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
It does not follow that a price was regularly paid in the case of the
Jesus Barabbas rite, though the record actually insists on the item
by way of the Judas story: what is clear is that a memory of bought
victims subsisted after the fall of Jerusalem. It is not unlikely
that "Aceldama" was a field where sacrificial victims were either
slain or buried, or both. A passage in the Kalika Purana suggests
the procedure, and the probable significance of Golgotha, the "place
of skulls." In the Hindu rite, the human victim was immolated "at a
cemetery or holy place," upon which the sacrificer was not to look;
and the head was presented in "the place of skulls, sacred to Bhoiruvu"
(God of Fear). This could be in a special temple, or in a part of
the cemetery, "or on a mountain." [75]
At this point a warning must be given against the confusion set up by
the habitual assumption that "something of the kind" occurred under
Pontius Pilate. It is only on the biographical theory that that date is
valid. Pontius Pilate is simply a figure in the later Mystery Drama,
originally chosen, probably, because of his notoriety as a shedder
of Jewish blood. [76] We are not bound to prove that at his date
the usage of ritual human sacrifice, real or pretended, survived at
Jerusalem, though it may have done, as it survived at Rhodes in the
time of Porphyry in the form, perhaps, of a Semitic mystery drama. [77]
It is the assumption of the historicity of the Crucifixion that partly
disarms the theorem of Sir J. G. Frazer as to a coincidence of Jewish
sacrificial rites. [78] Noting that the details of the Crucifixion
closely conform to those of a human sacrifice sometimes practised
in the Christian era in connection with the Roman Saturnalia, and
also to those of a real or mock rite connected with the Babylonian
feast of the Sacæa, he resorts to the alternative hypotheses (a)
that the analogous Jewish feast of Purim, imported from Babylon after
the Return, and also involving either a real or a mock crucifixion,
chanced to coincide with the actual crucifixion of the gospel Jesus;
or that (b) Christian tradition "shifted the date of the crucifixion
by a month or so" to connect it with the Passover. As the official
Purim rite, though cognate with that of the Passover, cannot well have
been allowed to coincide with it, the theory of coincidence is barred;
and the theorist is assured by an expert colleague that "all that we
hear of the Passion is only explicable by the Passover festival," and
that "without the background of the festival all that we know of the
Crucifixion and of what led up to it is totally unintelligible." [79]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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