For anyone who will soberly and faithfully face the facts there must sooner or later arise the problem, Is there any unifying personality behind this medley of many sets of doctrines, many voices, many schools? Even if it were possible to piece together from it a coherent body of either ethical or religious thought, and jettison the rest, is there any reason to believe that the selected matter belongs to the Gospel Teacher with the Twelve Disciples, crucified on the morning after the Passover under Pontius Pilate? When the crowning doctrine of sacrament and sacrifice is seen to be but the consummation of a religious lore beginning in prehistoric and systematic human sacrifice, and traceable in a score of ancient cults, is it possible to claim that the palpably dramatic record of Last Supper, Agony, Betrayal, Trial, and Crucifixion is a historic record of a strange coincidence between cult practice and biography? And if that goes, what is left? If, says Loisy, the condemnation of Jesus as pretended Messiah by Pilate “could be put in doubt, one would have no motive for affirming the existence of Christ.”1 And it can!

Some, assuming to settle the problem by rhetoric, in effect stand for a “personality” without any pretence of establishing what the “personality” taught. And this inexpensive device will doubtless long continue to be practised by the large class who insist upon solving all such problems by instinct. An example of that procedure is afforded by an article headed “A Barren Controversy,” by the Rev. Frederick Sinclair, in a magazine entitled Fellowship, the organ of the Free Religious Fellowship, Melbourne, issue of March, 1915. The controversy is certainly barren enough as Mr. Sinclair conducts it. His religious temper is of a familiar type. “It is a hard task to prove the obvious,” he begins; “and no obligation is laid on us to examine and refute the evidences alleged in support of this or that cock-and-bull theory.” We can imagine how the reverend critic would have shone in the sixteenth or the seventeenth century, disposing of the Copernican theory, which so presumptuously assailed “the obvious.” True to his principles, he does not hamper himself by meeting arguments or evidence. “Mythical theories about Christ have about as much scientific value and importance as the theories of the Baconians about Shakespeare. They ... are products ... of that perverted credulity which will swallow anything, so long as it is not orthodox; and they are best met by the method of satire adopted by Whately in his ‘Historic Doubts’ on Napoleon.” And yet our expert renounces that admirable instrument in favour of the simpler procedure vulgarly known as “bluff.” He is in reality a good example of the psychosis of the very Baconism which he contemns, and which he would probably be quite unable to confute. An Æsthetic impression of “reality” derived from a hypnotized perusal of Mark, and a feeling that only one man could deliver such oracles, are the beginning and end of his dialectic and scholarly stock-in-trade; even as a consciousness that Bacon must be the author of the Plays, and that the actor Shakespeare could not have written them, is the beginning and end of the ignorant polemic of the Baconists.

To do him justice, it should be noted that Mr. Sinclair warns his readers both before and after his case that his handling of the theme and their preparation for estimating it leave a great deal to be desired by those who care to see applied “the method of careful criticism.” Still, he is satisfied that it is “adequate to the particular question we have been considering.” And this is how Mr. Sinclair has considered:—

The open-minded reader, I trust, will hardly need to be told that what is here done is to set a false problem and ignore the real issue. Mr. Sinclair either cannot understand that issue or elects to evade it. Probably the former is the explanation. No critic of the Gospels, so far as I remember, ever suggested that any of them “cunningly counterfeits life”; and certainly no one ever pretended that Mark2 exhibits a “conventional, symmetrical design,” though Wilke argued that it “freely moulded the traditional historical material in pursuance of literary aims,” and B. Weiss praises its literary colouring. It is a heap of unreal incident, fortuitously collocated,3 and showing nothing approaching to symmetrical design. “Conventional” raises another question; in this as in all the Gospels there is plenty of convention.

Let us but follow for a little the simple method of selection prescribed by Mr. Sinclair, and see what we get. What we are to make of Mark i, 1–9, is far from clear. It sets forth the advent of John as the fulfilment of a prophecy—i.e., a miracle; and it describes his mission in the baldest conceivable summary, save for the sentence: “And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and had a leathern girdle about his loins, and did eat locusts and wild honey.” Is this “convention” or “reality”? I am not inclined to call it “literary artifice,” unless we are to apply that description to the beginning of the average nursery tale, as perhaps we should. What must strike the inquiring reader is that if we were to have a touch of “reality” about the Baptist we should be told something about his inner history, his antecedents, and what he preached. What we are told is that “he preached, saying, There cometh after me he that is mightier than I.... I baptized you with water; but he shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

If this part of the narrative has not been “struck out” by Mr. Sinclair’s neophytes as plainly belonging to the miraculous, the next five verses presumably must be. The non-miraculous narrative begins at v. 14:—

This “episode,” for Mr. Sinclair, “seems to belong to real life, to be told of a real human being with distinct individuality.” For critical readers it is a primitive “conventional” narrative, told by a writer who has absolutely no historic knowledge to communicate. Of the preaching of the Saviour he has no more to tell than of the preaching of the Baptist. Both are as purely “conventional,” so far, as an archaic statue of Hermes. Of “the freedom and variety of life” there is not a trace; Mr. Sinclair, who professes to find these qualities, is talking in the manner of a showman at a fair. The important process of making disciples resolves itself into a fairy tale: “Come and I will make you fishers of men; and they came.” A measure of “literary artifice” is perhaps to be assigned to the items of “casting a net,” “mending the net,” and “left their father in the boat with the hired servants”;4 but it is the literary art of a thousand fairy tales, savage and civilized, and stands for the method of a narrator who is dealing with purely conventional figures, not with characters concerning which he has knowledge. The calling of the first disciples in the rejected Fourth Gospel has much more semblance of reality.

If the cautious reader is slow to see these plain facts on the pointing of one who is avowedly an unbeliever in the historic tradition, let him listen to a scholar of the highest eminence, who, after proving himself a master in Old Testament criticism, set himself to specialize on the New. Says Wellhausen: “The Gospel of Mark, in its entirety, lacks the character of history.”5 And he makes good his judgment in detail:—

Wellhausen, it is true, finds suggestions of a real and commanding personality; but they are very scanty, the only concrete detail being the watching the people as they drop their offerings into the collecting-chest! “Passionate moral sensibility distinguishes him. He gives way to divine feeling in anger against the oppressors of the people and in sympathy with the lowly.” But here too there is qualification:—

Then we have a significant balancing between the perception that Mark is not history, and that, after all, it is practically all there is:—

Such is the outcome of a close examination by an original scholar who takes for granted the historicity of Jesus. It is a poor support to a pretence of finding a lifelike narrative.

If the reader under Mr. Sinclair’s tutelage will at this point vary his study somewhat (at the cost of a few extra hours) by reading samples of quite primitive folk-lore—say the Hottentot Fables and Tales collected by Dr. Bleek, in which the characters are mostly, but not always, animals; or some of the fairy tales in Gill’s Myths and Songs of the South Pacific—and then proceed to the tale of Tom Tit Tot, as given by Mr. Edward Clodd in the dialect of East Anglia, he will perhaps begin to realize that unsophisticated narrators not only can but frequently do give certain touches of quasi-reality to “episodes” which no civilized reader can suppose to have been real. In particular he will find in the vivacious Tom Tit Tot an amount of “the freedom and variety of life” in comparison with which the archaic stiffness and bareness of the Gospel narrative is as dumb-show beside drama. And if he will next pay some attention to the narrative of Homer, in which Zeus and HÊrÊ are so much more life-like than a multitude of the human personages of the epic, and then turn to see how Plutarch writes professed biography, some of it absolutely mythical, but all of it on a documentary basis of some kind, he will perhaps begin to suspect that Mr. Sinclair has not even perceived the nature of the problem on which he pronounces, and so is not in a position to “consider” it at all. Plutarch is nearly as circumstantial about Theseus and Herakles and Romulus as about Solon. But when he has real biographical material to go upon as to real personages he gives us a “freedom and variety of life” which is as far as the poles asunder from the hieratic figures of the Christian Gospel. Take his Fabius Maximus. After the pedigree, with its due touch of myth, we read:—

This is biography, accurate or otherwise. Take again the Life of Pericles, where after the brief account of parentage, with the item of the mother’s dream, we get this:—

The “biographer” who so satisfies Mr. Sinclair’s sense of actuality has not one word of this kind to say of the youth, upbringing, birthplace, or appearance of the Teacher, who for him was either God or Supreme Man. Seeking for the alleged “freedom and variety of life” in the narrative, we go on to read:—

and straightway we are back in the miraculous. Mr. Joseph McCabe, who in his excellent book on the Sources of the Morality of the Gospels avows that he holds by the belief in a historical Jesus, though unable to assign to him with confidence any one utterance in the record, fatally anticipates Mr. Sinclair by remarking that “If the inquirer will try the simple and interesting experiment of eliminating from the Gospel of Mark all the episodes which essentially involve miracle, he will find the remainder of the narrative amazingly paltry.” To which verdict does the independent reader begin to incline? Thus the “episodes” continue, after three paragraphs of the miraculous:—

It would seem sufficient to say that Mr. Sinclair, with his “freedom and variety of life,” is incapable of critical reflection upon what he reads. In the opening chapter we have not a single touch of actuality; the three meaningless and valueless touches of detail (“a great while before day” is the third) serve only to reveal the absolute deficit of biographical knowledge. We have reiterated statements that there was teaching, and not a syllable of what was taught. The only utterances recorded in the chapter are parts of the miracle-episodes, which we are supposed to ignore. Let us then consider the critic’s further asseveration:—

a notable variation from the more familiar thesis of the “sublime” and “unique” figure of current polemic. Looking for the alleged details, we find Jesus calling the fifth disciple: “He saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose and followed him”—another touch of “freedom and variety.” Then, after a series of Messianic utterances, including a pronouncement against Sabbatarianism of the extremer sort, comes the story of the healing of the withered hand, with its indignant allocution to “them” in the synagogue: “Is it lawful on the sabbath day to do good, or to do harm, to save a life or to kill?” Here, in a miracle story, we have an intelligible protest against Sabbatarianism: is it the protest or the indignation that vouches for the actuality of the protesting figure? Nay, if we are to elide the miraculous, how are we to let the allocution stand?

These protests against Sabbatarianism, as it happens, are the first approximations to actuality in the document; and as such they raise questions of which the “instinctive” school appear to have no glimpse, but which we shall later have to consider closely. In the present connection, it may suffice to ask the question: Was anti-Sabbatarianism, or was it not, the first concrete issue raised by the alleged Teacher? In the case put, is it likely to have been? Were the miraculous healing of disease, and the necessity of feeding the disciples, with the corollary that the Son of Man was Lord of the Sabbath, salient features in a popular gospel of repentance in view of the coming of the Kingdom of God? If so, it is in flat negation of the insistence on the maintenance of the law in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. v, 17–20), which thus becomes for us a later imposition on the cultus of a purely Judaic principle, in antagonism to the other. That is to say, a movement which began with anti-Sabbatarianism was after a time joined or directed by Sabbatarian Judaists, for whom the complete apparatus of the law was vital. If, on the other hand, recognizing that anti-Sabbatarianism, in the terms of the case, was not likely to be a primary element in the new teaching, that its first obtrusion in the alleged earliest Gospel is in an expressly Messianic deliverance, and its second in a miracle-story, we proceed to “strike out” both items upon Mr. Sinclair’s ostensible principles, we are deprived of the first touch of “indignation” and “anger” which would otherwise serve to support his very simple thesis.