Multiplicity of documents converging on and involving an historical Jesus I have remarked above that if the Gospel of Mark were an isolated writing, if we knew nothing of its fortunes, nothing of any society that accepted it as history; if, above all, we were without any independent documents that fitted in with it and mentioned the persons and events that crowd its pages, then it would be a possible hypothesis that it was like the Recognitions of Clement, a skilfully contrived romance. Such a hypothesis, I said, would indeed be improbable, yet not unthinkable or self-destructive. But as a matter of fact we have an extensive series of documents, independent of Mark, yet attesting by their undesigned coincidences its historicity—not, of course, in the sense that we must accept everything in it, but anyhow in the sense that it is largely founded on fact and is a record of real incident. Were it a mere romance of events that never happened, and of people who never lived, would it not be a first-class miracle that in another romance, concocted apart from it and in ignorance of its contents, the same outline of events met our gaze, the same personages, the same atmosphere, moral, intellectual, and religious, the same interests? If in a third and fourth writing the same phenomenon recurred, the marvel would be multiplied. Would any sane person doubt that there was a substratum of fact and real history underlying them all? [97]It would be as if several tables in the gambling saloon of Monte Carlo threw up the same series of numbers—say, 8, 3, 11, 7, 33, 21—simultaneously and independently of one another. A few of the habitués—for Monte Carlo is a great centre of superstition—might take refuge in the opinion that the tables were bewitched; but most men would infer that there was human collusion and conspiracy to produce such a result, and that the croupiers of the several tables were in the plot.

Mark and Q the two earliest documents Now Mark’s Gospel does not stand alone. As I have pointed out in Myth, Magic, and Morals, Luke and Matthew hold in solution as it were a second document, called Q (Quelle), or the non-Marcan, which yields us a few incidents and a great many sayings and parables of Jesus. Now this second document, so utterly separate from and independent of Mark that it does not even allude to the crucifixion and death episodes, nevertheless has Jesus all through for its central figure. No doubt it ultimately came out of the same general medium as Mark; but that consideration does not much diminish the weight of its testimony. If I met two people a hundred yards apart both coming from St. Paul’s Cathedral, and if they both assured me that they had just been listening to a sermon of Dr. Inge’s, I should not credit them the less because they had been together in church.

That both these documents—I mean Mark and the non-Marcan—were in circulation at a fairly early date is certain on many grounds. So great a scholar as Wellhausen, a scholar untrammelled by ties of orthodoxy, shows in his commentary that Mark, as it lies before us, must have been redacted before the [98]fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70; so vague are its forecasts of disasters that were to befall the holy city. In Luke, on the other hand, these forecasts are accommodated to the facts, as we should expect to be the case in an author who wrote after the blow had fallen.

The first and third Gospels constitute two more such documents And another consideration arises here. Matthew and Luke wrote quite independently of one another—for they practically never join hands across Mark—and yet they both assume in their compilations that these two basal documents, Mark and the non-Marcan, are genuine narratives of real events. They allow themselves, indeed, according to the literary fashion of the age, to re-arrange, modify, and omit episodes in them; but their manner of handling and combining the two documents is in general inexplicable on the hypothesis that they considered them to be mere romances. They are too plainly in earnest, too eager to find in them material for the life of a master whom they revered. Luke in particular prefixes a personal letter to one Theophilus, explaining the purpose of his compilation. In it we find not a word about the transcribing of Osiris dramas. On the contrary, it will set in order for Theophilus a story in which he had already been instructed. It is clear that Theophilus had already been made acquainted with “the facts about Jesus,” perhaps insufficiently, perhaps along lines which Luke deprecated. Luke’s prologue argues an indefinite number more of such documentsHowever this be, Luke desires to improve upon the information which Theophilus had so far acquired about Jesus. It is clear that written and unwritten traditions of Jesus were already disseminated among believers. The prologue is inexplicable otherwise, and it implies a whole series of witnesses [99]to the historicity of Jesus prior to Luke himself, of whom, as I have said, we still have Mark and can reconstruct Q. Both Matthew (whoever he was) and Luke, then, are convinced of the historicity of Jesus, and regarded Mark and Q as historical sources. They exploit them, and they also try to fill up lacunas left in these basal documents, and in particular to supply their readers with some account of his birth and upbringing. Both supplements, of course, are largely fictitious, that of Matthew in particular; but they both testify to a fixed consciousness and belief among early Christians that the Messiah was a real historical person. Such an interest in the birth and upbringing of Jesus as Matthew and Luke reveal could never have been felt by sectaries who were well aware that he was not a real person, but a solar myth and first cousin of Osiris. Had he been known, even by a few believers and no more, to have been not a man but a composite myth, people would not have craved for details, even miraculous, about his birth and parentage and upbringing. Was it necessary to concoct human pedigrees for a solar myth, and to pretend that Jacob begat Joseph, and Joseph begat Jesus? The very idea is absurd. They wanted such details, and got them, just as did the worshippers of Plato, Alexander, Augustus, Apollonius, and other famous men. In connection with Osiris and Dionysus such details were never asked for and never supplied.

Implications of Luke’s exordium In the covering letter which forms a sort of exordium to his Gospel the following are the words in which Luke assures us that others before himself had planned histories of the life of Jesus:—

    Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have [100]been fully established (or fulfilled) among us, even as they delivered them unto us which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having traced out the course of all things accurately from the first, to write them unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus; that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed.

This is not the tone of a man who trades in sun-myths. The passage has a thoroughly bona fide ring, and declares (1) that Theophilus had already been instructed in the Gospel narrative, but not so accurately as the writer could wish; (2) that several accounts of Jesus’s life and teaching were in circulation; (3) that these accounts were based on the traditions of those who had seen Jesus and assisted in the diffusion of his Messianic and other teachings.

The passage cannot be later than A.D. 100, and is probably as early as A.D. 80; many scholars put it earlier. In any case, it reveals a consciousness, stretching far back among believers, that Jesus had really lived and died. Moreover, it is from the pen of one who either had himself visited, with Paul, James the brother (or, according to the orthodox, the half-brother) of Jesus at Jerusalem (Acts xxi, 17), or—if not that—anyhow had in his possession and made copious use of a travel document written by the companion of Paul.

Luke probably used a document independent of Mark and Q A study of Luke also suggests that he had a third narrative document of his own. Thus, without going outside the Synoptic Gospels, we have two, if not three, wholly independent accounts of the doings and sayings of Jesus, and an inferential certainty that they were not the only ones which then existed. In the earliest Christian writers, moreover, citations [101]occur that cannot well be referred to the canonical Gospels, but which may very well have been taken from the other narratives which Luke assures us were in the possession of the earliest Church. These narratives, like all other wholly or partly independent documents, must have differed widely from one another in detail; for their authors probably handled the tradition as freely as Matthew and Luke handle Mark. Messianic and apocalyptic character of these early documentsBut the inspiring motive of them all was the belief that a human Messiah had founded, or rather begun, the community of believers in Palestine. That any of them were contemporary is improbable, for the simple reason that the eyes of believers were turned, not backward on the life of the herald, but forward to the Kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven on earth which he heralded. They all felt themselves to be living in the last days, and that the Kingdom was to surprise many of them during their lifetime. Nor among the earliest believers was this expectation confined to Jews alone; it extended equally to Gentile converts. Thus Paul, in his epistles to the Corinthians, labours to answer the pathetic query his converts had addressed to him—namely, why the kingdom to come so long delayed; why many of them had fallen sick and some had died, while yet it tarried. Men and women who breathed such an atmosphere of tense expectation, as a passage like this and as the Gospel parables reveal, could not be solicitous for annals of the past. Still less is the attitude revealed that of people nurtured on ritual dramas of an annually slain and annually resuscitated god; for in that case they only needed to wait for the manifestation they yearned for, until the following spring, when the god would rise afresh to secure [102]salvation for his votaries. The tone of this passage of Paul, as of all the earliest Christian documents, shows that the mind’s eye of the common believer, as had been the founder’s, was dazzled with the apocalyptic splendours soon to be revealed, with the beatitudes shortly to be fulfilled in the faithful. They were as wayfarers walking in a dark night towards a light which is far off, yet, because of its brightness and of the lack of an interposed landscape to fix the perspective, seems close at hand. Many a Socialist workman, especially on the continent, cherishes a similar dream of a good time coming ere long for himself and his fellows. He has no sense of the difficulties which for many a weary year—perhaps for ever—will hinder the realization of his passionately desired ideal. It is better so, for we live by our enthusiasms, and are the better for having indulged in them; if the labourer had none, he would be a chilly, useless being. Happily the Socialist seldom reflects how commonplace he would probably find his ideal if it were suddenly realized around him. Such were the eschatological hopes and dreams rife in the circles among which the Synoptic Gospels and their constituent documents first saw the light; they are revealed on their every page, and, needless to say, are inexplicable on Mr. Robertson’s hypothesis. Devoid of sympathy with his subject, incapable of seeing it against its true background, without tact or perspective, he has never felt or understood the difficulties which beset his central hypothesis. He therefore attempts no explanation of them.

Character of the Fourth Gospel Of the Fourth Gospel I have already said whatever is strictly necessary in this connection. It hangs together with the Johannine epistles; and its writer [103]certainly had the Gospel of Mark before him, for he derives many incidents from it, and often covertly controverts it. It seems to belong to the end of the first century, and was in the hands of Gnostic sects fairly early in the second—say about 128. When it was written, the Gnosis of the Hellenized Jews, and in especial of Philo, was invading the primitive community. The Messianic and human traits of Jesus, still so salient in Mark and Matthew, though less so in Luke, are receding into the background before the opinion that he had been the representation in flesh of the eternal Logos. All his conversations are re-written to suit the newer standpoint; the homely scenes and surroundings of Galilee are forgotten as much as can be, and Samaria and Jerusalem—a more resounding theatre—are substituted. The teaching in parables is dropped, and we hear no more of the exorcisms of devils. Such things were unedifying, and unworthy of so sublime a figure, as much in the mind of this evangelist as of the fastidious Professor W. B. Smith. Hence it may be said that the Fourth Gospel has made the fortune of the Catholic Church; without it Athanasius could never have triumphed, nor the Nicene Creed have been penned, nor Professor Smith’s diatribes have attracted readers. It is half-doceticFor in it Jesus is becoming unreal, a divine pedant masquerading in a vesture of flesh. When it was written, the Docetes, as they were called, were already beginning to dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s” of the teachers who sublimated Jesus into the Philonian Logos; and, as I said above, it is against them, no doubt, that the caveat—so necessary in the context—is entered that in Jesus the Word was made flesh. Similarly, in the Johannine epistles certain [104]teachers are denounced who declared that Jesus Christ had not come in the flesh, and taught that his flesh was only a blind. Ignatius’s account of DocetismWe have a fairly full account of these docetic teachers in the Epistles of Ignatius, which cannot be much later than A.D. 120. From these we gather that they adopted the ordinary tradition about Jesus, and believed that he had been born, and eaten and drunk, had walked about with his disciples, had delivered his teaching by word of mouth, had been crucified by Pontius Pilate, had died, and been buried. But all these operations had been unreal and subjective in the minds of those who were present at them, as are things we see in a dream. They had taken place to the eye and ear of bystanders, but not in reality. The partizans, therefore, of the view that Jesus never lived deceive themselves when they appeal to the Docetes as witnesses on their side. The Docetes lend no colour to their thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus, but just the opposite. Drews writes (p. 57) that

    Drews misunderstands Gnosticismthe Gnostics of the second century really questioned the historical existence of Jesus by their docetic conception; in other words, they believed only in a metaphysical and ideal, not an historical and real, Christ. The whole polemic of the Christians against the Gnostics was based essentially on the fact that the Gnostics denied the historicity of Jesus, or at least put it in a subordinate position.

This is nonsense. The Docetes admitted to the full that the Messiah had appeared on earth; but, partly to meet the Jewish objections to a crucified Messiah, and partly inspired by that contempt for matter which was and is common in the East, and has been the inspiring motive of much vain asceticism, they shrank from believing that he shared with ordinary men [105]their flesh and blood, their secretions and evacuations. Matter was too evil for a Messiah, much more for the heavenly Logos, to have been encased in it, and so subjected to its dominion; to ascribe real flesh to him was to humble him before the evil Demiurge, who created matter. Docetes accepted current Christian traditionThe Docetes accordingly took refuge in the idea that his body was a phantom, and that in phantom form he had undergone all that was related of him in Christian tradition; to which their views bear testimony, instead of contradicting it, as Dr. Drews and his friends pretend. “If these things,” writes Ignatius, “were done by our Lord in Semblance, then am I also a prisoner in semblance.” This means that—mutatis mutandis—the arguments of the Docetes would turn Ignatius too, chains and all, into a phantom. Again and again this writer affirms that the Docetes believed quite correctly that Jesus was born of a virgin and baptized by John, was nailed up for our sakes under Pontius Pilate and Herod the Tetrarch, that he suffered, died, and raised himself up out of the grave. They only would not believe that he underwent and performed all this truly—that is, objectively. They insisted that the Saviour had only been among men as a phantom, in the same manner as Helen had gone through the siege of Troy as a mere phantom. She was not really there, though Greeks and Trojans saw and met her daily. She was all the time enjoying herself amid the asphodel meadows of the Nile. Even so the disciples, according to the Docetes, had heard and seen Jesus all through his ministry; yet the body they saw was phantasmal only. The Docetes also argued—so we can infer from Ignatius’s Epistle to the Church of Smyrna—that, as Jesus ate and drank [106]after the resurrection in phantom guise, so he had eaten and drunk before his death in no other than phantom guise. The answer of Ignatius to this is: “I know and believe that he was in the flesh even after the resurrection”; and he forthwith relates how the risen Jesus approached Peter and his company, who thought they were in the presence of a phantom or ghost, and said to them: “Lay hold and handle me, and see that I am not a demon without a body.” Everything, then, that we read about the Docetes shows that on all points, in respect of the miraculous incidents of Jesus’s life no less than of the natural, they blindly accepted the record of evangelical tradition. Their heresy was not to deny what the tradition related, but to interpret it wrongly. Docetism in Philo, Philo had long before set the example of such an interpretation, when in his commentaries, which were widely read by Christians in the second century, he asserted that the angels who appeared to Abraham at the oak of Mambre, and ate and drank with him, only ate and drank in semblance, and not in reality. They laid a spell on the eyes of Abraham, and of the other guests at the banquet. and in TobitSo in the Book of Tobit xii, 19, the angel says: “All these days did I appear unto you; and I did neither eat nor drink, but it was a vision ye yourselves saw.”

In the same way, Jesus laid a spell on the eyes of his followers, in the belief of this very early sect of Christian believers. Professor Smith and Hippolytus Professor W. B. Smith, like his two companions, writes as if Docetism were an asset in favour of his thesis that Christianity began as the cult of a slain God, and that “the humanization of this divinity proceeds apace as we descend the stream of tradition.” Yet the Docetic doctrine, as given in the [107]report of Hippolytus, and adduced by Mr. Smith himself (p. 88), exactly bears out the estimate of its import with which one rises from a study of the Ignatian Epistles. It is from Hippolytus’s Refutation of Heresies, viii, 10, and runs thus:—

    Having come from above, he (Jesus) put on the begotten (body), and did all things just as has been written in the Gospels; he washed himself in Jordan, etc.

Hippolytus was in contact with Docetes, and familiar with their writings and arguments. What better proof could we have than this citation of the fact that they servilely adopted the traditions of Jesus recorded in the Gospels? They were not supplying an answer to imaginary Jews who had objected to Christianity on the score that Jesus had never lived. Their speciality was to interpret the Gospel record, which they did not dream of disputing, along phantasmagoric lines. There was still left in the Church enough common sense and historic insight to brush their interpretation on one side as nonsensical.

Drews misunderstands Justin Martyr Drews once more has conjured up out of Justin Martyr a Jew of the second century who denied the human existence of Jesus. The relevant passage is at p. 16 of his Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, and runs as follows:—

    It is not true, however, as has recently been stated, that no Jew ever questioned the historical reality of Jesus, so that we may see in this some evidence for his existence. The Jew Trypho, whom Justin introduces in his Dialogue with Trypho, expresses himself very sceptically about it. “Ye follow an empty rumour,” he says, “and make a Christ for yourselves.” “If he was born and lived somewhere, he is entirely unknown” (viii, 3). This work appeared in the second half of the second century; it is therefore [108]the first indication of a denial of the human existence of Jesus, and shows that such opinions were current at the time.

Professor Drews has, I regret to say, failed to read his text intelligently. So I will transcribe the passage of Justin in full, premising that it was more probably written in the first than in the second half of the second century. The dialogue is between a Jew and an ex-Platonist who has turned Christian, and the Jew says with an ironical smile to the Christian:—

    The rest of your arguments I admit, and I admire your religious enthusiasm. Nevertheless, you would have done better to stick to Plato’s or any other sage’s philosophy, practising the virtues of endurance and continence and temperance, rather than let yourself be ensnared by false arguments and follow utterly worthless men. For if you had remained loyal to that form of philosophy and lived a blameless life, there was left a hope of your rising to something better. But as it is you have abandoned God and put your trust in man, so what further hope is left to you of salvation? If, then, you are willing to take advice from myself—for I already have come to regard you as a friend—begin first by circumcising yourself, and next keep in the legal fashion the sabbath and the festivals and the new moons of God, and in a word fulfil all the commandments written in the Law, and then perhaps you will attain unto God’s mercy. But Messiah (or Christ), even supposing he has come into being and exists somewhere or other, is unrecognized, and can neither know himself as such nor possess any might, until Elias having come shall anoint him and make him manifest unto all. But you (Christians), having lent ear to a vain report, feign a sort of Messiah unto yourselves, and for his sake are now rashly going to perdition.

There is a parallel passage in the Dialogue, c. cx, [109]where the Christian interlocutor, after reciting the prophecy of Micah, iv, 1–7, adds these words:—

    I am quite aware, gentlemen, that your rabbis admit all the words of the above passage to have been uttered about, and to refer to the Messiah; and I also know that they deny him so far to have come, or, if they say he has come, then that it is not yet known who he is. However, when he is manifested and in glory, then, they say, it will be known who he is. And then, so they say, the things foreshadowed in the above passage will come to pass.

The Jews in Justin testify to Jesus’s historicity The sense, then, of the passage adduced by Drews is perfectly clear, and exactly the opposite of that which he puts upon it. The Christ or Messiah referred to by the Jew is not that man of Nazareth in whom the Christians had falsely recognized the signs of Messiahship. No, he is, on the contrary, the Messiah expected by the Jews; but the latter has not so far come; or, if he has come, still lurks in some corner unrecognized until such time as Elias, to whom the r?le appertains, shall appear again and proclaim him. There is not a word of Jesus of Nazareth not having come, or of his being still unrecognized. The gravamen of the Jew is that the ex-Platonist had been chicaned by Christians into believing that the Messiah had already come in the person of Jesus, and had been recognized in him. The passage, therefore, has exactly the opposite bearing to what Drews imagines.

Second century Jews did not detest mere shadows There is, too, another very significant point to be made in this connection. It is this, that the Jews of that age would not have borne the bitter grudge they did against the Christians if the latter had merely devoted themselves to the cult of a mythical personage, a Sun-God-Saviour, who never existed at all. They [110]were quite well capable of ridiculing myths of such a kind, as the story of Bel and the Dragon shows. Jesus, however, was a real memory to them, and one which they detested. Their hatred for him was that which you bear for a man who has upset your religion and trampled on your prejudices—the sort of hatred that Catholics have for the memory of Luther and Calvin; it was not in any way akin to their mockery of idols, their disgust for the demons that inhabited them, their abhorrence of their votaries. It was hatred of a religious antagonist, odium theologicum of the purest kind, and hatred like that with which the Ebionites for generations hated the memory of Paul. Jesus had violated and set at naught the law of Moses. A solar myth could not do that.

To this hatred of the Jews for the memory of Jesus, and to the early date at which it showed itself, Dr. Drews himself bears witness when, on p. 12 of the work cited, he writes as follows:—

    There is no room for doubt that after the destruction of Jerusalem, and especially during the first quarter of the second century, the hostility of the Jews and Christians increased; indeed, by the year 130 the hatred of the Jews for the Christians became so fierce that a rabbi whose niece had been bitten by a serpent preferred to let her die rather than see her healed “in the name of Jesus.”

Chwolson on early Rabbis Chwolson argues from this and similar episodes that the Rabbis of the second half of the first century, or the beginning of the second, were well acquainted with the person of Christ. “Here,” says Drews, “he clearly deceives himself and his readers if the impression is given that they had any personal knowledge of him.” The self-deception is surely on the part of Dr. Drews. Chwolson does not imply that any [111]Rabbis of the years 50–100 had a personal knowledge of Jesus, in the sense of having seen him or conversed with him; for he is not given to writing nonsense. He does, however, imply that they knew of him as a real man who had lived and done them a power of evil. If they had only known him as a solar myth, their hostility to his followers, admitted by Drews, would be inexplicable; equally inexplicable if, as Dr. W. B. Smith contends, he had been a merely heavenly power, a divine Logos or God, incidentally the object of a monotheist cult. In that case the Jews would rather have been inclined to fall on the neck of the Christians and welcome them; and their cult would have been no more offensive to them than the theosophy of Philo the Jew, from which it would have been hardly distinguishable. Justin Martyr furthermore makes statements on this point which perfectly agree with the story of the hostile Rabbi adduced by Drews. In the Jewish synagogues Jesus was regularly execratedNot in one, but in half-a-dozen, passages he testifies that in his day the Jews in all their synagogues, at the conclusion of their prayers, cursed the memory of Jesus, execrated his name and personality (for name meaned personality in that age), and poured ridicule on the soi-disant Messiah that had been crucified by the Romans. “Even to this day,” Justin exclaims (ch. xciii), “you persevere in your wickedness, imprecating curses on us because we can prove that he whom you crucified is Messiah.” He records (ch. cviii) “that the Jews chose and appointed emissaries whom they sent forth all over the world to proclaim that a godless heresy and unlawful had been vamped up by a certain Jesus, a charlatan of Galilee. They were to warn their compatriots that the disciples had stolen him [112]out of the tomb in which, after being unnailed from the cross, he had been laid, and then pretended that he had been raised from the dead and ascended into heaven.”

Eusebius’s evidence on this point At first sight the above is a mere réchauffé of Matt. xxviii, 13; but Eusebius, who had in his hands much first- and second-century literature of the Christians and Hellenized Jews that we have not, attests a similar tradition, and declares that he found it in the publications of the ancients.1

    The priests and elders of the Jewish race who lived in Jerusalem wrote epistles and sent them broadcast to the Jews everywhere among the Gentiles, calumniating the teaching of Christ as a brand-new heresy and alien to God; and they warned them by letters not to receive it. And their apostles took their epistles, written on papyrus … and ran up and down the earth, maligning our account of the Saviour?…. It is still the custom of the Jews to give the name of Apostles to those who carry encyclical letters from their rulers.

Note that Eusebius does not weave in the story of the disciples stealing their Master’s body from out of the tomb. From his omission of it, and from the dissimilarity of his language, we can infer that the “publications of the ancients” from which he derived his information were not the works of Justin, but an independent source, which may also have been in Justin’s hands. In any case, the Jews were not given to tilting at windmills; their secular and bitter hatred of the very name of Jesus, the relentless war waged with pen and sword from the first between the Christians [113]and themselves—all this is attested by the earliest writings of the Church. It already colours Luke’s Gospel, and is a leading inspiration of the Johannine. It alone is all-sufficient to dissipate the hypotheses of these twentieth-century fabulists.

Evidence of Acts Let us turn to the Acts of the Apostles, the only book of the New Testament which contains a history of the Apostolic age. In the last half of this book is embedded, as even Van Manen admitted, a travel document or narrative of voyage undertaken by its author in common with Paul. Whether or no the fellow-traveller was the compiler of the Third Gospel and of Acts is not certain; but he was assuredly a man named Luke. It does not matter. “It is not,” writes Dr. Drews (Christ Myth, p. 19),

    the imagined historical Jesus, but, if anyone, Paul, who is that “great personality” that called Christianity into life as a new religion; and the depth of his moral experience gave it the strength for its journey, the strength which bestowed upon it victory over the other competing religions. Without Jesus the rise of Christianity can be quite well understood; without Paul, not so.

Van Manen on Acts and Paul We infer from the above that, on the whole, Drews accepts the narrative of Paul’s sayings and doings as given in Acts, and does not consider it a mere record of the feats a solar hero performed, not on earth, but in heaven. We gather also that Mr. Robertson takes the same indulgent view of Acts, for he frequently impugns the age of the Pauline epistles and the evidence they contain on the strength of “Van Manen’s thesis of the non-genuineness” of them. “In point of fact,” he writes (p. 453), “Van Manen’s whole case is an argument; Dr. Carpenter’s is a simple declaration.” [114]

But Van Manen never for a moment questioned the historical reality of Jesus. What he insisted upon is2 that

    there is no word, nor any trace, of any essential difference as regards faith and life between Paul and other disciples?…. He is a “disciple” among the “disciples.” What he preaches is substantially nothing else than what their mind and heart are full of—the things concerning Jesus.

Van Manen, however, allows

    that Paul’s journeyings, his protracted sojourn outside of Palestine, his intercourse in foreign parts with converted Jews and former heathen, may have emancipated him (as it did so many other Jews of the Dispersion) without his knowing it, more or less—perhaps in essence completely—from circumcision and other Jewish religious duties, customs, and rites.

Concerning Paul the same writer says (op. cit., art, “Paul”) that Acts gives us

    a variety of narratives concerning him, differing in their dates, and also in respect of the influences under which they were written?…. With regard to Paul’s journeys, we can in strictness speak with reasonable certainty and with some detail only of one great journey, which he undertook towards the end of his life. (Acts xvi, 10–17; xx, 5–15; xxi, 1–18; xxvii, 1–xxviii, 16.)

Evidence of the we sections of Acts It is upon Acts, then, that Van Manen bases his estimate, which we just now cited, of Paul’s relations with the other disciples. He refuses, and rightly, “to assume that Acts must take a subordinate place in comparison with the principal epistles of Paul.” In effect, his assault on the Pauline Epistles rests on the assumption that the record of Paul’s activity presented in Acts is the more trustworthy wherever [115]it appears to conflict with the Pauline Epistles, and in particular with Galatians. In accepting Van Manen’s conclusion, Mr. Robertson implicitly accepts his premises, one of which is the superior reliability of Acts in general, and in particular of the four sections enumerated above, and characterized by the use of the word “we.” For the moment, therefore, let us confine ourselves to the ninety-seven verses of these “we” sections, which are obviously from the pen of a fellow-traveller of Paul. We find it recorded in them that Paul was moved by a vision to go and preach the Gospel3 in Macedonia; that at Philippi a certain woman named Lydia, who already worshipped God—i.e., was a heathen converted to Jewish monotheism—had opened her heart in consequence to give heed to the things spoken by Paul. We infer that Paul’s Gospel supplemented in some way her monotheism. She and her household became something more than mere worshippers of God, and were baptized. We learn that Paul and his companion reckoned time by the Jewish feasts and fasts—e.g., by the days of unleavened bread—but at the same time were in the habit of meeting together with the rest of the faithful on the first day of the week, in order to break bread and discourse about the faith. At Tyre, as at Troas, they found “disciples” who, like Paul, arranged future events, or were warned of them through the Spirit. At C?sarea, of Palestine, they stayed with Philip the evangelist, who was one of the seven, and had four daughters—virgins who did prophesy. They also met there a certain prophet Agabus, who was a mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost, [116]and as such foretold that the Jews at Jerusalem, of whose plots against Paul we elsewhere hear in these sections, would deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles. Paul, in his turn, declares his readiness to be bound and die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus. they stay with an early disciple from Cyprus, Mnason, and, on reaching Jerusalem, the brethren received them gladly. And the day following Paul went in with us unto James; and all the elders (of the Church) were present. Paul relates to them the facts of his ministry among the Gentiles. In the course of the final voyage to Rome, when all the crew have despaired of their lives, because of the violence of the storm and of the ship leaking, Paul comes to the rescue, and informs them that the angel of the God whom he served, and whose he was, had stood by him in the night, saying: “Fear not, Paul; thou must stand before C?sar.” He therefore could not perish by shipwreck, nor they either. In Melita the trivial circumstance that the bite of a viper, promptly shaken off by him into the fire, did not cause Paul to swell up (i.e., his hand to be inflamed), or die, caused the barbarians to acclaim him as a god; and in the sequel the sick in the island flock to him, and are healed. At Puteoli Paul and his companion find brethren, as they had found them at Jerusalem and elsewhere; and presently they enter Rome.

In these sections, then, we have glimpses of a brotherhood disseminated all about the Mediterranean whose members were Monotheists of the Jewish type, but something besides, in so far as they accepted a gospel which Paul also preached, about a Lord Jesus Christ; these brethren solemnly broke bread on the first day of the week. In these sections we breathe [117]the same atmosphere of personal visions, of angels, of prophecy, of direct inspiration of individuals by the Holy Ghost, of the cult of virginity, which we breathe in the rest of Acts and throughout the Pauline Epistles. Philip one of the sevenWe meet also with a Philip, an evangelist, and one of the seven. Who were the seven? We turn to an earlier chapter of Acts,4 and read that in the earliest days of the religion at Jerusalem, in order to satisfy the claims of the widows of Greek Jews who were neglected in the daily ministration, the twelve apostles had called together the multitude of the faithful, and chosen seven men of good report, full of the Spirit and of wisdom to serve the tables, because they, the Twelve, were too busy preaching the word to attend to the catering of the new Messianic society. The first on the list of these seven deacons was Stephen, the second Philip. When, therefore, in the later passage the fellow-traveller of Paul refers to Philip as one of the seven, he assumes that we know who the seven were; and he can only expect us to know it because we have read the earlier chapter which narrates their appointment. The fellow-traveller of Paul, therefore, was aware of the appointment of the seven deacons, and testifies thereto. Here we have irrefragable evidence of the historicity of verses 1–6 of chapter vi of Acts, and at the same time a strong presumption that the fellow-traveller of Paul was himself the redactor, if not the author, of the earlier chapters (i–xv) of Acts, as he is obviously of the last half (ch. xvi to end); for that [118]last half coheres inseparably with the contiguous we sections.

Literary unity of Acts Have we, then, any way of testing this presumption that the fellow-traveller who penned these we sections also penned the rest of Acts? We have, though it is one which can only appeal to trained philologists, and I doubt if Messrs. Drews and Robertson are likely to give to such an argument its due weight. The linguistic evidence of the we sections has been sifted and tested by Sir John Hawkins in his Hor? Synoptic?. The statistic of words and phrases cannot lie. It proves that the writer of Acts, and consequently of the Third Gospel, “was from time to time a companion of Paul in his travels, and that he simply and naturally wrote in the first person when narrating events at which he had been present.”

This is the best hypothesis which a study of the language of Acts and of the Third Gospel permits us to accept. I do not say it is the only possible one, and I expect Mr. Robertson and his pupil, Dr. Drews, to reject it with scorn, for their philology is of the sort which recognizes in Maria the same name as Moira and Myrrha. The only other explanations of the presence of we in these sections are, either that a compiler who used the diary of the fellow-traveller left it standing in the document when he embodied it in his narrative, through carelessness and by accident, or else that he left it of set design, and because he wished his readers to identify him with the older reporter, and so to pass for a companion of Paul. The first of these explanations is very improbable; the second not only much too subtle, but out of keeping with the babbling, but credulous, honesty which everywhere shows itself in Acts. [119]

Van Manen’s system of dating Luke and Acts would postpone all ancient literature to the Middle Ages It is true that Van Manen assumes a priori, and without a shadow of proof, that Luke and Acts were written as late as the period 125–150. His only argument is that Marcion already had the former in his hands as early as 140; and he is prone to make the childish assumption that the date of composition of any book in the New Testament is exactly that of its earliest ascertainable use by a later author. Such a mode of reasoning is utterly false and uncritical, and would, if applied in other fields, prove that the great mass of ancient literature was not ancient at all, but composed in the tenth or later centuries to which our earliest MSS. belong; for we have no citations either in contemporary or in nearly contemporary writers of nine-tenths of the whole volume of the old Greek and Latin literatures. Most of it, if we applied Van Manen’s canons of evidence (which, of course, are accepted and improved upon by the three writers I am criticizing), would turn out to have been written as late as the renaissance of European learning. It is a fallacious test, and Van Manen would have shrunk from the paradox of enforcing it in regard to any other literature than the New Testament. It would appear as if the orthodox traditionalists, by insisting that the Bible must not be judged and criticized like other books, have prejudiced not merely their own cause—that would not matter—but the cause of sober history. They have invested it with such an atmosphere of mystery and falsetto, with what I may call a Sunday-school atmosphere, that a certain class of inquirers rush to an opposite extreme, and insist on canons of evidence and authenticity which would, if consistently used, eliminate all ancient literature and history. One form of error provokes the other. [120]

Ephrem’s commentary on Acts We have examined for their evidence as regards the Early Church those sections which directly evidence the hand of a companion of Paul, who was probably Luke the physician, seeing that tradition was unanimous in ascribing the Third Gospel and Acts to him. Some scholars have observed that the old Syriac version cited by Ephrem the Syrian in his commentary5 on Acts read in Acts xx, 13, as follows: “But I, Lucas, and those with me, going before to the ship, set sail for Assos,” where the conventional text reads: “But we, going before.” The pronoun we in this passage cannot include, as it usually does, Paul, who had taken another route and had left directions that they should call for him; this may have led Ephrem to substitute the paraphrase I, Lucas, and those with me. Anyhow, without further evidence, we can hardly use Ephrem’s citation as a proof of the Lucan authorship of Acts. Evidence of those parts of Acts which cohere with the we sectionsBut we must anyhow consider the evidence as to Paul’s beliefs which is to be gathered from the sections of Acts which immediately cohere with the travel document, and which clearly depended for their information on a source closely allied to them and of the same age and provenance. Firstly, then, it is noticeable that all this last part of Acts is relatively free from the fabulous details which mar the earlier part descriptive of the exploits of Peter. Next we note that Paul, on entering a city, goes straight to the Jewish Synagogue, and that the gospel with which he undertakes to supplement their monotheism consisted not of tidings about an ancient Palestinian Sun-god named Joshua, or Dionysus or Krishna, or Osiris, or ?sculapius, or [121]Mithras, nor about a vegetation or harvest demon of any kind, nor about any of the other members of the Christian pandemonium invented by Mr. Robertson and adopted by Dr. Drews. No; on the contrary, at Thessalonica Paul spent three sabbaths trying to convince the Jews in their synagogue that Jesus must have been the Jewish Messiah promised in the Jewish scriptures, because in accordance with prophecy he had suffered and risen from the dead. That he taught them, further, that Jesus, qua Christ or Messiah, was also the Jewish king whose advent they looked for, is obvious from the fact that he was accused on this occasion, as on others, of teaching, “contrary to the decrees of C?sar, that there was another king, one Jesus.” At Corinth Paul found he was wasting time in trying to persuade the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah whose advent they expected; and he declared to them that thenceforth he would devote himself to spreading his good news among the Gentiles. None the less he persisted, wherever he afterwards went, in going first to the synagogue, so as to give his compatriots a prior chance of accepting his spiritual wares, according to the principle enunciated in his epistles, that the promises were for the Jews first and only after them for the Gentiles. In Acts xxv, 19, Festus lays before King Agrippa the case against Paul as he had learned it from the Jewish priests and elders at Jerusalem. It amounted to this, that Paul affirmed that “one Jesus, who was dead, was really alive.” We learn in an earlier passage that Paul was a Jew of Tarsus, an adherent of the Pharisaic sect which believed in a general resurrection of good Jews, that nevertheless he had persecuted the adherents of Jesus of Nazareth and [122]connived at the murder of Stephen. He has some difficulty in convincing the Roman governor of Jud?a that he is not a leader of the Jewish sicarii, or sect of assassins, who were ever anxious to range themselves on the side of any Messiah ready to show fight against the Roman Legions. The impression made on Festus, the Roman Governor, by Paul’s prophetic arguments about a Messiah who had suffered and then risen from the dead was (Acts xxvi, 24) that “much learning had made him mad.” We can discern all through this last half of Acts that attitude of Paul to Jesus which confronts us in his epistles. Nothing interests him except his death on the cross and his resurrection. Of the rest of his career we learn nothing. In one passage, ch. xiii, 26 foll., we have a slightly more detailed account of the staple of Paul’s teaching, as delivered to the Jews when he encountered them in their synagogues. He informed them of how “they that dwell in Jerusalem and their rulers” had condemned Jesus; “though they found no cause of death in him, yet asked they of Pilate that he should be slain.” They afterwards “took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead: and he was seen for many days of them that came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses unto the people.”

There is not much of a vegetation-god story about the above concise narrative, which, however, is strikingly independent of the Gospel legends concerning the burial and resurrection of Jesus; for, according to them, it was the friends and adherents of Jesus, and not the rulers, who condemned him, that were careful to bury him; and his post-resurrectional [123]appearances are here confined to his Galilean followers, who, by virtue of their longer association and intimacy with him, would be more likely than others to see him after death in dreams and visions.

Six independent and early documents involve a real Jesus I have now reviewed the historical books of the New Testament. We have in them at least six monuments—to wit, Mark, the non-Marcan document, the parts of the First and Third Gospels peculiar to their authors, the Fourth Gospel, and the history of Paul and his mission given in chapters xiii to xxviii of Acts. Perhaps I ought to add the first twelve chapters of Acts, of which the information, according to Van Manen, was derived from an early and lost document, the Acts of Peter. That would make seven monuments. Unless all philological analysis is false, the Third Gospel and Acts are from the pen of a companion of Paul, and cannot be set later than about 90 A.D. Mark, which he used, must be indefinitely earlier, and I have pointed out that there are good reasons for setting its date before the year 70. The non-Marcan document, which critics have agreed to call Q (Quelle), cannot be later than Mark, and is probably much earlier, judging from the fact that it as yet reported no miracles of Jesus, nor hints of his death and resurrection. Now all these documents are independent of one another in style and contents, yet they all have a common interest—namely, the memory of a historical man Jesus; and such data as they isolatedly afford about Jesus agree on the whole as closely as any profane documents ever agreed which, being written independently and from very different standpoints, yet refer to one and the same person. If we see a number of convergent rays of light streaming down under clouds across a widely [124]extended landscape, we infer a central sun behind the clouds by which they are all emitted. Similarly, we have here several traditions and documents which converge on a single man, and are all and severally meaningless, and their genesis impossible of explanation unless we assume that he lived. It is sufficiently incredible that one tradition should (to take the hypothesis of non-historicity in its most rational form—that, namely, of Professor W. B. Smith) allegorize the myth of a Saviour God as the career of a man, and that man a Galilean teacher, in whose humanity the Church believed from the first. That six or seven parallel traditions should all have hit on the same form of deception and allegory is, as I said before, as incredible as that several roulette tables at Monte Carlo should independently and at one and the same time throw up an identical series of numbers. Credat Jud?us Apella, These writers who develop the thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus because miracles came to be attributed to him—how could they not in that age and social medium?—ask us to believe in a miracle which far outweighs any which any religionists ever reported of their founder; they themselves have fallen into fathomless depths of credulity. [125]

1 Euseb., in Esai, xviii, 1 foll., p. 424, foll. The words might mean Justin; but when he quotes Justin he always gives his name. The Gospels cannot be intended. ↑

2 Encycl. Bibl., art, “Paul.” ↑

3 Words italicized in the sequel are citations of the text of Acts. ↑

4 I expect Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson, in their next editions, to broach the view that the earlier chapter was forged to explain the later one, and that in the later one “The Seven” are a cryptic reference to the Pleiades. ↑

5 The relevant part of this commentary is preserved in an old Armenian version of which we have ancient MSS.