It is only just to confess that the conservatives are already learning to employ some prudential expedients. Met by the challenge to their own nakedly untenable positions, and offered a constructive hypothesis, diversely elaborated from various quarters, they mostly evade the discussion at nearly every point where the impossible tradition is concretely confronted by a thinkable substitute, and spend themselves over the remoter issues of universal mythology. Habitually misrepresenting every argument from comparative mythology as an assertion of a historical sequence in the compared data, they expatiate over questions of etymology, and are loud in their outcry over a suggestion that a given historical sequence may be surmised from data more or less obscure. But to the question how the evangel could possibly have begun as the record represents, or how the consummation could possibly have taken place as described, they either attempt no answer whatever or offer answers which are worse than evasions. One professional disputant, dealing with the proposition that such a judicial and police procedure as the systematic search for witnesses described in the Gospel story of the Trial could not take place by night, “when an Eastern city is as a city of the dead,” did not scruple to say that the thesis amounted to saying that in an Eastern city nothing could happen by night. This controversialist is an instructor of youth, and claims to be an instructed scholar. And his is the only answer that I have seen to the challenge with which it professes to deal. Loisy agrees that the challenge cannot be met.

To the hypothesis that there was a pre-Christian cult of a Jesus-God, the traditionalist—above all, the Unitarian, who seems to feel the pinch here most acutely—retorts with a volley of indignant contempt. He can see no sign of any such cult. In the mind’s eye he can see, as a historic process, twelve Apostles creating a Christian community by simply crying aloud that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, excommunicating for the after life those who will not listen, and all the while assiduously casting out devils. His records baldly tell him that this happened; and “we believe in baptism because we have seen it done.” But whereas, in the nature of the case, the reconstruction of the real historic process must be by tentative inference from a variety of data which for the most part the records as a matter of course obscured, he makes loud play with the simple fact that the records lack the required clear mention, and brands as “unsupported conjecture” the theorem offered in place of the plain untruth with which he has so long been satisfied.

In his own sifted and “primitive” records we have the narration of the carrying of the Divine Man to a height (“pinnacle of the temple” only in the supposed primitive Gospel) by Satan for purposes of temptation. For a mythologist this myth easily falls into line as a variant of the series of Pan and the young Zeus at the altar on the mountain top, Pan and Apollo competing on the top of Mount Tmolus, Apollo and Marsyas, all deriving from the Babylonian figures of the Goat-God (Capricorn) and the Sun-God on the Mountain of the World, representing the starting of the sun on his yearly course. That assignment explains at once the Pagan myths and the Christian, which is thus shown to have borrowed from the myth material of the Greco-Oriental world in an early documentary stage. Challenged to evade that solution, he mentions only the Pan-Zeus story, says nothing of the series of variants or of the Babylonian original, and replies that he is

And this figures as a refutation. For our traditionalist, comparative mythology does not and cannot exist; for him there can be no fundamental connection between any two nominal myths unless they are absolutely identical in all their details; and the goat-footed Pan and the goat-footed Satan (certainly descended from the Goat-God Azazel) are merely “very different beings,” though Satan for the later Jews and Jesuists actually corresponded to Pan (who is not a mere satyr for the Greeks) not only in being the spirit of concupiscence3 but in being “the God of this world,” as the Gospel myth in effect shows him to be. And this exhibition of ignorance of every principle of mythology passes for “scholarship,” and will be duly so certificated by Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who undertakes to preside in that department, as in politics, with about equal qualifications.

By way of constructive solution of the problem we have from the apologist this:—

The thoroughly orthodox, it would appear, must still be catered for, albeit only by the concession of the possibility of “some” malignant spiritual being, which seems a gratuitous slight to the canonical Satan, whose moral dignity had immediately before been acclaimed. But, after expressly insisting on the elements of “temptation” and “ambition” in the story, with the apparent implication that the young Teacher may have had a passing ambition to become a world conqueror, our exegete, in conclusion, collapses to the position of the German exegetes who, the other day, were still debating on the spiritual interpretation of what they could not perceive to be a pure myth of art.

At this stage of enlightenment we hear allusions to “psychology,” though I have not yet met with any explicit pretence that the traditionalist scholars know anything about psychology that is not known to the rest of us. In any case, the suggestion may be hazarded that the first researches they make into psychology might usefully be directed to their own, which is a distressing illustration of the survival of the intellectual methods of the ancient apologists for the Vedas and for the mythology of the Greeks.

A severe scrutiny of psychic processes is indeed highly necessary in this as in so many other disputes in which the affections wrestle with the reason. Such a process of analysis gives us the real causation of the testimony borne by Mill, which is so widely typical. For non-religious as for religious minds the conception they form of the Gospel Jesus is commonly a resultant of a few dominant impressions, varying in each case but all cognate. Jesus is figured first to the recipient spirit as a blessed babe in the arms of an idealized mother, and last as dying on the cross, cruelly tortured for no crime—the supreme example of the martyred philanthropist. In the interim he figures as commanding his dull disciples to “Suffer little children to come unto me,” and as “going about doing good,” all the while preaching forgiveness and brotherly love. No knowledge of the impossibility of most of the particularized cures will withhold even instructed men from soothing their sensibilities by crediting the favourite figure with some vague “healing power” and talking of the possibilities of “faith healing,” even as they loosely accredit some elevating quality, some practical purport, to the visionary evangel, so absolutely mythical that the Gospel writers can tell us not a word of its matter.

Even Professor Schmiedel, expressly applying the tests of naturalism, negates those tests at the outset by taking for granted the Teacher’s possession of unquantified “psychic” healing powers, though the narratives twenty times tell of cures which cannot possibly be described as cases of faith-healing.4 If for the sane inquirer the absolute miracle stories are false, and these stories are false, by what right does he allot evidential value to wholesale allegations of multitudinous cures from the same sources? By the sole right of his predilections. The measure which he metes to the thousand prodigies in Livy is never meted to those of the Gospels. For him, these are different things, being seen in another atmosphere.

In men concerned to be intellectually law-abiding, these dialectic divagations are decently veiled; by others they are passionately flaunted. No recollection of the anger of Plato at those who denied that the Sun and Planets were divine and blessed beings can withhold certain professed scholars from the same angry folly in a similar predicament. But even where theological animus has been in a manner disciplined by the long professional battle over documentary problems, the sheer lack of logical challenge on fundamental issues has left all the disputants alike, down till the other day, taking for granted data to which they had no critical right.

Throughout the whole debate, even in the case of scholars who profess to be loyal to induction, we find that there is a presupposition upon which induction has no effect. Bernhard Weiss, quoting from Holtzmann the profoundly subversive proposition that “Christianity has been ‘book-learning’ from the beginning,” in reply “can only say, God be praised that it is not so.” Yet the real effect of his own research is to show us much—to show that there was no oral evangel, that the formula of “the kingdom of heaven” is but a phrase to fill a blank. Even candid inquirers who see the difficulty, like Samuel Davidson, leave it unsolved. Says Davidson:—

“We must” do no such thing. We “must” draw a licit inference. The alleged great fact is morally a chimera, and historically a hallucination. To admit that all the evidence collapses, and then to posit the visionary gospel with a “must,” is to abandon critical principle. The “must” is simply the eternal presupposition. And the choice of the sincere student “must” be between that negation of science and a fresh scientific search, from which the presupposition, as such, is excluded. If it can reappear as a licit conclusion, so be it. But it has never yet so arisen.