WHILE the world was thus seething and fermenting with new faiths the creed of the Christ made its first appearance on the seaboard of Asia. In spite of certain remarks in my first chapter, I am not such a “gross and crass Euhemerist” as to insist dogmatically on the historical existence of a personal Jesus. Of the Christ himself, if a Christ there were, we know little or nothing. The account of his life which has come down to us in the Gospels is so devoid of authority, and so entirely built up of miraculous fragments, derived from elsewhere, that we may well be excused for gravely doubting whether he is not rather to be numbered with St. George and St. Catherine, with Perseus and Arthur, among the wholly mythical and imaginary figures of legend and religion.
On the other hand, it is quite possible, or even probable, that there really did live in Galilee, at some time about the beginning of our accepted era, a teacher and reformer bearing the Semitic name which is finally Hellenised and Latinised for us as Jesus. If so, it seems not unlikely that this unknown person was crucified (or rather hung on a post) by the Romans at Jerusalem under the Procurator C. Pontius Pilatus; and that after his death he was worshipped more or less as a god by his immediate followers. Such kernel of truth may very well exist in the late and derivative Gospel story; a kernel of truth, but imbedded in a mass of unhistorical myth, which implicitly identifies him with all the familiar corn-gods and wine-gods of the Eastern Mediterranean.
Furthermore, 379it is even possible that the Christ may have been deliberately put to death, at the instigation of the Jewish rabble, as one of those temporary divine kings whose nature and meaning we have already discussed. If this suggestion seem improbable from the lack of any similar recorded case in the scanty Jewish annals, I would answer that formal histories seldom give us any hint of the similar customs still surviving in civilised European countries; that many popular rites exist unheard of everywhere; and that the Jews were commonly believed through the Middle Ages to crucify Christian boys, like St. Hugh of Lincoln, in certain irregular and unrecognised ethnical ceremonies. Furthermore, lest I should be thought to adduce this instance through an anti-Semite tendency (which I do not in the slightest degree possess), I may add that even among Christians similar customs are believed to exist in rural parts of Italy at the present day,—there are villages where a man dies yearly as the representative of Christ; and that in my opinion the Oberammergau and other Passion Plays are survivals of like representations in which a condemned criminal, the usual substitute, did once actually enact the part of Christ. In short, I do not hesitate to say that god-slaying ceremonies, more or less attenuated, have lingered on everywhere in obscure forms among the folk-rites and folk-customs of the most civilised peoples.
Without doing more than briefly indicate this possibility, however, I pass on to say that if ever there was really a personal Christ, and if his followers began by vaguely believing in his resurrection, the legend, as we get it, is obviously made up of collected fragments from all the godslaying customs and beliefs we have been considering in detail through the last six or seven chapters. In the Gospel of his later believers, after the sect had spread widely among the Gentiles of the towns, Jesus is conceived of as a corn and wine god, a temporary king, slain on a cross as a piacular atonement, and raised again from the dead after 380three days, in the manner common to all corn and wine gods. It is possible, of course, that the first believers may have fastened all these ideas on to an accidental condemnation and execution, so to speak; but it is possible too that the Christ may actually have been put to death at the great spring feast of the Passover, in accordance with some obscure and unrecognised folk-rite of the rabble of Jerusalem. I do not even pretend to have an opinion on this subject; I do not assert or deny any historical nucleus of fact: I am satisfied with saying that the story on the whole exhibits the Christ to us entirely in the character of a temporary king, slain with piacular rites as a corn and wine god. In this case at least, I am no dogmatic Euhemerist.
I think it was Professor Freeman who once quaintly described Buddhism as “a blasphemous anticipatory parody of Christianity.” The learned historian’s idea apparently was that the author of all evil, being aware beforehand of the divine intentions, had invented Buddhism before the advent of Christ, so as to discount the Christian Plan of Salvation by anticipation. If so, we must regard all other religions as similar blasphemous attempts at forestalling God: for we shall see as we proceed that every one of them contains innumerable anticipations of Christianity—or, to put it conversely, that Christianity subsumes them all into itself, in a highly concentrated and etherealised solution.
In the earliest Christian documents, the Pauline and other Apostolic Epistles, we get little information about the history of the real or mythical Christ. Shadowy allusions alone to the crucifixion and the resurrection repay our scrutiny. But through the mist of words we see two or three things clearly. The Christ is described as the son of God—that is to say of the Jewish deity; and he is spoken of continually as slain on a post or tree, the sacred symbol of so many old religions. He dies to save mankind; and salvation is offered in his name to all men. A careful reading 381of the epistles from this point of view will give in brief an epitome of the earliest and least dogmatic yet very doctrinal Christian theology. Its cardinal points are four —incarnation, death, resurrection, atonement.
The later accounts which we get in the Gospels are far more explicit. The legend by that time had taken form: it had grown clear and consistent. All the elements of the slain and risen corn and wine god are there in perfection. For brevity’s sake, I will run all these accounts together, adding to them certain traits of still later origin.
The aspect of Christ as a survival of the corn-god is already clear in Paul’s argument in First Corinthians on the resurrection of the body. This argument would strike home at once to every Greek and every Asiatic. “That which you sow is not quickened unless it die. And when you sow, you sow not the body that is to be, but bare grain; it may be wheat or any other grain. But God gives it a shape as pleases him; to every seed its own body.” The whole of this fifteenth chapter, the earliest statement of the Christian belief, should be read through in this connexion by any one who wishes to understand the close relation of the idea of sowing to the resurrection. It might have been written by any worshipper of Adonis or Osiris who wished to recommend his special doctrine of a bodily resurrection to a doubtful cremationist, familiar with the cult of Dionysus and of Attis.
The earliest known rite of the Christian church was the sacramental eating and drinking of bread and wine together; which rite was said to commemorate the death of the Lord, and his last supper, when he eat and drank bread and wine with his disciples. The language put into his mouth on this occasion in the Gospels, especially the Fourth, is distinctly that of the corn and wine god. “I am the true vine; ye are the branches.” “I am the bread of life.” “Take, eat, this is my body.” “This is my blood of the new testament.” Numberless other touches of like kind are scattered through the speeches. In the parable 382of the vineyard, God the Father is described as the owner of a vineyard, who sends his only begotten son to receive the fruit of it: and the workers slay him. The first miracle at Cana of Galilee is one where water is turned into wine by the hand of Jesus: and so on through a long series of curious instances, which readers can discover for themselves by inspection.
In early Christian art, as exhibited in the catacombs at Rome, the true vine is most frequently figured; as are also baskets of loaves, with the corresponding miracle of the loaves and fishes. Multiplication of bread and wine are the natural credentials of the corn and wine god. The earliest description we possess of Christ, that of John of Damascus, states that his complexion was “of the colour of wheat”; while in the apocryphal letter of Lentulus to the Roman Senate we read in the same spirit that his hair was “wine-coloured.” The Greek description by Epiphanius Monachus says that Christ was six feet high; his hair long and golden-coloured; and in countenance he was ruddy like his father David. All these descriptions are obviously influenced by the identification of the bread and wine of the eucharist with the personal Jesus.
In the usage of the church from very early days, it has been customary to eat the body of Christ in the form of bread, and to drink his blood as wine in the sacrament. In the Catholic church, this continuous ceremony takes place at an altar, containing sacred bones, and is represented as being the offering of God, himself to himself, in the form of a mystic and piacular sacrifice. The priest drinks the wine or blood; the laity eat only the bread or body.
A curious custom which occurs in many churches of Sicily at Easter still further enforces this unity of Christ with the cult of earlier corn and wine gods, like Adonis and Osiris. The women sow wheat, lentils, and canary-seed in plates, which are kept in the dark and watered every second day. The plants soon shoot up; they are then tied together 383with red ribbons, and the plates containing them are placed on the sepulchres which, with effigies of the dead Christ, are made up in Roman Catholic and Greek churches on Good Friday, “just as the gardens of Adonis,” says Mr. Frazer, “were placed on the grave of the dead Adonis.” In this curious ceremony we get a survival from the very lowest stratum of corn-god worship; the stratum where an actual human victim is killed, and corn and other crops are sown above his body. Even where the sowing itself no longer survives, the sepulchre remains as a relic of the same antique ritual. Such sepulchres are everywhere common at Easter, as are the cradles of the child-god at the feast of the winter solstice. The Piet脿 is the final form of this mourning of the corn-god by the holy women.
Passing on to the other aspects of Christ as corn-god and divine-human victim, we see that he is doubly recognised as god and man, like all the similar gods of early races. In the speeches put into his mouth by his biographers, he constantly claims the Jewish god as his father. Moreover, he is a king; and his kingly descent from his ancestor David is insisted upon in the genealogies with some little persistence. He is God incarnate; but also he is the King of the Jews, and the King of Glory. Wise men come from the east to worship him, and bring gifts of gold and myrrh and frankincense to the infant God in his manger cradle. But he is further the Christ, the anointed of God; and, as we saw, anointment is a common element with numerous other divine-human victims.
Once more, he is the King’s son; and he is the only begotten son, the dearly beloved son, who is slain as an expiation for the sins of the people. The heavens open, and a voice from them declares, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” He is affiliated, like all other such victims, on the older and earlier ethnical god, Jah-weh; and though he is himself God, and one with the Father, he is offered up, himself to himself, in expiation of 384the sin committed by men against divine justice. All this would be familiar theology indeed to the worshipper of Osiris, Adonis, and Attis.
The common Hebrew offering was the paschal lamb; therefore Christ is envisaged as the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. In the paintings of the catacombs, it is as a lamb that the Saviour of the world is oftenest represented. As a lamb he raises another lamb, Lazarus; as a lamb he turns the water into wine; as a lamb he strikes the living springs from the rock on the spandrils of the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus. But his birth in a manger is also significant: and his vine and his dove are almost as frequent as his lamb in the catacombs.
The Gospel history represents the passion of Christ essentially as the sacrifice of a temporary king, invested with all the familiar elements of that early ritual. Christ enters Jerusalem in royal state, among popular plaudits, like those which always accompany the temporary king, and the Attis or Adonis. He is mounted on an ass, the royal beast of the Semites. The people fling down branches of trees in his path, as they always fling down parts of green trees before the gods of vegetation. On Palm Sunday his churches are still decked with palm-branches or with sprays of willow-catkin. Such rites with green things form an integral part of all the old rituals of the tree-god or the corn-god, and of all the modern European survivals in folk-lore—they are equally found in the Dionysiac festival, and in the Jack-in-the-Green revels on English fair-days. The connexion with trees is also well marked throughout the Gospels; and the miracle of the barren fig-tree is specially mentioned in close connexion with the entry into Jerusalem. The people as he entered cried “Hosanna” to the son of David and the prophetic words were supposed to be fulfilled, “Behold, thy king cometh unto thee, meek, sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.”
The Christ goes as a willing victim to the cross; he does not 385seriously ask that the cup should pass from him. He foretells his own death, and voluntarily submits to it But he is also bought with a price—the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas. Of all this, we had forecasts in the Khond, the Mexican, and various other rituals.
Furthermore, there is a trial—a double trial, before the high priest, and before Pilate. Such trials, we have seen, are common elements of the mock-king’s degradation. Like all other similar victims, the Christ, after being treated like a monarch, is reviled and spat upon, buffeted and insulted. He is bound with cords, and carried before Pilate. The procurator asks him, “Art thou the King of the Jews?” and the Christ by implication admits the justice of the title. All the subsequent episodes of the painful drama are already familiar to us. The sacred victim is cruelly scourged that his tears may flow. As in other cases he is crowned with flowers or with bark, in order to mark his position as king of vegetation, so here he is crowned with a chaplet of thorns that adds to his ignominy. The sacred blood must flow from the sacred head. But still, he is clothed with purple and saluted with the words, “Hail, King of the Jews!” in solemn irony. He is struck on the head with a reed by the soldiers: yet even as they strike, they bow their knees and worship him. They give him to drink wine, mingled with myrrh; “but he received it not.” Then he is crucified at Golgotha, the place of a skull, * on a cross, the old sacred emblem of so many religions; it bears the inscription, “The King of the Jews,” by order of the Procurator. After the death of the Christ he is mourned over, like Adonis and Osiris, by the holy women, including his mother. I do not think I need point out in detail the many close resemblances which exist between the Mother of the Gods and the Mother of God—the Theotokos.
* According to mediaeval legend, the skull was Adam’s, and
the sacred blood which fell upon it revived it. In
crucifixions, a skull is generally represented at the foot
of the cross.
The 386thieves crucified with the Saviour have their legs broken, like many other sacred victims; but the Christ himself has not a bone broken, like the paschal lamb which was the Jewish substitute for the primitive human victim. Thus both ideas on this subject, the earlier and the later, seem to find an appropriate place in the history. Instead of having his legs broken, however, the Christ has his side pierced; and from it flows the mystic blood of the atonement, in which all Christians are theoretically washed; this baptism of blood (a literal reality in older cults) being already a familiar image at the date of the Apocalypse, where the robes of the elect are washed white in the blood of the lamb that was slain.
After the crucifixion, the Christ is taken down and buried. But, like all other corn and wine gods, he rises again from the dead on the third day—this very period of three days being already a conventional one in similar cases. Every one of the surroundings recalls Osiris and Attis. It is the women once more who see him first; and afterwards the men. Finally, he ascends into heaven, to his Father, before the wondering eyes of his disciples and his mother. In each item of this, there is nothing with which we are not already familiar elsewhere.
I will not pursue the analogy further. To do so would be endless. Indeed, I do not think there is an element in the Gospel story which does not bear out the parallel here suggested. The slight incident of the visit to Herod, for example, is exactly analogous to the visit of the false Osiris in modern Egypt to the governor’s house, and the visit of the temporary or mock king in so many other cases to the real king’s palace. The episode where Herod and his men of war array the Christ in a gorgeous robe is the equivalent of the episode of the Mexican king arraying the god-victim in royal dress, and is also paralleled in numerous other like dramas elsewhere. The women who prepare spices and ointments for the body recall the Adonis rites; Pilate washing his hands of the guilt of condemnation 387recalls the frequent episode of the slaughterers of the god laying the blame upon others, or casting it on the knife, or crying out, “We bought you with a price; we are guiltless.” Whoever will read carefully through the > Gospel accounts, side by side with Mr. Frazer’s well-chosen collection of mock-king narratives, will see for himself that endless other minor traits crop up in the story which may be equated with numerous similar incidents in the death and resurrection of the man-god elsewhere.
The very subjects of the parables are in themselves significant: the lord of the vineyard who sends his son, whom the hirers slay; the labourers who come at the eleventh hour: the sower and the good and bad ground: the grain of mustard-seed: the leaven of the Pharisees: the seed growing secretly: the sons in the vineyard. It will be found that almost all of them turn on the key-note subjects of bread and wine, or at least of seed-sowing.
By what precise stages the story of the Galil忙an man-god arose and fixed itself around the person of the real or mythical Jesus it would be hard to say. Already in the epistles we may catch stray glimpses, in the germ, of most of it. Already we notice strange hints and foreshadowings. Probably the first Jewish disciples had arrived at the outline of the existing story even before the Gentiles began to add their quotum. And when we look at documents so overloaded with miracle and legend as the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, we find it hard indeed to separate any element of historical truth from the enormous accretion of myth and legend. Still, I see no grave reason to doubt the general truth of the idea that the Christian belief and practice arose first among Galil忙an Jews, and that from them it spread with comparative rapidity to the people of Syria and Asia Minor. It even seems probable that one Saul or Paul was really the person who first conceived the idea of preaching the new religion throughout the empire, and especially in the great cities, as a faith which might be embraced by both Jew and Gentile.
Certainly, 388while the young cult contained most of the best features of Judaism, viewed as a possible universal religion,—its monotheism, its purity, its comparative freedom from vile and absurd legends of the gods and their amours—it surpassed the elder faith in acceptability to the world at large, and especially to the people of Syria and western Asia. Every one of them could have said with perfect truth, “Nothing is changed; there is but one god more to worship.”
As the church spread, the legend grew apace. To the early account of the death and resurrection of the King of the Jews, later narrators added the story of his miraculous birth from a virgin mother, who conceived directly from the spirit of God wafted down upon her. The wide extent and the origin of this belief about the conception of gods and heroes has been fully examined by Mr. Sidney Hartland in his admirable study of the Legend of Perseus. The new believers further provided their divine leader with a royal genealogy from David downward, and made him by a tolerably circuitous argument be born at Bethlehem, according to the supposed prophecy—though if there ever was really a Jesus at all, it would seem that the one fact of which we could feel tolerably sure about him, was the fact of his being a man of Nazareth. Later writers put into his mouth a high moral teaching for its time, somewhat anticipated by Hillel and other rabbis, and perhaps in part of Buddhist origin; they also made him announce for himself that divine r么le of mediator and atoner which they themselves claimed for the Saviour of Mankind. He calls himself the vine, the bread of life, the good shepherd; he is called “the lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world,” by John the Baptist, an enthusiast whose fame has attracted him at last into the Christian legend. Very early, the old rite of water-lustration or baptism, adopted by John, was employed as one of the chief Christian ceremonies, the ceremony of initiation, which replaced with advantage the bloody and dangerous Jewish circumcision.
This 389allowed for far freer proselytism than Judaism could ever expect; and though no doubt at first the Christians regarded themselves as a sect of the Jews, and though they always adopted entire the Jewish sacred books and the Jewish God, with all the Jewish history, cosmogony, and mythology, yet the new religion was from the beginning a cosmopolitan one, and preached the word unto all nations. Such a faith, coming at such a moment, and telling men precisely what they were ready to believe, was certain beforehand of pretty general acceptance. When Constantine made Christianity the official creed of the empire, it is clear that he did but put an official stamp of approval on a revolution that had long been growing more and more inevitable.
In one word, Christianity triumphed, because it united in itself all the most vital elements of all the religions then current in the world, with little that was local, national, or distasteful; and it added to them all a high ethical note and a social doctrine of human brotherhood especially suited to an age of unification and systematic government.
Occasionally, even in the Gospels themselves, we get strange passing echoes of a mysterious identification of the Christ with the ancient Hebrew ethnical god, not as the Lord of the Universe alone, but vaguely remembered as the sacred stone of the ark, the Rock of Israel. “The stone which the builders rejected, that one has become the head of the corner.” “Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.” And in a speech put into the mouth of Christ, he says to Peter, “Rock thou art, and on this Rock will I build my assembly.” *
* I can honestly assure the polemical Protestant divine
that I am well aware of the difference in gender in this
passage—and of its utter unimportance. The name Peter could
not well be made feminine to suit a particular play upon
words or to anticipate the objections of a particular set of
trivial word-twisters.
Sometimes, too, in the epistles the two ideas of the corn-god and the foundation stone-god are worked upon alternately. 390"I have planted; Apollos watered.” “Ye are God’s husbandry; ye are God’s building.” “I have laid the foundation, and another builds thereon. Let every man take care how he builds upon it. For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is the Christ, Jesus.” Or again, “You are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus, the Christ, being himself the chief corner stone.” Whoever rereads the epistles by the light of the analogies suggested in this book will find that they positively teem with similar references to the familiar theology of the various slain man-gods, which must have been known to every one along the shores of the Mediterranean.
The church which was built upon this rock—and that Rock was Christ—has shown its continuity with earlier religions in a thousand ways and by a thousand analogies. Solar and astrological elements have been freely admitted, side by side with those which recall the corn and wine gods. The chief festivals still cling to the solar feasts of the equinoxes and the solstices. Thus every year the church celebrates in mimicry the death and resurrection of the Christ, as the Mediterranean peoples celebrated the death and resurrection of the Attis, the Adonis, the Dionysus, the Osiris. It celebrates the feast at the usual time for most such festivals, the spring equinox. More than that, it chooses for the actual day of the resurrection, commonly called in English Easter, and in the Latin dialects the Paschal feast (or P芒ques), a trebly astrological date. The festival must be as near as possible to the spring equinox; but it must be after a full moon, and it must be on the day sacred to the sun. Before the feast, a long fast takes place, at the close of which the Christ is slain in effigy, and solemnly laid in a mimic sepulchre. Good Friday is the anniversary of his piacular death, and the special day of the annual mourning, as for Adonis and Attis. On Easter Sunday, he rises again from the dead, and every good Catholic is bound to communicate—to eat the body of his slaughtered 391god on the annual spring festival of reviving vegetation. Comparison of the Holy Week ceremonies at Rome with the other annual festivals, from the Mexican corn-feast and the Potraj rite of India to Attis and Adonis, will be found extremely enlightening—I mean, of course, the ceremonies as they were when the Pope, the Priest-King, the representative of the annual Attis at Pessinus, officiated publicly in the Sistine Chapel, with paschal music known as Lamentations, and elevation of the Host amid the blare of trumpets. On this subject, I limit myself to the barest hint. Whoever chooses to follow out so pregnant a clue will find it lead him into curious analogies and almost incredible survivals.
Similarly, the birth of Christ is celebrated at the winter solstice, the well-known date for so many earlier ceremonies of the gods of vegetation. Then the infant god lies unconscious in his cradle. Whoever has read Mr. Frazer’s great work will understand the connexion of the holly and the mistletoe, and the Christmas tree, with this second great festival of Christendom, very important in the Teutonic north, though far inferior in the south to the spring-tide feast, when the god is slain and eaten of necessity. I limit myself to saying that the Christmas rites are all of them rites of the birth of the corn-god.
Even the Christian cross, it is now known, was not employed as a symbol of the faith before the days of Constantine, and was borrowed from the solar wheel of the Gaulish sun-god-worshippers who formed the mass of the successful emperor’s legionaries.
We are now, therefore, in a very different position for understanding the causes which led to the rise and development of the Christian religion from that which we occupied at the outset of our enquiry. We had then to accept crudely the bare fact that about the first century of our era a certain cult of a Divine Man, Jesus, arose among a fraction of the maritime people of Lower Syria. That fact as we at first received it stood isolated and unrelated 392in its naked singularity. We can now see that it was but one more example of a universal god-making tendency in human nature, high or low; and in our last chapter we shall find that this universal tendency to worship the dead has ever since persisted as fully as ever, and is in fact the central element in the entire religious instinct of humanity.
The main emotional chord upon which Christianity played in its early days—and indeed the main chord upon which it still plays—is just, I believe, the universal feeling in favour of the deification or beatification of the dead, with the desire for immortality on the part of the individual believer himself in person. Like all other religions, but even more than any other religion at that time in vogue, Christianity appealed to these two allied and deep-seated longings of human nature. It appealed on the one hand to the unselfish emotions and affections of mankind by promising a close, bodily, personal, and speedy reassociation of the living believer with his dead relatives and friends. It appealed on the other hand to the selfish wishes and desires of each, by holding forth to every man the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection. Like all other creeds, but beyond all other creeds, it was the religion of immortality, of the dead revived, of the new world: in an age of doubt, of scepticism, of the decay of faith, it gave fresh life and a totally new basis to the old beliefs—perhaps the old delusions—of the religious nature.
A necessary consequence of the universal ferment and intermixture of pantheons everywhere during the early days of the Roman empire was a certain amount of floating scepticism about the gods as a whole, which reaches its highest point in the mocking humour of Lucian, or still earlier in the Epicurean atheism of Lucretius and of Roman philosophy in general. But while this nascent scepticism was very real and very widespread, it affected rather current beliefs as to the personality and history of the various gods than the 393underlying conception of godhead in the abstract. Even those who laughed and those who disbelieved, retained at bottom many superstitions and supernatural ideas. Their scepticism was due, not like that of our own time to fundamental criticism of the very notion of the supernatural, but to the obvious inadequacy of existing gods to satisfy the requirements of educated cosmopolitans. The deities of the time were too coarse, too childish, too gross for their worshippers. The common philosophic attitude of cultivated Rome and cultivated Alexandria might be compared to some extent to that of our own Unitarians, who are not indeed hostile to the conception of theology in ............