All this applies, of course, to the “Primitive Gospel” held to underlie all of the synoptics, Mark included—a datum which reduces to comparative unimportance the question of priority among these. As collected by the school of Bernhard Weiss,1 the primitive Gospel, like Mark, set out with a non-historical introduction of the Messiah to be baptized by John. It then gives the temptation myth in full; and immediately afterwards the Teacher is made to address to disciples (who have not previously been mentioned or in any way accounted for) the Sermon on the Mount, with variations, and without any mount. In this place we have the uncompromising insistence on the Mosaic law; and soon, after some miracles of healing and some Messianic discourses, including the liturgical “Come unto me all ye that labour,” we have the Sabbatarian question raised on the miracle of the healing of the man with the dropsy, but without the argument from the Davidic eating of the shewbread.2

There is no more of the colour of history here than in Mark: so obviously is it wanting in both that the really considerate exegetes are driven to explain that history was not the object in either writing. In both “the twelve” are suddenly sent—in the case of Mark, after a list of twelve had been inserted without any reference to the first specified five; in the reconstructed “primitive” document without any list whatever—to preach the blank gospel, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” with menaces for the non-recipient, the allocutions to Chorazin and Bethsaida being here made part of the instructions to the apostles.

What, then, are the disciples supposed to have preached? What had the Teacher preached as an evangel of “the Kingdom”? The record has expressly represented that his parables were incomprehensible to his own disciples; and when they ask for an explanation they are told that the parables are expressly meant to be unintelligible, but that to them an explanation is vouchsafed. It is to the effect that “the seed is the word.” What word? The “Kingdom”? The mystic allegories on that head are avowedly not for the multitude: they could not have been. Yet those allegories are the sole explanations ever afforded in the Gospels of the formula of “the Kingdom” which was to be the purport of the evangel of the apostles to the multitude. They themselves had failed to understand the parables; and they were forbidden to convey the explanation. What, then, had they to convey?

And that issue raises another. Why were there disciples at all? Disciples are understood to be prepared as participants in or propagandists of somebody’s teaching—a lore either exoteric or esoteric. But no intelligible view has ever been given of the purpose of the Gospel Jesus in creating his group of Twelve. If we ask what he taught them, the only answer given by the documents is: (1) Casting out devils; (2) The meaning of parables which were meant to be unintelligible to the people: that is, either sheer thaumaturgy or a teaching which was never to be passed on. On the economic life of the group not one gleam of light is cast. Judas carried a “bag,” but as to whence came its contents there is no hint. The whole concept hangs in the air, a baseless dream. The myth-makers have not even tried to make it plausible.

The problems thus raised are not only not faced by the orthodox exegetes; they are not seen by them. They take the most laudable pains to ascertain what the primitive Gospel was like, and, having settled it to the satisfaction of a certain number, they rest from their labours. Yet we are only at the beginning of the main, the historic problem, from which Baur recalled Strauss to the documentary, with the virtual promise that its solution would clear up the other.

A “higher” criticism than that so-called, it is clear, must set about the task; and its first conclusion, I suggest, must be that there never was any Christian evangel by the Christ and the Twelve. These allegories of the Kingdom are framed to conceal the fact that the gospel-makers had no evangel to describe; though it may be claimed as a proof of their forensic simplicity that they actually represent the Founder as vetoing all popular explanation of the very formula which they say he sent his disciples to preach to the populace. An idea of the Kingdom of God, it may be argued, was already current among the Jews: the documents assert that that was the theme of the Baptist. Precisely, but was the evangel of Jesus then simply the evangel of John, which it was to supersede? And was the evangel of John only the old evangel, preached by Pharisees and others from the time of the Maccabees onwards?3 Whatever it was, what is the meaning of the repeated Gospel declaration that the nature of the Kingdom must not be explained to the people? There is only one inference. The story of the sending forth of the twelve is as plainly mythical as is Luke’s story of the sending forth of the seventy, which even the orthodox exegetes abandon as a “symmetrical” myth; though they retain the allocution embodied in it. What is in theory the supreme episode in the early propaganda of the cult is found to have neither historical content nor moral significance. Not only is there not a word of explanation of the formula of the evangel, there is not a word of description of the apostles’ experience, but simply the usual negation of knowledge:—

And this is history, or what the early Christian leaders thought fit to put in place of history, for Christian edification. The disciples, be it observed, had exorcized in the name of Jesus where Jesus had never been, a detail accepted by the faithful unsuspectingly, and temporized over no less unsuspectingly by the “liberal” school, but serving for the critical student to raise the question: Was there, then, an older cult of a Jesus-God in Palestine? Leaving that problem for the present, we can but note that the report in effect tells that there was no evangel to preach. To any reflecting mind, it is the utterance of men who had nothing to relate, but are inserting an empty framework, wholly mythical, in a void past. Themselves ruled by the crudest superstition, they do but make the Divine Teacher talk on their own level, babbling of Satan falling from heaven, and of treading on serpents. All the labours of the generations of laborious scholars who have striven to get to the foundations of their documents have resulted in a pastiche which only the more clearly reveals the total absence of a historic basis such as the Gospels more circumstantially suggest. In the end we have neither history nor biography, but an absolutely enigmatic evangel, set in a miscellany of miracles and of discourses which are but devices to disguise the fact that there had been no original evangel to preach. If the early church had any creed, it was not this. It originated in a rite, not in an evangel.

One hypothesis might, indeed, be hazarded to save the possibility of an actual evangel by the Founder. If, taking him to be historical, we assume him to have preached a political doctrine subversive of the Roman rule, and to have thereby met his death, we could understand that, in a later period in which the writers connected with the movement were much concerned to conciliate the Romans, it might have been felt expedient, and indeed imperative, to suppress the facts. They would not specify the evangel, because they dared not. On this view the Founder was a Messiah of the ordinary Jewish type, aiming at the restoration of the Jewish State. But such a Jesus would not be the “Jesus of the Gospels” at all. He would merely be a personage of the same (common) name, who in no way answered to the Gospel figure, but had been wholly denaturalized to make him a cult-centre. On this hypothesis there has been no escape from the “myth-theory,” but merely a restatement of it. A Jesus put to death by the Romans as a rebel Mahdi refuses to compose with the Teacher who sends out his apostles to preach his evangel; who proclaims, if anything, a purely spiritual kingdom; and who is put to death as seeking to subvert the Jewish faith, the Roman governor giving only a passive and reluctant assent. On the political hypothesis, as on the myth-theory here put, the whole Gospel narrative of the Tragedy which establishes the cult remains mythical. We have but to proceed, then, with the analysis which reveals the manner of its composition and of its inclusion in the record.

It is admitted by the reconstructors that the primitive Gospel had no conclusion, telling nothing of Last Supper, Agony, Betrayal, Crucifixion, or Resurrection. It did not even name Judas as the betrayer. And they explain that it was because of lacking these details that it passed out of use, superseded by the Gospels which gave them. As if the conclusion, were it compiled in the same fashion, could not have been added to the original document, which ex hypothesi had the prestige of priority. Why the composer of the original did not add the required chapters is a question to which we get only the most futile answers, as is natural when the exegetes have not critically scrutinized the later matter. Thus even Mr. Jolley is content to say:—

Here the alleged fact that only some had seen the Crucifixion, while all knew all about the ministry, is given as a reason why the ministry should be described and the Crucifixion left undescribed and unmentioned!

The problem thus impossibly disposed of is really of capital importance. Any complete solution must remain hypothetical in the nature of the case; but at least we are bound to recognize that the Primitive Gospel may have had a different conclusion, as it may further have contained matter not preserved in the synoptics. That might well be a sufficient ground for its abandonment by the Christian community; and some such suspicion simply cannot be excluded, though it cannot be proved. But whatever we may surmise as to what may have been in the original document, we can offer a decisive reason why the existing conclusion should not have been part of it. That conclusion is primarily extraneous to any gospel, and is not originally a piece of narrative at all.

Bernhard Weiss ascribes to Mark the original narrative of the closing events, making Matthew a simple copyist—a matter of no ultimate importance, seeing that it is the same impossible and unhistorical narrative in both documents. Like all the other professional exegetes, Bernhard Weiss and his school have failed to discern that the document reveals not only that it is not an original narrative at all, but that it could not possibly be a narrative. “It was only in the history of the passion,” writes Weiss, “that Mark could give a somewhat connected account partly of what he himself had seen and partly of what he gathered from those who witnessed the crucifixion.”5 Whether “passion” here includes the Agony in the Garden is not clear: as it is expressly distinguished from the crucifixion, which Mark by implication had not seen, the meaning remains obscure. Like the ordinary traditionalists, Weiss assumes that “after Peter’s death Mark began to note down his recollections of what the Apostle had told him of the acts and discourses of Jesus.” Supposing this to include the record of the night of the Betrayal, what were Mark’s possible sources for the description of the Agony, with its prayers, its entrances and exits, when the only disciples present are alleged to have been asleep?

It is the inconceivable omission of the exegetes to face such problems that forces us finally to insist on their serious inadequacy in this regard. They laboriously conduct an investigation up to the point at which it leaves us, more certainly than ever, facing the incredible, and there they leave it. Their work is done. That the story of the Last Night was never framed as a narrative, but is primarily a drama, which the Gospel simply transcribes, is manifest in every section, and is definitely proved by the verses (Mk. xiv, 41–42) in which, without an intervening exit, Jesus says: “Sleep on now, and take your rest.... Arise, let us be going.” The moment the document is realized to be a transcript of a drama it becomes clear that the “Sleep on now, and take your rest” should be inserted before the otherwise speechless exit in verse 40, where the text says that “they wist not what to answer him.” Two divergent speeches have by an oversight in transcription been fused into one.

That the story of the tragedy is a separate composition has been partly perceived by critics of different schools without drawing any elucidating inference. Wellhausen pronounces that the Passion cannot be excepted from the verdict that Mark as a whole lacks the character of history. “Nothing is motived and explained by preliminaries.”6 But “we learn as much about the week in Jerusalem as about the year in Galilee.”7 And the Rev. Mr. Wright gets further, though following a wrong track:—

Precisely. The story of the events in Jerusalem is no proper part either of a primary document or of the first or second Gospel. In its detail it has no congruity with the scanty and incoherent narrative of Mark. It is of another provenance, although, as Wellhausen notes, quite as unhistorical as the rest. The non-historicity of the entire action is as plain as in the case of any episode in the Gospels. Judas is paid to betray a man who could easily have been arrested without any process of betrayal; and the conducting of the trial immediately upon the arrest, throughout the night, the very witnesses being “sought for” in the darkness, is plain fiction, explicable only by the dramatic obligation to continuous action.