In the ancient history of religions, as in the ancient history of nations, the first account given of origins is almost always a myth. A divine or worshipful founder is craved by the primitive imagination no less for cults and institutions, tribes and polities, than for the forms of life and the universe itself; and history, like science, may roughly be said to begin only when that craving for first causes has been discredited, or controlled, by the later arising instinct of exact observation. Such a check or control tends to be set up by the presence of intelligently hostile forces, as in the case of the religion of Mohammed, whose teaching warred with and was warred on by rival faiths from the first, and whose own written and definite doctrine forbade his apotheosis. Some of the early Christian sects, which went far towards setting up independent cults, had their origins similarly defined by the pressure of criticism from the main body. But even in some such cases, notably in that of the ManichÆan movement, the myth-making process has partly eluded hostile scrutiny;1 and earlier growths incurred much less of critical inquiry. Before the Christian system had taken organised historic form, in virtue of having come into the heritage of literary and political method embodied in the Greco-Roman civilization, it is rarely possible to trust the record of any cult’s beginnings, even where it professes to derive from a non-supernatural teacher; so ungoverned is the myth-making instinct in the absence of persistent criticism. Buddha, Zoroaster, and Moses are only less obviously mythical figures than Krishna, Herakles, and Osiris. Of the Christian cult it can at best be said that it takes its rise on the border-land between the historical and the unhistorical, since any rational defence of it to-day admits that in the story of its origins there is at least an element of sheer myth.

The oldest documents of the cult are ostensibly the Epistles of Paul; and concerning these there are initial perplexities, some being more or less clearly spurious—that is, very different from or much later in character than the rest—while all of the others show signs of interpolation. Taken as they stand, however, they reveal a remarkable ignorance of the greater part of the narratives in the gospels, and of the whole body of the teachings there ascribed to Jesus. In three respects only do the Pauline writings give any support to the histories later accepted by the Christian Church. They habitually speak of Jesus as crucified, and as having risen from the dead; they contain one account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper, in agreement with the gospel account; and they make one mention of “the twelve.” But the two latter allusions occur in passages (1 Cor. xi and xv) which have plain marks of interpolation; and when they are withdrawn the Pauline letters tell only of a cult, Jewish in origin, in which a crucified Jesus—called the Messiah or Christos or Anointed One—figures as a saving sacrifice, but counts for absolutely nothing as a teacher or even as a wonder-worker. Yet he is a God or Demigod who has risen from the dead. A eucharist or religious meal is celebrated in his name, but no mention is made of any teaching uttered by the founder. And nothing in the epistles enables us even to date them independently of the gospel narratives, which they so strangely fail to confirm. Thus the case stands with the New Testament very much as with the Old. As the Book of Judges reveals a state of Hebrew life quite incompatible with that described in the Pentateuch as having preceded it, so do the epistles of Paul reveal a stage of Christist propaganda incompatible with any such prior development as is set forth in the gospel. And the reasonable conclusion in the two cases seems to be the same: that the documents setting forth the prior developments are, as they now stand, not only later in composition but substantially fictitious, even where they do not tell of supernatural events. The only tenable alternative is the hypothesis of two separate movements of Christism, which ignored or discredited each other.

What needs to be explained in both cases is the way in which the later narratives came to be compiled. Within a hundred years from the date commonly assigned to the Crucifixion, there are Gentile traces of a Jesuist or Christist movement deriving from Jewry, and possessing a gospel or memoir as well as some of the Pauline and other epistles, both spurious and genuine; but the gospel then current is seen to have contained some matter not preserved in the canonical four, and to have lacked much that those contain. Of those traces the earliest are found in one epistle of Clement called Bishop of Rome (fl. about 100), which, whether genuine or not, is ancient, and in the older form of the epistles ascribed to the Martyr Ignatius (d. about 115?) of which the same may be said. About the middle of the second century the writings of Justin Martyr tell of a Christist memoir, but show no knowledge of the Pauline epistles. All alike tell of a spreading cult, with a theology not yet coherently dogmatic, founding mainly on a crucified Jesus, faith in whom ensures salvation.

Like the letters of Paul, those ascribed to Clement and Ignatius tell of schisms and bitter strifes in the churches: that is the constant note of Christian history from first to last. As to rites, we have but a bare mention of the eucharist and of baptism; the story of the founder’s parentage is still unknown to the makers of documents, and his miracles are as unheard of as most of his teachings. There is nothing in Clement, or in the older Ignatian epistles, or in that ascribed to Polycarp (circa 150), or in that of Barnabas (same period), to show knowledge of the existing gospels of Luke or John; a solitary parallel to Luke being rather a proof that the passage echoed had been taken from some earlier document; and the gospel actually cited as late as Justin is certainly not identical with either Mark or Matthew. Even from Paul there is hardly any quotation; and Clement, who mentions or is made to mention his epistles to the Corinthians, pens a long passage in praise of love which has no quotation from the apostle’s famous chapter on that head, though it would have seemed made for his purpose. In view of their lax way of quoting the Old Testament we may infer that the early Fathers or forgers had few manuscripts; and it is plain that they set no such store by Christian documents as they did by the Jewish; but the fact remains that they fail to vouch for much even of those Pauline epistles which commonly rank as incontestable. At times, as in the Pauline use of the word ektroma (1 Cor. xv, 8), which occurs in a similar phrase in one of the Ignatian epistles, there is reason to suspect that the “apostolic” writing has been interpolated in imitation of the “post-apostolic.” In the latter the expression is appropriate; in the former it is not.

It does not indeed follow that documents or chapters not quoted or utilized by the Fathers were in their day non-existent. The letters of Paul, supposing them to be genuine, would in any case be only gradually made common property. All the evidence goes to show that the early Christians were for the most part drawn from the illiterate classes; and the age of abundant manuscripts would begin only with the age of educated converts. But what is inconceivable is that one so placed as Paul should never once cite the teachings of the founder, if such teachings were current in his day in any shape; and what is extremely improbable is that one so placed as Clement, or one forging or interpolating in his name, should possess Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians as it now stands, and yet should barely mention it in a letter to the same church dealing with almost the same problems. In the first case, we are almost forced to conclude that the gospel narratives were non-existent for the writer or writers of the Pauline epistles up to the point of the two interpolations which allege an accepted tradition; and, in the second, that the Pauline epistles themselves are nowhere to be taken as certainly genuine.2 Such irremovable doubt is the Nemesis of the early Christian habits of forgery and fiction.

There emerges, however, the residual fact that Paul ranked in the second century as a historical and natural personage, in whose name it was worth while to forge. For Paul’s period, again, Jesus was possibly a historical personage, since he was not declared to be supernaturally born, though credited with a supernatural resurrection. Broadly speaking, the age of an early Christian document is found to be in the ratio of its narrative bareness, its lack of biographical myth, its want of relation to the existing gospels. As between the shorter and the longer form of the Ignatian epistles, the question of priority is at once settled by the frequent citations from the gospels and from Paul in the latter, and the lack of them in the former. But all the documents alike appear to point to a movement which remotely took its rise among the Jews long before the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70, and subsisted in Jewry long afterwards; and, as the Jewish environment lacked many of the forces of change present in the Gentile, it is to the Jewish form of the cult that we must first look if we would trace its growth.

The first properly historical as distinct from the “scriptural” notices of the Church at Jerusalem tell of a quasi-Christian sect there, known as Ebionites or Ebionim, a Hebrew word which signified simply “the poor.” From the point of view of the Gentile Christians of the end of the second century they were heretics, seeing that they used a form of the Gospel of Matthew lacking the first two chapters, denied the divinity of Jesus, and rejected the apostleship of Paul. As they likewise rejected the Hebrew prophets, accepting only the Pentateuch, there is some reason to suppose that they were either of Samaritan derivation or the descendants of an old element in the Judean population which, from the time of Ezra onwards, had rejected the later Biblical writings as the Samaritans did. On either view it would follow that the Jesuist movement rooted from the first in a lower stratum of the population, hostile to orthodox or Pharisaic Judaism, as were the Sadducees among the upper classes. The Samaritans made special account of Joshua (=Jesus), having a book which bore his name; and we shall see later that that name was anciently a divine one for some Syrian populations.

Later notices bring to light the existence of a smaller sect, called by the Greeks Nazoraioi, Nazarites or NazarÆans, the term said in the Acts of the Apostles (xxiv, 5) to have been applied to the early Jesuists, and often applied in that book as well as in the gospels to Jesus. According to one account this sect objected to be called Christians, though it appears to have been on the assumption of their derivation from the first Christians that they had not earlier been stamped as heretics. Through the two sects under notice may be gathered the probable development of early Jesuism.

It cannot have been from the place-name Nazareth that any Jesuist sect were first called NazarÆans, a term standing either for the variously-spelt Nazir (Nazarite, or, properly, Nazirite) of the Old Testament, or for a compound of the term netzer (=a branch), used in the passage of Isaiah (xi, 1), supposed to be cited in the first gospel (ii, 23). Even the form “Nazarene,” sometimes substituted in the gospels for the other, could not conceivably have been, to start with, the name for a sect founded by a man who, like the gospel Jesus, was merely said to have been reared at a village called Nazareth or Nazara, and never taught there. In none of the Pauline or other canonical epistles, however, is Jesus ever called Nazarite, or Nazarene, or “of Nazareth”; and the Ebionite gospel, lacking the Nazareth story, would lack any such appellation. The Ebionite sect, then, appears to have stood for the first form of the cult, and to have developed the first form of gospel; while the later NazarÆan sect appears to be either a post-Pauline but Judaic growth from the Ebionite roots, or a post-Pauline grafting of another movement on the Jesuism of the Ebionites.

Ebionism, to begin with, whether ancient and quasi-Samaritan or a product of innovation in the immediately pre-Roman period, is intelligible as the label of a movement which held by the saying “Blessed are ye poor” or “poor in spirit,” found in the so-called Sermon on the Plain and Sermon on the Mount (Luke vi, 20; Matt. v, 3). In poverty-stricken Jewry, with a prophetic and proverbial literature in which, as generally in the East, the poor are treated with sympathy, such a label would readily grow popular, as it had done for the Buddhist “mendicants” in India. Its association, however, with the cult of a slain and Messianic Jesus raises the question whether the latter was not the germ of the movement; and there are some grounds for surmising that the sect may have arisen around one Jesus the son of Pandira, who is mentioned in the Talmud as having been hanged on a tree and stoned to death at Lydda, on the eve of a Passover, in the reign of Alexander JannÆus. It was customary to execute important offenders at that season; and as the Paschal feast had a specifically atoning significance, a teacher then executed might come to be regarded as an atoning sacrifice. But there are traces in the Old Testament of a Messianic movement connected with the name Jesus at some uncertain period before the Christian era. In the book of Zechariah, of which the first six chapters appear to be much later than the rest, there is named one Jesus (Heb. Joshua), a high priest, who figures Messianically as “the Branch,” and is doubly crowned as priest and king. In the obscurity which covers most of the prophetic literature, it is difficult to say for what historic activities this piece of symbolism stands; but it must have stood for something. From it, in any case, we gather the fact that much stress was laid on the symbol of “the Branch” (or “sprout”), called in the present text of Zechariah tsemach, but in Isaiah nazar or netzer. Among the Gentiles that symbol belonged to the worships of several Gods and Goddesses—as Mithra, Attis, Apollo, and DÊmÊtÊr—and appears to have meant the principle of life, typified in vegetation; among the Jews it was certainly bound up with the general belief in a coming Messiah who should restore Jewish independence. It is not impossible, then, that a Messianic party were early called “Netzerites” or “NazarÆans” on that account; and such a sect could in the Judaic fashion find all manner of significances in the name of the high priest, since “Jesus” (=Joshua) signified Saviour, and the ancient and mythical Joshua was a typical deliverer. The Mosaic promise (Deut. xviii, 15) of a later prophet and leader, which in the Acts is held to apply to the crucified Jesus, had formerly been held by Jews to apply to the Joshua who succeeded Moses; and in that case there is reason to surmise that an older myth or cult centring round the name had given rise to the historical fiction of the Hebrew books. In some very ancient MSS. the text of the epistle of Jude, verse 5, reads “Jesus” where our version has “the Lord,” a circumstance which suggests yet another Joshuan myth. But the subject remains obscure. There is even some doubtful evidence of the later existence of a sect of “Jesseans,” possibly distinct from the historical “Essenes,” who may have founded on Isaiah’s “Branch from the roots of Jesse.”

The following, then, are the historical possibilities. A poor sect or caste of Ebionim, marked off from orthodox Jewry, and akin to the population of Samaria, may have subsisted throughout the post-exilic period, and may either have preserved an old Jesuist cult with a sacrament or adopted a later Samaritan movement. From that might have been developed the “Nazarene” sect of Christist history. On the other hand, a sect of “NazarÆans,” holding by the Messianic name of Jesus, may have existed in the pre-Roman period, but may have come to figure specially as Ebionim or “poor” when the earlier or political form of Messianic hope waned. Their name may also have led to their being either confused or conjoined with the “Nazarites” of Jewry, a numerous but fluctuating body, under temporary vows of abstention. But that body, again, may have become generally Messianist, and may have adopted the Messianic “Branch” in the verbalizing spirit so common in Jewry, while continuing to call itself Nazarite in the old sense. It is indeed on record that some Jews made vows to “be a Nazarite when the Son of David should come”; and such were free to drink wine on Sabbaths, though not on week days. Such Nazarites could have constituted the first sacramental assemblies of the Christists. And as the Hebrew Nazir (Sept. Gr. Nazoraios) had the meaning of “consecrated” or “holy to the Lord,” the early Gentile Christians may very well have translated the word into their own languages instead of transliterating it. On that view the hagioi or “saints” of the Acts and the epistles and the Apocalypse may have strictly stood for “the Nazirites,” “the devoti.”

Seeing, however, that the later NazarÆans are reported to have adopted the (obviously late) first and second chapters of Matthew, while the Ebionites rejected them; and seeing that these chapters, embodying the story of the flight into Egypt, make Jesus at once a Jewish and a Gentile Christ, it would appear that the Gentile movement had then reacted on the Jewish, and that the ultra-Jewish Jesuists had now relinquished the name of NazarÆan to the less rigid, who at this stage probably used a Greek gospel. Finally, as the original sense of “Nazirite” implied either a Judaic vow—irksome to the Gentile Christians, and probably to many of the Jewish—or a specially Judaic character in the founder, and as the political implication of the “netzer” (supposing that to have adhered to the sect-name) was anti-Roman, there would arise a disposition to seek for the term another significance. This, presumably on the suggestion of Gentiles accustomed to hear Jewish sectaries called “Galileans,” was found in the figment that the founder, though declared to have been Messianically born in Bethlehem, had been reared in the Galilean village of Nazareth or Nazara. Instead of being a historical datum, as is assumed by so many rationalizing historians, that record appears to be really a pragmatic myth superimposed on the Bethlehem myth. The textual analysis shows that wherever it occurs in the gospels and Acts the name Nazareth has been foisted on the documents.

Hence, however, arose the Greek form “Nazarenos,” which finally became to a certain extent imposed on the canonical gospels, but especially on that of Mark, which appears to have been redacted under Roman authority in the interests of ecclesiastical order. Naturally, the Latin Vulgate adopted the same term throughout the gospels and Acts, save in the crucial text, Matt. ii, 23. Otherwise the texts are almost wholly in favour of the form “Nazoraios”—that is, NazarÆan or Nazirite.

Even for minds wont to see mere myth in the idea of such long-worshipped Saviours as Apollo and Osiris, Krishna and Mithra, it cannot but be startling to meet for the first time the thought that there is no historic reality in a figure so long revered and beloved by half the human race as the Jesus of the gospels. It was only after generations of scrutiny that modern rationalism began to doubt the actuality of the Teacher it had unhesitatingly surmised behind the impossible demigod of the records. The first, indeed, to see in him sheer myth were the students who were intent chiefly on the myths of action in the story: to return to the teaching as such was to recover the old impression of a real voice. It is only after a further analysis—a scrupulous survey of the texts—that the inquirer can realise how illusory that impression really is.

The proposition is not that the mere lateness of the gospels deprives them of authority as evidence (for they proceeded on earlier documents), but that throughout they are demonstrably results of accretion through several generations, and that the earliest sections were put together long after the period they profess to deal with. The older portions of the Pauline epistles show no knowledge of any Jesuine biography or any Jesuine teaching—a circumstance which suggests that the Jesus of Paul is much more remote from Paul’s day than is admitted by the records. Later, the Christian writers are found to have certain narratives, evidently expanded from generation to generation, till at the end of the second century there exist the four canonical gospels, which, however, are not known to have been even then completed. Celsus, in his anti-Christian treatise, supposed to have been written between 170 and 180, speaks of the gospels as having undergone endless alteration; and additions were still possible after the time of Origen, who weakly replied to Celsus that the alterations were the work of heretics. Side by side with the four there had grown up a number of “apocryphal” gospels, of which some were long as popular as the canonical, though all were ultimately discarded by the Councils of the Church. The principle of exclusion was essentially that of the tentative criticism of modern times—the critical sense of the inferiority of mere tales of wonders to narratives which contained, besides wonders, elements of moral instruction.

In natural course criticism first rejects miraculous episodes, next excludes teachings which purport to come from a God-man, and then seeks to infer a personality from those which are left; but inasmuch as those, like the rest, are disparate and even contradictory, the process usually ends in an avowedly arbitrary selection. And to all such selection the loyal study of the texts is fatal. To put aside, as some still do, the fourth gospel, and then take a stand on the synoptics, is merely to arrest factitiously the critical process, which, when consistently pursued, leads to the conviction that the synoptics were built up by the same order of impulses, under the same conditions of unchecked invention and interpolation, as gave rise to the most obvious fictions in the gospel of “John.” We are led without escape to the conclusion that no strain of teaching in the gospels can be fathered on the shadowy founder, who for Paul is only a crucified phantom. The humanistic teachings are no more primordial, no less capable of interpolation, than the mystical and the oracular. Some of the best sayings are among the very latest; some of the narrowest belong to the earliest tradition. Collectively, they tell of a hundred hands.

Surmising that the nominal founder of Paul’s Jesuism may possibly be the slain Jesus Pandira of the Talmud, a hundred years “before Christ,” we next ask whether any such founder must not be supposed to have taught something, to make men see in him a Messiah and preserve his name. The answer is that the name alone was a large part of the qualification for a Jewish Messiah; that the chance of his execution on the eve of the Passover would give it for some Jews a mystic significance; and that a story of his resurrection, a story easily floated in case of an alleged sorcerer, such as the Talmudic Jesus, would complete the conditions required for the growth of a myth and a cult, seeing that the Jews traditionally expected the Messiah to come at midnight of the day of Passover. Doubtless the alleged sorcerer may have been an innovating teacher. It is quite possible, indeed, that as a bearer of the fated name he may have made Messianic claims: the form of death said to have been inflicted on him suggests energetic priestly or political hostility. But of his utterances history preserves no trace: even in the Talmud his story has passed into legendary form. Thus it is not even certain that “pre-Christian” Jesuism took shape round the memory of an actual man. The mythic Joshua (Jesus) of the Old Testament is seen to have been in all likelihood, like Samson, an ancient Semitic Sun-God, his name, “the Saviour,” being a common divine epithet; and as he is in Perso-Arab tradition the son of the mythic Miriam (Mary), it may be that the roots of the historic Christian cult go back to an immemorial Semitic antiquity, when already the name of Jesus was divine.3 In the shadow of that name its origins are hidden.

What is clear is that the central narrative of the gospel biography, the story of the Last Supper, the Agony, Betrayal, Trial, and Crucifixion, is neither a contemporary report nor a historical tradition, but the simple transcript of a Mystery-Drama. The proof lies in the very structure of the document.

Anyone who will attentively follow the account of the Last Supper and its sequelÆ in the first gospel will see that it reproduces a series of closely-continuous dramatic scenes, with no room given to such considerations as would naturally occur to a narrator of real events, and no sign of perception of the extreme improbability of the huddled sequence set forth. A more or less unnatural compression of events is the specific mark of drama, even in the hands of great masters, as Shakespeare and Ibsen; and the primitive mystery-play, as might be expected, is excessively compressed, so as to conform to the recognised Greek rule that the action of a drama should be limited to twenty-four hours. Jesus is made to take the Passover after dark; then to go forth in the night for no reason given with his disciples, who sleep while he prays; then to be captured in the darkness by a “multitude”; then to be taken straight to the high priest, “where the scribes and elders were gathered together.” These now proceed, in the dead of the night, to “seek false witnesses,” and “many false witnesses” come, to no purpose, till “afterward” come two who testify to his words about destroying the temple; whereupon he is judged and buffeted, and the night’s history ends with the episode of Peter’s denial. No hint is ever given of anything said or done or felt by Jesus on the way from the Supper to the Mount, or in the interval between the Jewish and the Roman trials.

Such a narrative cannot have been originally composed for reading. A writer, whether inventing or reproducing hearsay, would have sought to explain the strangely protracted midnight procedure of the high priest and scribes and elders; would have given some thought to the time necessary between event and event; would have thought of the Lord in his dungeon. The story before us yields exactly what could be scenically enacted, nothing more; and where on the stage the successive scenes would originally raise no question of the time taken, the unreflecting narrative loses all verisimilitude by making everything happen in unbroken sequence, and by making the Master utter words of prayer which, apart from the audience of the drama, there was no one to hear. In the play the “false witnesses” would of necessity be sent for and introduced without lapse of time, and the action would raise in a popular audience no perplexity, where the narrative loses all semblance of probability by turning the dramatic act into a historical process. After the unspecified slight pause till “the morning was come,” the action is resumed before Pilate with the same dramatic speed, and the execution impossibly follows immediately on the trial. We are reading the bare transcript of a mystery-drama; a transcript so bare that, in the scene of the Passion, the speech beginning “Sleep on now,” and that beginning “Arise, let us be going,” are put together as if they were one utterance, without specification of the required exit and entrance between.

Such a clearly dramatic composition can be accounted for only as a development, after the fashion of the pagan mystery-dramas, from a remote, primitive rite of human sacrifice, such as we know to have been long habitual among the Jews as among other Semites. To the ancient rite the very name of Jesus probably belonged; and the existing document is presumptively an adaptation, made after the fall of Jerusalem by Gentile Christists, of a simpler and earlier Judaic ritual-drama. We are thus left facing a myth, not a history—a Jesus who compares not with Mohammed but with Dionysos and Osiris.

When the historic Church set about a statement of its history it could not even fix satisfactorily the year of its supposed founder’s birth; and the “Christian era” was made to begin some years—two, three, four, five, or eight—after that on which the chronologists were later fain to fix, by way of conforming to their most precise document. Their data, however, have no more value than any other guess. So little of the semblance of historical testimony do the gospels yield that it is impossible to establish from them any proposition as to the duration of the God-man’s ministry; and the early Church in general held by the tradition that it lasted exactly one year, an opinion which again points straight to myth, since it is either a dogmatic assumption based on the formula of “the acceptable year of the Lord,” or a simple reversion to the story of the Sun-God. Of the life of the alleged teacher from the age of twelve to thirty—another mythological period—there is not a single trace, mythical or non-mythical, though at his death he is represented as the centre of a large and adoring following. Ultimately, his birth was placed at the winter solstice, the birth-day of the Sun-God in the most popular cults; and while that is fixed as an anniversary, the date of his crucifixion is made to vary from year to year in order to conform to the astronomical principle on which the Jews, following the sun-worshippers, had fixed their Passover. Between those fabulous points everything the gospels affirm as biographical fact is fortuitous or purposive invention, which on scientific analysis “leaves not a wrack behind” in the nature of objective history.

Before accepting such a verdict the sympathetic seeker is apt to grasp at the old argument that such a figure as the gospel Jesus cannot have been created either by fortuitous fable or by fictions; that its moral stature is above that of any of the men we can trace in the gospel-making period; that its spiritual unity excludes the theory of a literary mosaic. It must first be answered that these positions beg the question and falsify the data. That the figure of the gospel Jesus is actually devoid of moral unity is made clear by the very attempts to unify it, since they one and all leave out much of the records; and the claim to moral superiority collapses, even apart from the obvious fact that the texts are aggregations, as soon as we compare them with the contemporary and previous ethical literature of the Jews, Greeks, Romans, and Hindus. There is not one teaching in the gospels that is not there paralleled; and the passages which have been claimed as most characteristic—for instance, the Sermon on the Mount—are mere compilations of earlier Jewish utterances. Thus the unity credited to the records, and the personality ascribed to the founder, are but creations of the same sympathetic human imagination that wove tissues of poetry and pathos round the figures of Dionysos and Buddha, and framed for the cult of Krishna its most impressive document when the cult was already ancient beyond reckoning. As man has made his Gods, so he has made his Christs: it would be strange indeed if the faculty which wrought the one could not create the other.

In one of the Pauline epistles, which are usually understood to belong to the second generation after that of the founder, there is mention of three chief Apostles with whom Paul had disputes, but none of any contemporary group of Twelve; and the only historical allusion to the latter number is in one of the interpolations in First Corinthians, where it appears to be a patch upon a patch. In the Acts of the Apostles, which though a fraudulent is an ancient compilation, there is a preliminary story of the election of an apostle to fill the place of Judas, deceased and disgraced; but not only is there no further pretence of such a process of completion, the majority of the twelve themselves speedily disappear from the history. Once more we are dealing with a myth. In the Apocalypse, again, after the original Judaic document has pictured a New Jerusalem with twelve gates and angels, named after the twelve tribes, the Christian interpolator has betrayed himself by the awkward invention of twelve “basement courses” named after the “twelve Apostles of the Lamb,” where an original Christian author would have given the apostles the gates if anything, had a list of twelve Jesuist apostles existed for him. In heaven the Lamb is surrounded, not by twelve disciples, but by the “four and twenty presbyters” of an older cult, probably that of Babylonia, which had twenty-four “Counsellor Gods.”

In the gospels the lack of historic foundation is no less decisive. Circumstantial but irreconcilable accounts, obviously mythical, are given of the selection of four or five apostles, whereafter the narratives, without a word of preparation or explanation, proceed to a sudden constitution of the group of twelve, with only the mythological detail, in one case, that they were “called” by the Master on a mountain. Thus the element of the Twelve is not even an early item in the records. It has been imposed on documents which set out with no such datum, but with primary groups of five, four, and three.

The historical solution of the problem as to the source of the fiction is now tolerably certain. It is on record that the Jewish High Priest of the latter days of the Temple, and after him the Patriarch at Tiberias, employed certain “Apostles” as tribute-collectors and supervisors of the many faithful Jews scattered throughout the neighbouring kingdoms. By common Jewish usage these would number twelve. As the dispersed Jewish race multiplied abroad after the fall of the Temple, it is probable that under the upper grade of twelve there was created a body of seventy-two collectors, who answered to the traditional number of “the nations” in Jewish lore. Such a body is the probable basis for the admittedly mythical “seventy” or “seventy-two” of the third gospel. At this stage the twelve appear to have exercised chiefly teaching and regulative functions, for it is clear that the quasi-Christian document, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, recovered in 1873 and published in 1883, was originally a purely Jewish manual of moral exhortation, and as such bore its existing title. To the six or seven purely Judaic and non-Jesuist chapters which seem to constitute the original document, and which contain passages copied in the so-called Sermon on the Mount, there were gradually added others, introducing the rites of baptism and the eucharist, the name of Jesus, the doctrine of the Trinity, and various rules of economic procedure. In this gradual fashion a Jesuist cult, in which Jesus is called the “servant” of God, was grafted on an originally Judaic moral teaching, the prestige of the Jewish “Twelve Apostles” being all the while carried on. It was to give a Christian origin for this document, or for the institution pointed to by its title, that the gospel myth of the Twelve Apostles was framed. After the time of Athanasius, the expanded document, being still unduly Judaic and otherwise unsuitable for the purposes of the organized Church, passed into disuse; but the myth remained.

As regards the three “chief” apostles named in one of the Pauline epistles, there is a reasonable presumption that they were either leading propagandists of the Jesuist cult as it existed at the time of the writing, or so reputed by later tradition; but the assumption that they had been associates and disciples of the founder must be abandoned with the rest of the gospel tradition. They were necessarily woven into the gospel narrative by the later compilers; but the Epistle to the Galatians lies under the general suspicion of having been interpolated, if not wholly forged; and its very naming of the Judaic apostles is as much a ground for question as a datum for construction. It is probable, further, that the title “brethren of the Lord” was originally a group-name, and that the literal construction of it was a misconception by the later readers or interpolators of the epistles and the gospels. Nothing in the gospels or the Acts can make intelligible the appearance of certain actual brothers of the gospel Jesus at the head of a Jesuist cult. The name of Peter, finally, became a nucleus for many myths; and the two epistles which bear his name have so little relation to the personality set forth in the gospels that both have been widely discredited as forgeries; the second having indeed been so reputed in the days of Eusebius. The Simon-Petros (Cephas) of the gospels, however, is in himself a mere literary creation. Represented there as basely denying his captured Master, he figures in the Acts as the supernatural slayer of Ananias and Sapphira for a much slighter sin. The gospel story must be one of the products of the anti-Judaic animus of later Gentile Jesuists, for even the Ananias story is late. All that holds good is the fact that a tradition grew round the names in question, both of which hint of mythology—Petros (“the Rock”) being the name of an Egyptian God and of the popular Eastern deity Mithra; and Simon the name of a no less popular Semitic God. In his final aspect as leader of the twelve, basis of the Church, and keeper of the heavenly keys, Peter combines the attributes of Mithra and of Janus, both official deities of the Roman military class, as well as of the Egyptian Petra—who is door-keeper of heaven, earth, and the underworld.

The Epistle of James, by whomsoever written, is in no sense a Christist document—containing as it does not a single Jesuist or Christian doctrine, save perhaps the appended invective against the rich, which is Ebionitic. Of its two namings of Jesus, one is clearly an interpolation, and the other is presumptively so. There remains only a moral exhortation to Jews meeting in synagogues, a teaching strictly comparable to that of the original and pre-Jesuine “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” though the epistle makes no mention of any other apostles. Such writing tells of an essentially different propaganda from that of the Christists proper; and its preservation by them testifies to its priority. The epistles ascribed to John, on the contrary, belong to a considerably later period; telling as they do of a fanatical movement which swears by the name of Jesus the Christ as one who has died to take away sin, but which is full of apprehension as to the advent and functions of a number of Anti-Christs.

Judas (Ioudas), of whom there is no mention in any of the epistles, and whose traditional treason is not recognized in the lately-recovered “Gospel of Peter,” or in the pseudo-Pauline reference to “the twelve,” is a late creation; having probably taken shape first as a simple Ioudaios, “a Jew,” in an early Christian mystery-play of the crucifixion and resurrection. Mythologically, the conception may derive from the Diabolos or “Adversary” of Persian lore, as Judas in the gospels is called “a devil”; and the tradition which gave him red hair assimilated him to Typhon, the slayer of the Egyptian Saviour-God, Osiris. On the other hand, the name may have a mythological connection with the story of the betrayal of Joseph by his eleven brethren, of whom Judas was the ringleader.4 The story of the betrayal in the gospels is in any case plainly fabulous. The hired help of Judas is represented as necessary to identify a teacher who figured daily in the temple, and was a familiar figure to the populace. Such a myth can be best explained on the theory that a Jesuist mystery-play, arising or becoming modified among the Gentiles, would readily represent a Jew as betraying the Lord, even as the twelve were represented as forsaking their master. A bag to hold the blood-money would be a dramatic accessory, and would originate the view that Judas had been the treasurer of the apostolic group.

In its first traceable historic form Christianity was simply a phase of Judaism, being the creed of a small number of Jews and Jewish proselytes who believed that the long-desired Messiah had come in the person of one Jesus, who had been so slain as to constitute an atoning sacrifice. Such believers were wont to meet at simple religious banquets, of a kind common in the Greco-Roman world, where they ate and drank in a semi-ceremonial way. A sacrificial banquet of this kind was one of the most universal features of ancient religion, being originally the typical tribal ceremony; and though among the Jews it had been to a remarkable extent superseded by sacrifices without communion, the usage was once as general with them as with the Gentiles. If grown rare in their life, the idea was abundantly preserved in their sacred books. The presumption is that such a banquet was connected with the Semitic God-name Jesus or Joshua before the Christian era; otherwise we must conclude that a sect of Jesuists, starting from the bare belief in the sacrificial death, adopted arbitrarily a kind of rite which was identified with the heathen worships of the surrounding Gentiles, and adopted also the Gentile sun-worshippers’ practice of assembling by night. Paul’s Corinthian converts are described as frequenting indifferently the table of Jesus (“the Lord”) and the table of “dÆmons”—that is, of heathen Gods or Demigods. As the less orthodox Jews had long5 dabbled in similar “mysteries,” there is every probability that private “Holy Suppers” had been practised even in Jewry by some groups long before the Christian period, whether or not in connection with the name of Jesus “the Saviour.” The gospel phrase “blood of the covenant” points to a standing usage, the original form of which was probably the mutual drinking of actual human blood by the parties to a solemn pledge. In the Hebrew system some such covenant was held to be set up between the Deity and the worshippers on the one hand, and among the latter themselves on the other, when a sacrifice was partaken of. But it is further probable that the idea of a mystical partaking of an atoning or inspiring “body and blood” was of old standing in the same kind of connection. Such a practice was certainly part of the great Asiatic cults of Dionysos and Mithra; and as the ancient idea of a sacrificial banquet in honour of a God usually was that in some sense the worshipped power was either eaten, or present as partaker, it is more than likely that any banquets in connection with the Syrian worships of Adonis and (or) Marnas (each name = “the Lord”) carried with them the same significance. In early Christian usage the ministrant of the eucharist spoke in the person of the founder, using the formulas preserved in the gospels; and as the priest in the cult of Attis also personated the God, there is a strong presumption that the same thing had been done in Jewry in the pre-Christian period, by way of modifying a still older usage in which a deified victim was actually slain and eaten.

For such an ancient Jesuine eucharist (revived, perhaps, as old mysteries were apt to be among the Jews, no less than among other ancient peoples, in times of national disaster) a new meaning may have been found in the story of an actually slain man Jesus, whose death took a sacrificial aspect from its occurrence at the time of the atoning feast. In the earliest written teaching, certainly, Jesus is not a God; he is merely the Jewish God’s “holy servant.” The eating of his symbolic body and blood, however, was on a par with the rituals in which Pagans mystically partook of their deities, and it thus lay in the nature of the eucharist that he should become divine if he were not so originally. The expression “Son of God,” once of common application, would in his case come to have a special force, in terms of the ancient Semitic doctrine that the great God Kronos or Saturn or El had sacrificed his “only begotten Son.” Abraham undertakes to do the same thing in the legend in Genesis; and Abraham and Isaac as well as Jacob were presumptively ancient deities. On the other hand, the evolution of a fabulous hero from man to demigod, and thence to a status among the highest Gods, is a common phenomenon in the ancient religions (Herakles and Dionysos being typical cases), and among the recognized Syrian worships there was already one of a Theandrios or God-man. Even for the Jews the name Jehovah was applicable to the Messiah. It lay, too, in the nature of the religious instinct that the man-like and man-loving God should gradually take the foremost place in a cult in which he was at first subordinate, as happened in the worships of Dionysos, Mithra, Herakles, and Krishna. Some such tendency is seen in the worship of Demigods among the earlier Hebrews (Deut. xxxii, 17; Heb.).

It is not necessary to suppose that the Christian cult arose solely by way of a mystic sacrament. There may have been a blending of the usage of quasi-commemorative banquets, the simpler AgapÆ or love-feasts of antiquity, with that of a special “mystery”; and in the case of the latter there may have been many varieties, as there were later in the matter of liturgies. The humble Corinthian banquets appear to have combined the features of AgapÆ and Eucharistia, and in the former aspect they were anything but solemn; some of the members sleeping, some drinking too much—a pathetic picture of the dim yearning for communion among a heavy-laden caste. But the nature of the eucharist proper, the claim to present an immortal “body and blood” for regenerative eating and drinking, involved a striving after sacro-sanctity; and as soon as a regular ministrant was appointed by any group he would tend to develop into a priest of the Christist mysteries, magnifying his office.

The great feature of the Jewish Feast of the Passover being the eating of a lamb “before the Lord,” that usage would in Jewish circles be preferred to, or at least combined with, the sacrament of bread and wine, “Ceres and Bacchus,” which was perhaps commonest among the Gentiles. In the legend of Abraham and Melchisedek, priest of the Phoenician God El Elyon, there figures a sacramental meal of bread and wine (Gen. xiv, 18); and in the non-canonical book of Ecclesiasticus there is a passage (l, 15) which suggests a use of wine as symbolical of blood. The “shew-bread,” too, seems to have had a measure of sacramental significance. But while such a rite would seem to have flourished in the background of Judaism, that of the Passover was one of the great usages of the Jewish world, and the first Jesuists clearly held by it. It is indeed one of the hierological probabilities that the paschal lamb was anciently “Jeschu” or Jesus, the springtide symbol of a Sun-God so named; for in the book of Revelation, which is markedly Judaic, “the Lamb” figures as the known symbol or mystic name of a Son of God “slain from the founding of the world,” and identified with a mystic Jesus who is one with Jehovah—this apparently long before the Christian cult in general had arrived at such a doctrine. There is a mythological presumption that such language had reference to the fact—dwelt on by later Jewish writers—that the date of the Passover fell at the entrance of the sun into the constellation Aries in the zodiac; and the rule that the paschal lamb must be roasted, not boiled, tells also of the sun-myth. Yet again, the lamb is the animal latterly substituted in the myth of Abraham and Isaac for the sacrificed only-begotten son Isaac, whose name in the Hebrew (Yischak) comes somewhat near to the common form of the name Jesus (Yeschu), and who is mythologically identifiable as a Sun-God. In any case, “the Lamb slain for us” in the Apocalypse implies a recognized sacrament of lamb-eating, such as that of the Passover, which was anciently the time for sacrificing first-born sons (Ex. xxii, 29), and which is explained even in the priestly myth as a commemoration of the sparing of the first-born of Israel when the first-born of Egypt were divinely destroyed. To such a national precedent the Hebrew Jesuists would tend to cling as they did to the practice of circumcision.

But mere poverty on the one hand, and on the other the then common ascetic instinct (which in some cases put water for wine), would tell among Gentiles against the eating of actual flesh even when the pretence was to eat flesh and drink blood. In some early Christian groups accordingly the sacrificial food took the shape of a model of a lamb in bread6 (a kind of device often resorted to in pagan worship with a special form of animal sacrifice), while others actually ate a lamb and drank its blood, as did some of the Mithraists and some of the Egyptian worshippers of Ammon. The Pauline phrase, “Our Passover also has been sacrificed, Christ”—which may or may not be an interpolation—would square with either practice. But that Jews who had been wont to make much of a paschal lamb, and who held Jesus to have represented that lamb, should pass at once to a sacred meal of simple bread and wine or water, is unlikely; and the gospels themselves indicate that a dish of another kind preceded the bread and wine formality in the traditional Supper.

Light is thrown on the original nature of the Jesuist rite by the Paschal controversy in which the Eastern and Western churches are found embroiled towards the end of the second century. It turned nominally on the different accounts of the crucifixion in the synoptics and the fourth gospel. Whereas the synoptics make Jesus take the Passover with his disciples in due course, and die on the cross on the first day (the Jewish day being reckoned from evening to evening), the fourth gospel makes him sup informally with his disciples on the day before the Passover, and die at the very hour of the paschal meal. The idea obviously is that implied in the Pauline phrase already quoted—that he is henceforth the substitute for the lamb; and in actual fact the Eastern Christians of the second century are found breaking their Easter fast on the Passover day, while the Westerns did not break it till the Sunday of the resurrection. Evidently the Eastern Christians had all along preserved an immemorial usage of eating their eucharist on the Passover. They did not do this as orthodox Jews, for they called their meal one of “salvation” in a Christist sense, and their opponents did not charge them with Judaizing; but they argued that they must take the eucharist at the time at which Jesus took it with his disciples; while the Westerns contended that the time for rejoicing and commemoration was the day of resurrection. The explanation is that the story of Jesus eating with his disciples is a myth of the kind always framed to account for an ancient ritual practice; that the Jewish circumstances naturally gave the story a form which made Jesus obey a Judaic ordinance; and that the Westerns, coming newly into the cult, either recoiled from the procedure of a banquet on the very eve of the Lord’s betrayal, or followed an Adonisian or Attisian usage, in which the original sacrificial banquet, though perhaps not abandoned, had been overshadowed by the “love feast” on the announcement that “the Lord has arisen.”

In the nature of the case, the controversy was insoluble by argument. The Easterns had always taken the Holy Supper at the time of the Passover, and they had the gospel story telling them to repeat it “in remembrance” of the Lord who so supped at the Passover. The Westerns had the fourth gospel as their evidence that Jesus actually died at the time of the Passover, thus constituting a universal substitute for the Jewish sacrifice; and as in this gospel there is no use of bread and wine, but merely the nondescript meal which precedes the ritual in the synoptics, and in which the only symbolic act is the giving of a “sop” to the betrayer, they were left to practise the traditional eucharist in the way most conformable to their feelings or to their pre-Christian usages. All theory was finally lost sight of in the historic church, with its daily celebration of the “mass,” which is the annual sacrifice turned into a weekly and daily one; but from the whole discussion there emerges the fact that the sacrifice is the oldest element in the cult, antedating its biographical myths. And as the symbolic eating of bread and wine as “body and blood” in the pagan cults is a late refinement on a grosser practice of primitive sacrifice, so it was in the Christist. As the wafer in the Catholic ritual is the attenuated symbol of the bread of the mystic supper, so that bread was in turn an attenuated symbol of an earlier object.

When Christianity comes into aggressive competition with Paganism, one of the common charges of its Roman enemies is found to be that the Christians were wont to eat the body of an actual child in their mysteries. There is no good reason to believe that this horror ever happened among them; though the language of the rite tells of a pre-historic practice of human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism, such as actually took place among the early Semites and the pre-Christian Mexicans, and was said to have been in use among the Druids about the beginning of the Christian era; but it is probable that in some Christist groups there was a usage of eating a baked image of a child, as had been done in the Dionysian mysteries. The manipulation of the Abraham and Isaac legend, taken with other data in the Pentateuch and elsewhere, makes it clear that child-sacrifice had been practised among the early Hebrews as among the Phoenicians, and that the sacrifice of a lamb or kid became the equivalent, as it was perhaps the prototype. When it was permitted to substitute a dough image for the actual lamb, the mystical principle could be further served by a dough image of the child that the lamb itself typified. Under the veil of secrecy, which was as much a matter of course with the early Christians as with the pagan initiates of the Eleusinian and other mysteries, such variations of the cult were possible to an indefinite extent. It was only when there grew up an ecclesiastical organization, in the spirit and on the scale of the imperial system itself, and when the compiled gospels had become a recognised code for the Church in general, that they were reduced to the norm of the pagan sacrament of bread and wine.

The only other primary Christian rite, that of baptism, is shown even in the gospels to have been pre-Christian; and the anti-Judaic John the Baptist may have been a historic figure among the Jews, though his connection with the Christos is a myth, seen in the gospels in different stages of its development.7 The presumption is that it was framed at the stage at which the Jewish Christists, faced by the Pauline and Gentile opposition to circumcision, hitherto held binding among the Jesuists, decided to substitute baptism (which already had a Jewish vogue) and thereby maintain a Jewish primacy. But baptism too was a common Gentile usage, as was the use of holy water, later adopted by the Christian Church.

With these Christist rites, it is clear, there was originally associated a fixed belief in the speedily-approaching end of the world, that being the notion which most completely pervades every book in the New Testament. The rites then, like the similar mysteries of the Pagans, were regarded as the way of entrance into the future life, whether that were conceived as the apparition of a supernatural New Jerusalem on earth, or as a transformed existence in a material heaven in the skies. For the Pauline period, the approaching catastrophe was evidently the supreme pre-occupation; and to the fear of it the whole of the early Christian propaganda appealed. There is no reason, however, to believe that the Christians at Jerusalem ever “had all things in common,” as is asserted in the Acts of the Apostles, where other passages confute the claim. Such communities indeed had arisen in antiquity, and there was a kindred tradition that Pythagoras had centuries before, in Italy, converted by one discourse a multitude of hearers, who adopted a communal life. But the narrative in the Acts, especially as regards the fable of Ananias and Sapphira, seems to have been framed in the interest of some of the Christian communist groups which arose after the period in question, and whose promoters needed at once an apostolic precedent for their ideal and a menace against those who temporized with it. In the Pauline epistles the Gentile converts, so far from cultivating community of goods, are seen going to law with each other before heathen judges.

It is probable that the use of the sign of the cross, as a mark of membership and a symbol of salvation, belonged to the earliest stages of the cult; at least the sign in question figures as the mark of a body of religious enthusiasts in Jewry as early as the Book of Ezekiel (ix, 4; Heb.); and in the Apocalypse (vii, 2, 3) the “seal of the living God” appears to have been understood in the same sense as the sign prescribed in the prophecy. The Hebrew letter tau, there specified, is known to have represented at different periods different forms of cross; and the oldest of all is believed to have been the crux ansata of the Egyptians, which was a hieroglyph of immortal life. Thus the historic form of the crucifix was determined, not by the actual manner of normal crucifixion (for in that the arms were drawn above the head and not outspread), but by previous symbolism. In the Egyptian ritual of Osiris a spreading of the arms on the cross was in remote antiquity a form of mystic regeneration; and in some amulets the stauros or tree-cross of Osiris is found represented with human arms.

A severance between the Jewish and the Gentile Christists was the necessary condition of any wide spread of the cult. Though it was the success of Jewish proselytism that paved the way for the propaganda of Christism, only a handful of Gentiles would willingly bow to the Jewish pretension of holding all the sources of “salvation.” That a GrÆcized Jew, as Paul is represented to have been, should begin to make the cult cosmopolitan, in despite of opposition from Jerusalem, is likely enough; and continued opposition would only deepen the breach. The Judaic claim involved a financial interest; and as local economic interest was a factor in the development of every Gentile group of Christists, a theological argument for Gentile independence was sure to be evolved. As the composition of the Christ-myth proceeded, accordingly, various episodes to the discredit of the mythic twelve disciples of Jesus are framed: “one of the twelve” figures as the betrayer; Peter openly denies his Master, and the others forsake him in a body in the hour of trial; while their incapacity to understand him in life is often insisted on. John the Baptist and Jesus, again, are made explicitly to teach that the “Kingdom of God” is taken away from the Jews, though Jesus also promises the twelve that they shall sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes. Finally, there is a manipulation of narratives on the question of the responsibility for Jesus’ execution, the outcome being that it lies neither with the Roman governor nor with the sub-Roman king, but with the Jewish priests and people, even as the life of the Child-God at his birth is menaced by the Jewish King. In all likelihood most of those episodes were first set forth in a Gentile Passion-play, whence they passed into the common stream of tradition; but such an item as the part played by Pilate is likely to have been first introduced from the Jewish side, Pilate having been an object of special Jewish detestation.

In such matters the literary or myth-making faculty of the Gentiles, with their many Saviour-Gods, gave them the advantage over the Judaists; but the strife of the two interests was long and bitter. It flames out in the Judaic book of Revelation, in the allusion to those who “say they are apostles and are not”; and long after the time allotted to Paul we find him caricatured in certain Judaizing writings, the so-called Clementine Recognitions and Homilies, in the person of Simon Magus, an entirely unhistorical personage, who also appears in the Acts of the Apostles. Simon Magus is, in fact, a mythical figure evolved from Semo Megas or Great Sem (=Sem-on, as Samson is Samas-on), an old Semitic Sun-God worshipped by the polytheists of Samaria, and in connection with whose cultus there was evidently a Gentile Christist movement, of a Gnostic or mythical character, its Christ being conceived as non-human. Such a movement being competitive with that of the Jewish Jesus, “Simon,” to whom was ascribed an impressive Gnostic treatise, became the type of anti-Jewish heresy; whence the late Christian story in the Acts, where Elymas again (=Great El) is a mythical duplication of Simon.

There are many signs that Samaritan elements entered early into the Christist movement. The fourth gospel even represents the founder to have been accepted in Samaria as the Messiah; and in so far as the cult became Gentilised, even if the Ebionites did not stand for an ancient local and quasi-Samaritan foundation, Samaritans would be the more ready to join it, since they were thereby helping to discomfit the more exclusive Jews. But they too had their Christ-myth; and the conception of the Holy Spirit as a dove came from them to the Christians. Seeking to found finally on the Old Testament, the scripture-makers of the latter movement had to explain away their Samaritan antecedents by myths of heresy.

The book of Acts as a whole, however, stands for an ecclesiastical tendency in the second century to make out that the first apostles had not been divided; that Peter too was a preacher of Gentile Christism, to which he had been converted by a vision; and that Paul, in turn, had made concessions to Judaism. When the Judaic Church became less and less dangerous as a possible monopolist, the organizing Gentile churches could thus proceed to construct a theoretic connection between Christianity and Judaism, the “new dispensation” and the old, thus preserving for the new creed the prestige of the Old Testament, with which, as a body of sacred books, the New could not for a long time compete, even in the eyes of its devotees. At the same time the apostles, who had long figured as church-founders, were effectively glorified as wonder-workers, being credited with miracles which rivalled those of the Christos himself; and Peter raises a “Tabitha” from the dead as Jesus had done the “Talitha” or maiden in the gospels—a myth which was itself a duplicate of a traditional pagan miracle later credited to Apollonius of Tyana.

Alongside, however, of the systematizing or centripetal process there went on a centrifugal one, the process of innovating Gentile heresy. Already in Paul’s epistles we read of “another Jesus” whom the apostle “had not preached”; and in the second century a dozen “Gnostic” heresies were honeycombing the movement. Their basis or inspiration was the mystic claim to inner light, “gnosis” or knowledge, disparaged in the Pauline phrase about “knowledge [or science] falsely so-called.” It was in nearly all cases a combination of ideas current in the theosophies of Asia and Egypt with the God-names of the Judaic and Christian cults. So powerful was the instinct of independence, then as in later periods of political change, that the spirit of Gnosticism, in a Judaic form, found its way into the expanding gospels, where Jesus is at times made to pose as the holder of a mystical knowledge, denied to the capacities of the multitude, but conveyed by him to his disciples; who, however, are in other passages reduced to the popular level of spiritual incapacity. It cannot be doubted that the ferment thus promoted by what the systematizers denounced as heresy helped at first to spread the cult, at least in name, since all Christists alike would tend to resort to the eucharist, or to the assemblies which were to develop into Churches.

At first the Jewish Christists may well have shared in the ordinary Jewish detestation of the Roman tyranny; and for them Nero may have been “Anti-Christ,” as he appears to be in the Apocalypse; but there is no good reason to suppose that in Nero’s day the historic Christians in Rome were a perceptible quantity. Martyr-making later became an ecclesiastical industry; and the striking passage in Tacitus which alleges the torture and destruction of a “vast multitude” of Christians at Nero’s hands is nowhere cited in Christian literature till after the printing, under suspicious circumstances, of the Annals. No hint of such a catastrophe is given in the Acts of the Apostles. An equivalent statement to that of Tacitus is first found in the chronicle of Sulpicius Severus in the fifth century, where it is an expanded episode in the midst of an extremely curt epitome. The similarly suspicious passage on the same subject in Suetonius is put in further perplexity by the same writer’s statement that in the reign of Claudius the Jews in Rome were constantly rioting, “Chrestus stirring them up”—an expression which suggests, if anything, that there was on foot in Rome a common Jewish movement of Messianic aspiration, in which the Christ was simply expected as a deliverer, apart from any such special cult as that of Jesus. It is quite inapplicable to any such movement as is set forth in the Pauline epistles. In any case, after the fall of Jerusalem Jesuist hopes were visibly confined to the religious sphere; and Gentile Christianity above all was perforce resigned to the imperial system, of which it was one day to become a limb.

There is seen too, even on the face of the Pauline epistles, a superimposing of the new Greek terms and concepts on the vocabulary of Jewish theology—terms of metaphysic and religion such as immortality, conscience, providence, natural, corruptible, invisible—and in the language of the gospels and the Acts the Grecising influence becomes more and more marked, increasing in the Acts and in the third gospel, and becoming paramount in the fourth. The very conception of religious as distinct from temporal salvation is Hellenistic or Persian rather than Judaic; and the title of Saviour, which becomes the special epithet of the Christ, is constituted as much by pagan usage as by the original significance of the name Jesus. Gentile also, rather than Judaic—though common to the pre-Judaic Semites and the idolaters among the Hebrews—was the idea expressed in the Pauline epistles that the Christist who partakes of the mystic rite suffers with and henceforth is one with the slain demigod, being “crucified with Christ.” That conception is precedented generally in all the cults of ritual mourning, notably in that of Osiris, and particularly in that of Attis, in which the worshippers gashed themselves and punctured their hands or necks; some of the priests even mutilating themselves as the God was mutilated in the myth. The Pauline expression is to be understood in the light of the passage in which a bitter censure, for having taken up a false Christism, is passed on the Galatians, “before whose eyes Christ had been openly depicted, crucified” (cp. 1 Cor. xi, 26, Gr. and A.V.). In some but not in all MSS. are added the words “among you,” words which may either have been omitted by late transcribers whom they embarrassed, or added by some one desirous of accentuating the already emphatic expression of the original. When we connect with these the further passage, usually taken also without inquiry as purely metaphorical, in which Paul says he “bears branded on his body the marks of Jesus,” we find reason to surmise that, even as the ministrant in the Dionysian college was called by the God’s name, Bacchus; as the Osirian worshipper spread himself on the cross and became one with Osiris; and as the priest of Attis personated Attis in his mysteries—so Paul or another personated Jesus in the mysteries of his sect; that what has so long passed for verbal metaphor stood originally for a process of acted symbolism; and that the theory of the mystery was that he who personated the crucified demigod became specially assimilated to him. The Pauline language on this head coincides exactly with the general and primordial theory of theanthropic sacrifice: “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.” (Cp. Phil. iii, 11.) Obscure and violent if understood as sheer metaphor, such expressions fall into line with much ancient religious belief when read as describing a symbolic rite.

In any case, the first-cited passage seems to tell of either a dramatic or a pictorial representation of the crucified Christ in connection with the sacrament; a procedure which would probably not be favoured by the art-hating Jews, but which, gradually developed among the Gentiles in the fashion of the drama-loving Greeks, is the probable origin of several of the gospel narratives. It belonged to the conception of all such mysteries that their details should never be divulged to outsiders; hence the rarity of such allusions, even in letters to the faithful. The Christian cult adopted the very terms of the heathen practice, and its initiates were called mystÆ, like those of all the rival religions.

A study of the early Christian tombs shows how much of more or less unconscious compromise took place wherever Christism made converts. The charming myth of Psyche had become for Pagans a doctrine of immortality; and in that sense the figure of the child-goddess was without misgiving carved on early Christian tombs. So with the figure of Hermes Kriophoros, Hermes the Ram-Bearer, who is the true original of the Christian conception of the Good Shepherd, in art and in thought, though a figure of Apollo in the same capacity may have been the medium of conveyance. Orpheus was assimilated in the same fashion; and when art began to be applied to the needs of the new cult, Jesus was commonly figured as a beardless youth, like the popular deities of the Pagans in general.

Last but not least of the Gentile elements which determined the spread of the Christist cult was the double meaning attaching to the Greek form of the Messianic name. In the unplausible passage above cited from Suetonius, that is spelt Chrestus, evidently after the Greek word Chrestos=“good, excellent, gracious,” which occurs frequently in the New Testament, and which was a special title of the “infernal” or underworld Gods of the Samothracian mysteries, also of Hermes, of Osiris, and of Isis. The two words were pronounced alike; and the coincidence is often such as would be made much of by ancient thinkers, wont to lay great stress on words. In the gospel phrase so loosely rendered “my yoke is easy” the Greek adjective is chrestos; as also in that translated: “he is kind towards the unthankful and evil” (Lk. vi, 35); and in the phrase “the Lord is gracious” (1 Pet. ii, 3). In the epistles, too, chrestotes is the word used in the phrase “the goodness of God”; and in the familiar Pauline quotation from Menander “good manners” is in the Greek chresta ethe. Among the Pagans, again, this epithet constantly figured on the kind of tomb called heroon, erected to distinguished persons who thus received the status of inferior deities or demigods, and who in consequence of this very epigraphic formula came in later times to be regarded as Christian martyrs, and to be so celebrated in festivals which were really continuations of the pagan feasts in their honour. The Christians themselves, on the other hand, habitually wrote their founder’s name Chrestos or Chreistos on their tombs in the second and third centuries, thus assimilating it to the pagan epigraphic formula chreste chaire; and the term Christian frequently followed the same spelling. Several of the Fathers, indeed, make play with the double spelling, claiming that the terms are for them correlative. So fixed was the double usage that to this day the spelling of the French word chrÉtien preserves the trace. There was thus on the Christist side an appeal to Gentiles on the lines of a name or badge already much associated with Gentile religion, and attractive to them in a way in which the name “Christ” as signifying “one anointed” would not be.

How far this attraction operated may be partly inferred from such a document as the apologetic treatise of Theophilus of Antioch, conjecturally dated about the year 180, in which there is not a single mention of Jesus as a basis of the Christian creed, while the names Christos and Christian are repeatedly bracketed with “chrestos.” The writer figures less as a Pauline Christist than as a Gentile proselyte who founded on the Hebrew sacred books, and believed in some impersonal Christ at once “good” and “anointed.” Similarly in the Apology of Athenagoras, belonging to the same period, the founder figures purely as the divine Logos, not being even mentioned as a person with a biography, though the writer quotes the Logos through an apocryphal gospel. In such a propaganda the Greek associations with the epithet chrestos would count for much more than those of the Judaic standpoint.

But above all other gains on this score may be reckoned those made in Egypt, where the cult of the cross belonged alike to the ancient worship of Osiris and the recent one of Serapis. Not only was Osiris in especial chrestos, the benign God, but the hieroglyph of goodness, applied to him in common with others, had the form of a cross standing on a hillock (= a grave?), while the cross symbol in another form was the sign of immortal life. In the imported worship of Serapis, which inevitably conformed in the main to that of Osiris, the cross was equally a divine and mystic emblem. It thus becomes intelligible that some devotees of Serapis should, as is stated in the well-known letter of the Emperor Hadrian, figure as bishops of Christ; and that Serapis-worshippers should rank as Christians, their God being like Osiris “Chrestos.” To gather into one loosely-coherent mass the elements so variously collected was the work of the gradually-developed hierarchical organization; and the process involved a retention of some of the characteristics of the various worships concerned.

That there were yet other sources of membership for the early Church, apart from direct conversion, is to be gathered from the allegorical writing known as the Pastor of Hermas, which is known to have been one of the most popular books in the whole Christian literature of the second century. This work, apparently written in Italy, never once mentions the name Jesus or the name Christ, and never quotes from any book in either Testament, nor alludes to a crucifixion or a eucharist; but speaks of One God, a Holy Spirit, and a Son of God who underwent labours and sufferings; of a “Church” which appears to mean the community of all good men; and of bishops and apostles and presbyters. It is intelligible only as standing for some species of pre-Jesuist propaganda very loosely related to Judaism, inasmuch as it appears to cite some apocryphal Jewish work, yet utters no Judaic doctrine. Its sole specified rite is baptism; and its moral teaching barely recognizes the idea of vicarious sacrifice. Such a work must have had its public before the Jesuist movement took sectarian or dogmatic form; and its popularity in the early Church must have come of the inclusion of its earlier following. When the Church attained definite organization and a dogmatic system the book was naturally discarded as having none of the specific qualities of a Christian document.

A “Church” such as is ambiguously set forth in the Pastor may conceivably have been set up by one of the movements of Samaritan Christism already mentioned, or by that connected with the name of the Jew Elxai, who is recorded to have written of “Christ” without making it clear whether he referred to the gospel Jesus. As among the Elcesaites, so in the Pastor, the “Son” is conceived as of gigantic stature. On any view, being neither Christian nor anti-Christian, but simply pre-Christian, yet turned to Christian uses, the book strengthens the surmise that a number of the so-called heresies of the early Church were in reality survivals of earlier movements which the Church had absorbed, perhaps during times of persecution. The “heresy” of Simon Magus was certainly such a pre-Christian cult; that of Dositheus appears to be in the same case; and the ideas of the Pastor conform to no canonical version of the Christian creed.

The Christist cult gained ground not because there was anything new either in its dogma or in its promise, but on the contrary because these were so closely paralleled in many pagan cults: its growth was in fact by way of assimilation of new details from these. Step by step it is seen to have adopted the mysteries, the miracles, and the myths of the popular Gentile religions. The resurrection of Jesus is made to take place like that of Mithra, from a rock tomb; and to the sacred banquet of twelve represented by the Last Supper there is added, in the fourth gospel, an episode which embodies the common pagan usage of a sacred banquet of seven.8 In the way of miracle the Christ is made to turn water into wine, as Dionysos had been immemorially held to do; he walks on the water like Poseidon; like Osiris and Phoebus Apollo he wields the scourge; like the solar Dionysos, he rides on two asses and feeds multitudes in the desert; like Æsculapius, he raises men from the dead, gives sight to the blind, and heals the sick; and like Attis and Adonis he is mourned over and rejoiced over by women. Where the parallel is not exact we still find pagan myth giving rise to Christian; for the fable of the temptation is but a new story told of the oft-copied ancient Babylonian astronomical symbol in which the Goat-God (the sign of Capricorn) stands beside the Sun-God—a scene turned by the Greeks into the myths of Pan leading Jupiter to the mountain-top, of Pan or Marsyas competing with Apollo, and of Silenus instructing Dionysos.9 Above all, the Christ had to be born in the manner of the ever-cherished Child-God of the ancient world; he must have a virgin for mother, and he must be pictured in swaddling-clothes in the basket-manger, preserved from immemorial antiquity in the myth of Ion and in the cult of Dionysos, in which the image of the Child-God was carried in procession on Christmas day. Like Horos he must be born in a stable—the stable-temple of the sacred cow, the symbol of the Virgin Goddess Isis, queen of heaven; and the apocryphal gospels completed the pagan parallel by making the stable a cave, the birthplace of Zeus and Mithra and Dionysos and Adonis and Hermes and Horos.10 Prudence excluded the last detail from the canonical gospels, but it became part of the popular faith; and the Christ’s birthday had been naÏvely assimilated by the populace to the solstitial birth-day of the Sun-God, December 25, long before the Church ventured to endorse the usage.

Judaic manipulation, however, was not lacking. Though Jesus is born of a virgin, it is in the manner of Jewish theosophy; for the “Spirit of God” broods over Mary as it had done on the germinal deep in Genesis. Having been a Jewish Saviour before he was a Gentile or Samaritan Christ, Jesus had further to satisfy as many as possible of the Jewish Messianic requirements. He must be of the line of David, and born at Bethlehem; but inasmuch as Jewish tradition expected both a Messiah Ben-David and a Messiah Ben-Joseph—the latter being apparently a Samaritan requirement11—he was made Ben-David by royal descent, and Ben-Joseph through his putative father. Yet again, there being Messianists who denied the necessity that the Anointed One should descend from David, there was inserted in the gospels a story in which Jesus repudiates such descent; the two opposed theories being thus alike harboured, without discomfort and without explanation. In the same fashion the ascetics of the movement made the Son of Man poor and homeless, while the anti-ascetics made him a wine-drinker, ready to sit at meat with publicans and sinners. For the Jews, too, he had to raise the “widow’s son” as did Elijah and Elisha in the Old Testament story—a Hebrew variant of the (pictured?) Gentile myth of the raising of the dead Attis or Adonis, or the dead child Horos or Dionysos, further reproduced in the resurrection of the Christ himself; and there had to be at his birth a massacre of the innocents, as in the myth of Moses and in the Arab myths of the births of Abraham and Daniel. Yet again, he had to figure in his crucifixion as bearing the insignia of royalty, like the sacrificed “only-begotten son” of the Semitic God El, and the sacrificed God-man of the Babylonian feast of SacÆa.12 It may be that Barabbas, “the son of the father,” is a survival of the same conception and the same ritual usage, similarly imposed on a narrative of which no part is historical.

As with action, so with theory. In the East there had long prevailed the mystical dogma that the Supreme God, who was above knowledge, had incarnated himself in or created a deity representing his mind in relation to men, the Logos or Word, in the sense of message or revealed reason. Such was Mithra, the Mediator, in the Mazdean system, whence apparently the conception originated; such was Thoth in the theosophy of Egypt; such was Hermes, son of Maia and messenger of the Gods, in the pantheon of the Greeks; and the Jews had long been assimilating the principle, partly by making the deity figure as the Logos in human or angelic form (as in Gen. xv); partly in the form of a personalizing of Sophia, wisdom, as in the books of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs and in the Old Testament apocrypha; partly in the later form of a theoretic doctrine of the Logos, as developed on the basis of Plato in the writings of Philo the Jew of Alexandria, about the beginning of the Christian era.13 In the fourth gospel this doctrine is summarily imposed on the Christist cult in an advanced form, though the three synoptic gospels had shown no trace of it. The new myth was welcomed like the others; all alike went to frame a deity who could compare and compete with those of the other cults of the day.

Doctrine followed the same law of assimilation; the Christ must needs reflect in his teaching all the phases of the religious thought of the age, however contradictory. First he had to voice the Judaic hope of a kingdom of heaven, with stress laid on the claims of the poor; he must insist on the speedy coming of the Judaic doomsday and on his own function at the catastrophe; but yet again he is made to present the kingdom of heaven as a kind of spiritual change; and last of all he is made to utter the wisdom of the thinker who had penetrated all the popular delusions and seen that “the kingdom of heaven is among you”—or nowhere. In one gospel he excludes Samaritans and Gentiles from his mission; in another he makes a Samaritan the model “neighbour”; in another he goes among the Samaritans in person. He becomes as manifold in doctrine as is Apollo or Dionysos in function. Even when he is made to lay down, as against Jewish superstition, the sane principle that victims of fatalities are not to be reckoned worse sinners than other men, a later hand appends a tag which reaffirms the very superstition impugned. Every variety of ethic, within the limits of the Jewish and Gentile ideals of the time, is imposed on him in turn. Alternately particularist and universalist, a bigoted Jew and a cosmopolitan, a lover of the people and a Gnostic despiser of their ignorance, a pleader for love to enemies and a bitter denouncer of opponents; successively insisting on unlimited forgiveness and on the ostracism of recalcitrant brethren, on the utter fulfilment of the Mosaic law and on its supersession; alternately promising and denying temporal blessings, avowing and concealing his belief in his Messiahship; prescribing by turns secrecy and publicity to his auditors, blind faith and simple good works to his disciples—he is the heterogeneous product of a hundred mutually frustrative hands, a medley of voices that never was and could not be in one personality. Through his supernatural mask there speak the warring sects and ideals of three centuries: wisdom and delusion, lenity and bitterness, ventriloquize in turns in his name. Even as the many generations of Jewish teachers had preluded all their changing counsels with a “thus saith the Lord,” so did their Christist successors seek to mint their cherished dogmas, their rigid prejudices, and their better inspirations, with the image and superscription of the new Logos, the growing God of a transforming world. The later product is thus as unreal as the older.

It is only on presuppositions themselves the fruit of belief in the myth that such a growth seems unlikely or impossible, or that something supernormal is needed to account for the wide development of the Christian system. Those who look upon the historic flood in the broad and peopled plain are slow to conceive that it had its rise in the minute rills and random brooks of a far-off mountain land. But it is so that the great rivers begin.