How did Christianity begin?

According to the official teaching of the Christian Churches it originated in certain unique events which occurred in Palestine under the Roman emperors Augustus and Tiberius. In the reign of Augustus, the God by whom all things were made became man by miraculous birth from a virgin mother. In the reign of Tiberius the God-man, Jesus Christ, was crucified by Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator of Judaea. After suffering death he rose from the dead on the third day and ascended into heaven, leaving behind him a Church divinely empowered to interpret his teaching until he comes again to judge the living and the dead and to inaugurate the life of the world to come.

These dogmas, contained in the Nicene Creed, were enforced on Europe during the Middle Ages. To deny them is still an offence against the common law of this country. They are taught to children at the public expense in our nationally provided schools and sedulously propagated by the radio. The law against blasphemy is now enforced only against poor people who attack Christianity in unguarded language. But a public denial of its truth is a risk which few politicians, whatever their private beliefs, are prepared to take, and the "defence of Christian civilization" is used along with other pretexts to justify present-day warmongering.

The Nicene Creed dates from the fourth century of our era. No creed remotely resembling it can be traced further back than the third century. When we turn from the creeds to the New Testament, on which they are said to be based, we are confronted by writings of disputed dates and contradictory tendencies. Before proceeding to the problem of Christian origins it is necessary to consider briefly the nature of these writings.

First there are the four Gospels. As these stand first in the New Testament, the reader may be led to suppose that they were written first. This is far from being the case. Christian writers of the first and early second centuries nowhere refer to the Gospels, though they sometimes quote "words of the Lord Jesus" in terms which suggest that they drew on a tradition other than the Gospels we know.

The first writer to mention any Gospel is Papias, who lived at Hierapolis in Asia Minor in the first half of the second century. His work, An Interpretation of the Oracles of the Lord, is entirely lost except for passages quoted by later Christian writers. Eusebius in the fourth century quotes a fragment in which Papias says that he prefers oral tradition to books. Irenaeus, late in the second century, preserves one of the oral traditions collected by Papias. In it Jesus paints a highly materialistic picture of the good time coming in the Messianic kingdom, when vineyards will yield wine to overflowing and wheat will yield flour in fabulous abundance. Such a prophecy is nowhere recorded in the Gospels; but one very like it is found in a Jewish work, the Apocalypse of Baruch, written shortly before A.D. 70. Doubtless such prophecies were appreciatively passed from mouth to mouth among the disinherited class of the first and second centuries, and attributed by different people to different prophets.

Coming to the Gospels, Papias (according to Eusebius) quotes an unnamed "elder" as saying that Mark, a disciple of Peter, but not of Jesus, wrote "accurately, but not in order" what Peter remembered of the sayings and doings of Jesus. Papias further says that Matthew. collected the "oracles" of Jesus in "Hebrew" and that others translated them into Greek as best they could.¹ No mention by Papias of Luke's or John's Gospel has come down to us. It does not follow that he did not know them; but as Eusebius is silent, the presumption is that Papias said nothing about those Gospels which a fourth-century Christian historian found fit to quote.

Plainly in the time of Papias there was no canon of the New Testament. He knew of a Gospel attributed to Mark, competing versions of another Gospel attributed to Matthew, and possibly others, but nothing superior in his opinion to oral traditions such as the prophecy cited above.

The next writer to mention any Gospel is Justin, who wrote at Rome in the middle years of the second century. He refers to no Gospel by name, but says that "memoirs of the apostles" were read at Christian meetings along with the Jewish prophets, and often cites these "memoirs" on points of fact or doctrine. His quotations are from Matthew, Mark, Luke and other sources unknown to us, but not from John -- though John would have been useful in proving some of Justin's points. Evidently the Fourth Gospel was not yet accepted, as authoritative, and the Gospels were not yet reduced to a canon of four.

In the second half of the second century our four Gospels emerge as authoritative or, as we now say, canonical. Tatian, a pupil of Justin, about 170-180 composed a harmony of the four (Diatessaron) which was read in the Syrian churches until the fifth century. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons about 180, is the first extant author to name the traditional writers of all four gospels, and gives mystical reasons why there must be no more or less than four. His account of Matthew and Mark is a variant of that given by Papias. He is the earliest writer to attribute the Third Gospel to Luke, the companion of Paul, and the Fourth to "John, the disciple of the Lord". Thenceforth the authority of the four was generally accepted; but there were Christians of note who rejected the Fourth Gospel even in the third century.

Of the dogmas of the traditional Creed, that of the deity and incarnation of Jesus Christ is found only in the Fourth Gospel, the latest of the four to be accepted as authoritative. The first three Gospels -- usually called the Synoptics, since they embody a common tradition -- call Jesus the Christ, the Son of Man, even the Son of God, but never God. Two, Matthew and Luke, relate the virgin birth: but after the nativity it is never mentioned again, and as Luke repeatedly calls Joseph and Mary the parents of Jesus, the virgin birth cannot have been in his Gospel as originally written. Mark and even John ignore it. In describing the teaching of Jesus both Matthew and Luke reproduce, evidently from a common source, discourses exalting the poor and persecuted, denouncing riches, calling his followers to face struggle and danger, and predicting the speedy coming of the kingdom of God, which is to follow the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Mark compresses this teaching and omits much of it. John omits it altogether and substitutes arguments about the divine nature of Jesus. All Gospels relate the crucifixion and the resurrection; but the accounts of the resurrection differ so much that to reconcile them is past the wit of commentators. We clearly cannot go to these anonymous and contradictory documents for a true account of the origin of Christianity. All that we can gather from them is the teaching current in different Christian churches during the period from A.D. 70 to 150, when the Gospels were taking shape.

After the Gospels in the New Testament stand the Acts of the Apostles, which will be dealt with later. After the Acts stand the Pauline Epistles. Tradition credits Paul with fourteen; but of these the Epistle to the Hebrews does not pretend to be his, and those to Timothy and Titus are regarded even by professional theologians as second-century concoctions. How much of the remaining ten is really Paul's we must for the present leave an open question. They contain many internal contradictions.

Taking the Epistles for the present at their face value, we are struck by an amazing contrast between them and the Synoptic Gospels. The Jesus of the Synoptics, with his denunciations of the rich, exaltations of the poor and proclamations of the coming kingdom of God, is nowhere to be found. There is only the meagrest mention of any historical Jesus at all. In a few short, scattered passages we learn that the Son of God was "born of the seed of David",² that Paul has met "brethren of the Lord",³ that Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper, that he was killed by the Jews and that after rising from the dead he appeared to a number of people, including Paul himself. But the list of witnesses to the resurrection does not tally with the Gospels. Moreover all these passages stand out incongruously against a very different background. In the main the Epistles are not concerned with historical events, but with a divine being called Jesus Christ, "the image of God",⁴ the "firstborn of all creation",⁵ "through whom are all things",⁶ who was crucified by the demonic rulers of this world, but by his death brings them to nought, and lives again to die no more. This divine being has commissioned Paul to preach his death and resurrection to all mankind that they may be united to Christ in baptism and live for ever.

This teaching is closely akin to that of certain cults widely diffused in the Graeco-Roman world and commonly called "mystery religions". In fact Paul himself calls his teaching a "mystery" and his converts "initiates", though our translators prefer to render the latter word "perfect" or "full-grown".⁷

It may be thought that the reason for Paul's all but total silence about the career and teaching of Jesus is that the Gospel story was already familiar to his readers. No such explanation is possible. Were it so, we should expect to find in the Epistles "words of the Lord" such as later Christian writers are fond of quoting. With one exception -- the words of institution of the Lord's Supper in I Corinthians xi, 23-25 -- we do not find any. On the few other occasions when the Epistles urge the Lord's commands, they do so indirectly and do not quote. Moreover Paul, even when dealing with the institution of the Lord's Supper, claims that his teaching is derived by direct revelation from Jesus Christ himself and from no human source. Plainly this excludes the use of any oral or written tradition of the teaching of Jesus.

To sum up, the Pauline Epistles are not written to propagate the teaching of a human founder. They are written to propagate the cult of a god crucified for the salvation of man. To Paul the crucifixion and resurrection are everything. And as this world is nothing and the next world everything, the Epistles are socially and politically conservative. "The powers that be are ordained of God."⁸ Later editors tried to bring the Epistles into relation with the Gospel story by interpolation, but only threw into relief their essentially mystical outlook. We shall find further evidence of this when we examine the Epistles in detail.⁹

The Pauline Epistles are followed by seven Epistles ascribed to four personal followers of Jesus -- James, Peter, John and Jude. None of these reads like the work of a personal disciple. Those attributed to John are akin to the Fourth Gospel in style and outlook, and won slow acceptance from about the middle of the second century. 1 Peter is merely a weakened version of Paul. 2 Peter is not heard of until the third century and was rejected by many Christians even in the fourth. It is without doubt the latest writing in the New Testament.

The Apocalypse or Revelation of John, which closes the canon, is in many ways the most interesting book of all. Its detailed examination must be deferred for the present. Meanwhile we may note that like the Pauline Epistles, to which it is otherwise diametrically opposed, the Apocalypse contains next to no reference to the career of Jesus. The Christ of the Apocalypse is "the first and the last", the "lamb slain from the foundation of the world", whose blood has purchased a kingdom on earth for people of every tribe and tongue, and who will feed the vultures with the flesh of the kings of the earth and their armies.¹⁰ There is very little to connect this Christ with an historical individual. Only once, in a way so offhand that we suspect interpolation, does the book refer to the crucifixion. This submersion of the career and teaching of Jesus, in the Pauline Epistles by a mystery cult, in the Apocalypse by a vision of vengeance on Rome, creates a problem which no student of Christian origins can ignore.

Another point to be noted about the books of the New Testament is their poetical form. Great portions of them are written in rhythmical diction reminiscent of the Old Testament prophets. The rhythm is often perceptible even in a translation. This rhythmical form, which will be apparent when we have occasion to quote them, would be out of place in straightforward biography, history or letters. Real lives and letters are not written in rhythm; but simulated lives and letters may very well be. There is only one reason why these writings should have taken this form. They must have been deliberately put into a form in which they could be memorized and recited by illiterate people. To this end the writers resort to rhythm, and occasionally even to rhyme. The New Testament is certainly in parts based on real history and real letters. But we have no guarantee that the history or the letters have come down to us as they were originally written, and every reason to think that they have not. For once they were rehandled to enable them to be memorized, there would be no limit to alteration and interpolation to meet the views of this or that church or the needs of this or that situation.

The mystery religions of the ancient world sprang from the rituals and myths of the prehistoric past. As we saw in Chapter I, a stock feature of early religion was the killing of the tribal chief after a certain time in order that his power, before it failed, might pass into the earth and renew the tribal food supply. With the development of class society the chief tended to dodge his liabilities and to have a substitute sacrificed in his place. The fiction of sacrificing the chief was kept up by treating the substitute as a chief for the time being. This ancient ritual was reflected in the myth of a beneficent god-king of the remote past who had been killed and buried, whose flesh his people ate in the ripening corn and whose blood they drank in the teeming vintage. These myths lived on among the peasantry long after the ruling classes had explained them away to their own satisfaction by a more or less monotheistic theology or metaphysic.

But with the further development of class society a change took place. Though it can be traced farther back, this was especially so after the conquests of Alexander the Great, and above all under the Roman Empire, when the peasant societies of the ancient East were dominated and exploited by the urban civilization of their Greek and Roman conquerors. Large masses of Orientals and of Greeks too (for imperialism, except for ideological purposes, is no respecter of race) were reduced to slavery or to menial occupations in such cities as Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, Pergamum and Rome itself. These uprooted people carried into their new surroundings the tradition of their ancient rites and myths. But the myths could no longer have their original significance. The murder and resuscitation of Osiris, the slaughter and return to life of the Lord Tammuz (Adonis), the death of Attis and his resurrection after three days, the tearing to pieces and rebirth of Dionysus could not for the uprooted and urbanized masses -- slaves, freedmen and poor freemen -- as for their peasant ancestors, represent the annual death and revival of tilth and vineyard, ensuring continued life to the community. The urban masses did not live among cornfields and vineyards, and they had been torn from their community. As Engels puts it, they "had their paradise, their golden age, behind them".¹¹ To them henceforward these myths of death and resurrection represented the hope of continued life not in the degrading environment of a great slave-empire, but in a happier world which wishful thinking located beyond the grave. Ancient ritual formulae referring to the life derived by the community from the annual resurrection of the corn-god were adapted to the new belief.

Thus Osiris, whose cult had spread from Egypt to Greece and Rome before the Christian era, was believed by his worshippers to ensure to them by his resurrection eternal life in a better world. Even before the age of Alexander this significance had been read into his rites. "As surely as Osiris lives", ran the incantation pronounced over the dead in Egypt, "he shall live; as surely as Osiris cannot die, he also shall not die; as surely as Osiris shall not be annihilated, he also shall not be annihilated."¹² Attis, whose rites spread from Asia Minor to the West during the same period, was each year at the vernal equinox bound in effigy to a pine tree, wildly lamented, and buried until the third day, when his joyful resurrection was hailed as a promise that his devotees too would rise triumphant over death. In token of this they were baptized in the blood of a bull and "born again to eternal life". "Be comforted, ye pious," said the priest of Attis to his worshippers at their annual festival; "as the god is saved, so will ye be saved."¹³ Dionysus, who had been put to death by the Titans and whose grave was shown at Delphi and at Thebes in Boeotia, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven; and those initiated into his mysteries, in which his death and resurrection were enacted, were made partakers of his immortality. The Orphic brotherhoods in the Greek world, closely associated with the cult of Dionysus, preached from the sixth century B.C. onward, to freemen and slaves alike, the doctrine that the soul of man was entombed in the body on account of sin, but might after many incarnations be freed from the "wheel of birth" by ascetic living and regain its original divinity.

Yet the mystery cults never lost the mark of their peasant origin. Attis was addressed by his worshippers as the "reaped corn." In the mysteries at Eleusis an ear of corn was solemnly shown to the congregation as a token of the renewal of life.

Competing with the mystery cults in the Mediterranean cities towards the time of the Christian era were the Jewish synagogues of the "dispersion". It is too often assumed that relations between the Jews and their Gentile neighbours were uncompromisingly hostile and that no mutual influence was possible. This is to ignore the active propaganda which distinguished post-exilic Judaism. The Pharisees, who inherited the tradition of the prophets, regarded Judaism as a way of life to be preached among the peoples until the whole world adopted it, and for the purpose of propaganda never hesitated to appropriate such Gentile ideas as were not flagrantly incompatible with Judaism. In the exchange of ideas between subject peoples which took place under the successors of Alexander, the Jewish masses, as we have seen, took over from the Persians the conception of life as an age-long war between good and evil powers, at the end of which in the not distant future the dead would be raised and rewarded according to their works, the good and true living happily ever after in a kingdom of God on earth. The Essenes, the Utopian "left wing" of the Pharisees, seem to have taken over, perhaps throughy channels, the Orphic idea of the imprisonment "of the soul in the body and its release from bondage by ascetic living. And as we have seen, for propagandist purposes Jews of the "dispersion" circulated oracles in the borrowed name of the Greek prophetess Sibylla.

It is therefore not surprising that, in the day-to-day exchange of ideas with their Gentile neighbours, some Jews should have taken up the idea that the Messiah, the representative of God on earth in the new order about to be, must like an ancient king have suffered death and risen again that his people might live. There were many factors to contribute to such a belief. The last centuries before the Christian era were a period of continual struggle against oppression not only on the part of conquered Asiatics, but on the part of the exploited classes in Greece and Italy too. Many rebel leaders met violent ends and were remembered as martyrs.

Late in the third century B.C. Cleomenes, king of Sparta, embarked on a revolutionary policy of cancellation of debts, redistribution of land and emancipation of the helots. He was driven out of Sparta by a Macedonian army and fled to Alexandria. There he tried to raise a revolt against Ptolemy IV, but failed and put an end to his life. In the story preserved by Plutarch, Cleomenes and twelve friend have a last supper together on the night before his death. He is betrayed to his enemies and bids his friends to cease their hopeless fight. His dead body is crucified. A prodigy occurs after the crucifixion; and the people of Alexandria call him a "hero and son of the gods". The parallels with the Gospel story are too many to be accidental. From the apotheosis of a dead leader it is a short step to the expectation of a miraculous return. Under the successors of Alexander, as we have seen, there were friendly relations and at one time negotiations for an alliance between Sparta and Jerusalem. The story of Cleomenes must have been known to the Jews, of whom there were plenty in Alexandria. His policy had much in common with their own Deuteronomic legislation. Legends of his end may well have been told among the exploited classes, Jewish and Gentile, as an example of what befell the people's friends. They were betrayed, they died, they were crucified; and then? The people did not believe that that was the end.

Fifty years after the death of Cleomenes at Alexandria came the Jewish people's struggle against the Seleucid Empire, in the course of which Jewish blood was shed like water by the Greek conquerors and their priestly and aristocratic collaborators. We have already seen the mark made by those events on contemporary Jewish literature. It was just at that time that the Persian belief in the resurrection first found articulate expression in the books of Daniel and Enoch. To those who expected martyred patriots to return and share in the good time coming, nothing could be more natural than to suppose that such martyrs, or one such martyr, would preside over the regenerated world.

In the next century this idea comes into the open. The Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus in his repression of the Pharisees about 88 B.C. crucified eight hundred rebels, slew their wives and children before their eyes and forced thousands of refugees to fly to Egypt. Not long after that time an Alexandrian Jew wrote the apocryphal book called the Wisdom of Solomon. He may have Alexander Jannaeus in mind when he speaks of ungodly rulers putting the righteous to torture and shameful death. He comforts his readers with the assurance that "the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God", and that though "in the eyes of the foolish" they seem to die, "they are in peace" and will receive their reward.

They shall judge nations, and have dominion over peoples; And the Lord shall reign over them for evermore."¹⁴

Here the martyrs are to rule the earth, but no individual is singled out. That step is taken in the Essene scroll already mentioned, written between 48 and 41 B.C. and recently discovered near the Dead Sea. In it a martyred leader of the Essenes is himself to reappear and judge the world. From that time on the idea of a suffering Messiah was in the air.

For over fifty years Freethinkers have wrangled over the question whether "the Gospel Jesus" ever lived or not. Much of the Gospel story can undoubtedly be accounted for as myth. The name "Jesus " is a Greek transliteration of "Joshua" and means "Jah is deliverance". In the Old Testament Joshua is the leader of Israel in the conquest of Canaan. It would be natural to give the name in anticipation to the predestined deliverer of Israel from the Roman yoke. In fact we have evidence that it was so given. In an anti-Roman Sibylline Oracle circulated about A.D. 80 and containing no other evidence of Christian authorship we find the lines.

Then shall one come again from heaven, an excellent hero,
He who spread his hands on a tree of beautiful fruitage --
Best of the Hebrews all, who stayed the sun in his course once."¹⁵

Here a crucified Messiah is explicitly identified with the legendary Joshua who made the sun stand still. In the Apocalypse of Ezra, another anti-Roman work put together towards the end of the first century, the coming Messiah is explicitly called Jesus, though the work is not otherwise noticeably Christian. Evidently many Jewish patriots in the first century hoped for the return of Joshua to inaugurate a new world-order on the ruins of the Roman Empire. The phrase "Messiah Joshua" or (in Greek) "Christ Jesus" was doubtless a revolutionary slogan before it became associated with any historical individual. To any actual claimant to Messiahship the name "Jesus", a common enough Jewish name, would undoubtedly be an asset.

In the Gospels and Acts (but not, it is to be noted, in the Epistles or the Apocalypse) Jesus is called a "Nazarene" or "Nazoraean"; and in the Talmud he and his followers are regularly called Notzrim. This name is usually derived from Nazareth, called in Matthew and Luke a "city" of Galilee.¹⁶ But though Nazareth is today a well-known town and has been so since the fourth century, when pilgrimages to the "holy places" began, it is curious that neither the Old Testament, Josephus nor the Talmud mention such a place. If it existed in the first century, it must have been an insignificant village; and it is as a village that Julius Africanus, who lived in Palestine in the third century, refers to it. It is, on the face of it, odd that a sect should be named after a small village in which its founder lived rather than after the founder himself.

Now Epiphanius, a bishop of the fourth century and a native of Palestine, tells us that a sect of " Nasaraeans ",¹⁷ existing in Syria and Palestine in his day, had existed beforelhe Christian era; that they were Jews who recognized a Messiah: and that they used the same sacred book as the " Ossaeans . These are our old friends the Essenes, whose part in revolutionary Judaism we have already noted and who hoped, as we have seen, for the return of a martyred leader of their own. Another odd fact is that a sect called the Mandaeans, a few hundred of whom survive today like a historical fossil in Iraq, revere John the Baptist as the true prophet and denounce Jesus as a liar and impostor, but none the less call their chief members Nasoraye (Nazoraeans). All this does not look as if" Nazoraean " were derived from Nazareth. The name is more likely connected with a Hebrew word natzar, meaning to watch, guard or keep. Notzrim or " Nazoraeans " would mean " keepers " of secrets or of some special rules or usages. A pre-Christian sect cannot have been called after Jesus the Nazoraean; but he, if he existed, may well have been so called as a member of the sect. The Nazareth story may have been invented to explain the name " Nazoraean " by people ignorant of Hebrew and hazy enough about geography to make a city of an insignificant village.

There is nothing improbable in the statement that Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judaea under Tiberius from A.D. 26 to 36, crucified Jesus the Nazoraean as a would-be Messiah or king of the Jews. But mythical material has certainly contributed to the Gospel story, which in its earliest shape was not written down before A.D. 70.

We saw in Chapter I that in ancient Babylon it was an annual custom to dress a condemned prisoner in the king's robes, seat him on the king's throne and allow him to enjoy himself for five days, after which he was stripped, scourged and hanged or impaled. This points back to the prehistoric sacrifice of the chief, but it also points forward to the Gospel story, where Pilate's soldiers robe Jesus in purple, crown him with thorns and salute him as king of the Jews before leading him to crucifixion. No followers of Jesus can have been at the Roman headquarters to witness the mockery. In the oldest Gospel source they have " all left him and fled."¹⁸ Not until Luke do we read of any disciples staying to see the crucifixioneven "afar off".¹⁹ Not until John do we read of any standing by the cross. The mock robing and crowning, therefore, will not bear examination as history. But we can see how the story came to be told. Human sacrifice was widespread in ancient society -- in Babylonia, in Egypt, even in Greece. Until the second century A.D. human victims were offered on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia, at Alos in Thessaly, at Salamis in Cyprus. These barbarities must have bitten deep into the consciousness ofthe exploited classes from whom victims were invariably drawn. Nothing afforded a readier handle to Jewish propaganda. On nothing did the Jewish people more justly pride themselves than on their abolition of the human sacrifices still sanctioned by pagan religion. When the story of a crucified Messiah came to be told, nothing would be more natural than for details to be supplied from those sacrificial rites which were practised in the pagan world at the expense of helpless social outcasts.

The expectation that a martyred Messiah would return victorious over death assimilated the Messianic idea to those of the mystery cults. It is not surprising that those who told the story should have depicted him as crucified, dead and buried, and as raised on the third day -- " the first fruits of them that sleep."²⁰ There is probably a conscious echo of the mystery cults in the analogy drawn in i Corinthians between the growth of a grain of corn and the putting on of immortality by mortal men.

If the earliest features of the Gospel legend have many parallels in pagan cults, still more is this the case with later features. The virgin birth, related only in one dubious paragraph of Matthew and two palpably interpolated verses of Luke, is typical of such accretions. It is a pagan myth ultimately traceable to the prehistoric age when the nature of paternity was unknown and every child, therefore, was reputed to be virgin-born. Hence the gods, made in the image of man, were originally virgin-born too. In one Egyptian myth Isis conceives Horus after her husband, Osiris, is dead. The Babylonian mother-goddess, Ishtar,had originally no male counterpart. A Phrygian variant of Ishtar, Nana. was the virgin-mother of Attis. In the Hesiodic Theogony Hera bears Hephaestus, the fire-god, without sexual union. In such myths the mother-goddess was originally earth, the mother of mankind and of all things needful to mankind. Until paternity was understood, she had no need of a consort. Later a father-god was associated with her and, as patriarchal and class society developed, might come to dominate her, as Zeus dominates Hera in Greek mythology. But although the Graeco-Roman pantheon conformed to the pattern of patriarchal society, the tradition of virgin goddesses and virgin births lingered among the masses. Even in the time of Plutarch (about A.D. 100) such births were believed in Egypt to be not impossible. When, therefore, Christianity spread to people holding these beliefs, a story that Jesus had been conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary was inserted in Matthew and Luke. That the Fourth Gospel deliberately ignores the story shows that it was not received with unanimity. The words put into the mouth of Jesus, "Woman, what have I to do with thee?"²¹ are the evangelist's reproof to those who would attribute to a mere Jewess a part in the salvation of the world.

Similarly the story in Luke of the infant Jesus lying in a manger is traceable to the legend of the pastoral god Hermes, who is represented on an ancient Greek vase and in a Homeric hymn as cradled in a basket and surrounded by oxen.²² The miracle of turning water into wine, related in the Fourth Gospel, is traceable to a rite performed in more than one Greek city at the winter festival of Dionysus. In the isle of Andros -- a short sail across the Aegean from Ephesus, where the Fourth Gospel was written -- a fountain in the temple of Dionysus was believed to run with wine every year on January 5. It can hardly be accidental that the Catholic Church commemorates the miracle of Cana on January 6.

Such was the sort of floating legend which went to the building up of the story of Jesus. In part this material was older than history, like the myths of Osiris, Tammuz, Attis and Dionysus. In part it had already been attached to historical figures like Cleomenes and the victims of Alexander Jannaeus and Aristobulus. The exponents of the myth theory could have made their case stronger than it is by paying more attention to the class struggles in the ancient world. Being, with a few honourable exceptions, imbued with a bourgeois contempt for mass movements, they have contented themselves mostly with cataloguing similarities between stories told of pagan gods and stories told of Jesus, and with searching the heavens for astral explanations of both, leaving unanswered the question why people who needed a mystery cult should have gone to the trouble of manufacturing a new one at great inconvenience and danger to themselves instead of availing themselves of the abundant existing facilities.

If we consider that ancient society was the scene of fierce struggles between masters and slaves, rich and poor, imperialists and subject peoples, in which every rebel took his life in his hand; if we consider that one revolutionary leader after another, with his followers, met a violent end, often by the horrible punishment of crucifixion inflicted on rebels in slave societies (eight hundred Pharisees crucified at Jerusalem by Alexander Tannaeus, six thousand slave soldiers of Spartacus crucified along the Appian Way, two thousand Jewish rebels crucified by Varus); if we consider that Jews and Gentiles were not mutually isolated, but mingled daily in the Mediterranean cities, the poorer Jews propagating their vision of a coming Messiah and in the process assimilating it to the poorer Gentiles' dream of a redeeming god triumphant over death -- we shall not need to go to the signs of the zodiac for an explanation of the crucifixion and resurrection stories.²³

We shall understand too why Judaism, rather than any existing mystery cult, had to provide the new movement with its ideology. The existing mystery cults, however popular in their origin, had one by one become part and parcel of Roman State religion. The cult of Dionysus, after a short attempt at suppression in the second century B.C., had been found politically innocuous and amalgamated with that of the Italian fertility-god Liber. The cult of Attis. which the Roman republic had tolerated among aliens and slaves, but banned to Roman citizens, was by Claudius opened to all and incorporated with the State religion. That of Isis, which the republic had suppressed again and again and which even Tiberius forbade in Italy, was soon afterwards freed from restrictions and established throughout the Roman world. All these cults could easily be fitted into the State religion, since all, however transformed to meet the needs of the urban masses, bore unmistakeable marks of their prehistoric peasant origin. Judaism alone had been deliberately expurgated and turned into an ideology aiming at a reign of righteousness on earth. For that reason it could not be fitted into the religion of the Graeco-Roman ruling class, which deliberately exploited ancient ritual and myth as engines of government. For the same reason Judaism, with a little adaptation, was eminently capable of providing an ideology for the uprooted and disaffected masses of the Mediterranean cities. Much of the Gospel story can be explained as a fusion of the Jewish hope of a Messiah with legends of a redeeming god or of some martyred leader which were current among the masses towards the time of the Christian era.²⁴

But when all this has been said (and mythicists have rendered a lasting service to history by saying it) there remain traces of history in the Gospel story. Take, for example, this passage from a source used by both Matthew and Luke:

" From the days of John the Baptist until now
The kingdom of God is taken by violence,
And violent men take it by force."²⁵

Now John the Baptist is an historical individual. Josephus says that Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great and tetrarch of Galilee and Transjordan from 4 B.C. to A.D. 39, executed John without trial in order to prevent a revolt, since the people ' seemed ready to do anything " on John's advice;²⁶ and that the utter defeat of Antipas in 36 by the Arab king Aretas seemed to some a punishment for John's martyrdom. The authenticity of this passage has been denied, but on inadequate grounds. It was known to Origen in the third century. If a Christian had forged it in the period between Josephus and Origen, he would have followed the Gospels more closely than the passage in fact does. Josephus gives no date for the death of John; but it must have been before 36.

Though not an interpolation, the account of the Baptist in Josephus is undoubtedly doctored. We are told that John was a good man, a preacher of virtue, justice and piety, and that he bade the Jews " come together through baptism; for baptism would be acceptable to God if they made use of it not as an expiation of any sins, but as a purification of the body, the soul having been first purified by righteousness ".²⁷ This, as it stands, is unintelligible. Inculcation of cleanliness and godliness would not have led Antipas to fear revolution, unless that Roman puppet-prince was a maniac for dirt, which there is no reason to suppose. Something has been cut out. The Synoptic Gospels fill the gap. John proclaimed that the kingdom of God -- the revolutionary kingdom foretold by Daniel, which was to break in pieces and consume all the kingdoms of the earth -- was at hand; that the Messiah would soon winnow the earth, garner the wheat and burn up the chaff in unquenchable fire. Baptism by total immersion in water -- a rite practised on the admission of proselytes to Judaism, a symbolic drowning, signifying death to paganism and resurrection to a new way of life -- was to be undergone by all John's recruits as a token of national purification from the pollution of Roman rule. It was also an occasion for mass rallies. The people were to " come together through baptism ". This could easily turn into a revolt. Antipag did no more than a client-prince would naturally do in executing the agitator.

The Gospels minimize the revolutionary significance of John by a romantic story in which he reproves Antipas for marrying his sister-in-law Herodias and incurs her deadly hate. The incestuous union is historical. But the rest of the story is made up. Salome, the daughter of Herodias, at the time when she is said to have danced John's head off, was the wife of her uncle Philip, tetrarch of north-eastern Palestine -- if indeed she was not his widow; for he died in 34. The Herods had more serious reasons for killing: Tohn than his censure of their tangled domestic relations.

The Gospel passage quoted earlier proves that the primitive Christians who repeated it regarded John's movement as revolutionary and their own movement as a continuation of John's. In both Matthew and Mark the preaching of Jesus too is summed up in the slogan: " The kingdom of God is at hand."²⁸ In the source from which Luke took his stories of the births of John and Jesus, the destiny of both is foretold in frankly revolutionary language -- to " put down princes from thrones ", to " exalt them of low degree ", and to win for Israel " salvation from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us ".²⁹

Further evidence of the nature of the earliest Christianity is to be found in a source used by all three Synoptics. After encountering a rich man who refuses to abandon his possessions, Jesus says:

"'How hardly shall they that have riches
Enter into the kingdom of God? . . .
It is easier for a camel
To go through the eye of a needle,
Than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.'
And they were exceedingly astonished,
Saying to him,
'Then who can be saved?'
Looking upon them, Jesus says,
'With men it is impossible,
But not with God:
For all things are possible with God.'
Peter began to say to him,
'Lo, we have left all,
And have followed thee.'
Said Jesus,
'Verily I say to you,
There is no man that has left
House, or brothers, or sisters,
Or mother, or father, or children, or lands,
For my sake, and for the gospel's sake,
But he shall receive a hundredfold,
Now in this time,
Houses, and brothers, and sisters,
And mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions,
And in the age to come eternal life.
But many that are first shall be last;
And the last first.'"³⁰

It is instructive to see how the different Synoptics handle this passage. The above is the version of Mark. A source used by Matthew and Luke -- probably emanating from Palestine, where the twelve Apostles were held in honour and Paul was not -- contains a special promise to the twelve:

"You shall sit on twelve thrones,
Judging the twelve tribes of Israel."

It is inconceivable that the materialist promise of "houses and lands now" should have been inserted in the second century in a Gospel originally spiritual; but it is quite natural that an originally materialist promise should have been deleted. We see here an evolution from a material kingdom of God on earth to a spiritual kingdom beyond the grave. In Mark, Jesus promises his followers, at the cost of persecution for a time, houses, lands and human comradeship now, and eternal life hereafter. Luke deletes the details. Matthew deletes earthly rewards altogether and leaves only the promise of eternal life. John takes the final step by making Jesus say explicitly: "My kingdom is not of this world."³¹ This evolution points to a movement originally more this-worldly and revolutionary than our much-edited Gospels describe.

Confirmation is to be found in the accounts of the Barabbas episode. This episode is itself incredible: no Roman governor in a disturbed province, and least of all such a one as Pilate, could have countenanced such a custom as the release of a political prisoner selected by the people. But the way in which this incredible story is told is nevertheless instructive. In Mark we read:

"There was one called Barabbas lying bound with the insurgents,
Men who in the insurrection had committed murder."³²

Another sort of rehandling may be observed in passages which relate the miraculous. In describing the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, Mark says:

"Straightway coming up out of the water,
He saw the heavens rent asunder,
And the Spirit as a dove descending on him:
And a voice came out of the heavens,
'Thou art my beloved Son,
In thee I am well pleased.'"³³

In relating miraculous cures at Capernaum, Mark says:

"They brought to him all that were sick,
And that were possessed by demons . . .
And he healed many that were sick with divers diseases,
And cast out many demons."³⁴

In such passages Mark evidently preserves an older version, which Matthew often amends and Luke nearly always. It is inconceivable that Mark should have limited the power of an originally omnipotent Jesus. We are witnessing the progressive growth of a legend. Some miracles a Messiah had to perform. Miracles were in the air; Tacitus relates them of Vespasian. But in the earlier version the powers of the prophet are limited and fail him as he dies. Later the limitations are swept away to suit the taste of Christian congregations bent on refashioning Jesus in the likeness of a god.

Yet no Synoptic goes so far as formally to deify Jesus. That step is taken in the Fourth Gospel, where Jesus is God from the beginning, wearing only the outer form of a man, never tempted (the temptation story is suppressed), never marvelling, omnipotent and omniscient from first to last, and at length lays down his life after announcing his power to take it again. Thus the legend evolves from the less to the more marvellous, from a divine voice audible to Jesus only to a divine voice audible to all, from the cure of many patients to the cure of all, from surprised inability to cure unbelievers to a serene refusal to do so -- in short, from a man "approved of God"³⁷ to God who "became flesh and dwelt among us".³⁸ We may consequently, by a process analogous to mathematical extrapolation, infer at the beginning of this evolution a man round whom mythical matter gathered rather than a myth pure and simple.

The source of the Synoptic tradition seems to have been written down about the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The references to that event in all the Synoptics are too specific to allow of an earlier date; and internal evidence shows that it must have been written down soon afterwards. This will appear if we scrutinize the passages where Jesus is made to prophesy the Jewish tragedy.

First, we have a passage all but identical in Matthew and Luke:

"Woe to thee, Chorazin!
Woe to thee, Bethsaida!
For if in Tyre and Sidon had been done
The mighty works which were done in you,
Long ago in sackcloth and ashes
They would have sat and repented.
Howbeit I say to you,
It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon
In the day of judgment than for you.
And thou, Capernaum,
Shalt thou be exalted to heaven?
Thou shalt be brought down to Hades."³⁹

Next, we have a piece of invective varying somewhat in Matthew and Luke, but evidently based on a common source:

"Therefore I send to you
Prophets and wise men and scribes:
Some of them shall you kill and crucify;
And some of them shall you scourge in your synagogues,
And persecute from city to city:
That on you may come all the righteous blood
Shed on the earth
From the blood of Abel the righteous
To the blood of Zachariah son of Barachiah,
Whom you slew between the sanctuary and the altar . . .
Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
Who kills the prophets,
And stones them that are sent to her!
How often would I have gathered thy children together,
Even as a hen gathers
Her chickens under her wings,
And you would not!
Behold, your house is left to you desolate.
For I say to you, you shall not see me
Henceforth, till you shall say,
'Blessed is he that comes
In the name of the Lord.'"⁴⁰

This is not a discourse of Jesus; indeed it is not a discourse at all, but a prophecy written, like other prophecies, in rhythmical form. Near the end, in fact, the Greek drops into rhyme. The passage bears the imprint of the events of 66-70. " Zachariah son of Barachiah" has puzzled commentator after commentator. The Old Testament mentions a Zechariah who was stoned; but he was not the son of Barachiah; and as he died about 800 B.C., it is hard to see why he should be singled out as the last of a series of martyrs. The prophet Zechariah is called son of Berechiah; but we have no evidence that he was murdered. Josephus, however, mentions a Zacharias, son of Baruch, a rich citizen of Jerusalem, who was lynched in 68 "in the middle of the temple" as a suspected traitor. "Baruch" and "Barachiah" are variants of the same name. There can hardly be a doubt that this invective, put by an anachronism into the mouth of Jesus, links Zacharias as the latest innocent victim with Abel as the first. Luke, who edits his sources more freely than the other Synoptics, conceals the obvious anachronism by deleting "son of Barachiah", and in minor ways adapts the passage to the taste of Greek churches.

Lastly, we have a passage common to all three Synoptics, though Luke diverges in important particulars from the other two:

"'There shall not be left here Stone on stone,
Which shall not be thrown down. . . .'
And they asked him privately,
'Tell us, when shall these things be?
And what shall be the sign of thy coming,
And of the end of the age?'
And Jesus answering said to them,
'Take heed that none lead you astray.
Many shall come in my name,
Saying, "I am the Christ";
And shall lead many astray.
And you shall hear of wars and rumours of wars:
See that you are not troubled:
For it must needs come to pass;
But the end is not yet.
For nation shall rise against nation,
And kingdom against kingdom:
Then shall be famines and earthquakes in places;
But all these things are the beginning of travail . . .
But when you see the abomination of desolation
Standing where he ought not
(Let him that reads understand)
Then let them that are in Judaea flee_tajthe mountains . . .
But woe to them that are with child
And to them that give suck in those days!
And pray that your flight be not in the winter, nor on a sabbath:
For then shall be great tribulation,
Such as has not been from the beginning of the world
Until now, nor ever shall be.
And except those days had been shortened,
No flesh would have been saved:
But for the elect's sake
Those days shall be shortened . . .
But immediately after the tribulation of those days,
The sun shall be darkened,
And the moon shall not give her light,
And the stars shall fall from heaven,
And the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.
. . . And they shall see the Son of Man
Coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory . . .
Now from the fig tree learn her parable:
When her branch is now become tender and puts forth leaves,
You know that the summer is nigh;
Even so also, when you see all these things,
Know that he is nigh at the doors.
Verily I say unto you,
This generation shall not pass away,
Until all these things are accomplished.
Heaven and earth shall pass away:
But my words shall not pass away.'"⁴¹

This, again, is not a discourse of Jesus, nor a discourse at all, but (as the parenthesis, "Let him that reads understand", shows) a written prophecy. We are reading the outpourings of a prophet carried away by the last agony of Jerusalem. We watch with him the closing scenes of the tragedy -- one fanatic after another setting up as Messiah and winning a following: wars and rumours of wars from end to end of the Roman world in the "year of four emperors" which followed the death of Nero; famine, the accompaniment of a disordered society; earthquakes, such as that of 60, which overthrew Laodicea in Asia Minor, or that of 63 which demolished much of Pompeii and heralded the fatal eruption of 79; the Roman eagles storming Jerusalem; men, women and children fleeing to the mountains from the Roman scourge; the temple burnt to the ground; a nation foundering in misery. The prophet looks for divine intervention, all other hope having sunk below the horizon.

In the main Matthew is closest to the original source. Mark does not diverge very far; but Luke's variations are striking. In the original source the upheavals of 66-70 are called "the beginning of travail" -- the pangs which are to issue in the birth of a new world. By the time when Luke wrote (at the beginning of the second century) it was clear that the Jewish revolt had been nothing of the kind. Luke, therefore, a less careless editor than Matthew or Mark, deletes these words.

In describing the Roman invasion of Judaea Mark preserves an older wording than Matthew. The "abomination of desolation" stands "where he ought not": the Roman eagles are around Jerusalem. In Matthew the "abomination" stands "in the holy place": the city has already fallen. Or the more precise wording may have been substituted in the second century after Hadrian had rebuilt Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina and erected a temple of Jupiter on the site of the demolished temple of Jahveh.

In the original source the fall of Jerusalem is to be followed "immediately" by the signs which portend the coming of the Son of Man. A very few years were enough to falsify this prediction; and that fact helps to date it. Matthew nevertheless lets it pass. Mark deletes "immediately"; but retains the vaguer phrase "in those days". Luke rewrites the whole passage and says that Jerusalem will be "trodden down by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled" -- implying a much longer interval. Yet all three Synoptics, even the relatively careful Luke, retain the flagrantly falsified prophecy that "this generation shall not pass away until all these things are accomplished". All three in another part of the Gospel retain (with inessential variations) a no less falsified prophecy in which Jesus is made to say:

"There are some of them that stand here.
Who shall in no wise taste of death.
Till they see the Son ot Man
Coming in his kingdom."⁴²

Passages like this, common to all three Synoptics, appear to be based on a source dating from about the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. If they put prophecies such as the above into the mouth of a man said to have lived some forty years earlier, the inference that such a man existed is very strong. This does not mean that the utterances attributed to him are authentic. Forty years are ample time for the growth of a legend. But it means that the legend had roots not only in prehistoric myth, but in history as well.

We naturally look to non-Christian sources for confirmation of this conclusion. And immediately we encounter a difficulty. The extant writings of Josephus, the only first-century historian of Palestine who has come down to us, contain only two references to Jesus. One is a flagrant forgery. It refers to Jesus in terms which only a Christian could have used. Jesus is "a wise man, if indeed it be lawful to call him a man". He is "a worker of marvels, a teacher of men who receive the truth with pleasure". He is "the Christ". He rose from death on the third day; and "this and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him" had been predicted by the prophets.⁴³ Origen in the third century knows the paragraph of Josephus on John the Baptist, but not this paragraph on Jesus, for he writes of Josephus as "not believing in Jesus as the Christ".⁴⁴ The first writer to cite the passage is Eusebius in the fourth century -- which dates the interpolation.

The other reference to Jesus in Josephus is a short statement that in A.D. 62 the Jewish high priest, Ananus, executed "James, the brother of Jesus, who was called the Christ, and certain others".⁴⁵ This is cited three times by Origen and may be genuine. The only objection to it is that it would be odd if Josephus referred to Jesus here and nowhere else. Mythicists accordingly reject both passages; and the resultant "silence of Josephus" is one of their trump cards.

But the argument proves too much. Josephus, apart from these two passages, is silent not only on Jesus, but on the whole Christian movement. If this proves that Jesus never existed, it equally proves that no Christians existed in the time of Josephus. Yet we know that they did. We have not only the New Testament, not only the statements of Tacitus and Suetonius that Christians were executed under Nero, but the evidence of the younger Pliny, who as governor of Bithynia in 111-113 came across people who "had once been Christians, but had now (some above three years, others more, and a few above twenty years ago) renounced the profession"⁴⁶ Twenty years from 111-113 take us back to 91-93, the very date at which Josephus wrote his Antiquities and is supposed not to have known of any Christians! The more rigorous and vigorous mythicists get over the difficulty by denouncing not only the whole of the New Testament, but the Annals of Tacitus, the reference to the Christians in Suetonius and the despatch of Pliny to Trajan as one and all forgeries. Such methods are a caricature of Rationalism. It is a pity that they should be used to support a theory which, as we have seen, contains important elements of truth.

We shall understand the silence of Josephus on Christianity if we consider his background and the purpose with which he wrote. Josephus was a wealthy Jewish priest who in the national revolt of 66-70 collaborated with the Romans and was rewarded with Roman citizenship, a pension and a considerable estate. He wrote his Jewish War with the express object of conveying to the Jews and other subjects of the Empire the futility of resistance to Rome. His work was duly approved by Vespasian and Titus; and he continued in imperial favour under Domitian, in whose reign he wrote the Antiquities. To influence his countrymen Josephus stresses his Jewish orthodoxy. But to retain the favour or his Roman patrons he has to insist that Jewish orthodoxy is politically innocuous. He therefore omits as far as possible any reference to the Messianic movement. Only once does he allude to it. Towards the end of the Jewish War he mentions as one motive for the revolt of the Jews "an ambiguous oracle found in their sacred writings, that about that time one from their country should become governor of the habitable earth", and says that it was fulfilled by the accession of Vespasian.⁴⁷ And that is all. Josephus suppresses the fact, known to us from the Dead Sea scrolls, that the Essenes were Messianists. Though inference from the obviously doctored text is hazardous, it seems that he suppresses John the Baptist's preaching of the kingdom of God. And, so far as we can say with certainty, he suppresses the fact of the existence of the Christian movement.

So far as we can say with certainty! But it is rash to dogmatize. The works of Josephus have come down to us through Christian hands. Those who interpolate can also delete. After Christianity became the religion of the Empire, anti-Christian writings were drastically censored. To this censorship we owe the loss of all but fragments of the anti-Christian works of Celsus, Porphyry, Hierocles and Julian. If Josephus wrote a hostile account of the Christian movement, either the censorship destroyed it, or Christian copyists, anticipating the censorship, substituted something more agreeable to the new regime. The extant text of the Antiquities looks as if something of this sort had occurred.

Josephus relates a series of troubles which befell the Jews under the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate. Pilate belonged to the well-to-do Italian middle class which had risen to power under the early emperors in place of the old Roman aristocracy. He was an unimaginative imperialist of an only too familiar type -- the type that tells us even today that Asiatics understand only force and mistake conciliation for weakness. His first act was to insult Jewish feeling by sending a detachment of troops to Jerusalem with standards bearing the image of the emperor. After a five days' demonstration by the people before Pilate's headquarters at Caesarea, the standards were withdrawn. Having thus set the Jews on edge, Pilate proceeded to apply part of the temple treasure to the construction of an aqueduct. This led to a noisy demonstration which Pilate dispersed by means of soldiers in mufti armed with bludgeons, many Jews being killed. Here in the text of Josephus follows the interpolated paragraph on Jesus. Then, continues Josephus, more trouble befell the Jews. Before relating it he tells a story, with no apparent bearing on Jewish history, of the seduction of a lady named Paulina in the temple of Isis at Rome, which led to the suppression of the Isis cult by Tiberius. It is hard to see why this story is inserted. It has been suggested that at this point there was originally a hostile account of Jesus, in which Josephus ridiculed the rumour of his supernatural birth by showing how divine conceptions were fraudulently counterfeited. After the victory of Christianity somebody deleted the account and interpolated the present paragraph on Jesus, but omitted to delete the Paulina story. If so, the later reference to Jesus, which is attested by Origen, can be accepted as genuine. Whether this be so or not, the " silence of Josephus" is not a conclusive argument for the myth theory.

Later Jewish evidence is mainly contained in the Talmud, a collection of rabbinical teaching compiled at dates ranging from the second to the fifth century. As the Talmud is not history, but a commentary on Jewish law and ritual intended exclusively for Jews, none but incidental references to Christianity can be expected. The Mishnah, or portion of the Talmud completed in the second or early in the third century, nowhere explicitly mentions Christianity. The Gemara, or supplementary matter added from the third to the fifth century, contains an anonymous account of a certain Jesus called the Nazoraean (Notzri) who was executed under Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 B.C.) for witchcraft and rebellion. This is merely the answer of the rabbis to the odious charge of judicial murder flung at them by Christians. Yet it is singular that they do not deny the execution of Jesus, and even more singular that they date it so early. Something of the kind may really have happened then. Alexander Jannaeus executed many rebels; and we know from Josephus that he was fond of crucifying his victims. Or the rabbis, who were never good at dates, may have confused Alexander with his son Aristobulus, who, as we saw, executed an Essene leader shortly before 63 B.C. The Essenes and the Nazoraeans were kindred sects and probably had a common origin.

But the Talmud contains a more important piece of evidence, not anonymous and referring to the first century. We read in it that Eliezer ben-Hyrcanus, a well-known rabbi who flourished between A.D. 90 and 130, told his contemporary, the famous rabbi Akiba, this story:

"I once went on the upper street of Sepphoris; there I met one of the disciples of Jesus the Nazoraean, named Jacob of Kephar Sechaniah, who said to me: 'In your law it is written: "Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore into the house of thy God." Is it permissible to use such hire to make a privy for the high priest?' I did not know what to answer him. Then he said to me: 'This is what Jesus the Nazoraean taught me: "Of the hire of a harlot hath she gathered it, and unto the hire of a harlot shall they return it: it has come from dirt, and to the place of dirt it shall go." ' "⁴⁸

Here, if we may credit the Talmud, we have evidence dating from the first century. Eliezer relates an encounter with an actual follower of Jesus, who quotes a sarcastic attack on the priesthood of Jerusalem made long ago by Jesus himself. But can we credit the Talmud? In this case perhaps we can. It is hard to assign any motive for the invention of this story by a Jew. The Jewish people had reason enough to hate the priesthood of the first century; but if later rabbis wanted to attack it, they would hardly have put the attack into the mouth of Jesus, whose following by that time they hated far more. Probably, therefore, Eliezer's story is authentic. If so, this is evidence that Jesus the Nazoraean lived and attacked the Jewish priesthood at some date in the first century not far removed from the traditional date.

Some indirect evidence may be added here. In Matthew there is a story (told in no other Gospel) of the posting of a guard at the sepulchre of Jesus to prevent the theft of the body. After the resurrection the priests bribe the soldiers to say that the disciples stole the body while they slept. This story, says the evangelist, was current among the Jews in his own day. Here we have fiction met by counter-fiction. The Christian story of the empty tomb is countered by a Jewish story of the stolen body, and that by a Christian story of the guard. The fact that such fiction and counter-fiction were exchanged early in the second century, when Matthew was compiled, shows at least that the existence of Jesus was common ground to Jews and Christians. If his very existence could be denied, why did not the Jews deny it?

So incommoded are some mythicists by this fact that in trying to rebut it they fall, one after another, into the simplest booby-trap ever set for the unwary. About the middle of the second century the Christian apologist Justin wrote an imaginary dialogue between a Jewish rabbi named Trypho and himself, in which Trypho attacks and Justin defends Christianity. In the dialogue Trypho, arguing that Jesus cannot be the Messiah, says:

"The Christ, if he is born and exists anywhere, is unknown to others and even to himself, and has no power until Elijah comes and anoints him and makes him manifest to all. You have accepted an idle report and fashioned a sort of Christ for yourselves, and for his sake inconsiderately throw away your lives."⁴⁹

The meaning is plain. According to a Jewish belief the prophet Elijah will miraculously return to earth in order to anoint and proclaim the Messiah. Till then the Messiah, whoever he may be, is unknown. Jesus was not proclaimed by Elijah; therefore he is not the Messiah, and his followers are fools for their pains. Straight enough, one would have thought! But not straight enough for some mythicists. By omitting the words after "unknown" to the end of the first sentence, the passage may be garbled so as to read: "The Christ, if he is born and exists anywhere, is unknown." By stretching a further point and supposing that Trypho, a Jew, could call Jesus "the Christ", he may be made into a good mythicist. Incredible as it must seem, some otherwise reputable scholars play this trick with the text to prove their point. It is dangerous to be wedded to a theory -- even to a theory which has played a progressive part in its day.

Tacitus, relating Nero's persecution of the Christians, states that Christ, after whom the sect was named, "suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate".⁵⁰ Some mythicists try to dispose of this evidence by reviving the theory of a nineteenth-century crank that the Annals of Tacitus were forged by a Florentine scholar of the fifteenth century, Poggio Bracciolini. This theory was exploded by the subsequent discovery of coins and inscriptions confirming facts previously known only from the Annals.

Other mythicists, admitting the bulk of the Annals to be genuine, pronounce the account of the Neronian persecution a Christian interpolation. But it is hard to see why any Christian should have written it. It is violently hostile to Christianity, calling it a "mischievous superstition" and its devotees "criminals" who deserve "extreme and exemplary punishment" for their "abominations" and their "hatred against mankind".⁵¹ Those are not the sentiments of a Christian interpolator, but of a conservative Roman senator.

Others, accepting the passage as genuine, urge that Tacitus only repeated what he heard from Christians -- either at Rome or as proconsul of Asia in 114. But why should Tacitus rely on Christian evidence? He was born under Nero, entered public life under Vespasian and held high office under Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. He had ample opportunities in the last quarter of the first century of hearing the official view of the origin of Christianity without going for information to the adherents of what to him was a criminally subversive movement. The statement in the Annals is exactly the sort of information which we should expect him to pick up from his colleagues in office and in the senate.

The fact is that no ancient author whose opinion is known to us questions the historicity of Jesus. The statement of the younger Pliny, governor of Bithynia and Pontus from 111 to 113, that Christians in his province sang hymns "to Christ as to a god" tells us what they thought of Jesus, not what Pliny thought. Half a century later the satirist Lucian refers to Jesus as a "crucified sophist".⁵² Celsus, a Platonic philosopher who about 178 wrote against the Christians a work known only from Origen's reply, calls Jesus a "ringleader of sedition".⁵³ Hierocles, an imperial governor who attacked Christianity at the end of the third century in a work quoted by Lactantius, describes Jesus as a bandit leader with nine hundred followers. It is arguable that Lucian, Celsus and Hierocles had no independent information, but merely drew their own conclusions from the Gospels. This is consistent with Lucian's brief allusion. But Celsus, from the fragments quoted by Origen, stands out as an able and careful writer, and Hierocles had access to official sources. The epithet "bandit", invariably applied by imperialists to revolutionaries, suggests that these writers had access to accounts independent of the New Testament.

Pagan and Jewish evidence, so far as it survives, as well as the internal evidence of the Synoptic Gospels, is against the undiluted myth theory, though it does not affect the important contribution which mythicism must make to any true solution.

The earliest strata of the Gospels -- proved to be such by internal evidence and by a comparative study of the Synoptics -- point back to a revolutionary movement led first by John the Baptist and then by Jesus the Nazoraean, and aimed at the overthrow of Roman and Herodian rule in Palestine and the establishment of an earthly "kingdom of God" in which the first would be last and the last first, the rich sent empty away and the poor filled with good things and given houses and land. The followers of John and Jesus were called Notzrimor Nazoraeans, not from the village of Nazareth, but from the Hebrew word natzar, "to keep" -- either as keepers of secrets or as strict keepers of the Jewish law. This last is rather suggested by the saying preserved in Matthew v, 20:

"Except your righteousness shall exceed
That of the scribes and Pharisees,
You shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven."

The Nazoraeans were probably an offshoot of the Essenes. This appears from the close similarity between many of their rules. We have already seen that according to Epiphanius the "Nasaraeans" used the same sacred book as the "Ossaeans". The Essenes, says Josephus, "are despisers of riches. . . . Nor is there anyone to be found among them who has more than another; for it is a law among them that those who come to them must let what they have be common to the whole order. ... So there is, as it were, one patrimony among all the brethren".⁵⁴ Similarly in the Synoptic Gospels:

"Where your treasure is,
There will your heart be also . . .
No man can serve two masters . . .
You cannot serve God and mammon . . .
Seek first his kingdom, and his righteousness,
And all these things shall be added to you . . .
Whatsoever thou hast, sell,
And give to the poor,
And thou shalt have treasure in heaven:
And come, follow me."⁵⁵

The Essenes, says Josephus, "carry nothing at all with them when they travel into remote parts, though they take their weapons with them for fear of thieves. Accordingly there is, in every city where they live, one appointed particularly to take care of strangers and to provide garments and other necessaries for them. . . . Nor do they allow the change of garments or of shoes till they are first entirely torn to pieces or worn out by time. Nor do they either buy or sell anything among themselves, but everyone of them gives what he has to him that wants it, and receives from him again in lieu what may be convenient for himself".⁵⁶ Similarly in the Synoptics we read:

"Get you no gold, nor silver,
Nor brass in your girdles;
No wallet for the journey,
Nor two coats,
Nor shoes, nor staff:
For the labourer is worthy of his food.
And into whatsoever city or village you shall enter,
Search out who in it is worthy;
And there abide till you go forth."⁵⁷

The Essenes, says Josephus, "dispense their anger after a just manner and restrain their passion. They are eminent for fidelity and are ministers of peace; whatsoever they say is firmer than an oath; but swearing is avoided by them, and they esteem it worse than perjury; for they say that he who cannot be believed without swearing by God is already condemned".⁵⁸ Similarly in the Synoptics anger and oaths are forbidden.

Josephus, it will be noted, says that the Essenes carry weapons to defend themselves from thieves. From the part which he assigns to them in the struggle with Rome, it seems that they could put their weapons to other uses too and were less absolute pacifists than is usually made out. Similarly in the Synoptics, in spite of the injunctions to turn the other cheek and love our enemies, we see a movement of which the revolutionary character has been almost obliterated in the extant records. "From the days of John the Baptist the kingdom of God is taken by violence." It is significant that the Gospels, while they often attack the Pharisees and Sadducees, never attack the Zealots, and that a Zealot is included in the lists of the twelve apostles. It is possible for a movement to impose a rigid discipline on its members in the matter of private quarrels without renouncing the use of force in the common cause.

The movement of John the Baptist was nipped in the bud by Antipas. A Nazoraean attempt to seize Jerusalem led to the crucifixion of Jesus by Pilate. The date of these events is unknown; but they must have taken place before 36, in which year Antipas was defeated by Aretas, and Pilate was recalled to Rome. The Essenes, as we have seen, even before the Christian era believed in a Messiah who would return from the dead; and so did the Nazoraeans. According to the Synoptics Jesus was believed by some to be John the Baptist risen from death, and by others to be Elijah or one of the ancient prophets. The whole history of the Messianic idea from Daniel onwards shows that it was the projection of the hopes of a revolutionary movement which had taken root among simple and ignorant people, attaching itself to leader after leader and able to survive the death of many such. We need not wonder that it survived the death of Jesus. In the words of the bitterly conservative and hostile Tacitus, "a most mischievous superstitition, checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular".⁵⁹

This reconstruction in no way diminishes the importance of the mythicist contribution to the history of Christianity. Traditional Christianity, and any attempt to trace traditional Christianity to a unique personal founder, alike break down on the evidence. The religion officially established in the fourth century, for which history has to account, was not the cult of a dead Jewish Messiah, but the cult of a redeemer-god who differed from others only in having a local habitation in first-century Palestine and a Jewish name with Messianic associations. In formulating the creeds of the Church the Pauline Epistles and the discourses of the Fourth Gospel were to play a far greater part than the revolutionary and apocalyptic propaganda of the Synoptics. The Synoptic Gospels themselves were edited and re-edited ("three times, four times and many times", says the acute critic Celsus⁶⁰) into a ragged conformity with Pauline theology. Somehow a historical individual of whom we know very little, but whose existence we infer from the evidence of Tacitus and the Talmud and from an analysis of the Synoptic documents, became the subject of demonstrably mythical stories -- stories of an incarnate God; a virgin birth; a mystical death, burial and resurrection reminiscent of slain gods of prehistoric origin; a mystical feeding of his people on his flesh, turned to bread, and his blood, turned to wine, by which they became partakers in his eternal life. Not only so, but in centres remote from Palestine, such as the Aegean cities where the Pauline Epistles took shape, the myth of the incarnate God, and not the career of a historic Jesus, was the basis of the cult from the first. Paul knows no more of the Nazoraean Jesus than the Synoptics know of the pre-existent Christ. The social genesis of these contradictory factors and the history of their fusion into traditional Christianity constitute the problem to be solved.

1 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, III, 39. By "Hebrew" Papias probably meant Aramaic, the vernacular language of Palestine at that time. A Greek would need to be very erudite to know the difterence.

2 Romans i, 3.

3 I Corinthians ix, 5; Galatians i, 19.

4 2 Corinthians iv, 4.

5 Colossians i, 15.

6 1 Cor. viii, 6.

7 I Corinthians ii, 6-8.

8 Romans xiii, I.

9 See next chapter.

10 Revelation i, 17; ii, 8; xiii, 8; xix, 19-21; xxii, 13.

11 Neue Zeit, No. XIII, 36.

12 L. Gordon Rylands, The Beginnings of Gnostic Christianity, chap. VI. Compare the Pauline formula: "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."

13 See note 12.

14 Wisdom ii-iii.

15 Sibylline Oracles, V, 256-258.

16 Matthew ii, 23; Luke i, 26; ii, 39; iv, 29.

17 The difference in spelling is unimportant. The Hebrew letter tzade had no Greek equivalent and could be represented by both "s" and "z".

18 Matthew xxvi, 56; Mark xiv, 50.

19 Luke, xxiii, 49.

20 I Corinthians xv, 20.

21 John ii, 4.

22 In the Homeric hymn the infant Hermes steals the oxen from Apollo -- a touch of Homeric humour dating from an age of border war and cattle-lifting.

23 "We still bow the knee before the Cross, which, like the Orphic Wheel, was once the symbol of a contemporary reality." Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens, chap. IX.

24 I have omitted reference to Mithraism for two reasons, (1) The vogue of Mithraism came later. (2) Mithra, though in many ways a passable "pagan Christ", did not die or rise again.

25 Matthew xi, 12. Cf. Luke xvi, 16.

26 Josephus, Antiquities, XVIII, 5, 2.

27 Ibid.

28 Matthew iv, 17; Mark i, 14-15.

29 Luke i, 52, 71.

30 Mark x, 23, 25-31. Cf. Matthew xix, 23-30; Luke xviii, 24-30; xxii, 28-30.

31 John xviii, 36.

32 Mark xv, 7. Cf. Matthew xxvii, 16; Luke xxiii, 19.

33 Mark i, 10-11. Cf. Matthew iii, 17.

34 Mark i, 32, 34. Cf. Matthew viii, 16; Luke iv, 40.

35 Mark iii, 10. Cf. Matthew xii, 15.

36 Mark vi, 5-6. Cf. Matthew xiii, 58.

37 Acts ii, 22.

38 John i, 14.

39 Matthew xi, 21-23; Luke x, 13-15.

40 Matthew xxiii, 34-39. Cf. Luke xi, 49-51; xiii, 34-35.

41 Matthew xxiv, 2-8, 15-16, 19-22, 29-30, 32-35; Mark xiii, 2-8, 14, 17-20, 24-26, 28-31. Cf. Luke xxi, 6-11, 21, 23, 25-27, 29-33.

42 Matthew xvi, 28; Mark ix, I; Luke ix, 27.

43 Josephus, Antiquities, XVIII, 3, 3.

44 Origen, Against Celsus, I, 47.

45 Josephus, Antiquities, XX, 9, 1.

46 Pliny, Letters, X, 97.

47 Josephus, Jewish War, VI, 5, 4.

48 Aboda Zara, 16b-17a, quoted by Eisler, The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist, Appendix III.

49 Justin, Dialogue, 8.

50 Tacitus, Annals, XV, 44.

51 Ibid.

52 Lucian, The Death of Peregrinus, XIII.

53 Origen, Against Celsus, VIII, 14. Sec chapter VIII, §8.

54 Josephus, Jewish War, II, 8, 3.

55 Matthew vi, 21, 24, 33; xix, 21. Cf. Mark x, 21; Luke xii, 31, 34; xvi, 13; xviii, 22.

56 Josephus, Jewish War, II, 8, 4.

57 Matthew x, 9-11. Cf. Mark vi, 8-10; Luke ix, 3-4; x, 4-7.

58 Josephus, Jewish War, II, 8, 6.

59 Tacitus, Annals, XV, 44.

60 Origen, Against Celsus, II, 27.