As was explained in the preamble to The Historical Jesus (1916), that work was offered as prolegomena to a concise restatement of the theory that the Gospel Jesus is a mythical construction. That theory had been discursively expounded by the writer in two large volumes, Christianity and Mythology and Pagan Christs, and summarily in A Short History of Christianity, the argument in the two former combining a negative criticism of the New Testament narrative with an exposition of the myth-evidence. Criticism having in large part taken the form of a denial that the records were unhistorical, it was necessary to clear the ground by showing that all the various attempts of the past generation to find in the gospels a historical residuum have entirely failed to meet critical tests. Those attempts, conflicting as they do with each other, and collapsing as they do in themselves, give undesigned support to the conclusion that the gospel story is without historic basis.

It remains to restate with equal brevity the myth-theory which, long ago propounded on a very narrow basis, has latterly been re-developed in the light of modern mythology and anthropology, and has in recent years found rapidly increasing acceptance. Inevitably the different lines of approach have involved varieties of speculation; Professors Drews and W. B. Smith have ably and independently developed the theory in various ways; and a conspectus and restatement has become necessary for the sake of the theory itself no less than for the sake of those readers who call for a condensed statement.

This in turn is in itself tentative. If the progressive analysis of the subject matter from the point of view of its historicity has meant a century and a half of debate and an immense special literature, it is not to be supposed that the theory which negates the fundamental assumptions of that literature can be fully developed and established in one lifetime, at the hands of a few writers. The problem “What really happened?” is in fact a far wider one for the advocate of the myth-theory than for the critic who undertakes to extract a biography from the documents. In its first form, as propounded by Dupuis and Volney, the myth-theory was confined simply to certain parallelisms between Christian and Pagan myth, and to the astronomical basis of a number of these. From this standpoint the actual historic inception of the cult was little considered. Strauss, again, developed with great power and precision the view that most of the detail in the gospel narrative is myth construction on the lines of Jewish prophecy and dogma. But Strauss never fully accepted the myth-theory, having always assumed the existence of a teacher as a nucleus for the whole. As apart from the continuators of Dupuis and Volney, it was Bruno Bauer who, setting out with the purpose of extracting a biography from the gospels, and finding no standing ground, first propounded a myth-theory from that point of view.

His construction, being the substantially arbitrary one of a hypothetical evangelist who created a myth and thereby founded the cultus, naturally made no headway; and its artificiality strengthened the hands of those who claimed to work inductively on the documents. It was by reason of a similar failure to find a historic footing where he had at first taken it for granted that the present writer was gradually led, on lines of comparative hierology and comparative mythology and anthropology, to the conception of the evolution of the Jesus-cult from the roots of a “pre-Christian” one. The fact that this view has been independently reached by such a student as Professor W. B. Smith, who approached the problem from within rather than by way of the comparative method, seems in itself a very important confirmation.

What is now to be done is to revise the general theory in the light of further study as well as of the highly important expositions of it by Professor Smith and other scholars. An attempt is now definitely made not merely to combine concisely the evidence for a pre-Christian Jesus-cult, but to show how that historically grew into “Christianity,” thus substituting a defensible historical view for a mythic narrative of beginnings. And this, of course, is a heavy undertaking.

The question, “What do you put in its place?” is often addressed to the destructive critic of a belief, not with any philosophic perception of the fact that complete removal is effected only by putting a tested or tenable judgment in place of an untested or untenable one, but with a sense of injury, as if a false belief were a personal possession, for the removal of which there must be “compensation.” In point of fact, the destructive process is rarely attempted without a coincident process of substitution. Even to say that a particular text is spurious is to say that some one forged or inserted it where it is, for a purpose. That concept is “something in its place.” Some Comtists, again, are wont to commit the contradiction of affirming that “no belief is really destroyed without replacement,” and, in the next breath, of condemning rationalists who “destroy without replacing.” Both propositions cannot stand.

If it be meant merely to insist that explanation is replacement, and that explanation is a necessary part of a successful or complete process of destruction, the answer is that it is hardly possible even to attempt to cancel a belief without putting a different belief in its place; and that it is nearly always by way of positing a new belief that an old one is assailed. The old charge against rationalism, of “destroying without building up,” is historically quite false. Almost invariably, the innovator has offered a new doctrine or conception in place of the old. True, it might not be ostensibly an equivalent, for the believer who wanted an equivalent in kind. An exploded God-idea is not for me replaceable by another God-idea: the only rational “replacement” is a substitution of a reasoned for an authoritarian cosmology and ethic. But in the way of reasoned replacements the innovators have been only too quick, in general, to formulate new conceptions, new creeds. They have really been too eager to build afresh, and many untenable formulas and hypotheses are the consequences.

These very attempts, naturally, are constantly made the objects of still more hasty counter-attack. Every form of the myth-theory with which I am acquainted, whatever its defects, has been the result of much labour, and even if astray can be fairly pronounced “hasty” only in the sense that it proves to be inadequate. It is not so with most of the counter-criticism. The reader may rest assured that it is not possible for any exposition of the new theory to be as “hasty” as is usually its rejection.1 Professional theologians who cast that epithet are in general recognizably men who believed their hereditary creed before they were able to think, and have at no later stage made good the first inevitable omission.

Myth-theories, sound or unsound, are the attempts of students who find the record incredible as history to think out, in the light of the documents and of comparative mythology and hierology, the process by which it came to be produced; and even as all myth is but a form of traditionary error, so any attempt to trace its growth runs the risk of error. It is one thing to show, for instance, that the Pentateuch cannot have been written by “Moses,” seen to be a non-historical figure: it is another thing to settle how the books were really made. In such cases, the “something in the place” of the tradition is to be ascertained only after long and patient investigation and counter-criticism. So with the investigation of the fabulous history of early Rome. After several scholars had set forth grounded doubts, the problem was ably and systematically handled by the French freethinker Louis de Beaufort in 1738. Early in the nineteenth century, Niebuhr, confidently undertaking “with the help of God” to get at the truth, and falsely disparaging Beaufort’s work as wholly “sceptical,” effected a reconstruction which has since been found to be in large measure unsound, though long acquiesced in by English students.2 In such matters there is really no finality. If well-documented history must in every age be rewritten, no less inevitable is the re-writing of that which is reached only by processes of inference. And the gospel problem is the hardest of all. Still more than in the case of the Pentateuch problem, many revisions will probably be needed before a generally satisfactory solution is reached.

There is nothing for it but to trace and retrace, consider and reconsider, the inferrible historic process. Met as he is by alternate charges of reckless iconoclasm and “hasty” construction, the proper course for the holder of the myth-theory is to repeat with dispassionate vigilance both of his processes—to show first that the progressive effort to extract from the gospels a tenable biography has ended in complete critical collapse, revealing only a tissue of myth; and then to attempt to indicate how the pseudo-history came to be compiled: in other words, how the myth arose. Such has been my procedure in the preceding volume and in this.

It may of course be argued that the previous negative criticism of the gospel record is indecisive; that the avowal of Loisy: “If the trial and condemnation of Jesus, as pretended Messiah, could be put in doubt, we should have no ground for affirming the existence of the Christ,” does not commit other inquirers, or that the historicity of the trial story has not really been exploded; that the nullity of the alleged Evangel has not been established; or that the complete destruction of previous biographical theories claimed by Schweitzer for himself and Wrede has not been accomplished. The answer is that these issues are not re-opened in the following chapters. They were carefully handled in the previous volume, to which I have seen no attempt at a comprehensive and reasoned answer.

The examination of the recent positions of independent writers seeking to construct a documentary theory has, I think, sufficed to safeguard the honest lay student of the myth-theory against the kind of spurious rebuttal set up by those who, themselves innocent of all original research, pretend that the fundamental historicity of the gospels is established by a “consensus of scholarship.” There is no consensus of scholarship. I observe that M. Loisy, to whom I devoted special study, is journalistically disparaged by the Very Rev. Dean Inge. That disparagement—which, I also observe, I have the undeserved honour to share—will not impose upon serious students, who will realize that Dean Inge, himself transparently unorthodox, has no resource in such matters but to disparage all who labour with any measure of rational purpose to put concrete conclusions where church dignitaries inevitably prefer to maintain rhetorical mystification. For the purposes of serious students, M. Loisy is an important investigator, Dean Inge a negligible essayist.

It is true that one of the positions I discussed—that of the school of Weiss—is not “new.” But in that case the reason for selection was not merely that it was one of the efforts to reach something less neutral than the “two-documents hypothesis,” but that it is in substance the position of some of the most recent and most virulent English critics of the myth-theory. It is in fact the gist of the polemic of Dr. Conybeare. I have shown, accordingly, that the thesis of a primary biography is psychologically absurd in itself; and, further, that like all the other documentary hypotheses it has been left high and dry by the latest German exegetes, who, expressly assuming the historicity of a Jesus, and founding on the gospels for their case, reduce these to a minimum of tradition at which M. Loisy must stand aghast. It is in England, in short, that the biographical school, as represented by Dean Inge and Dr. Conybeare, is seen to be most entirely out of touch with the movement of rational criticism.

It is in England, too, that we find the most uncritical reliance put upon the “impression of a personality” said to be set up by the gospels. This argument is still used without any attempt at psychological self-analysis, any effort to find out what an impression is worth. A generation or two ago, exactly the same position was taken up in regard to the fourth gospel: both the Arnolds, for instance, were confident that the vision of Jesus there given was peculiarly real. Critical study has since forced all save the sworn traditionalists and the mere compromisers to the conclusion that it cannot be real if there is any substantial truth in the presentment of the synoptics. Slowly it has been realized that the methods which produce a vivid impression of “personality” are methods open to fictive art, and differ only in detail from the methods of the Bhagavat GÎta or the methods of Homer. If a strong impression of a personality be a certificate of historicity, what of Zeus and HÊrÊ, AthÊnÊ and Achilles, Ulysses and Nestor? Most critics who handle the problem seem to work in vacuo, without regard to the phenomena and the machinery of fictive literature in general, even when they are moved to accept a hypothesis of fiction.

The vision presented in the fourth gospel is prima facie more lifelike than that of the synoptics, because its main author is more of an artist than his predecessors. It has been justly affirmed by Professor W. B. Smith that

Contemporary German scholars, such as Wellhausen, working on the synoptics, begin uneasily to note the lack of reality and verisimilitude in the presentment there given, avowing a deficit of biographical quality where English amateurs still heedlessly affirm a veridical naÏvetÉ. Wellhausen, tacitly clinging to the biographical assumption, gives up section after section of Mark, where our amateurs primitively acclaim as genuine biographic detail such an item as “asleep on the cushion” (Mk. iv, 38). Following another will-o’-the-wisp, Wellhausen is moved to claim the episode of the widow’s mite (Lk. xxi, 1–4) as having biographical flavour, as if the admitted inventor of other Lucan episodes could not have doctrinally framed this. There is no science in such tentatives. They do but tell of a search for a subjective basis of belief when criticism has dissolved the objective bases of the old assumption.

When it is pretended, as by Dr. Conybeare, that the mythical theory rests on and grows solely out of the supernaturalist details in the gospel story, the case is simply falsified. This writer never seems to master his subject matter. Before Strauss, as by Strauss, the myth-theory was widely applied to non-supernatural matter; and to surmise a historical Jesus behind those details has been the first step in all modern inquiry. The assertion that the rejection of the historicity of Jesus “is not really the final conclusion of their [myth-theorists’] researches, but an initial unproved assumption”10 is categorically false. Professor Smith’s biographical statement negates it.11 As I have repeatedly stated, I began without misgivings by assuming a historical Jesus, and sought historically to trace him, regarding the birth myth and the others as mere accretions. But the very first step in the strictly historical inquiry revealed difficulties which the biographical school and the traditionalists alike had simply never faced. The questions whether Jesus was “of Nazareth,” “Nazarene” in that sense, or “the Nazarite”; and why, if he was either of these, he was never so named in the epistles, stood in the very front of the problem, wholly unregarded by those who profess to trace a historical Jesus by historical method. The problem of “the twelve” is to this day passed with equal heedlessness by critics professing to work on historico-critical lines; and the question of the authenticity of the teachings is no more scientifically met. It was because at every step the effort to find historical foundation failed utterly that after years of investigation I sought and found in a thorough application of the myth-theory the solution of the enigma. Invariably that gives light where the historical assumption yields darkness.

It is thoroughly characteristic of the spirit in which some champions of the biographical view work that, in sequel to the falsification of the problem just noted, we have from them the plea that if we give up the historicity of Jesus, we must give up that of Solon and Pythagoras; and that “obviously Jesus has a far larger chance to have really existed than Solon.”12 Such a use of the conception of “chance” reveals the kind of dialectic we are dealing with. One recalls Newman’s derision of the Paleyan position that the “chances” were in favour of there being a God. “If we deny all authenticity to Jesus’s teaching,” we are asked, “what of Solon’s traditional lore?” Well, what of it? Is it to be authenticated by the threat that it must go if we deny that the Sermon on the Mount is a sermon at all? The fragments of Solon’s verse purport to have been written by him: have we anything purporting to have been written by Jesus? The very fact that we have only fragments of Solon is in itself an argument in favour of their genuineness: to Jesus any evangelist could ascribe any sayings at will.13

As usual, the critic falsifies the debate, affirming that “the stories of Plutarch about him [Solon] are, as Grote says, ‘contradictory as well as apocryphal.’” What Grote really says14 is that Plutarch’s stories “as to the way in which Salamis was recovered are contradictory as well as apocryphal.” He makes no such assertion as to the stories of Solon’s life in general, though, like every critical historian, he recognizes that many things were ultimately ascribed to Solon which belong to later times.15 But the genuine fragments of Solon’s verse and laws are sound historical material. As Meyer claims,16 the Archon list is as valid as the Roman Fasti. It is precisely because of the solid elements in the record that Solon stands as a historic figure, while Lycurgus is given up as a deity Evemerized.17 On the principles of Dr. Conybeare, we must give up Solon because we give up Lycurgus, or accept Lykurgos if we accept Solon. Historical criticism does no such thing. It decides the cases on their merits by critical tests, and finds the fact of a Solonian legislation historically as certain as the Lycurgean is fabulous. The item that Solon’s family claimed to be descended from Poseidon is no ground for doubting the historicity of Solon, because such claims were normal in early Greece. Is it pretended that claims to be the Son of God were normal in later Jewry?

The device of saying that we must accept the historicity of Jesus if we accept that of Solon is merely a new dressing of the old claim that we must believe in the resurrection if we believe in the assassination of CÆsar. Both theses rest on spurious analogies; and both alike defeat themselves, the older by carrying the implication that the prodigies at CÆsar’s death are as historical as the assassination; the newer by involving the consequence that Solon accredits not only Lycurgus but Herakles and Dionysos, Ulysses and Achilles.

The argument from Pythagoras is a still more fatal device. Of him “it is no easy task to give an account that can claim to be regarded as history.”18 And “of the opinions of Pythagoras we know even less than of his life.”19 It is held to be certain that he taught the doctrine of transmigration and originated certain propositions in mathematics; but while the mathematical element has no analogue in the gospels, the residual view of Pythagoras as vending in religion only a “thoroughly primitive” set of taboos20 would sanction, by analogy, the view that the real Jesus was the Talmudic Ben Pandira, who dates about 100 B.C., and was reputed a worker of wonders by sorcery. This is a sufficiently lame and impotent conclusion from a polemic in favour of the gospel Jesus, whom it leaves, in effect, a myth, as the myth-theory maintains. As for Apollonius of Tyana, one holds him historical21 just because his myth-laden story is finally intelligible as history, which is precisely what the Jesus story is not.

This said, The Historical Jesus may be left, as it is, open to critical refutation. The present volume is theoretically constructive, and does not unnecessarily return upon the other. It is open in its turn to refutative criticism.

That description, it may be remarked, would not be accorded by me to a mere asseveration that there “must” be a historical basis for the gospels in a person answering broadly to the Gospel Jesus. Any one who confidently holds such a view need hardly trouble himself with the present thesis at all: and for me any one who affects to dispose of the issue by merely fulminating the “must” is simply begging the question. Those who, on the other hand, do but lean instinctively to such a belief may be respectfully invited to reconsider it in the light of all hierology. That there “must” be a historic process of causation behind every cult is a truism: it does not in the least follow that the historic basis must be the historicity of the God or Demigod round whose name the cult centres.

Many Saviour names have been the centres of cults, in the ancient world as in the modern. There were extensive and long-lived worships of Herakles, Dionysos, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, in addition to the age-long cults of the “Supreme” Gods. Is it claimed that there “must” have been a historical Herakles, or Dionysos, or Adonis? If so, is it further contended that there must have been a historical Jehovah, a Jove, a CybelÊ, a Juno, a Venus? If the Father-Gods and Mother-Gods could be evolved by protracted mythopoeia, why not the Son-Gods?

It is perfectly true, as was urged by the late Sir Alfred Lyall, that in India and elsewhere distinguished men may to this day be deified; that ancestor-worship played a great part in God-making; and that tribal Gods are in many cases probably evolved from distinguished chiefs. But such cases really defeat the inference drawn from them. Such God-making can in no instance be shown ever to have set up what can reasonably be termed a world-religion. The world-religions are the product of a far more protracted and complex causation. They grow from far further-reaching roots. Above all, they have never grown up without the services either of a numerous priesthood or of Sacred Books, or of both.

Is it then contended that a Sacred Book must represent the originative teaching of a real person and his disciples? It may or may not; but what does not at all follow is that the personality deified or extolled in the Sacred Book was real. Mohammed was a real person: he made no claim to deity: he acclaimed an established God. The names of Zoroaster and Buddha were probably not those of real persons: the first figures as a cult-building priest; the second as a Teacher, enshrined from the first in a luxuriant myth, whence his practical deification. In both cases the specific centre of the religion is the Book or Books; and it is beyond question that in both cases many hands wrought on these. To say that only a primary personality of abnormal greatness could have inspired the writing of the books is really equivalent to saying that there must have been a historical Jehovah to account for the Old Testament, and a historical Allah to account for the Koran. Let it be freely granted that the writers of Sacred Books were in many cases remarkable personalities. That is a totally different proposition from the one we are considering.

The claim that the gospels could only have originated round the memory of an inspiring and love-creating personality is in effect an evasion of the multitudinous facts of hierology. The European who sees nothing in the fact that the mythic Krishna is loved by millions of Hindoos; that in ages of antiquity millions of worshippers were absorbed in the love of Dionysos, mutilated themselves for Attis, and wept for Adonis, is not really ready for a verdict on what “must” have been as regards the building up of any cult. Are the Psalms, once more, a testimony to the historicity of Jehovah, or is the hymn of Hippolytos to Artemis, in Euripides, a proof of anything but that men can love an imagination?

The special claim for a historical Jesus arises out of the very fact that Jesus alone among the Saviour Gods of antiquity (Buddha being excluded from that category) is celebrated in a set of Sacred Books in which he figures as at once a Sacrificed God and a Teaching God.22 But the worships of the Saviours Dionysos and Herakles and Adonis, without Sacred Books (apart from temple liturgies), were as confident as the worship of Jesus. Is the production of Sacred Books in itself any more of a testimony to a Saviour God’s human actuality than the worship with which they are associated?

Historically speaking, the emergence of Sacred Books as accompaniments of a popular cultus is a result of special culture conditions. In the case of Judaism these have never been scientifically traced, by reason of the presuppositions of the past.23 But we can trace later cases. Early Christism founded primarily on the Sacred Books of Judaism; and it needed to produce books of its own if it was to survive as against the overshadowing parent cult. Save for these books, Christism would have disappeared as did Mithraism, of which the scanty hieratic literature remained occult, liturgical, unpopular, where Christism was committed to publicity by the Jewish lead. To make of Sacred Books produced under those special conditions a special argument for the historicity of their contents, or of their narrative groundwork, is to embrace the fallacy of the single instance. And when the contents utterly fail to sustain the tests of rational documentary criticism, to fall back on a “must” for certification of the actuality of the figure they deify is merely to renounce critical reason.

The rational problem is to account historically for the projection as a whole, to explain the main features and as many minor details as may be, as we explain the “personality” and the myth of Herakles or Samson or Adonis, the doctrines and fictions of the Books of Ruth and Esther, the religions of Krishna and Mithra and Quetzalcoatl. We are now compendiously to make the attempt.

M. Loisy has declared24 that “One can explain to oneself Jesus: one cannot explain to oneself those who invented him.” In the previous volume it has been contended that M. Loisy has decisively failed to “explain Jesus” as a possible person: in this we essay to explain “those who invented him.” M. Loisy is an illustrious New-Testament scholar: he is not a mythologist or a comparative hierologist. It is very likely that he would find it difficult to explain to himself those who invented Tezcatlipoca; but it would hardly follow that Tezcatlipoca was not invented. In point of fact, a large portion of M. Loisy’s own important critical performance consists precisely in explaining away as inventions a multitude of items in the gospel narrative. He can understand invention of many parts, and admits that unless removed they make an incongruous whole. There is really no more difficulty in explaining the other parts as similar inventions than in explaining these. Thus the alleged difficulty is illusory.

The occupation of “explaining to oneself” imaginary beings has been the occupation of theologians through whole millenniums. There can still be found even a hierologist or two who believe in the historicity of Krishna; as the judicious Mosheim in the eighteenth century confidently believed in the historicity of Mercury and Mithra. Those—and they are many—who are now content to see myth in the figures of Mithra and Krishna, with or without the nimbus of Sacred Books, may on that score consent to consider the thesis of this volume.

It will be no adequate answer to that to say, as will doubtless be said, that the outline of the evolution of the myth is unsatisfying. In the very nature of the case, the connections of the data must be speculative. It may well be that those here attempted—some of them modifications of previous theories—will have to be at various points reshaped; and I invite the reader to weigh carefully the views of Professors Drews and Smith where I diverge from them. The complete establishment of a historical construction will be a long and difficult task. But in its least satisfying aspect the myth-theory is a scientific substitution for what is wholly dissatisfying—the entirely unhistorical construction furnished by the gospels.

That has been under revision for a hundred and fifty years, with an outlay of labour that is appalling to think of, in view of the utter futility of the search—or, let us say, the labour in proportion to the result, for toil even upon false clues has yielded some knowledge that avails for rectification. But the labour has meant a steadily dwindling confidence in a dwindling residuum of supposed fact; though every shortening of the line of defence has evoked furious outcry from the unthinking faithful. The first pious framers of “harmonies” of the gospels were indignantly told by the more stupid pious that there was no strife to harmonize: the Schmiedels and Loisys of to-day, striving their hardest to save something by rational methods from the rational advance, are execrated by those who believe more than they. The more instructed believers are as warm in their resentment of the latest and coolest negative criticism as were their fathers towards the contemptuous exposure of the contradictions of “inspiration.” Anger, it would seem, always leaps to the help of shaken confidence. Let the believer perpend.

It is not orthodoxy that is to-day fighting the case of the historicity of Jesus. Orthodoxy is committed to the miraculous, to Revelation, to the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and, if it would be consistent, to the Ascension, which is on the same plane of belief. Upon such assumptions, there can be no critical defence worthy of the name. The defence is being conducted mainly by the avowed or non-avowed Neo-Unitarians of the various churches and countries; and these are simply standing either at the position taken up fifty years ago by Renan, whose “biography” of Jesus was received with a far more widespread and no less violent storm of censure than that now being turned upon the myth-theory; or at the more nearly negative position of Strauss, which was still more fiercely censured. Renan’s position, or Strauss’s, is now the position of the mass of “moderate” scholars and students. Those who have thus seen a denounced heresy become the standpoint of ordinary scholarly belief should be slow to conclude that a newer heresy will not in time find similar acceptance.