The Historical Jesus: A Survey of PositionsRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Jesus Christ -- Historicity; Jesus Christ -- Rationalistic interpretations
In that connection it is interesting to note that Sir J. G. Frazer,
who has so warmly contended that, as history cannot be explained
"without the influence of great men," we must accept the historicity
of Jesus, [221] latterly propounds a tentative theory of a historic
original for Osiris, whom he supposes to have been perhaps evolved
from the idealized personality of an ancient King Khent, buried
at Abydos. [222] It is a mere suggestion, and it at once evokes the
reminder that, on the theorist's own general principles, King Khent may
be regarded as having been theocratically identified with the already
existing God. However that may be, the hypothesis does nothing to save
Sir James's irrelevant plea about the operation of "great men" and
"extraordinary minds" in the founding of all religions, for he does
not suggest that King Khent's career in any way resembled the myth
of Osiris, or that he first taught the things Osiris is said to have
taught. So that, in the case of Osiris as of Jesus, the required great
men and extraordinary minds may still, in the terms of the claim, be
inserted at any point rather than in the personage named or suggested
as Founder. [223] If we agree to call the compiler of the Sermon on
the Mount and the parables of the Kingdom and the Prodigal Son and
the Good Samaritan great men and extraordinary minds, Sir James's very
simple argument is turned. And we should still be left asking who were
the historic founders of the cults of Zeus and Brahma and Attis and
Adonis, Dionysos and Herakles and Krishna and Aphrodite and Artemis.
On the other hand, as it happens, that very suggestion as to King
Khent points afresh to the myth theory as the solution of the Gospel
problem. Nothing emerges oftener in Sir James's great survey than the
ancient connection between kingship and liability to sacrifice. It
will not avail to close off that connection by claiming King Khent as
a potentate of an age after that of sacrificed kings. The sacrificial
past would still have to be taken into account in explaining the
deification of King Khent. And it is just an analogous process that
is suggested in our theory of the Jesus myth. A long series of slain
Jesuses, ritually put to death at an annual sacrament "for the sins
of many," is the ultimate anthropological ground given for the special
cultus out of which grew the mythical biography of the Gospels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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