A Short History of Christianity: Second Edition, Revised, With AdditionsRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
History
A Short History of Christianity: Second Edition, Revised, With Additions
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Church history
Judaic manipulation, however, was not lacking. Though Jesus is
born of a virgin, it is in the manner of Jewish theosophy; for the
"Spirit of God" broods over Mary as it had done on the germinal deep
in Genesis. Having been a Jewish Saviour before he was a Gentile or
Samaritan Christ, Jesus had further to satisfy as many as possible of
the Jewish Messianic requirements. He must be of the line of David,
and born at Bethlehem; but inasmuch as Jewish tradition expected
both a Messiah Ben-David and a Messiah Ben-Joseph--the latter being
apparently a Samaritan requirement [13]--he was made Ben-David by
royal descent, and Ben-Joseph through his putative father. Yet again,
there being Messianists who denied the necessity that the Anointed One
should descend from David, there was inserted in the gospels a story
in which Jesus repudiates such descent; the two opposed theories being
thus alike harboured, without discomfort and without explanation. In
the same fashion the ascetics of the movement made the Son of Man
poor and homeless, while the anti-ascetics made him a wine-drinker,
ready to sit at meat with publicans and sinners. For the Jews, too,
he had to raise the "widow's son" as did Elijah and Elisha in the Old
Testament story--a Hebrew variant of the (pictured?) Gentile myth of
the raising of the dead Attis or Adonis, or the dead child Horos or
Dionysos, further reproduced in the resurrection of the Christ himself;
and there had to be at his birth a massacre of the innocents, as in
the myth of Moses and in the Arab myths of the births of Abraham and
Daniel. Yet again, he had to figure in his crucifixion as bearing the
insignia of royalty, like the sacrificed "only-begotten son" of the
Semitic God El, and the sacrificed God-man of the Babylonian feast
of Sacæa. [14] It may be that Barabbas, "the son of the father,"
is a survival of the same conception and the same ritual usage,
similarly imposed on a narrative of which no part is historical.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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