newspaper notices of the book; and in not a single one was there any recognition of the gross and thrice-repeated blunder above italicized, to modify the chorus of uncritical assent. A professed Rationalist repeated and endorsed Dr. Conybeare’s assertion. Needless to say, not only did Dr. Conybeare not mention that Joseph is never named in Mark, he never once alluded to the fact that in the same Gospel Mary is presented as not the mother of Jesus; and the brothers and sisters, by implication, as not his brothers and sisters.
When aggressive scholars and confident reviewers thus alike reveal that they have not read the Gospels with the amount of attention supposed to be bestowed on them by an intelligent Sunday-school teacher, it is evidently inadvisable to take for granted any general critical preparation even among rationalistic readers. Before men can realize the need for a new theoretic interpretation of the whole, they must be invited to note the vital incongruities (as apart from miracle stories) in each Gospel singly, as the lay Freethinkers of an earlier generation did without pretending to be scholars.
Those Rationalists are ill-advised who suppose that, in virtue of having listened to latter-day publicists who profess to extract a non-supernatural “religion” from the supernaturalisms of the past, they have reached a higher and truer standpoint than that of the men who made sheer truth their standard and their ideal. Really scholarly and scrupulous advocates of theism are as zealous to expose the historical truth as the men who put that first and foremost; it is the ethical sentimentalists who put the question of historic truth on one side. The fact that some men of scientific training in other fields join at times in such complacent constructions does not alter the fact that they are non-scientific. The personal equation even of a man of science is not science. On these as on other sides of the intellectual life, “opinion of store is cause of want,” as Bacon has it.
Some of us who in our teens critically read the sacred books first and foremost to clear our minds on the general question of supernaturalism, and then proceeded to try, with the help of the documentary scholars, to trace the history of religion as matter of anthropology and sociology, had the experience of being told by Professor Huxley, whose own work we had followed, that we were still at the standpoint of Voltaire. Later we had the edification of seeing Huxley expatiate upon topics which had long been stale for Secularist audiences, and laboriously impugn the story of the Flood and the miracle of the Gadarene swine in discursive debate with Gladstone, even making scientific mistakes in the former connection.
In view of it all, it seems still a sound discipline to treat all opinions as for ever open to revision, and at the same time to doubt whether the acceptance of any popular formula will place us in a position to disparage unreservedly all our critical predecessors. If we find reason to dismiss as inadequate the conclusions of many scholars of the past, orthodox and heterodox, we are not thereby entitled to speak of the best of them otherwise than as powerful minds and strenuous toilers, hampered by some of their erroneous assumptions in the task of relieving their fellows of the burden of others.
It is precisely the habituation of the professional scholars to working in a special groove that has so retarded the progress of New Testament criticism. The re-discussion of the historicity question that has followed upon the modern exposition of the myth-theory has involved the reiteration by the historicity school of a set of elementary claims from the long-discredited interpolation in Josephus and the pagan “testimonies” of Suetonius and Tacitus; and Professor W. B. Smith has had to meet these with a detailed rebuttal such as used to be made—of course with less care and fullness—on the ordinary English Secularist platform forty or even seventy years ago. Less advanced scholars once more begin to recognize the nullity of the argument from the famous passage in the Annals of Tacitus,2 which was clear to so many unpretending freethinkers in the past; and to other Gelehrten vom Fach it has to be again pointed out that the impulsore Chresto of Suetonius, so far from testifying to the presence of a Christian multitude at Rome under Nero—a thing so incompatible with their own records—is rather a datum for the myth-theory, inasmuch as it posits a cult of a Chrēstos or Christos out of all connection with the “Christian” movement.
The passage in Josephus was given up long ago by hundreds of orthodox scholars as a palpable interpolation, proved as such by the total silence in regard to it of early Fathers who would have rejoiced to cite it if it had been in existence. The device of supposing it to be a Christian modification of a different testimony by Josephus is a resort of despair, which evades altogether the fact of the rupture of context made by the passage—a feature only less salient in the paragraph of Tacitus. But even if there were no reason to suspect the latter item of being a late echo from Sulpicius Severus, who is assumed to have copied it, nothing can be proved from it for the historicity of the Gospel Jesus, inasmuch as it does but set forth from a hostile standpoint the ordinary Christian account of the beginnings of the cult. Those who at this time of day found upon such data are further from an appreciation of the evidential problem than were their orthodox predecessors who debated the issue with Freethinkers half a century ago.
I have thought it well, then, to precede a restatement of the “myth-theory” with a critical survey in which a number of preliminary questions of scientific method and critical ethic are pressed upon those who would deal with the main problem aright; and a certain amount of controversy with other critical schools is indulged in by way of making plain the radical weakness of all the conventional positions. The negative criticism, certainly, will not establish in advance the positive theory: that must meet the ordeal of criticism like every other. But the preliminary discussion may at once serve to free from waste polemic the constructive argument and guard readers against bringing to that a delusive light from false assumptions.
A recent and more notorious exhibition of “critical method” by Dr. Conybeare has satisfied me that it is needless to offer any further systematic exposure of the nullity of his treatise, with which I had dealt at some length in The Literary Guide. His memorable attack upon the Foreign Secretary, and his still more memorable retractation, may enable some of his laudatory reviewers to realize the kind of temper and the kind of scrutiny he brings to bear upon documents and theories that kindle his passions. All that was relevant in his constructive process was really extracted, with misconceptions and blunders and exaggerations, from the works of a few scholars of standing who, however inconclusive their work might be, set him a controversial example which he was unable to follow. In dealing with them, I have the relief of no longer dealing with him. As to the constructive argument from comparative mythology, anthropology, and hierology, attacked by him and others with apparently no grasp of the principles of any of these sciences, objections may be best dealt with incidentally where they arise in the restatement of the case.
For the rest, I can conceive that some will say the second year of the World War is no time for the discussion even of a great problem of religious history. I answer that the War has actually been made the pretext for endless religious discussions of the most futile kind, ranging between medieval miracle-mongering and the lowest forms of journalistic charlatanism, with chronic debates on theism and on the military value of faith and prayer. The newspaper discussions on theism, in particular, reveal a degree of philosophic naïveté on the theistic side which seems to indicate that that view of the universe has of late years been abandoned by most men capable of understanding the logical problem. When dispute plays thus uselessly at the bidding of emotion there must be some seniors, or others withheld from war service, who in workless hours would as lief face soberly an inquiry which digs towards the roots of the organized religion of Europe. If the end of the search should be the conviction that that system took shape as naturally as any other cult of the ancient world, and that the sacrosanct records of its origin are but products of the mythopœic faculty of man, the time of war, with its soul-shaking challenge to the sense of reality, may not be the most unfit for the experience.
