Thus lax in his treatment of the subsidiary historical problems, M. Loisy is of necessity accommodating when he faces those which he recognizes to be central. Over the story of the “purification” of the temple—which Origen found at once unjustifiable and signally miraculous, since it was inconceivable that so great a multitude should have yielded to the mere attack of one man with a scourge of small cords—he has again no misgivings. He feels that some such story was needed to motive the priestly action against Jesus.1 In the story of the astonishing sophism ascribed to Jesus on the subject of the tribute to CÆsar he sees only “cleverness” (habiletÉ); and yet he accepts as historical—again by necessity of his thesis—Jesus’s admission that he claimed to be king of the Jews. In the story of the betrayal he sees fit, docilely following Brandt, to allege “a little confused fighting, some blows given and received” over and above the cutting off of the ear of Malchus, an imagined item which he finds in none of the Gospels. Over the prayers of the Lord while the disciples slept he had hesitated in his commentary;2 falling back on the notable avowal that “the sort of incoherence which results from describing a scene which passed while the witnesses [!] were asleep is without doubt to be explained by the origin and character of the narrative rather than by a negligence of the narrator.” For once, I unreservedly assent to the sans doute. Quite unwittingly, M. Loisy has put himself in line with our mythical theory, which postulates a drama as the origin of the narrative.

All the same, he accepts the narrative as history; and he sees nothing in the fusion of the two speeches: “Sleep on.... It is enough.... Arise now,”... though he rejects the proposal of Bleek, Volkmar, and Wellhausen to turn “Sleep on” into an interrogation,3 and admits that the “It is enough” is an “unclear and very insufficient transition” from “Sleep on” to “Arise.” Once more, which is the more superficial, this lame handling or the recognition of a transcribed drama with two speeches combined because of the omission of an exit and an entrance, in what M. Loisy admits to be “a highly dramatic mise en scÈne”?

But it is over the trial in the house of the high priest that M. Loisy most astonishingly redacts the narrative. In his commentary he recognizes that Matthew’s story, in which the scribes and the elders are “already gathered together” in the dead of night when Jesus is brought for trial, and the story of Mark, in which they “come together with” the high priest, are equally incredible; and that the story of the quest for witnesses in the night is still more so.

Once again we have a sans doute with which we can agree. “The nocturnal procedure, no doubt, did not take place.”4 Recognizing further that a Jewish blasphemer was by the Levitical law to be stoned, not crucified, he simply gives up the whole narrative as a product of “the Christian tradition,” bent on saddling the Jews rather than the Romans with the responsibility of the crucifixion.5 In his smaller work he simply cuts the knot and alleges:—

One certainly cannot call this manipulation of the texts “superficial.” It is sheer deliberate dissolution and reconstruction of the narrative, by way of substituting something more plausible for the incredible original, when all the while the credibility of the original is the thesis maintained. And yet even the reconstruction is so thoughtlessly managed that we get only a slightly less impossible account. Only a scholar who never followed the details of a legal process could suggest that the task of hunting up witnesses and arranging a procedure could be carried through between “earliest dawn” and “morning.” And for the headlong haste of such a procedure, only an hour or so after the arrest of the prisoner, no explanation is even suggested. A violent impossibility in the record, destructive of all faith in its historicity at this point, is sought to be saved by a violent redaction which simply “makes hay” of the very documents founded on. And this illicit violence is resorted to because M. Loisy recognizes that if he is to retain a historical Jesus at all he must bring the whole trial story into a historical shape. He certainly had cause to take drastic measures. Long ago it was pointed out that by Jewish law a prisoner must not be condemned to death on the day of his trial: Judicia de capitalibus finiunt eodem die si sint ad absolutionem; si vero sint ad damnationem, finiuntur die sequente.7 This might alone suffice to “bring into doubt” the priestly trial; to say nothing of the modern Jewish protest that a capital prosecution and execution on either the day after or the day of the Passover, at the instance of the High Priest, was unthinkable.8 There were good reasons, then, for seeking to found on the trial before Pilate.

Let us now survey broadly the process of historical criticism thus far. 1. At an early stage the reconstructors gave up as pure fiction the third trial before Herod, which appears solely in Luke. They did not ask what historical knowledge, or what sense of history, can have existed in a community among which such an absolute invention found ready currency. 2. The next step was to reject as “unhistorical” the narrative of the fourth Gospel, in which Jesus (a) is examined by Annas the high priest, but in no sense tried; (b) is then sent bound to Caiaphas the high priest; (c) is immediately passed on from Caiaphas to Pilate, who examines him within doors while the priests remain outside, there being thus no Jewish witnesses; (d) tells Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world,” and convinces him that he is not punishable. Rejecting this account, as they well might, the reconstructors failed to ask themselves what such an invention signifies. 3. Next disappears the so-called historical narrative of the trial before the high priest and chief priests in the synoptics.9 That in turn, taken on its merits, is found flagrantly incredible; and now M. Loisy in effect puts it aside, reducing it to a fundamentally different form.

Three of the trial stories are thus in turn rejected as hopelessly unhistorical. And now we are invited to regard as “incontestable” the fourth, the trial before Pilate as related in the synoptics; the Johannine version being dismissed as fiction. In the scientific sense of the word10 the rejected stories have been classed as myths. And still we are told that the “myth-theory” is outside discussion.

Yet, even in coming to the trial before Pilate, M. Loisy has to begin by noting the improbability that the entire sanhedrim should have attended it, as is alleged by the synoptics. “In the minds of the evangelists the sanhedrim represents the Jews, and it was the Jews who caused the death of Jesus. Hence the general expressions which the redactors used the more willingly because they were very incompletely informed on the facts.”11 Still, the trial must stand good. Judas goes the way of myth; but the unintelligible procedure of Pilate must be salved. With his general loyalty to the facts as he sees them M. Loisy notes, with Brandt, that in the synoptics as in John there is no Jesuist eye-witness or auditor to report for the faithful what took place. “Here begin the gaps in the Passion-history,” remarks Brandt.12 “Tradition could learn only by indirect ways the general features of the interrogation and the principal incidents which passed between the morning of Friday and the hour of the crucifixion,” says Loisy.13 The student really concerned to get at history is compelled to pronounce that the record thus avowed to be mainly guesswork is myth. Let us take the report as we have it in Mark:—

To this meagre record, in which a capital case is carried before the governor without the slightest documentary preliminaries, and in which he begins to interrogate before a word has been said about the indictment, Matthew adds nothing save the story of Pilate’s wife’s dream, which the reconstructors are fain to dismiss; while Luke, who sees fit to premise specific charges of anti-Roman sedition, follows them up simply by Pilate’s question and Jesus’s assenting answer; and then, quite unintelligibly, makes Pilate declare “unto the chief priests and the multitudes, I find no fault in this man.”

What can it mean? All the exegetes now agree that the “Thou sayest” of Jesus has the force of “I am.”14 By avowing that he called himself King of the Jews he committed a very grave offence towards Rome, unless he explained the title in a mystic sense; and the records exclude any such explanation. In Mark and Matthew the effect is the same: Pilate finds no guilt, and proposes release; but yields to the multitude and the priests. Could any serious student bring himself to regard this as history unless he presupposed the historicity of the crucifixion and was ready to let pass any semblance of motivation for it?

Once more we must affirm that the documents merely reveal entire ignorance of any judicial procedure. Pilate finally puts to death a Jewish prisoner at the request of the sanhedrim and the multitude on a charge for which he finds no evidence. That Pilate should make light of a Jew’s life is indeed easily to be believed: he is exhibited to us by Josephus as an entirely ruthless Roman; but both the synoptics and the fourth Gospel present him in an entirely different light; and no record or commentary makes it intelligible that the Roman governor should crucify a politically unoffending Jew for a purely ecclesiastical Jewish offence. The offence against Rome he is expressly represented as finding imaginary; and yet on the other hand the offence as avowed is very real. By the method of mere accommodation or partial critical rationalism the ascription of the prosecution to the Jews is accounted for as the result of the later developed anti-Judaism of the Christians. But on that view what historical basis have we left? If the later Christians could invent the trial and the Resurrection, what was to prevent their inventing the crucifixion? M. Loisy admits that if the trial goes the historicity of Jesus goes with it; then the crucifixion becomes myth. To say that this is impossible is to beg the question: the myth theory offers the solution.

Given the datum of an original cult-sacrament which had grown out of an ancient ritual-sacrifice, the crucifixion is the first step towards the establishment of a biography of Jesus. A trial and a condemnation, again, are necessary preliminaries to that; and when we critically examine these we find that they are patently unhistorical. Upon no theory of historicity can their contradictions and impossibilities be explained. Once we make the hypothesis, however, that the crucifixion is itself myth, the imbroglio becomes intelligible.

What we do know historically is that the early Christists included Judaizers and Gentilizers; this is established by the sect-history, apart from the Acts and the Epistles. For the Judaizers an execution by the Romans was necessary; for the Gentilizers, who were bound to guard against official Roman resentment, and whose hostility to the Jews was progressive, a Jewish prosecution was equally necessary. In the surviving mystery-play, predominantly a Gentile performance as it now stands in the Gospels, an impossible Jewish trial is followed by an equally impossible Roman trial, in which Jesus by doctrinal necessity avows that he is King of the Jews, thereby salving his Messiahship; while, to keep the guilt on Jewish shoulders and to exclude the suspicion of anti-Roman bias, Pilate is made to disclaim all responsibility. Such is, briefly, the outcome of the myth theory. Upon what other theory can the documents be explained?

Upon what other theory, again, can we explain the vast contrast between the triumphal entry into Jerusalem a few days before and the absolute unanimity of the priest-led multitude in demanding the execution of Jesus against the wish of Pilate? The reconstructors accept both items, with arbitrary modifications, as historical; though the story of the entry is preceded by a mythical item about the choice of the ass-foal whereon never man had sat,15 which is much more stressed and developed than the main point. We are asked to believe that Jesus on his entry is enthusiastically acclaimed by a great multitude as Son of David and King of Israel; and that a few days later not a voice is raised to save his life. Gentilizing Christians could easily credit such things of the Jews. Can a historical student do so? For the former it was enough that in the narrative the Messiahship of the Lord had been publicly accepted; coherence was not required. But historicity means coherence.

Last of all, the item of Barabbas, one of the elaborate irrelevancies which leap to the eye in a narrative so destitute of essentials, turns out to carry a curious corroboration to the myth-theory. This is not the place to develop the probable kinship of the Barabbas of the Gospels with the (misspelt) Karabbas16 of Philo; but we may note the probable reason for the introduction of the name into the myth. As the story stands, it serves merely to heighten the guilt of the Jews, making them in mass save the life of a murderer rather than that of the divine Saviour. The whole story is plainly unhistorical: “neither these details nor those which follow,” remarks M. Loisy (after noting the “extremely vague indications under an appearance of precision” in regard to the antecedents of Barabbas), “seem discussible from the point of view of history.”17 In point of fact, Pilate is made to release an ostensible ringleader of “men who in the insurrection [unspecified] had committed murder,” thus making his action doubly inconceivable. Why was such an item introduced at all?

It is not a case for very confident explanation; but when we note that Barabbas means “Son of the Father”; that the Karabbas of Philo is treated as a mock-king; and that the reading “Jesus Barabbas” in Matt, xxvii, 16, 17, was long the accepted one in the ancient church,18 we are strongly led to infer (1) that the formula “Jesus the Son of the Father” was well known among the first Christians as being connected with a popular rite—else how could such a strange perplexity be introduced into the text?—and (2) that the real reason for introducing it was that those anti-Christians who knew of the name and rite in question used their knowledge against the faith. The way to rebut them was to present Jesus Barabbas not only as a murderer but as the man actually released to the Jewish people instead of Jesus the Christ, proposed to be released by Pilate.

Again, then, on the mythical theory, we find a meaning and a sane solution where the historical theory can offer none. Sir James Frazer’s hypothesis that the story of the triumphal entry may preserve a tradition of a mock-royal procession for a destined victim is only a partial solution; and his further hypothesis of a strangely ignored coincidence between a Barabbas rite and the actual crucifixion of the Christian “Son of the Father” is but a sacrifice of mythological principle to the assumption of historicity. The conception of Jesus as sacrificed lies at the core of early Christian cult-propaganda.