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
What leaps to the eyes is that the gospel legend preserves two
separated features of the festival of a Sacrificed Mock-King, which
as incidents in the life of the Teacher are wholly incompatible,
and which the biographical theory cannot reasonably explain--the
acclaimed and welcomed Entry into Jerusalem and within a week the
demand of the city multitude for the crucifixion. The Entry is an
elaboration of several myth elements, but it contains the item of the
acclaimed ride of the quasi-king, mounted on an ass (or two asses). If
the biographical school would but consider historical probabilities,
they would realize that the story as told cannot be historical,
with or without the strange antithesis of the multitude's speedy
demand for the prophet's death. Such a triumphal entry, for such a
person as the gospel Jesus, could not spontaneously have taken place:
it must have been planned; and, if arranged with such an effect as
the record describes, it would have given Pilate very sufficient
ground for intervention without waiting for a complaint from the
priests. Taken as history, it is wholly irreconcilable with the
"Crucify him" ascribed to a multitude whose support of Jesus had
been affirmed the day before; and accordingly M. Loisy, accepting
the Entry, rejects the latter episode. Strauss, hesitating to go,
"as has latterly often been done," the length of rejecting the Entry
on the ass as wholly mythical, finds it very much so; [83] and Brandt
incidentally dismisses it as "under the strongest suspicion of being
framed upon Old Testament motives from beginning to end." [84]
Thus the biographical school itself proffers a myth-theory,
without indicating an explanatory motive for the positing of a
contradiction. But when we realize that an acclamation of a quasi-king
riding on an ass was actually part of the ritual in a sacrificial
rite in which he was to be crucified, the two clashing elements
in the legend are at once explained in the full myth-theory. Their
separate handling and development was, just as intelligibly, part of
the process of gospel-making, the creation of an ideal Jesus. But
seeing that in the Sacæa festival the mock-king had a five days'
reign between his start and his death, [85] the original ritual gave
the interval which in the gospel story is filled with the acts of
the Teaching God. Five days is the accepted traditional interval from
Palm Sunday to Crucifixion Day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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