth. But the prepossession in favour of a “human Jesus” balks at no inconsistency, and selects its items not on critical principles but simply in so far as they can be made to compose with a “human” figure that is to be conserved at all costs.
The curious myth-motive of the “taxing”23 at Bethlehem in Luke, an utterly unhistorical episode, has a remarkable parallel in the Krishna-myth,24 which has been cited in support of the thesis that that myth in general is derived from the Christian story. The general thesis breaks down completely;25 and in this one instance we are obviously entitled to ask whether the Christian myth is not derived from some intermediate Asiatic source connecting with the Indian.26 As a mere invention to motive the birth at Bethlehem the story seems exceptionally extravagant.