The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth TheoryRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Jesus Christ
While, then, the argument from unsuitableness is logically barred for
the biographical school by their own frequent rejection of passages
on the score of incompatibility, no aspect or portion of the New
Testament supplies a conclusive argument against the mythological
view. The whole constitutes an intelligible set of growths from the
point of view of the myth-theory; and from no other is the medley
explicable. A biographical theory, having posited a Messiah whose
Messianic claim is a mystery, a Teacher whose alleged teachings are
a mass of conflicting tendencies, and whose disciples admittedly
have no Messianic gospel till after his inexplicable execution,
following on an impossible trial, may make the assumption that by way
of popular myth he was then fortuitously deified by Messianist Jews,
and later transformed by other Jews into a Saviour for Gentiles;
but the biographical theory cannot even pretend to account for the
Apocalypse and the Didachê; and it has to renounce its own ground
principle of "personality" in order to assimilate the Epistles. On
critical principles, assent must go to the theory which explains
things, reducing the otherwise inexplicable to a natural evolution
on the known lines and bases of hierology.
§ 4. Historic Summary
We may now bring together in one outline the series of inductive
hypotheses by which we seek to recover the natural evolution of the
historic cult.
1. A primitive Semitic sacramental cult, whose sacrament centres in a
slain Saviour-God, a Jesus, who has assimilated to an abstraction of
the victim annually sacrificed to him--as in the case of the cults of
Adonis and Attis, both also Asiatic. Of the sacrificial rite, which in
the historic cult is embodied in the Last Supper and the dramatized
story of the Passion, the memory was preserved in particular by a
Jewish rite of Jesus Barabbas, Jesus the Son of the Father, in which
a victim goes through a mock coronation, ending latterly, perhaps, in
a mock-execution, where once there had been an actual human sacrifice.
2. This cult, with its sacrament, existed sporadically in various
parts of Asia Minor, whence it spread to Greece and Egypt. Its forms
would vary, and under Jewish control the sacrificial sacrament tended
to be reduced to a Eucharist or thankoffering in which the "body and
blood" are only vaguely, if at all, reminiscent of the Divine One's
death. As a God can always be developed indefinitely out of a God-Name,
and personal Gods are historically but conceptual aggregates shaped
round names or functions, the adherents of this could proselytize
like others. When the Temple of Jerusalem fell in the year 70, the
adherents of the cult there had a new opportunity and motive, which
some of them actively embraced, to cut loose from the Judaic basis
and proclaim a religion of universal scope, freed from Judaic trammels
and claims. Economic motives played a considerable part in the process.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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