§ 3 Minor Myths
To discuss in similar detail the myths of the Apocryphal gospels and the still later myths of Catholic Christendom would only be to extend the area of our demonstration without adding to its scientific weight. The general result would only be to prove derivations from pagan sources and to exhibit more fully the process (a) of inventing sayings of Jesus to vindicate different views of his Messianic and other functions, and (b) of enforcing ethical views by his authority. The legend of St. Christopher, for instance, is but a variant, probably iconographic in motive, of a multiform pagan myth which probably roots in a ritual of child-carrying.27 Iconography yields many evidences. The conventional figure of the Good-Shepherd carrying a sheep, which like the Birth-Story has counted for so much in popularizing Christianity, is admittedly derived from pagan art,28 like the conventional angel-figure. Even the figure of Peter29 as the bearer of the keys, head of the Twelve, and denier of his Lord, connects curiously with the myths of Proteus and Janus Bifrons,30 both bearers of the cosmic keys.
Iconography, again, is probably the source, for the gospels, of the myth of the Temptation, which professional scholars continue solemnly to discuss as a “biographical” episode to be somehow reduced to historicity. The story coincides so absolutely with the Græco-Roman account, evidently derived from painting or sculpture, of Pan (in figure the Satan of the Jews) standing by the young Jupiter on a mountain-top before an altar,31 that it might seem unnecessary to go further. But, recognizing that “of myth there is no ‘original,’ save man’s immemorial dream,” and remembering that there are similar Temptation myths concerning Buddha and Zarathustra, we are bound to extend the inquiry. The results are very interesting.
We are specially concerned with the versions of Matthew and Luke, of which Dr. Spitta, by analysis, finds the Lucan the earlier,32 pronouncing the Marcan to be a curtailment and manipulation, not the primary source, as was maintained by Von Harnack and many others.33 The essence of the story, as episode, is the presence of the God and the Adversary on a high place, surveying “the kingdoms of the world.” This originates proximately in Babylonian astronomy and astrology, where the Goat-God is represented standing beside the Sun-God on “the mountain of the world,” that is, the height of the heavens, at the beginning of the sun’s yearly course in the sign Capricorn, which, personified, figures as the sun’s tutor and guide. Graphically represented, it is the origin of a series of Greek myths—Pan and Zeus; Marsyas and Apollo; Silenus and Dionysos—all turning on a goat-legged figure beside a young God on a mountain-top. Satan and Jesus are but another variant, probably deriving from Greek iconography, but possibly more directly from the East, where the idea of a Temptation goes back to the Vedas.
The theologians, reluctantly admitting, of late, that the Devil could not carry Jesus through the air, anxiously debate as to whether or not Jesus had strange psychic experiences which he communicated to his disciples; and, utterly ignoring comparative mythology, look for motivation, as usual, only in the Old Testament. Spitta, after checking these researches, and declaring that the man is not to be envied who hopes to explain the story by Old Testament parallels from the forty years of wandering in the wilderness,34 confidently concludes that it stands for the spiritual experience of Jesus in regard to his Messianic ideal.35 To such a biographical inference he has not the slightest critical right on his own principles. The gospels say nothing whatever of any communication on the subject by Jesus to his disciples. The story is myth pure and simple, and belongs to universal mythology.
Mark turned the story to the illustration of the doctrine laid down in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,36 that devils and wild beasts will flee from the righteous man; and Luke and Matthew turn it into an affirmation of the theological maxims of Jewish monotheism; but these are simply the invariable practices of the evangelists, steeped in the habits of thought of Jewish symbolism. The myth remains; and the story, as story, has counted for a great deal more in Christian popular lore than the theology. When the writer of the fourth gospel put the miracle of turning water into wine in the forefront of his work, he doubtless had symbolic intentions;37 but his story is simply an adaptation of the annual Dionysiac rite of turning water into wine at the festival of the God on Twelfth Night.38 It may have come either from the Greek or from the eastern side. The duplicated tale of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, again, is either an adaptation of or an attempt to excel the story of the feeding of the host of Dionysos in a waterless desert in his campaign against the Titans.39 As the God had the power of miraculously producing, by touch, corn and wine and oil, his lore doubtless included miracles of feeding. The touch of the seating of the people “in ranks, by hundreds, and by fifties” (Mk. vi, 40) suggests a pictorial source.
Thus did paganism, chased out of the window of early Judaic Christianity, re-enter by all the doors, supplying the growing Church with the forms of psychic and literary attraction which ultimately served to give it a general hold over the ignorant and uncivilized masses of decadent and barbaric Europe.40 Even with that machinery, the Church was dissolving in universal schism when Constantine saved it—or at least its body—by establishing it. As the Church broadened its basis, especially after its establishment, its assimilation of pagan ideas, names and practices, became so general that the process has long been made a standing ground of Protestant impeachment of the Church of Rome.41 Middleton’s Letter from Rome (1729) may be said to begin the scientific investigation, which is still going on.42
Of that process the myth-theory is simply the attempted scientific consummation. It is resisted as every previous step was resisted, before and after Middleton, partly in sincere religious conviction, partly on the simple instinctive resentment felt for every “upsetting” theory about matters which men have habitually taken for granted. Some of the best reasoned resistance comes from professional theologians who have been disciplined by the habit of exact argument in the documentary field; some of the worst, as we have seen, comes from professed rationalists or Neo-Unitarians, who bring to the problem first and last the temper of spleen and bluster which history associates with the typical priest. Bluster never settles anything: argument, given free play under conditions which foster the intellectual life, in the end settles everything, even for the emotionalists who worship their instincts. But as historical like physical science is a process of continuous expansion and reconsideration, there can in this contest be no “triumph” for anything but the principle of unending renewal of thought, which is but an aspect of the principle of life. Insofar as the solution now offered is inadequate, it will in due course be improved upon; insofar as it is false, it will be ousted.
The average cleric, of course, does not attempt confutation. Realizing that it is prudent to avoid debate on such matters, he relies on the proved proclivity of “human nature” to beliefs which fall-in with habit, normal emotion, and normal religiosity; and his faith is, practically speaking, not ill-grounded. A thesis which looks first and last to scientific truth is therefore not addressed to him. It is addressed to the more earnest of the laity and the clerisy—hardly to those indeed who hold, as an amiable curate once put it to me, that “in the providence of God” all heresy is short-lived; but to those who, caring for righteousness, do not on that score cast out the spirit of truth. Many such are honestly convinced that the teaching on which they have been taught to found their conceptions of goodness cannot be the accretion of a myth; and many who acknowledge an abundance of myth in the documents are still insistent on elements of “religious” truth which they find even in systematic forgeries. The countenance thus given by the more liberal and critical theologians to the more uncritical stands constantly in the way even of the acceptance of the comparatively rational views of the former.43 There is reason then to ask whether the notion that human conduct is in any way dependent on visionary beliefs is any sounder than those beliefs themselves. On this head, something falls to be said in conclusion.
Notes
1 Compare the story of Joseph, Gen. xxxix.
2 Irenæus, Against Heresies, i, 26.
3 Ecce Deus, p. 60.
4 Id. pp. 171–2.
5 Cp. Ecce Deus, p. 26.
6 Dr. Thorburn (Mythical Interpretation, p. 34) sees fit to argue that the Christian φάτνη was a “totally different thing” from the pagan λίκνον (that is, if he argues anything at all). He carefully ignores the sculptures which show them to be the same. (C.M. 192, 307.)
7 Cp. Soltau on the appeal made by the story (Birth of Jesus Christ, Eng. tr. p. 4). “What is there,” he asks, “that can be compared with this in the religious literature of any other people?” The critic should compare the literature of Krishnaism.
8 Ludwig Conrady argues (Die Quelle der kanonischen Kindheitsgeschichte Jesus’, 1900, p. 272 sq.) that the stories of the Infancy in the Apocryphal Gospels, which appear to be at that point the sources for Matthew and Luke, probably derive from Egypt, where the hieratic ideals of virginity were high. This may be, but the evidence is very imperfect.
9 The precedents of the divine paternity of Alexander and Augustus, stressed by Soltau, would surely be inadequate. Heathen emperors would hardly be “types” for early Christians.
10 The Rev. Dr. Thorburn idly argues (Mythical Interpretation, pp. 38–39) that such stories do not affirm parthenogenesis where a Goddess or a woman is described as married. As if Mary were not in effect so described! But in Greek mythology we have the special case of the spouse-goddess Hêrê, who is repeatedly represented as conceiving without congress. (C.M. 295.)
11 P.C. 166, note 3.
12 C.M. 99; P.C. 165.
13 C.M. 191 sq., 306 sq.
14 Encyc. Bib. art. Moses, col. 3206.
15 C.M. 298.
16 Id. 167 sq.
17 C.M. 168–9. Cp. Dr. G. Contenau, La déesse nue Babylonienne, 1914, pp. 7, 15, 16, 57, 78, 80, 101, 129, 131.
18 C.M. 180–205.
19 Soltau argues not only that the belief in the Virgin Birth “could not have originated in Palestine; anyhow, it could never have taken its rise in Jewish circles,” but that “the idea that the Holy Spirit begat Jesus can have no other than a Hellenic origin” (Birth of Jesus Christ, Eng. trans, pp. 47–48). He forgets the “sons of God” in Genesis vi, 2. The stories of the births of Isaac and Samson inferribly had an original form less decorous than the Biblical.
20 It is doubly edifying to remember that the writer who pretends to find in avowed analogies of divine names, functions, and epithets a theory of a philological “equation,” himself insists on finding in every New Testament naming of a Jesus, and every pagan allusion to a “Chrestus” or “Christus,” a biographical allusion to Jesus of Nazareth. For Dr. Conybeare, the Jesus of the Apocalypse and the “Chrestus” of Suetonius are testimonies to the existence of Jesus the son of Mary and Joseph. The very absurdity he seeks to find in the myth-theory is inherent in his own method.
21 C.M. 301–2 and refs.
22 The Rev. Dr. Thorburn (Mythical Interpretation, p. 21) cites from the Encyc. Bib. as “the words of Dr. Cheyne” words which are not Cheyne’s at all, but those of Robertson Smith. Smith, so scientific in his anthropology, is always irrationalist in his theology.
23 R.V. “enrolment.” Dr. Thorburn appears to argue (p. 39) that the “taxing” story in the Krishna-myth is derived from “ignorant copying” of the English Authorized Version! The “to be taxed” of the A.V. of course represents the traditional interpretation—that taxing was the object of the enrolment.
24 C.M. 189–90.
25 C.M. 273.
26 I have been represented, by scholars who will not take the trouble to read the books they attack, as deriving the Christ-myth in general from the Krishna-myth. This folly belongs solely to their own imagination. Dr. Conybeare’s assertion (Histor. Christ, p. 69) that in my theory the Proto-Christian Joshua-God was a composite myth “made up of memories of Krishna... and a hundred other fiends,” is of the same order. In his case, of course, I do not charge omission to read the statement he falsifies: it is simply a matter of his normal inability to understand any position he attacks. As regards the Krishna-myth I suggest only in the detail of the “taxing” the possibility of Christian borrowing through an intermediate source: in another, that of “the bag” which is carried by a hostile demon-follower of Krishna (C.M. 241–3), I suggest the possibility of Indian borrowing from the fourth gospel, where “the bag” is presumptively derived from a stage accessory in the mystery-drama, Judas carrying a bag to receive his reward.
27 C.M. 205 sq.
28 C.M. 207.
29 Id. 347 sq.; Drews, Die Petrus Legende (pamphlet), 1910.
30 Dr. Conybeare, undeviating in error, represents me (Histor. Christ, p. 73) as suggesting that the epithet bifrons led to the invention of the story of Peter’s Denial. I had expressly pointed out that the epithet bifrons did not carry an aspersive sense, and suggested that the figure of Janus, with its Petrine characteristics, might have inspired the story of the Denial (C.M. 350–1). The subject of iconographic myth is evidently unknown matter to Dr. Conybeare.
31 C.M. 318 sq.
32 Die Versuchung Jesu (in Zur Gesch. und Litt. des Urchristentums, III, ii, 1907, pp. 53, 65.)
33 The simple principle of holding Mark for primary wherever it is brief has meant many such assumptions, in which many of us once uncritically acquiesced.
34 As cited, p. 85.
35 Id. pp. 92–93.
36 Test. Naphtali, viii, 4.
37 This is ably argued by Prof. Smith.
38 C.M. 329 sq.
39 Id. 335 sq.
40 Cp. Soltau, Das Fortleben des Heidentums in d. altchr. Kirche, 1906; S.H.C. 67 sq., 101 sq.; J. A. Farrer, Paganism and Christianity, R.P.A. rep. passim.
41 C.M. 220 and note 2. Cp. W. J. Wilkins, Paganism in the Papal Church, 1901.
42 Cp. Saint-Yves, Les Saints successeurs des Dieux, 1907; J. Rendel Harris, The Dioscuri in the Christian Legends, 1903.
43 Compare Soltau’s remarks on the hostility still shown to professional scholars who merely reject the Virgin Birth (work cited, p. 2), and the plea of Brandt for his piety (Die evangelische Geschichte, Vorwort).