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MYTHICAL ELEMENT
IN
CHRISTIANITY.
BY
ED. VANSITTART NEALE, M.R.I.'
PUBLISHED
BY
THOMAS
SCOT T,
NO. 11, THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD,
UPPER NORWOOD, LONDON, S.E.
Price One Shilling.
�LONDON:
FEINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET,
HAYMARKET, W.
�PRAYER,
[Reprintedfrom The Examiner of September 7, 1872.]
Sir,—An active correspondence is being carried on in
the columns of ofie of your contemporaries relative to
o/ Prayer, but I notice that the main issue®
are ^mtoffiched delicately and treated with reserve. Will
you allow me to state as clearly as I can in a few words
the sceptic’s difficulty ? I use the term sceptic simply
because it is short and convenient, and sufficiently, if
SOT^perfectly, accurate.
1. The sceptic cannot rely upon the a priori argument
foTjsrayer, cannot argue—as one of the writers has put
it, “ from the existence of a loving Father in heaven to
W efficacy of prayer,” for the very sufficient reasod
that he does not permit himself to indulge in any belief
at all respecting a Father in heaven. His view is that
the supernatural world is to us a 11 terra incognita,” and
that the notions so abundantly entertained regarding it
are the baseless products of human speculation. He is
not such a “ fool ” as to say even in his heart “ there is
no God he declares only that we are incapable of say
ing whether there is a God or not. The subject is not
within the. range of our faculties. Fully admitting that
the Theistic hypothesis may be correct, he denies that
we can know it to be so ; and to pray to a Deity who has
placed between Himself and us an impenetrable veil,
whose very existence is to us a mere possibility, is from
the sceptic’s standpoint as irrational an act as for persons in the dark to address communications to imaginary beings with whom their fancy may have peopled
the surrounding void.
2. The sceptic cannot argue to the efficacy of prayer
from tig’effects, for the very sufficient reason that no one
IS sable to satisfy him that prayer has any supernatural
effects at all. No phenomena are forthcoming toprove
that the required relation of cause and effect exists be*
tween the act of prayer and its alleged consequences.
People will not remember1 that post hoc is not equivalent
to
hoc. The so-called answers to prayer, which
the sceptic is invited to consider, are invariably capable of
natural explanation ,* and to prove answer to prayer in
the ordinary acceptation of the words, to prove, that is,
the.intervention of the Deity, it is obvious that all expla
nation of the phenomena on natural grounds must be
disproved, or at least practically precluded by the extra
ordinary nature of the circumstances. For instance, if
a man were to pray that he might throw sixes, his doing
so would be no evidence of answer to prayer ; but if he
threw sixes whenever he prayed that he might do so, no
natural explanation of the phenomenon would be pos
sible, and we should be forced to attribute it to the
efficacy of prayer.
As a matter of fact, the Christian carefully avoids
placing himself in a position to furnish the sceptic with
satisfactory evidence of the efficacy of prayer, since he
prays only for objects which might be attained, and for
results which might very possibly come about in the
natural course of things. He prays that a friend may
recover from sickness, but he does not pray that a broken
limb may knit together before the time. In a word, he
never prays for a miracle. And yet, since he is asking
for the intervention of the Deity, a miracle should be as
readily expected as an ordinary occurrence. But, as I
said before, the Christian never ventures to pray for
anything which appears to be impossible, for anything
the realisation of which would be inexplicable on natural
grounds. So long as he retains this attitude he will find
it impossible to satisfy the sceptic that the phenomena
which, in order of time, have followed after his prayer
are due to the influence of that prayer upon the mind of
the Deity.
I am, &c.,
Y.
�LONDON:
FEINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET,
HAYMARKET, W.
9
�;1
V
K G</
THE MYTHICAL ELEMENT
4
IK
CHRISTIANITY.
I
♦
HE importance attached by the teachers or de
fenders of Christianity to the historical character
ot the preternatural incidents asserted to have
attended the birth of Jesus, to have illustrated his
life, ana to have accompanied its close, has, not unnaturally, led to a reaction, liable to be as prejudicial
to a sound judgment about the origin of the Christian
religion on the one side, as an uncritical reliance
upon the absolute truth of all that is recorded in the
New Testament has been on the other side. An un
reasoning belief is in some danger of giving place to
an unreasoning distrust. The inconsistencies and
contradictions, of which so large a crop becomes ap
parent m the gospels, when surveyed by the eyes of
an uncompromising critic, as the author of ‘ The Eng
lish Life of Jesus,’ forming part of this series, has
■ d®r^’ns.tr^ed, combined with the very scanty notices
of Christianity to be found in any but professedly
Christian writers, during the first hundred and fifty
years after the birth of Jesus, have given rise to the
opinion, expressed by the writer of another tract
comprised m the series, that Jesus was not really an
istorical person at all ; “ that neither the twelve
Apostles nor their divine Master ever existed.” a
T
a ‘The Twelve Apostles,’ p. 28.
B
�4
‘The Mythical Element in Christianity.
It may appear, probably, a sufficient reply to such;
a conclusion, to observe that it is not shared by any
of the great critics whose labours in the investigation
of the New Testament have led to that change in
men’s judgments as to its historical character, which
seems to be now growing up into the recognised
critical opinion.
Strauss, Bauer, Renan, the
author of ‘ The English Life of Jesus,’ for instance,,
one and all write with the obvious conviction that,
in dealing with the life of Jesus, they are dealing
with the life not only of a real man, but a man of a
most remarkable character? But, in the interest of
historical truth, it is desirable to examine thoroughly
the grounds for any judgment on an important ques
tion, put forth, with apparent conviction, by any
writer who possesses sufficient knowledge of the sub
ject discussed to entitle his judgment to respect,
however much that judgment may run counter toreceived opinion. This is desirable, first, because
the progress of critical inquiry in historical matters
has involved a continuous destruction of received
opinions, and the substitution for them of others
which, when first announced, were considered ab
surd ; secondly, because history, not admitting of
verification by immediate observation, is peculiarly
exposed to that paralysis of doubt which hangs over
the intellect, hampering instead of stimulating its
energies, and substituting the sickly feebleness of
sceptical questionings in place of the vigorous health
of scientific research?
b See ‘ English Life of Jesus,’ p. 344, for a summary of the con
clusions to which this able and fearless critic comes about him.
c Thus, in Mr Lumisden Strange’s ‘ Is the Bible the Word of God 1 ’
the hypothesis of the mythical origin of Christianity peeps in, as a
theory which he neither accepts nor rejects, but which serves to
aid the conclusions to which he comes about Christianity, by the
mysterious uncertainty thrown over its origin. See pp. 351, 352,
374-381. .
�The Mythical Element in Christianity.
5
I propose, therefore, to subject to a critical exami
nation the reasons adduced in support of the hypo
thesis that Jesus Christ is a mythical personage,
■who never had any existence, except in the imagina
tions of his disciples.
The way in which this mythical belief arose is
supposed to have been somewhat as follows :d “ The
siege of Jerusalem kindled into a flame the enthusi
astic spirit of trust in Divine aid inherent in the
Jewish race. There were, says Josephus, a great
number of prophets who denounced to the people
that they should wait for deliverance from Heaven?
True, the Pharisaic historian can see in these men
only persons suborned by the leaders of the Zealots—
‘ the Tyrants,’ as he calls them—John and Simon ;
but we may read the tale of that age better by the
light of the ages preceding it. As from the depths of
the captivity at Babylon there came forth the glow
ing hopes of triumphant deliverance which inspire
the last twenty-seven chapters of our Book of Isaiah;
as the sufferings and struggles under Antiochus
Epiphanes produced the ^conception of the 1 Son of
Man ’ revealed in the clouds, to whom was given
dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people,
nations, and languages should serve him, an ever
lasting dominion, which should not pass away, and ‘ a
kingdom which should not be destroyed; ’f so the
fall of Jerusalem produced a reaction of hope and
trust, which gave a new and unexpectedly fruitful
development to the idea of the Messiah. To some
deep prophetic spirit, meditating on the mysterious
See ‘ The Twelve Apostles,’ p. 16. I have taken the liberty of
filling up the very scanty delineation of the supposed growth of
the myth, given in that tract, with some details which seem to me
to throw over it an air of plausibility, but for which the author of
the above-named publication is not responsible.
e ‘ Jewish War,’ vi. 5.
f Dan. vii. 14.
�6
The Mythical Element in Christianity.
questions, why Jehovah had given over his ancient
people to be trodden down of the Gentiles ? why
no deliverer had appeared from Heaven to save them
in their sore need ? light came with the notion—it is
for our sins ; because the Messiah has come, and we,
dihat is, our rulers, have not recognised him : he has
come, as the great prophet of the captivity foretold,
as ‘ one despised and rejected of men,’ ‘ a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief,’ one ‘ taken from
prison and from judgment,’ and ‘ cut off out of the
land of the living because ‘ for the transgressions
of his people was he stricken s but yet one whom
God has exalted to his throne in heaven to sit on
his right hand till the time should arrive when his
people, ‘ purified as by a refiner’s fire,’ ‘ purged as
gold and silver,’ should 1 offer to Jehovah an offer
ing of righteousness,’ h and who, then, shall ‘ sud
denly be revealed ’ to take vengeance on his enemies,
and establish that unending kingdom which the
ancient prophets have foretold.”
“ But when had this unrecognised Messiah ap
peared? An answer was supplied by the same
prophetic voice.
Had not Malachi foretold that
Jehovah would send Elijah the prophet before ‘ that
great and dreadful day, which should burn up all that
do wickedly,’ to ‘ turn the hearts of the fathers to the
children, and the hearts of the children to their
fathers ? ’ and was it not the fact that, about forty
years before the taking of Jerusalem, one had appeared
‘ in thespiritand power of Elijah,’ preaching repentance
as the preparation for a greater who should come
after him ? Was there not also a tradition that, not
long after the death of John the Baptist, Pontius
Pilate, the Roman governor, had put to death a native
of Galilee, one accused by the High priest and rulers
" Is. liii. 3—;
11 Mai. iii. 3; iv. 5, 6.
�' ^Lhe Mythical Element in Christianity,
7
of that day of blasphemy and sedition, whom Pilate
had crucified along with others, ‘malefactors,’ in whom
it might well be that the prophecy of the innocent
sufferer, who ‘ should make his grave with the wicked ’
had found its accomplishment ? Thus, on the slenderest
possible foundation of actual fact, may it have become
possible for the Jewish imagination to launch the
Messianic idea under a novel aspect, postponing to
an indefinite, though not very remote future, its
expectant glories, and supplementing them by the
conception of an earthly life suited to one who, for
our sakes, had borne our sins and tasted of our sor
rows ? 1 Opposed from the first to the formal spirit of
the Pharisaical party, the Scribes and Lawyers of the
New Testament, which had become dominant again
when the ardent hopes of supernatural victory, that
led to the obstinate resistance of Jerusalem, had been
crushed by its fall; drawing its inspirations from the
free air of ancient prophecy, rather than from the more
modern ‘ Book of the Law,’ from Isaiah and Jeremiah
rather than from Ezra; the new faith, while it attracted
within its influence many of the noblest and purest
spirits produced in that age by the Jewish people,
still met with a cold reception from the mass of the
nation. But it rapidly spread among the Gentile pro
selytes ; and soon shaking itself free from the fetter
of circumcision, was able to recruit its ranks from all
the varied populations comprised in the Roman em> The author of ‘ The Twelve Apostles ’ (p. 16) calls this notion an
“ inversion” of the popular belief, and alleges that other cases of
similar ‘ ‘ inversions ” may be produced, though he does not cite any
instance. But to make the Christian conception of the Messiah
into an inversion of the Jewish, it would be necessary to show that
the Jews believed in a Messiah who should suffer after having
triumphed, a notion which might have been inverted into that of
a Messiah who should triumph after having suffered; while, in
fact, the notion of a suffering Messiah appears to have been quite
foreign to Jewish expectations till it was introduced by the Chris
tian teaching.
�8
’The Mythical Element in Christianity.
pire, and thus swell its numbers to a large body;
while yet it retained, from the fervour of its
original members, in the general spirit of its doc
trines, and the character of the supernatural details
with which the imagination of the disciples gradually
clothed the supposed life of their master, the flavour
of Jewish thought and the traces of Jewish beliefs.
Thus grew up the myth of Jesus Christ embodied in
those four gospels, themselves only a part of a
far more extensive evangelic literature once widely
diffused in the Christian Church, to which the sub
sequent course of ecclesiastical history has given
such a wide and lasting influence over Europe and
the countries conquered or colonised by European
energy.”
If we regard this hypothesis only in itself, without
troubling ourselves as to its power of accounting for
the positive statements relating to the rise of Chris
tianity which have survived the waste of time, I
think it must be admitted that the mythical theory
of its origin presented above is not encumbered
by any inherent impossibility; that stranger things
have undoubtedly happened in the religious his
tory of mankind than the growth of such a
belief, deriving its nourishment, like some orchi
daceous plants, only from the atmosphere in
which its seeds germinated, and supporting itself on
the accidental props of surrounding circumstances,
without requiring to strike its roots into the solid
ground of facts. And, if we are disposed to found
our judgments as to the origin of Christianity only
on arguments of internal probability, and test them
only by the historical evidence for the details of the
narratives relating to it, we may be ready to acquiesce
in the canon proposed by the author whose hypothesis
we are examining, that, “ if a hero be known chiefly
as the performer of supernatural exploits, both hero
�*The Mythical Mement in Christianity.
9
and exploit are mythical.” ■> But to those who value
attested facts more highly than their own imagina
tions of possibilities, general canons of this nature
are unsatisfactory. Let us see, then, if we cannot find
some other test of more scientific precision than ima
ginary possibility to which to subject this hypothesis.
It is not difficult to find one. The hypothesis of the
mythical origin of Christianity above stated is founded
on the revolution in the expectations as to the coming
of the Messiah, supposed to have been produced in
the minds of some pious enthusiastic Jews by the de
struction of Jerusalem. If by good historical evidence
we can trace the conceptions which associate the
Messianic character with Jesus, called the Christ, to
a time anterior to the siege of Jerusalem, this mythi
cal theory must fall of itself; and for that purpose the
use of the name Christian is sufficient. For Christ is
the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Messiah ; “ the
anointed one the “ Son whose throne is for ever, and
the sceptre of whose kingdom is the sceptre of
righteousness; who had loved righteousness and
hated iniquity, wherefore God had anointed him with
the oil of gladness above his fellows,” k King and High
Priest for ever;1 and the sense of the termination
anus, in Clmstianus, is “ belonging to Christ.” So
that, even if we could not find any direct proof of the
title Christ having been applied to Jesus of Nazareth
prior to the siege of Jerusalem, but have proofs of the
use of the name Christian before that date, this would
suffice to show that Christianity did not arise out of
such a myth as has been above stated ; unless it could
be demonstrated that the name was then applied to
persons who held tenets quite distinct from those
subsequently associated with it.
Before entering upon this investigation, however,
J ‘ Twelve Apostles,’ 32.
k Ps. xlv. 6, 7.
1 Heb. i. 8, 9; ii. 5.
�io The Mythical Element in Christianity.
it will be well to consider another form of mythical
hypothesis about the origin of Christianity, not ad
mitting of being subjected to this chronological test,
namely, the theory which traces the name Christian
to a confusion between Christus and Chrestos, the
Greek word for “good,” and supposes that “Chris
tians ” may have originally meant only “ the good
men,” the followers of one who was imagined to have
been supremely “good;” an appellation afterwards
exchanged for “Christus,” or “the anointed one,”
when this body had come, by some process not dis
tinctly explained, to identify their supposed founder
with the Messiah. This idea is suggested by the
Rev. Robert Taylor in his 1 Diegesis ; or, Discovery of
the Origin and Early History of Christianity,’ who,
in support of it, makes the following statement: m
“Justin Martyr, in his account of the name (Chris
tian), which he gives in his apology to Antoninus
Pius, thus takes away all possible reference to the
name of Christ as the founder of a sect. Christianoi
einai kategoroumetlia, To de chreston miseisthai ou
dikaion—chrestotatoi huparchomen.10- Theophilus of
Antioch,0, after a long string of puns upon christus
and chrestus, thinks that christus, not chrestus, should
be the word, because of the sublime significance of
christus, which signifies the sweet, the agreeable, the
most useful, and never-to-be-laughed-at article, poma
tum. “ W^hat use of a ship,” he argues, “unless it
be smeared ? What tower or palace would be good
or useful unless it were greased ?
What man
comes into life or enters into a conflict without being
anointed ? What piece of work would be considered
finished unless it were oiled ? The air itself, and
m Pp. 399-400.
”
ar®.accused of being Christians, but it is not just to hate
tnat^wmch^is good. We are very good.
�f
"The Mythical Element in Christianity. 11
every creature under heaven, is, as it were, anointed
with light and spirit. Undoubtedly we are called
Christians for this reason and no other, because we
are anointed with the oil of God.”?
“ Tertullian,1! Clemens Alexandrinus,1’ and St
Jeromes abound in the same strain. Everywhere yre
meet with puns and conundrums on the name;
nowhere with the vestige of the real existence of a
person, to whom the name was distinctively appro
priated.”
Mr Taylor appears to have entertained very
peculiar notions as to the meaning of verbs of num
ber. The “ abounding ” of which he speaks consists
in the existence in the writers from whom he quotes
of the passages cited, and no others, so far as I can
discover, containing any allusion to the possible deri
vation of Christian from Chrestus: while his “ab
sence of any vestige of the real existence of a person
to whom the name (Christus) was distinctively
appropriated ” concerns writers, from quotations in
whose works the story in the Gospels might be
almost, if not entirely, reconstructed, if the Gospels
were lost. But, besides this, the passages cited, when
examined, do not support the position that the writers
of them had any doubt as to the true origin of the
name Christian. It is very questionable whether
Justin Martyr, in the passage quoted by Mr Taylor,
refers at all to an identification of Christus with
Chrestus, though Mr Taylor, by inverting the order
p Toigaroun gar toutou eneken Tcaloumetlia christianoi, hoti chriametha elaion Theou.
'i Cum perperam Ch.restian.us pronuntiatur (puta christianus),
de suavitate, vel benignitate compositum nomen est.—Apology.
» Strommata. Autika de eis Christon pepisteukotes chrestoi te
eisi kai legontai.
e In Gal. v. 22: Quum apud Grsecos chrestetes utrumque
sonat, virtus est lenis, blanda tranquilla, et omnium bonorum
censors.
�12 'The Mythical Element in Christianity.
of Justin’s sentences, and leaving out the connecting
passages, gives his words this appearance. Justin’s
argument, which is too long to quote fully, is, that
we (Christians) are very good men (jAirestotatoi) ;
therefore, we ought not to be condemned simply on
account of our name, because we are called Chris
tians, for it is not just to hate that which is good.
He does not say, as Mr. Taylor insinuates, our name
shows that we are good men; he directly asserts the
fact of this goodness. And that he did not himself
derive the name Christian from chrestos is placed
beyond a doubt by two other passages in his Apology,
the first of which says, “ Our Master, the Son of God,
the Father and Ruler of all things, is Jesus Christ,
from whom also we come to be named Christians ;r,t
while the second states that the true Son of God ....
is called Christ, because God had anointed and set in
order all things by Him.u Theophilus, in the passage
referred to by Mr Taylor, is arguing that his correspondentAutolycus “did not knowwhat he was saying,
in laughing at him for calling himself a Christian.” v A
proposition which he proceeds to prove, by dwelling
on the common practice and admitted usefulness of
the act of anointing, to show the excellent qualities
implied in the Christian name; an argument in which
we, who are not accustomed to anoint ourselves or
our houses, &c., may see as little force as those who
never wash themselves might see in the praise of
water as a source of cleanliness; but which is very far
from showing any doubt in the mind of Theophilus
about the derivation of the name Christian from the
verb chrio, to anoint. The quotation from Tertullian,
‘ 1 Apol. 12.
u Christos men kata to kechristliai, kai kosmesai ta panta di hautou,
tou Theou legetai.—2 Apol. 6.
' Pen de sou lcatagelan me, TcaPnmta me Christianon, ouk oidas
ho legeis.—Ad. Aut. i. 1.
�The Mythical ‘ lement in Christianity. 13
E
made by Mr Taylor, is garbled. The complete, pas
sage reads thus : li The interpretation of Christianus
is rarely derived [by you] from anointing. For since
it is very badly pronounced by you Chrestianus, for
you have no accurate knowledge even of the name, it
is compounded from suavity, or benignity. w So
that Tertullian, instead of intimating any doubt in
his own mind of the origin of the name, as Mr Taylor
suggests, adduces the use of the name Chrestianus in
proof of the gross ignorance of his contemporaries about
the true origin of Christianus; but says, if youwiZZ make
this mistaken substitution of e for i, then you must
derive the name from goodness. The passage quoted
from Jerome has nothing at all to do with the origin
of the name Christian ; but is simply an explanation
of the meaning of chrestotes in the passage, in Gala
tians, which, he says, is the Greek equivalent of
either suavity or benignity.* Lastly, the passage
cited from Clemens Alexandrinus ? is part of a meta
physical argument, based upon a statement of Plato,
“ that the knowledge of a’true king is a kingly know
ledge, and he who has acquired it, whether he is a
king or a private person, would always, according to
the true method, be rightly addressed as a king;
whence, continues Clemens, “ those who have be
lieved in Christ are, and are to be addressed as good,
since they are cared for as kings by the true king.
For as the wise are wise by wisdom, and the legal
legal by law, so those who belong to Christ the king
w Apol. c. 3. Christianus raro quantum interpretatio est de
unctione deducta. Nam et cum perperam Chrestianus pronuntiatur, avobis, nam nec nominis certa est notitiavobis, de suavitate
vel benignitate compositum est.
i -**
1 Benignitas autem sive suavitas, quum apud Grsecos chrestotes
utrumque sonat, virtus est lenis, &c. Mr Taylor’s scholarship
appears to have stopped short of teaching him that utrwmquc sonat
means has either sense, and has no reference to the sound of
chrestotes.
y Strom, ii. c. 418.
�14 The Mythical Element in Christianity.
are kings, and those who are of Christ are Christians ”
Whatever we may think of the argument, its con
clusion both shows that, in the idea of Clemens, it
rested on the office of Christ as “ anointed ” king, and
supplies in itself a clear “ vestige of a person to whom
the name Christ was distinctively appropriated,”
which Mr Taylor finds so difficult of discovery in the
writers cited by him.
The hypothesis that Christian may have grown up
by the transformation of chrestos, is thus left destitute
of any support from ancient authority. But, besides
this, it is exposed to a grave objection of a linguistic
character. Anos is a termination very little used by
Greek writers, and when it is employed, this is in the
sense of the possessor of a quality, which the primitive
expresses; as peitkedanos from peuke, having bitter
ness ; rigedanos from rigos, having cold.2 But there
is no Greek primitive expressing goodness, from
which Chrestianos could be derived. The primitive is
chrestates, and the name, therefore, if formed from
this source, would have been not Chrestianos, but
Chrestotetanos. On the other hand, anus is a very
common Latin termination, in the sense of belonging
to a distinct place or person, as Montanus, Fontanus,
Romanus, Albanus, Spartanus, Tullianus, Catonianus,
Sullanus;a the sense in which Christianus is com
monly employed. Whence F. C. Bauer has expressed
the opinion that the name probably arose at Rome,
notwithstanding the statement in the Acts,b “ that
the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.”
And, at all events, if it was first used in Antioch, this
was most likely done by Italians, or in order to make
the name intelligible to Roman ears.
» Matthiae Greek Gram I. Adjectives III.
» Zumpt. Lat. Gram. 181, sec. lix.
■ I so*
■^•^hengeschichte der drei erster Jahrhunderte,
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. 15
Now Chrestos or Chrestus is by no means uncommon
as an ancient name among Greeks and Romans.
Appian mentions a Socrates Chrestos, whom Mithri
dates made King of Pontus ; Aurelius Victor speaks
of a Chrestus as engaged in a conspiracy to kill
Hannibal; Martial has two epigrams on a “ Chrestus”
and one on a Chrestillus.c Chreste occurs in an
ancient epitaph; Fulgentius mentions a Manlius
Chrestus, who wrote a book on Hymns to the Gods ;
and Ausonius has an epigramd on two brothers,
Chrestos and Akindunos, of whom he says that, if
Akindunos would make a present of the a in his
name to Chrestos, the names would answer better to
their characters ; for Chrestos would become Achrestos—-i.e., useless, and Akindunos Kindunos—i.e., dan
gerous.6 And Mr Fynes Clinton, in his ‘Fasti Romani,’
mentions three other persons named Chrestus, one
contemporary with the sophist Adrian, a.d. 171;
another put to death by Ulpian, a.d. 228; and a
third, a grammarian, living a.d. 359. It cannot
therefore be at all surprising that the non-Christian
population of the Roman empire, in the first Christian
centuries, should have supposed the name of the
founder of the new religion to be Chrestus, and have
called his disciples Chrestiani, without intentional
reference to any good qualities ascribed to them; for
which, indeed, we know that they were very far from
disposed to give them credit.
This phase of the mythical hypothesis, where
Christ is presented as an ideal concentration of the
goodness manifested by his alleged followers, being
thus shown to be untenable, there remains for
examination only the other phase, which, resting
c vi. 54, ix. 25,. vi. 9.
d xxxix.
e See note on Tertullian Apol. c, 3, in Migny’s Edition of the
Fathers.
�16 Ehe Mythical Element in Christianity.
on a supposed modification of the idea of the
Messiah consequent on the destruction of Jeru
salem, admits of a chronological test, in the
inquiry whether there is satisfactory evidence of the
use of the name Christian before that event. Now
we have, in the works of two eminent Roman
historians, Tacitus and Suetonius, who lived in the
latter half of the first and the commencement of the
second Christian century, distinct evidence of the use
of this name five years before the siege of Jerusalem,
and its connection with a person called Christus, who
is stated to have lived about thirty-five years pre
viously. The passage in Tacitus has often been
quoted, but from its importance to the present argu
ment I repeat it here, in the words of Gibbon’s
translation. Tacitus, after narrating the conflagra
tion of Rome, the suspicions which attached to the
Emperor Nero of having ordered the city to be set
on fire, and the steps he had taken to avert this
charge by religious ceremonies intended to appease
the anger of the deities to whom he ascribed the
calamity, states “ that, to divert a suspicion which the
power of despotism was unable to suppress, the
emperor resolved to substitute in his place fictitious
criminals. With this view he inflicted the most ex
quisite tortures on those men, who, under the vulgar
appellation of Christians, were already branded with
deserved infamy. They derived their name and
origin from Christ, who in the reign of Tiberius had
suffered death by the sentence of the procurator,
Pontius Pilate. For a while this dire superstition
was checked; but it again burst forth, and not only
spread itself over Judeea, the first seat of this mis
chievous sect, but was even introduced into Rome,
the common asylum which receives and protects
whatever is impure, whatever is atrocious. The con
fessions of those who were seized discovered a great
�’The Mythical Element in Christianity. 17
number of their accomplices, who were all convicted,
not so much for the crime of setting fire to the city
as for their hatred of the human kind. They died in
torments, and their torments were embittered by
insult and derision. Some were nailed on crosses;
others sewn up in the skins of wild beasts, and ex
posed to the fury of dogs; others again, smeared
over with combustible materials, were used as torches
to illuminate the darkness of the night. The gardens
of Nero were destined for the melancholy spectacle,
which was accompanied by a horse race, and honoured
by the presence of the emperor, who mingled with the
populace in the dress and attitude of a charioteer.
The guilt of the (Christians) f deserved indeed the
most exemplary punishment, but the public abhor
rence was changed into commiseration, from the
opinion that these unhappy wretches were sacrificed,
not so much to the public welfare, as to the cruelty
of a jealous tyrant.”S
With this passage must be put in apposition the
following account of Nero’s measures in Suetonius.11
“ Many things were censured and repressed, and that
severely, and some ordered. A limit was set to ex
penditure. Public suppers with gratuitous doles of
food were established. It was provided that nothing
cooked but pulse or pot-herbs should come into the
cooks’ shops, while previously all kinds of victuals were
exposed there. The Christians, a class of men who
hold a new and mischievous superstition, were subjected
to capital punishment. The four-horse chariot games,
in which, by an inveterate license, cheating and rob
bery were sanctioned, with a right of going every
where, were forbidden; the troops of pantomimics were
banished with the pantomimes.”
Now, unless it can be shown, either that these pasf The name is not repeated in the original.
g Tac. Ann. xv. 44, Gibbon c. xvi.
h Vit. Ner., c. 16.
�18
T’he Mythical Element in Christianity.
sages have been interpolated into the. writings of
Tacitus and Suetonius, or that those authors applied
to the year 65 a.d. names not known till a later
time, and confused the persons whom Nero put to
death, on the charge of having set fire to Rome, with
the body known as Christians at a later epoch, they
completely upset the mythological hypothesis now
under our consideration, by proving that the Chris
tian name was in use and connected with a Christ
who had suffered at a date anterior by several years
to the time when, according to this hypothesis, the
idea of such a Christ first arose. The author of
‘ The Twelve Apostles ’ shows too much acquaintance
with classical literature to allow of our supposing
that he was not aware of these passages in Tacitus
and Suetonius, and too much logical power to allow
of our supposing that he did not see how fatal they
are to his hypothesis, unless they can be got rid of
in one or the other of the modes indicated above.
Unfortunately, he does not tell us which of these alter
natives he adopts, but prefers to ignore the positive
testimony of Tacitus and Suetonius to the existence
of Christians in the reign of Nero altogether, and to
rely for his external proof of the unhistorical cha
racter of Jesus upon certain negative evidences, to
which I shall fully advert subsequently. I am
therefore driven, in dealing with these passages, to
refer to the observations of other writers, who have
discussed them from a point of view opposed to
Christianity—such as Mr Taylor, in the work already
cited ; Mr Robert Cooper, in his ‘ Infidel’s Text Book
and Mr Lumisden Strange, in his ‘ The Bible: is it
the Word of God ? especially Mr Taylor, who seems
to have been a man of considerable, though not very
profound learning, and to whom his successors appear
to have been indebted for most of their arguments on
the subject before us.
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. 19Of the alternatives above stated Mr Taylor adopts
the first decidedly, in regard to Tacitus, and hints at
rather than contends for the second, in regard to
Suetonius. He adduces various reasons for supposing
the passage in Tacitus to be a forgery, which I
produce here, in a somewhat condensed shape, with
my replies to them.1
1. The passage is not quoted by Tertullian, though
he had read and largely quotes the works of Tacitus,,
and in his Apology is so hot upon it, that his missing
it is almost miraculous.
Reply. Tertullian quotes Tacitus twice only, and
both times the same passage—namely, an absurd
account given by him of the origin of the Jews, and
of their worshipping a deity with an ass’s head.l
But he does assert the existence of statements in the
Roman historians, implying that Hero persecuted the
Christians at Rome, which is what Tacitus and
Suetonius state.k
2. Tertullian has spoken of Tacitus in a way that
it is absolutely impossible he could have spoken of
him, if his writings had contained such a passage.
Reply. He calls him “ the most loquacious of the
great liars,” 1 an epithet agreeing well with the more
detailed abuse of the Christians to be found in
Tacitus, than in Suetonius.
3. The passage is not quoted by Clemens Alex
andrinus, who sets himself entirely to the task of
adducing and bringing together admissions and re
cognitions which Pagan authors had made of the
existence of Christ and Christianity.
Reply. Clemens applies himself to collect passages
’ Diegesis, p. 394—396.
i Apol. c. 16, In. Nat.c. 11.
k Consulite commentaries -vestros, in illis reperietis Neronem
primum, in hanc sectam turn maxim e Romas orientem, Csesariano
gladio fervisse.—Apol. 5.
1 Mendaciorum loquacissimus.—Apol. c. 16, In.Nat. c. 11.
C
�‘20 The Mythical Element in Christianity.
from heathen writers anterior to Christ, which might
be regarded as an unconscious anticipation of his
character and acts. To deal with historical notices
of Christ and Christianity was entirely beside the
object of his work.
4. The passage has not been stumbled upon by the
laborious, all-seeking Eusebius, who could by no pos
sibility have missed it, and whom it would have saved
the labour of forging the testimony of Josephus,
adducing the correspondence of Christ and Abgarus,
and the Sibylline Verses, or forging a revelation from
Apollo in attestation of Christ’s conception.
Reply. The object of Eusebius in citing the state
ments referred to by Mr Taylor, of which I by no
means defend the authenticity, though I do not know
what proof Mr Taylor could furnish that Eusebius
himself forged them, was not to establish the fact of
the existence of Jesus, or that of a body of Christians
before the siege of Jerusalem,—facts that probably no
one in the fourth century dreamt of disputing,—but to
adduce testimony favourable to the Christian beliefs
about Jesus, or to the character of Christians ; and, as
the passage of Tacitus was quite useless for this
purpose, Eusebius had no motive for referring to it,
5. There is no vestige of the existence of the pas
sage before the fifteenth century.
Reply. It is clearly referred to by Sulpicius Severus
at the close of the fourth century, though without
naming Tacitus, in a passage which is as follows : ni
“Nor could Nero, in any way prevent the supposition
that the fire had been ordered. Therefore he turned
the reproach upon the Christians, and perpetrated the
most cruel tortures on innocent persons—inventing
new modes of death, that they should be sewn up in
the skins of wild beasts, and torn to pieces by dogs.
m Sacr, Hist. 2, c. 29.
�<%he Mythical Element in Christianity. 21
Many were nailed to crosses, or roasted in the flames.
More were reserved to be burnt instead of lamps at
night, when the day had waned.”11
6. It rests on the fidelity of a single individual, who
had the ability, opportunity, and the strongest possible
inducement of interest, to introduce the interpolation.
Reply. To what the last words allude I cannot
imagine, but the statement generally rests upon a
blunder of Mr Taylor, who supposed that there were
no MSS. of Tacitus in existence, but such as were
■copied from a printed edition published by Johannes
•de Spire at Venice in 1468,° of which he seems to
have imagined that the original had disappeared.
But in fact there are, in the Medicean library, at
Florence, two ancient MSS. of Tacitus, both contain
ing this passage. The first mentioned in letters of
Poggio of the 21st Oct., 1427, and the 3rd June,
1428, is stated to have been written in the eleventh
■century by order of Desiderius, abbot of the monastery
of Casino, and tab have come into the possession of
the Medici from the convent of St Mark at Florence.
From it numerous copies are said to have been made
in the twelfth century, by which the works of Tacitus
» The following phrases in Sulpicius agree too closely with the
very peculiar phraseology of Tacitus to allow of the resemblance
being accidental:
Sed non ope humana decedebat infamia, quin jussum incendium
crederetur.—Tacitus.
Neque ulla re Nero efficiebat, quin ab eo jussum incendium
putaretur.—Sulp. Sev.
Et pereuntibus addita ludibria, ut ferarum tergis contexti laniatu
■canum interirent.— Tacitus.
Quin novae mortes excogitatatae, ut ferarum tergis’ contexti,
laniatu canum interirent.—Sulp. Sev.
Aut crucibus affixi, aut flammandi; atque ubi defecisset dies in
usum nocturni luminis urerentur.—Tacitus.
Multi crucibus affixi, aut flammis usti. Plerique ad id reservati,
ut cum defecisset dies, in usum nocturni luminis urereptur.—
Sulp. Sev.
° Diegesis, 394.
�22 The Mythical Mement in Christianity.
were spread through Italy, France, Britain, Germany,
and Spain; and from one of these copies Johannes
de Spire’s edition appears to have been printed. The
second MS. seems also to date from the eleventh cen
tury ; and contains a statement relating to the works of
Apuleius, written on the same set of skins, showing
that the original, of which the present MS. is a copy,
was made towards the close of the fourth century,P
7. The passage, though unquestionably the work
of a master, and entitled to be pronounced a chef
d’oeuvre of the sort, betrays a penchant for that
delight in descriptions of bloody horrors, as peculiarly
characteristic of the Christian disposition as it was
abhorrent to the mild and gentle mind and highlycultivated tastes of Tacitus. It has a character of
exaggeration, and trenches on the laws of natural
probability. It is indeed not conceivable that Nero
should have been so hardened in cruelty, and wanton
in wickedness, as this passage would represent him.
Reply. The most startling atrocity, the burning men
alive in dresses of combustible materials as living
torches, is well attested by Juvenal,i Seneca,r Mar
tial/ and Tertullian?
p See Preface by F. Ritter to edition of Tacitus of 1848,
p. 45—50.
9 vii. 235. Ausi quod liceat tunica punire molests. Daring what
may be punished by a vest of pain. The old scholiast describes
this ‘ ‘ tunica molesta ” as “ ex charta facta, pice illite in qu a ignibus
pcenee addicti ardere solebant ”—made of paper smeared with pitch,
in which those sentenced to punishinent by fire were wont to bum.
Ib. i. 155. Taada lucebis an ilia, qua stantes ardent qui fixo gutture
fumant. You will shine by that torch with which those glow who
smoke while standing with the neck fixed. Scholiast, Nero clothed
malefactors with pitch and papyrus, and ordered them to be
brought to a fire that they might burn.
r Epist. ii. ad Lucill. Cogita hoc loco carcerem, et circus, et
equuleos, et ancum, et illam tunicam alimentis ignium et illisam
et textam. Here think of the prison, and the circus, and the
horses, and the hook [instruments of torture], and that tunic
smeared with and woven of the food of fire. These lines appear
�’The Mythical Element in Christianity. 23
8. Such good and innocent people as the first
Christians must be supposed to be could not have
provoked so great a degree of hostility. They must
have sufficiently endeared themselves to their fellow
citizens to prevent the possibility of their being so
treated.
Reply. The whole character of the Christian apolo
gies shows that, from whatever cause, the first Chris
tians did call forth great hatred from certain classes,
as they called forth contemptuous disdain from other
classes.
9. So just a man as Tacitus unquestionably was
could not have spoken of the professors of a purer
religion than the world had ever seen as justly
criminal, and deserving exemplary punishment.
Reply. It does not appear that Tacitus ever
examined into the tenets of the Christian religion.
The charge of “ hatred of mankind,” u which is his
only definite accusation, is very intelligible, if we
bear in mind the anticipation of the speedy coming
of Christ to judge all men, which we know, from St
Paul’s epistles, that the Christians of that age
generally entertained, and the consequences attached
by Christian belief to that judgment.
10. The account is inconsistent with the 1st
to have been written while the atrocities were fresh in Seneca’s
memory, shortly before his own death, which took place the year
following the burning of Rome.
s X. 25, 5. Nam quum dicatur, Tunica presente molests,
Ure manum, plus est dicere non facio. For when in presence of a
vest of pain the order is given, “ Burn your hand,” it is more
courageous to say, “ I won’t do itbecause this might lead to the
burning of yotir body.
‘ Apol. § 50. Licet nunc sarmenticios et semiustos appelletis,
quasi ad stipitem dimidio axis revincti sarmentorum ambitu excoriamur. Though now you call us faggot men and half-axis men,
as if being bound to the stake by half our axis we were scorched by
the encircling faggots.
u Odium generis humani.
�24 The Mythical Element in Christianity.
Epistle of St Peter,v where Nero is spoken of as the
minister of God for good, and the Christians are
assured that, so long as they” are followers of that
which is good, no one would harm them.
Reply. There is no necessary contradiction between
the two accounts, even if the Epistle was written in
the age traditionally assigned to it. Nero, according
to Tacitus and Suetonius, in the beginning of his
reign, gave a promise of good government, to which
the Epistle may refer, supposing such passages as
ii. 12, iii. 13, and iv. 14 do not point to a period of
persecution and trial of the Christians, as has often
been contended, rather than to one of tranquillity.
And if it were written during the reign of Nero, no
other evidence would be required for overthrowing
the hypothesis which would make the origin of
Christianity be subsequent to the siege of Jerusalem.
But the Tubingen school of critics allege strong
grounds for placing the date of the Epistle in the
time of Trajan.w
11. It is inconsistent with the statements of Melito,
Bishop of Sardis, who expressly states that the
Christians up to his time—the third century—had
never been the victims of persecution; and that it
was in the provinces lying beyond the boundaries of
the Roman empire, and not in Judsea, that Chris
tianity originated.
Reply. Melito lived not in the third, but in the
second century. He dedicated an epistle to Marcus
Antoninus in defence of the Christians, which Euse
bius in his Chronicon places in a.d. 170, and which
cannot be later than the accession of Commodus,
a.d. 180 ; and he expressly mentions Nero and
Domitian “ as having been inclined, through the
persuasion of certain envious and malicious persons,
’ iii. 13.
w Schwegler Nach Apost. Zeitalter, ii., 11—17.
�the Mythical Element in Christianity. 25
to bring our doctrine into hatred ; but your godly
ancestors,” he continues (Trajan and Hadrian) “ cor
rected their blind ignorance, and rebuked oftentimes
by their epistles the rash enterprises of those who
were ill-affected towards us.” x Melito does not men
tion Judaea at all, but says only that “ our philosophy
first flourished among the Barbarians, and from thence
having spread over thy people, under the illustrious
reign of Augustus, thy predecessor, it has been an
eternal benefit to thy kingdom.” The use of bar
barian in this passage is agreeable to the Greek
practice in speaking of every nation who were not
Greeks.
Instances abound; I cite two only.
Plutarch says of his own contemporaries, “ The
people have no need of statesmen for procuring
peace, since all war, whether with Greeks or Bar
barians, is taken away and banished for ever.” s So
Philo2 speaks of “ Caius, after the death of Tiberius
Caesar, taking the command of all the earth, and sea,
the Barbarian races with the Hellenes, and the
Hellenes with the Barbarians.” Melito probably
meant simply that the Christian faith, having origi
nated in Judaea, had thence spread to Greece and
Italy.
12. Tacitus, in no other part of his writings,
makes any allusion to Christ or Christianity.
Reply. This silence is quite consistent with the
tone of the passage under consideration, which shows
a contemptuous indifference to Christian ideas as
a religion. Tacitus noticed Christianity only when
it came into collision with a political question.
In reviewing generally Mr Taylor’s objections to
this passage in Tacitus, we see that whatever
strength they possess apart from his confident asser
tions depends on his supposition, first, that no allu1 See Euseb. ii., H. E. 26.
* ‘ Political Precepts,’ § 32.
1 De Virtutibus, ii. 546. Mangey’s edition.
�*16 The Mythical Element in Christianity.
sion to the passage can be discovered before the
fifteenth century ; secondly, that there then existed a
writer who had the opportunity, the disposition, and
the ability to compose an account of the persecution
of the Christians under Nero, in what Gibbon calls
l; the inimitable style of Tacitus,” and thus palm off a
forgery on the literary world. Nothing in the con
text causes any suspicion that the passage has been
interpolated.
On the contrary, although it is
possible to strike out the sentences in Tacitus relating
to the persecution of the Christians by Nero without
making a gap in his narrative, his story is more con
sistent with itself if they are retained; because the
next paragraph begins with a statement implying the
lapse of some considerable time since the conflagra
tion, which the account of the proceedings against
the Christians fills up.a And when we find that the
passage is quoted by a writer of the fourth century
instead of having been unnoticed till the fifteenth;
that MSS. containing it were widely circulated
throughout Europe two or three centuries before the
date of the supposed forgery ; and that one ancient
MS. where it occurs has internal evidence of having
been copied from an original writer in the fourth
century, I can discover no reason for accepting Mr
Taylor’s hypothesis as having even a shade of pro
bability. The genuineness of the passage of Tacitus
must, I think, be considered as established, and
becomes a strong proof that, five years before the
siege of Jerusalem under Titus, there were at Rome
a considerable bodyb of persons commonly called
Christians, who traced their origin to a Ghristus put
to death by the procurator Pontius Pilate, in the
reign of Tiberius.
a Interea, conferen dis pecuniis pervastata Italia, provincial
eversse, soeiique popuJi.
b “ Multitudo ingens,” says Tacitus.
�The Mythical Element in Christianity.
The existence of a body of persons thus named in
Rome at this time is confirmed by the passage already
cited from Suetonius, on which Mr Taylor remarks
only “that he hopes the Christians will not be
offended, if he hopes that it may not apply to them,”
certainly a very feeble form of critical objection. No
doubt Mr Taylor felt the absurdity of supposing that
any Christian would have introduced a description of
his co-religionists as men who “ held a new and mis
chievous superstition ” into Suetonius, between two
passages relating the one to cooks’ shops and the other
to horse races ; and so endeavoured to ride out of the
difficulty, that the passage proves the existence in
Rome under Nero of a body of Christians consider
able enough to have become the subject of penal
•enactments, by a miserable joke. But the way in
which Suetonius introduces this notice, and the way
in which Tacitus refers to the death of Christ by
order of Pontius Pilate, not as to a rumour but as to
an ascertained fact, raises a question of considerable
interest, namely, whether those acts of Pilate c re
ferred to by Justin Martyr and Tertullian did
not really exist, and form a solid foundation
upon which the unscrupulous piety of Chris
tian writers in later times reared that fabric of for
geries preserved to us under the name of the Gospel
of Nicodemus,d and thus have brought into question
the existence of any official documents relating to
the history of Jesus ? In the time of the first
Roman Emperors, says Dr Lardner,e “ there were
acts of the Senate, acts of the city, or people of Rome,
c Ton epi Pontiou Pilatou genomen 5n acton. Justin Martyr, I.
Apol., p. 76, 84. Paris 1686. 63, 82 Bened. Ea omnia super
Christo Pilatus et ipse jam pro sua conscientia Christianus retulit.
Tertullian, Apol. 23.
d Fabricius Codex, Apocryph. N. T., i. 214.
e ‘ Heathen Testimonies,’ c. ii., from which the following state
ment is condensed.
�28
The Mythical Element in Christianity.
acts of other cities, and acts of the governors of
provinces. Of all these we can discern clear proofs
in ancient writers of the best credit.” Thus Julius
Caesar ordered that the acts of the Senate as well as
daily acts of the people should be published/
Augustus forbid the publication of those of the
Senate.s Tacitus mentions a senator appointed by
Tiberius to draw up these acts.11 Elsewhere we find
them referred to as containing speeches from which
the oratorical talent of Pompey and Crassus might be
appreciated.1 The acts of the people appear to have
been journals containing accounts of public trials and
affairs, punishments, assemblies, buildings, births,
deaths, marriages, divorces, &cJ They were kept
at other places besides Rome, as, e.p., at Antium,
whence Suetonius learned the day and place of birth
of Caligula, and which he refers to as official docu
ments/ And Philo speaks of acts or memoirs of
Alexandria1 being sent to Caligula, “ which he read
with more eagerness and satisfaction than anything
else.” That there should have been similar acts or
reports of remarkable occurrences sent up from the
governors of the provinces to Rome is therefore in
itself probable, and would explain in a satisfactory
manner the positive statement as to the death of
Christ by order of Pontius Pilate made by Tacitus ;
though Dr Lardner does not cite, nor have I been
able to discover, any reference to such acts by Roman
historians. But it seems improbable that either
Justin Martyr or Tertullian would have appealed to
records of this nature, in writings addressed to the
f Suet. Vit. J. C., c. 20.
s Suet. Vit. Aug., c. 36.
h Ann. i, 5.
’ Tac. Dial, de Oratore, 37.
. ’
3 See instances in Lipsius Excursus on Tac. Ann. v. 4.
k Vit. Cal., c. 8; Vit. Tib., c. 5.
1 Hupomnetikais ephemerisin. De Leg. ad Caium, 1016 A. Mangey.
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. 29
Emperor and Senate of Rome, as apologies for their
religion, if it were not generally known that such re
cords existed. So that the reference is in itself a
pretty good evidence of the fact.m And at all events,
the acts of the people of Rome must have contained
full details of events so sensational as the conflagra
tion of the city, and the steps taken by Nero to throw
off suspicion from himself upon the Christians, which
would supply Tacitus with official information of the
name ascribed to the victims of imperial cruelty and
cunning; as they probably furnished to Suetonius the
materials for his summary of Nero’s police regula
tions. Now this is all that is required to. take the
statement of the existence of bodies of Christians at
that time in Rome entirely out of the domain of
legend and myth.
To the positive evidence of the existence of Chris
tianity as a religious belief before the date of the
siege of Jerusalem, furnished by these passages in
Tacitus and Suetonius, must be added, as a strongconfirmatory proof, the statement of Pliny the
younger, in his often cited letter to the Emperor
Trajan, written probably in a.d. 107 or 108.n In this
letter he speaks not only of the great numbers of
“persons of all ages, of every rank and of both sexes,
who were in danger of suffering as. Christians, but of
“some who declared that they had ceased to be
Christians twenty years before.” Surely it is far
more likely that such a spread of the new faith to a
point so distant from Jerusalem as Bithynia, reprem The statements of Tertullian, however, make it nearly certain,
and those of Justin Martyr at least probable, that the documents
to which they referred were not copies of official records, but ac
counts similar to those circulated among the Christians in later
days as the acts of Pilate, in opposition to which Eusebius states
that acts derogatory to Christ were forged by the heathen in the
persecution of Maximin., E. H. i. 9, andix. 5.
” Lardner, ‘ Heathen Test.’ c. v.
�jO Ifhe Mythical TLletnent in Christianity.
serifs the results of a propaganda continued for
three-quarters of a century, rather than that a period
of about thirty-five years should have sufficed for the
incubation and production of the supposed myth—its
acceptaifce.among a certain class of Jews, its diffusion
among their Gentile converts, and the attainment of
a following so considerable as that described by
•PJ,nyj in a province remote from Judaea ?
But here again recourse has been had to the
weapon which we have found used against the testi
mony of Tacitus—suspicion of forgery. The learned
Dr J. S. Semler entertained doubts as to the genuine
ness of this letter, and his doubts are paraded, as if
they were unquestioned certainties, by Mr R. Cooper,
who expands them into a statement “ that the
German literati have long been of opinion that this
letter is a forgery.”0 As the main ground for this
conclusion, he adduces the objections, “that the letter
is found in one MS. only of Pliny’s letters, and not
in the others,” and that Pliny states that the Chris
tians used to meet before daylight and sing a hymn
to Christ as to a God; whereas, says Mr Cooper,
■“ the belief in the Divinity of Christ was not
established till the Council of Nice, in a.d. 325 ”;
whence Mr Cooper suggests that the letter was forged
during. the century intervening between Pliny and
Tertullian, a.d. 216, by whom it is quoted. How the
forger came to introduce a form of address to Christ,
which, according to Mr Cooper, did not come into use
till a century after Tertullian’s death, he does not
condescend to explain. But, in fact, Tertullian’s
quotation, while it proves the existence both of the
umr*68
Text Book,’ or Lectures on the Bible, London,
& o, pp. 56, 57. Mr Cooper cites Semler’s Neue Versuche die
Kirchen Histone der ersten Jahrhunderten aufzuklaren, 1788,
a wor^
which I have not been able to obtain a
sight.
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. j1
letter ascribed to Pliny, and the reply ascribed to
Trajan, at the time when his apology was written,
does create some suspicion that the particular expres
sion to which Mr Cooper objects may have been in
troduced at a later date, for he makes Pliny say that
the Christians sang a hymn to Christ and God,
instead of to Christ as to God ; which is the reading
of our present copies of Pliny. P So that, to say
nothing of the obvious answer to this objection,
that Pliny, who does not profess to report the
exact words used by any Christian, and, in this
letter, speaks of haying required those who were
charged before him “ to repeat after him an invocation
to the gods, and make offerings of wine and incense
to the statue of Trajan, which, for that purpose, he
had ordered to be brought out with those of the
deities,” may have somewhat misapprehended the
nature of the addresses made by the Bithynians to
Christ, the objection vanishes before the same kind
of doubt to which it owes its existence. The other
objection, that the letter is not to be found in some
of the best MSS. of Pliny’s letters, states a fact, but
omits to state that the omission is not confined to
this particular letter, but extends to the whole corres
pondence between Pliny and Trajan, which forms the
10th book of his letters, and apparently was not pub
lished till some considerable time after Pliny’s death,
while the bulk of his other letters were collected and
published during his life, or immediately after his
decease, whence these letters were not found in
many copies of his works, i
As for the German literati, they are so far from
p Christo et deo, instead of Christo quasi deo. This is stated to
be the reading of the best MSS. of Tertullian. Others have ut
deo. Eusebius renders the phrase diken theo, which seems to show
that he read ‘ quasi ’ in Pliny.
q See Preface to Titze's Edition of ‘Pliny,’ Leipsic, 1823.
�3 2 The Mythical 'Element in Christianity.
having “ generally concluded this letter to be a
forgery,” as Mr Cooper asserts, that edition after
edition of Pliny’s letters has been published in
Germany, since Semler’s work appeared, in which
this letter is treated as genuine. Its genuineness is
ably defended by a recent editor, Moritz Doring,r
who observes, as appears to me with perfect justice,
that it is difficult to see what object could be gained
by forging it. An enemy of Christianity would have
shown his desire for persecution more openly. A
secret Christian could not have hoped to stop it by
such meansthat is to say, by suggesting the adop
tion of a mixture of leniency and severity, involving
death to those who refused to recant,s with the
statement that, by the adoption of this course,
coupled with free pardon to such as would worship
the Roman deities, “ the temples, which had been
almost forsaken, were beginning to be more fre
quented, and the sacred solemnities, after a long
intermission, to be revived; ” and “ that victims were
everywhere bought up, whereas, before, there were
few purchasers.” How too can we suppose that any
Christian would have been contented to ascribe the
conduct of martyrs, who “ resisted even unto death,”
only to “ contumacy and inflexible obstinacy ; ’ * or
would not have insinuated some words of pity, if not
of praise, for the two deaconesses, whom Pliny put
to the torture, instead of simply stating that he “ dis
covered nothing but a bad and extravagant supersti
tion.”11 On the other hand, can we imagine that an
enemy to Christianity would make Trajan direct, as
he does in his reply to Pliny, that the Christians
r In an Edition published at Freyberg, 1843.
8 Confitentes, iterum ac tertio interrogavi, supplicium minatus :
perseverantes dud jussi.
* Pertinaciam, et inflexibilem obstinationem.
u Superstitionem pravam et immodicam.
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. 33
were not to be sought for, and were in all cases to be
pardoned “ on supplicating our gods,” without even
insisting “ on their reviling Christ,” though this is
suggested in Pliny’s letter, and absolutely prohibit
the reception of anonymous accusations, as “ a very
bad precedent and unworthy of his age.” But the
tone of the letters is just what might be reasonably
expected from what else we know of Pliny and
Trajan. Trajan expresses his hatred of the system
of spies. Pliny institutes careful inquiries, and does
not conceal from the emperor what is favourable to
the Christians; that they pledged themselves solemnly,
“ not to the commission of any crime, but not to be
guilty of theft, or robbery, or adultery, never to falsify
their word, or refuse to give up property entrusted to
them ; ” but he judges their refusal to sacrifice to the
gods to be a criminal obstinacy, and their belief to be
a contemptible superstition, and dislikes particularly
the secrecy of their meetings, and their forming a
separate society, to which others of his letters show
that Trajan was particularly adverse. Add that the
style and language of these letters agrees perfectly
with those of the other letters of Pliny and Trajan,
a point by no means unimportant, when we re
member that this style is far from easy of imitation.
On the whole, then, there seems no reason for doubt
ing what Tertullian and Eusebius assume, that the
letters are genuine parts of the correspondence
between Pliny and the Emperor Trajan.
The conclusion of the genuineness both of these
letters and the passages from Tacitus and Suetonius
previously adduced, is confirmed, I think, if wTe com
pare either of these authorities with the documents
which a mistaken piety undoubtedly did forge, for
the better confirmation of the Christian faith, such as
the letters of Pilate to Tiberius, or the testimony to
Christ interpolated into Josephus, which I select for
�j4 The Mythical Element in Christianity.
comparison, because they are the Zeasf obviously
absurd of these fictitious evidences.
2nd letter of Pilate.v
“ Pilate to Tiberius Caesar. Health!
“On Jesus Christ, of whom I gave you clear in
formation in my last, at length, by the desire of the
people, as it were against my will, and without my
order, a severe punishment has been inflicted. But,
by Hercules, so pious and pure a man no age has
ever produced, or will produce. But a wonderful
struggle of the people itself, and concurrence of all
the scribes and rulers existed, as their own prophets
and our sybils had forewarned, to crucify this am
bassador of the truth ; signs in nature, which in the
judgment of philosophers threatened destruction to
the universe, appearing while he was hanging. His
disciples thrive, not belying their master by their
words, and the continency of their lives—yea, being
in his name great doers of good. If I had not dreaded
a sedition of the people, who were all but boiling
over, perhaps this man would still live. But being
rather driven by my regard for your dignity, than led
by my own will, I did not oppose with my full
strength that this pure blood, innocent of any charge,
should by the malignity of the men, unjustly, on their
clamour, as the documents explain, suffer death, and
be exposed to the winds.”
Extract from Josephus :w
“At that time lived Jesus, a wise man, if he may
be called a man; for he performed many wonderful
works. He was the teacher of such men as received
the truth with pleasure. He drew over to himself
many Jews and Gentiles. This was the Christ. And
when Pilate, at the instigation of the chief men
v Acta Pilati, Fab. Cod. Apocryph. N. T. I., 244. The poverty
of the Latin style is necessarily concealed in the translation.
w Ant. xviii. 3, 3.
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. 35
among us, had condemned him to the cross, they who
beforehand had conceived a love for him did not
cease to adhere to him. For, on the third day, he
appeared to them again alive, the divine prophets
having foretold these and many wonderful things
respecting him; and the sect of Christians, so called
from him, subsists to this day.”
The contrast between the tone of such passages,
and those adduced above from Tacitus, Suetonius, and
Pliny, is apparent; and shows, what it is reasonable to
expect that, when the Christian imagination invented
testimonies, it neither made these imaginary witnesses
abuse the Christian religion, nor contented itself
with making them attest what no one at the time
disputed—namely, the existence of a body of Chris
tians before the middle of the first century ; but
applied itself to meet the matters really contested,
which was, not whether Jesus had lived at the time
when they asserted that he did live, but whether his
life and acts had been such as they represented.
Now, in opposition to this direct evidence of
the existence of Christianity before the siege of
Jerusalem, borne by the concurrent testimony of two
. eminent writers, who were not Christians, and con
firmed incidentally by the official correspondence of a
third, what is adduced F Simply a list of other
non-Christian writers living in that age, who make no
mention of Christianity.
The author of c The Twelve Apostles ’ enumerates
the following alleged contemporary writers, whose
silence on this subject, he says, “is most remark
able”*:—
x Mr Cooper, in his ‘ Infidel’s Text-Book,’ pp. 50,51, gives a much
longer list, to which Mr I. L. Strange refers in his ‘ The Bible ; is it
the Word of God ?’ p. 351, of writers who have said nothing about
Christians, including several, though not all, of those mentioned
above. The list is not remarkable for the classical knowledge of
names displayed in it; and as it includes several writers who lived
D
�36
The Mythical Element in Christianity.
A.P.
Josephus, born
....
. 37
Philo, the Jew, died about.
. 42
Plutarch, flourished ....
. 80
Pampbilus, the Grammarian, flourished
. 30
Memnon,
,,
. 50
55
Epictetus, the Philosopher,
. 90
55
Lesbonax, the Sophist,
. 10
55
Pliny the elder, died
. • 77
Seneca, the Philosopher, died .
65
Curtius, the Historian, flourished
69
Pomponius Mela, the Geographer, flourished 45
Velleius ? Paterculus, the Historian
30
55
Valerius Maximus
„
• ,,
26
55
Exception may be taken to the dates assigned to
some of these authors. The age of Pamyhilus is
doubtful. On the one hand he is called AnriarcAews,
of which the natural meaning is a pupil of Aristar
chus, who lived 130 B.O. On the other hand, he is
said to have quoted Apion, who was alive in a.d. 41.
Mr Fynes Clinton attaches most weight to the last
statement in fixing the date of Pamphilus, and
adduces another case to show that Aristarch&ios may
mean only, of the school of Aristarchus.2 But, as we
do not possess the alleged quotation from Apion, it
is possible that the statement may be a mistake, or
in the second century, when, even according to the mythical
theory, the name Christian was known, their silence tends to de
stroy the weight of any argument drawn from the silence of those
who liy ed in the first century, by showing that this silence may
have proceeded from other reasons than the one of the name being
unknown at the time. (See p. 65). The remarks made below, on
the improbability of the writers referred to by the author of ‘ The
Twelve Apostles’ mentioning Christianity, apply to the other
writers mentioned by Mr Cooper, as I have ascertained by indi
vidual examination of them. I have not gone more fully into
these cases here, to avoid making this tract tediously long,
y Misprinted Valerius.
1 Fasti Hell., iii. 584; C. N. 228.
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. 37
refer to some other Apion than the noted gram
marian, and that Aristmcheios should be taken in its
ordinary meaning, which would make Pamphilus
anterior to the Christian era.
The age of Memnon is also very uncertain; our
only acquaintance with him being derived from frag
ments of his works preserved by Photius. Voss
places him in the time of Augustus ; while Orellius,
in the preface to an edition of his works, published
in 1816, contends that he could not have written
before the time of Hadrian, or even of the Antonines.
Again, the date of Quintus Curtius has been placed
by different editors of his works at various periods
between the time of Cicero and that of the Emperor
Theodosius ; the epoch which seems the most probable
being that of the Emperor Constantine.a As to the
Sophist, Lesbonax, since the only writings of his
which have come down to us are two orations sup
posed to have been delivered during the Corinthian
war, B.C. 413, it is difficult to see why his silence
about Christianity should be considered remarkable.
In the case of the other writers, the question
arises, what probability is there that they would
notice such a fact as Christianity probably was up to
the close of the first century ? If we assume the
historical truth of all the prodigies recorded in the
N. T., the case would, no doubt, be very different
from what I take it to be. Gibbon, for instance, is,
I think, quite justified in arguing that Pliny the
elder could hardly have failed to notice the darkness
which is said to have overspread all Palestine for
several hours during the Crucifixion, in his careful
examination of all known instances of failure of the
sun’s light, if such a darkness had actually occurred.
But suppose these marvels to have been simply the
See Dissertations in Valpy’s Delphin Ed. 1826, i., p. 32.
�I
38 ’The Mythical Element in Christianity.
colouring given by the belief of the Christian com
munity in the superhuman character of Christ to the
events of his life : suppose that the Christians, until
after the siege of Jerusalem, were commonly regarded
as a Jewish sect,b distinguished from other sects
only because “ after a way which these called heresy,
so worshipped they the God of their fathers; ”c
differing from them only “ on certain questions
touching their own superstitions, and one Jesus,
which was dead, whom [the Christians] affirmed to
be alive,” d there would be no reason for expecting
to find notices of Christianity by any writers other
than Christian, unless it can be shown that these
writers bestowed much attention upon the Jewish
sects and their opinions generally. Now, so far is
this from being the case, that of the writers men
tioned above, the only ones not Jews who notice the
Jews at all are Memnon, Plutarch, Epictetus, Pliny
the elder, Seneca, and Pomponius Mela,e and the
notice which they take of the Jews is very slight.
PLemnon states only that they were subject to Antio
chus, the King of Syria, whom the Romans defeated/
Plutarch’s notice is confined to the questions, sug
gested as topics for after-dinner conversation, whe
ther the Jews abstained from swine’s flesh because
they worshipped that animal, or because they had an
antipathy to it; and whether Adonis, which he seems
to have supposed to be the name of the God of the
Jews, is not the same as Bacchus. ® Epictetus, in blamb “ Thou, seest, brother, how many thousands of Jews there are
who believe, and they are all zealots of the law!’ Acts xxi. 20.
c Acts xxiv. 14.
d Acts xxv. 19.
' I must except Pamphilus, whose works I have not been able to
obtain, of whom, therefore, I cannot say whether he mentions the
Jews or not.
f Ch. 25, 26.
'
g Sympos. iv., Ques. 5 and 6. How unsafe is it to argue from
the silence of ancient writers, as to remarkable persons in or near
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. 39
ing those who assume the profession of philosophy
without acting up to it, says, “ Why should you pre
tend to be a Greek when you are a Jew ? Do you
not perceive on what terms a man is called a Jew, a
Syrian, an Egyptian ? When we see a man incon
stant to his principles we say he is not a Jew, but
when he has the temper of a man dipped and pro
fessed, then he is, indeed, and is called, a Jew. Even
so, we are counterfeits—Jews in name, but in reality
something else.”11 Again, when discoursing of in
trepidity, be says, “It is possible that a man may
arrive at this temper and become indifferent to those
things [dangers] from madness, or from habit, as the
Galileans.”1 Both passages have been supposed, and
it seems not unlikely, do refer to the Christians;
they are all that Epictetus says about the Jews.
Pliny the elder gives a short account of the
geographical position of Judsea and its natural pro
ductions, and relates that there is a river in it which
dries up every Sabbath day ; but of the religious
beliefs of the nation he says only that they were re
markable for their contempt of the Deities,! and that
they practised a magical art, taught them by Moses
and Jochabela many thousand years after Zoroaster,
whom Eudoxus states to have lived 6000 years
before Plato.k Seneca twice alludes to the Jewish
Sabbath, once in a fragment of his dialogue on
“ Superstition,” preserved by St Augustine, where he
to their own day, to their non-existence, appears from the fact that
Plutarch never mentions Persius, Juvenal, Lucan, Seneca, Quin
tilian, Martial, Tacitus, Suetonius, or either Pliny, with all of
whom he was contemporary either in his youth or his old age. Nor
is he mentioned by any Roman writer. Yet he had lived for some
years in Rome and given popular lectures there. Emerson, Pre
face to translation of Plutarch’s Morals, ix.
h Book ii. 9, Upton’s translation.
1 Book iv. 7, lb.
j Gens contumelia numinum insignis. Hist. Nat. xiii. 4.
k lb. xxx. 1.
�40 The Mythical Element in Christianity.
accuses the Jews of “ thus causing a useless waste of
the seventh part of their time
and a second time,
in one of his letters,1 in which he speaks of a 11 pro
hibition to light candles on the Sabbaths and this
is the only notice which he takes of them. Lastly,
Pomponius Mela simply mentions that Judaea is a
district of Syria. Why should we expect that
authors who take so little notice of the ancient faith
of the Jewish people, who in the first Christian
century had spread so widely over the Roman em
pire, should specially busy themselves about a recent
offshoot of that faith rejected by the body of the
Jewish nation, then slowly diffusing itself, principally
among the poorer classes, slaves, and freed-men, and
women probably more than men,m in the great cities
of the empire ; and numbering, at the outside, not
more than a few thousand adherents in any one of
those cities.11
1 Ep. 95.
m ‘ Ye see, brethren, your calling. God hath chosen the foolish
things of the world, and base things, and things which are de
spised.’ 1 Cor. i. 25—28.
n Gibbon, after a careful consideration of all the numerical data
which he could find, concludes, “ that the most favourable calcula
tions will not permit us to imagine that more than a twentieth
part of the subjects of the empire had enlisted under the banner
of the Cross before the important conversion of Constantine,”
C. xv., near end; an estimate not contested by his modern editors.
He remarks also that ingens multitude), the expression used by
Tacitus of the Christians under Kero, is the same as that used by
Livy of the Bacchanals, multitudinem ingentem alterum jam prope
populum esse. Yet the whole number was found to be 7,000. Liv.
39, ch. 14—17. Of the ancient writers whom I have examined,
Strabo gives the fairest and fullest account of the Jewish religion.
Yet even he dwells almost exclusively on the prohibition against
making any image of the Deity, which seems to have made a deep
impression on him as profoundly reasonable, and which he
ascribes to Moses, from the purity of whose teachings he conceives
that his followers had degenerated into superstitious practices.
Obviously, he had not at all studied their religious history.
Geog. xvi. 2, secs. 34—36. Cicero, his contemporary, though he
lived in the age when the Romans first became acquainted with the
Jews from the capture of Jerusalem by Pompey, takes no notice
whatever of them.
�iThe Mythical Element in Christianity. 41
Among the list of writers enumerated by the
author of ‘ The Twelve Apostles ’ there are really two
only whose silence respecting Christianity can be
reasonably a subject of surprise, because, undoubtedly,
both of them were familiar with Jewish thought, and
paid great attention to the religious beliefs of their
nation—P7m7o and Josephus. But Philo was of a
generation earlier than Jesus. He calls himself old,
that is, probably, over 70, in a.d. 40, on the occasion
of his mission to Rome.0 His works, which princi
pally consist in a series of commentaries on the
Pentateuch, must have been written before that date,
with the exception of the account of his embassy to
Rome placed at the end of them; since he was selected
for this office, in spite of his advanced years, in con
sequence of the influence which his learning and re
putation was considered to give him. It is true that
in this narrative P he gives “ an account of the state
of the Jews and their afflictions under Augustus,
Tiberius, and Caligula,” as Mr Cooper states; but
this account is so far from entering into the par
ticulars of their religious opinions, that it does not
even mention the divisions of Pharisees and Sad
ducees, of which we learn nothing from Philo;
though he has devoted a separate treatise to the
Essenes, from his admiration of the contemplative
life, withdrawn from all worldly distractions, which
they led. The silence of Philo on the existence of a
sect of Christians among the Jews cannot, under
these circumstances, be considered of any weight as
an argument against its existence, whatever may
be the weight due to it, when adduced, as is done
by- Mr Cooper, to prove “ that the pretensions of
the Christians to the divine influence of their master
0 See Preface to Mangey’s Edition of his works.
p Satirically called ‘ Of Virtues.’
�42 The Mythical Element in Christianity.
%
are perfectly gratuitous; ” i a matter with which I am
not now dealing.
Josephus comes under another category. But the
allegation that he “ does not make the slightest
mention of Jesus Christ ” r can be established only if
it can be shown not only that the passage quoted
above is interpolated into his works, of which there
appears to be no reasonable doubt,s but also that the
short incidental notice of Jesus, contained in his
account of the death of James, by order of the High
Priest Ananus, is an interpolation. Now this is a
much more doubtful question. The passage is as fol
lows : “Ananus, thinking that he had met with a fitting
opportunity, seeing that Festus was dead and Albinus
was still on his journey, convened a Sanhedrim of
judges, and having brought before it the brother of
Jesus, who is called Christ, named James, and some
others, accused them of having broken the law, and
gave them over to be stoned.” 1
This passage was known to Photius, whose silence
as to the passage in Ant. xviii. is one strong argument
against it." It is quoted by Eusebius, and by
Jerome, though inaccurately, and it appears pro
bable that it is referred to by Origen.v Objection has
q £ Infidel’s Text Book,’ p. 51.
1 lb. p. 54, ‘ Twelve Apostles,’ p. 10.
' See Lardner’s discussion of this passage in his ‘ Jewish Testi
monies and Credibility of the Gospel.’
‘ Ant. xx. 9.1.
“ Lardner’s Jewish Test. v. 3.
v Origen says “ that Josephus, who wrote the ‘ J ewish Antiquities’
in twenty books, being desirous to assign the cause why the Jews
suffered such things, that even their temple was demolished to its
foundations, says that these things had happened because of the
anger of God against them for what they had done to James, the
brother of Jesus, called Christ.” In Matt., sec. 17. Again, in his
work against Celsus, i. c. 37, he states “ Josephus says that these
things befel the Jews in vindication of James, called The Just,
who was the brother of Jesus, called Christ; inasmuch as they
killed him who was a most righteous man.” And afterwards, in
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. 43
been taken to the genuineness, on the ground—first,
that it implies some longer account of Jesus, of which
none is given in Josephus except the passage allowed
to be interpolated. Secondly, that the absence of
a reference to Christ in any other passage of Josephus
than this one, shows a settled intention on his part
not to notice him, which is inconsistent with the
notice here. But neither of these objections appears
to me of much force. Josephus may have designedly
abstained from any notice of Christ, or Christianity
as a religious belief, and yet have mentioned the title
commonly given to Jesus, as a means of identifying
the James whom he names as condemned to death;
and if he introduced the title only for this purpose,
and his object was sufficiently attained by its intro
duction, he would have no reason for giving any
further account of Jesus, whom we know that he did
not acknowledge to be the true Messiah. The fact
that the passage is quoted by Photius, who does not
notice the account in Ant. xviii., proves that, at all
events, the two passages are independent of each
other. On the other hand, if any part of the passage
is struck out, the whole must go, including the notice
of James, and the sentence must be reduced to the
words, “ and bringing before it some, he accused
them of having broken the law.” But this is an
‘ Cont. Cels.’ ii, see. 13, he says of the destruction of Jerusalem,
“which, as Josephus writes, happened on account of James the
Just, the brother of Jesus, called Christ; but, in truth, upon ac
count of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God.” This account is not
to be found in Josephus; but the expression, 1 ‘ the brother of J esus,
called Christ,” is peculiar, and not likely to be used by Origen
except as a quotation, as we may see from the continuation of
the last passage. If he knew that Josephus had given an account
of the death of James under the description of the “ brother of
Jesus, called Christ,” he may have ascribed to Josephus notions
as to the consequences of this crime, which he had gathered from
other sources ; but it seems improbable that he should have done
this, if Josephus had not mentioned the death of James at all.
�44 The Mythical Element in Christianity.
awkward statement. It is not likely that Josephus
would have said, Ananus “ brought some ” before
the Council without any explanation of who they
were. Nor is it probable that an interpolator would
have divided the sentence, inserting the words from
“ the brother of Jesus ” to “ and,” before “ some,” and
l< others” after it, though the Greek would have
allowed him to say, with even more elegance, “ others
some,” instead of “ some others.” And if the inter
polator were a Christian, as is supposed, he would
probably have said, “ the brother of Jesus, the
Christ,” not “ the brother of Jesus, called Christ.” w
The gravest objection to the passage lies in its
alleged inconsistency with the account of the death of
James, given by Hegesippus and Clemens of Alex
andria, as cited by Eusebius, who do not mention
any trial of him instituted by Ananus, nor any others
put to death with him, but describe him to have been
“ killed in a tumult near the temple, where some
flung him down and threw stones at him; but his
death was completed by a blow on the head with a
fuller’s pole.” x Yet, surely, it is quite possible that this
may have been the actual mode of the death of James,
while it had been preceded by an informal judicial
process such as Josephus mentions. He does not
tell us on what particular transgressions of the law
the accusation turned. If the other persons accused
were not Christians, or were not put to death as
such, the Christian tradition would probably have
ignored them. The whole proceeding was irregular,
according to JosephusJ So that it is not improbable
that the attempt to execute the sentence may have
w As in Ant. xviii. 1, where we read, “He was the Christ.”
* Lardner’s ‘Jewish Testimonies,’ iv. 3.
y So. that, “ Albinus wrote to Ananus in great anger, threatening
to punish him for what he had done, and King Agrippa took away
from him the High Priesthood.” Josephus, u.s.
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. 45
led to a riot, in which James was killed—some
persons, perhaps, attempting to rescue him from a
judgment which they considered illegal.
On the whole, then, the arguments for the genuine
ness of this passage appear to me to preponderate
over those against it; and, if it is genuine, we
have in Josephus a witness not only to the fact but
to the notoriety of the ascription of the title of Christ
to Jesus, at a period anterior to the siege of Jeru
salem ; since he uses this title as a sufficient means of
identifying another person, by describing him as the
“brother of Jesus, called Christ.”2 But if this con
clusion is mistaken, other cases in Josephus must
put us on our guard against attaching much weight
to his silence. Dr Lardner has observed that,
although in the preface to his ‘ Jewish Antiquities ’
‘ he engages to write of things as he found them men
tioned in the Sacred Books, without adding any
thing to them, or omitting anything from them,’ yet
he says nothing about the golden calf made
by the people in the wilderness, nor does
he once name Mount Sion or Zion, either in his
‘ Antiquities ’ or his ‘ Jewish War,’ though there were
so many occasions for it, and it is so often mentioned
in the Old Testament.1 The importance of such a
8,
*
caution, in dealing with Jewish authorities, is con
firmed by the absence of any direct mention of
Christianity in the Mischna, or original text of the
Talmud, though this was certainly not compiled
earlier than the second Christian century, and pro1 Mr Cooper, in liis ‘Infidel’s Text Book,’ p. 54, omits to notice
this passage, and thus leaves his readers under the impression
that “ there is not the slightest mention made of Jesus Christ in
the works of Josephus except the passage interpolated in .Ant.
xviii.
and yet he was not ignorant of its existence, for, in an
earlier work, called ‘ The Bible and its Evidences,’ p. 81, he
quotes it, and makes to it one of the objections noticed above.
a ‘ Jewish Testimonies,’ iv. 4.
�46 The Mythical Element in Christianity.
z
bably at a still later date, and though there appear
to be some covert allusions to it.b Yet, unques
tionably, this silence cannot proceed from the absence
of a large body of Christians in that age.
Thus the negative testimony to which the author
of ‘ The Twelve Apostles’ attaches so much importance
dwindles into insignificance when examined, and
leaves unimpugned the positive testimony of Tacitus
and Suetonius to the existence at Rome of a body of
persons known as Christians some years before the
siege of Jerusalem, confirmed by the testimony of
Pliny to the extensive diffusion of the Christian faith
in Bithynia between a.d. 100 and 110 ; evidence fatal
to the mythical hypothesis advocated by this writer.
Having thus a solid foundation for believing
Christianity to have originated in the faith in an
historical person, laid by the testimony of writers
who did not share that faith, we may proceed to
inquire whether this testimony is not placed beyond
any reasonable doubt by the evidence of those who
did share it. Mr Cooper, indeed, objects to quotations
from Christian writers in support of Christian state
ments, that it is a petitio principii, proving a position
by that which is denied ; establishing Christian
statements by Christian statements, a modus operands
which cannot be tolerated in an examination into
their truth.0 And an objection of this nature would
have much force, if the matter to be proved were of
a nature likely to be coloured by the imaginations of
the narrators. To take the case of Mr Cooper him
self. If a question were raised as to the learning,
the fairness, the cogency of reasoning, and critical
sagacity displayed by him in his ‘ Infidel’s Text
Book,’ the testimony of a professed disciple of Mr
Cooper to the display of these qualities in his work
b ‘ Jewish Testimonies,’ v. 1. ii. 8.
c ‘ Infidel’s Text Book,’ p. 69.
�the Mythical Element in Christianity. 47
might reasonably be looked at with suspicion. But
if the question were only when or where Mr Cooper
was born, or the lectures which compose that book
were delivered, to whom could we turn, with so good
a prospect of obtaining correct information on these
matters, as to those who might be associated with
him in diffusing his Gospel of Infidelity. The
Mormons may be very questionable witnesses to the
character of Hiram Smith or Brigham Young, but
they are the best witnesses to the dates and ordinary
incidents of their fives. And so the writings of the
first generations of Christians must be regarded as
authorities, I will not say absolutely trustworthy, for
they must always be open to reasonable criticism,
yet certainly entitled to great weight, on questions
concerning the time when the Christian religion
began. Now on this point the New Testament gives
no “ uncertain sound.” All the Gospels agree in
connecting the appearance of Jesus as a teacher with
the preaching of John the Baptist, whose date is
fixed by Josephus. All agree in ascribing the cruci
fixion of Jesus to Pontius Pilate, the period of whose
government of Judtea is well ascertained. One of
the evangelists had apparently taken considerable
pains to fix the time when Jesus began to teach, by
reference to a number of contemporary sovereigns.
And though it is doubtful whether he was in all
these cases well-informed, still the fact of his having
made such researches shows that he was not indif
ferent to the duty of an historian to fix as far’as pos
sible the time when the events recorded by him
happened, and, in consequence, deserves the credit
generally conceded, upon such matters, to the state
ments of a writer who certainly was not removed by
a period of more than seventy years from the time of
which he writes.
,
. It may perhaps be objected to the statements of
�48
The Mythical Element in Christianity.
the Gospels, that the existence of some one on whom
the imagination of those who first launched the
Christian faith pitched, as the solid point round
which their mythical conceptions could crystallize,
as has been suggested in the beginning of this essay,
may be admitted without allowing an historical
foundation for the statement that a Messianic character
was attributed to Jesus before the siege of Jerusalem ;
and that the Gospels, which cannot be shown to have
been written before that event, may have antedated
this belief, by assigning to a time forty years earlier
ideas which really arose subsequently to, and in con
sequence of, this catastrophe. But the New Testa
ment supplies other evidence not open to this
objection—the evidence of three distinct witnesses,
in The Acts of the Apostles, The Epistles of St. Paul,
and The Apocalypse. Let us examine their testimony.
I am by no means disposed to take up the cudgels
generally in defence of the historical character of
the Acts. I admit that this work appears to have
been written with the object of reconciling the
Petrine and the Pauline factions, whose disputes
distracted the first age of the Church, by exhibiting
the two leaders acting side by side in the work
of evangelisation, giving to Peter especially the
“ ministry of the circumcision,” and to Paul that
of “ the uncircumcision,” as if by a mutual
agreement generally sanctioned by the Apostles;
while it ascribes to Peter the honour of making the
first important Gentile convert, and makes Paul
everywhere address himself first to the Jews, and
turn to the Gentiles only when rejected by them,
instead of presenting himself, as his epistles would
lead us to expect, in the character of an ambassador
for Christ, and announcing the principle of righteous
ness by the “ faith which Abraham had yet being
uncircumcised;” a faith where the difference between
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. 49
Jew and Greek vanished, and all alike were con
victed of “ having come short of the glory of God,”
and needing to be justified, “ not by the works of
the Law,” but by that inner principle of trust and
love by which they might be transformed into true
children of their heavenly Father. I allow that the
narrative of the first preachings of the Apostles at
Jerusalem is steeped in a roseate mist of mythological
wonders where the features of history disappear.
But this does not alter the fact that the latter
chapters of the Acts embody what appears to be the
narrative of an eyewitness and companion of Paul,
whose natural blending of “ they ” and “ we ” in the
story testifies to the truthfulness of his accounts ;d
while the undesigned coincidences between his state
ments and the letters of Paul, admirably pointed out
in Paley’s ‘ Horae Paulinas,’ “ make out,” to borrow
Mr Taylor’s words,e “ to the satisfaction of every
fair inquirer, that neither those epistles nor that
part of the Acts of the Apostles are supposititious.
The hero of the one is unquestionably the epistoler
of the other. Both writings are therefore genuine,
to the full extent of everything they purport to be.
Neither are the epistles forged, nor the history, as
far as relates to Paul, other than a faithful and a fair
account of a person who really existed, and acted the
part ascribed to him.”
I may observe, in confirmation of this conclu
sion, that the story of the preaching of Christianity,
as we read it in this part of the Acts, is not such as
might be naturally expected from the Gospels, and
certainly not that which the inventor of an imaginary
d xvi. 6—9, “they;” 10—17, “we;” 18 to xx. 4, “he” or
“ they ; ” xx. 5, to xxi. 17, “ we; ” xxi. 20, to xxvi. 35, “ he ” or
“ they; ” xxvi. to xxvii. 37, “ we; ” xxvii. 38, to xxviii. 6, “ he” or
“they;” xxviii. 7—16, “we.”
' ‘Diegesis,’p. 376.
�The Mythical Element in Christianity.
history would have been likely to produce. The
Acts of the Apostles profess to be a continuation of the
3rd Gospel, which ends with a solemn declaration
of Christ, made to the eleven Apostles immediately
before his ascension, that repentance and remission of
sins should be preached in his name to all nations,
beginning at Jerusalem, “ and ye are the witnesses
of these things.” f And the first part of the Acts
narrates a story of missionary effort, spreading from
Jerusalem to the countries bordering on Jud tea, in
apparent accordance with this injunction. But, from
the xvith chapter to the end of the book, all this is
changed. There is no talk of Jerusalem as a centre
of propaganda: there is no mention of “ the twelve,”
or any one connected with them, going forth among
the nations. The story of missionary activity centres
in the labours of a man who was not one of the
original apostles, who had been at first a bitter
opponent of Christianity, and between whom and
“ the twelve ” there is no trace of a very cordial
sympathy. While the only one of the latter body
who is mentioned at all, James, is described as
stationary in Jerusalem. Surely no one who had
begun by evolving twelve apostles out of his “ moral
consciousness ” would have gone on to assign to
them a part in the preaching of the Christian faith
which he records, so insignificant as this. The fact
is conceivable, for fact is often stranger than fiction.
The fiction is self-destructive.
Assuming, then, that Mr Taylor’s judgment upon
this part of the Acts is well founded, what does it
show us ? What are these thirteen chapters of the
Acts, but records of journies made by St Paul during
a long series of years, while the city and Temple of
Jerusalem were still undestroyed, for the purpose of
f Luke xxiv. 47, 48. The 1st and 2nd Gospels contain corre
sponding statements: Matt, xxviii. 20; Mark xvi. 15—20.
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. $ i
spreading through Asia Minor, Macedonia, and
Greece the faith in Jesus as the Christ ? s And with
this statement, the letters of Paul, whose genuineness
we have seen Mr Taylor admits, and no critic of whom
I know, who has studied them, has ever denied, to
the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, are in
complete agreement. From beginning to end, they
are full of earnest faith in Jesus Christ, “ who was
made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and
declared to be the son of God with power, according
to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the
dead.” h And of these epistles, those to the Galatians
and Corinthians distinctly testify to a time anterior
to the siege of Jerusalem. The Galatians describes two
journies made by Paul to Jerusalem, at an interval of
fourteen years.1 The 1st Epistle to the Corinthians
provides for the sending to Jerusalem money which
had been collected “for the Saints ;”■) the 2nd Epistle
mentions an intended visit of Paul to Judsea.k
They testify also to the existence of those apostles
which the author of ‘ The Twelve Apostles ’ denies.
The 1st Epistle to the Corinthians speaks of “ the
twelve,” 1 and twice mentions Peter under the name
of Cephas.111 The Epistle to the Galatians speaks of
Peter by both names,11 of James, the Lord’s brother,0
of John,? and Barnabas,i as names thoroughly well
? See Acts xvii. 3, 18; xviii. 5; xix. 4, 18; xx. 21, 24, 35.;
xxi. 13; xxv. 19; xxvi. 9, 15,23, 28 ; xxviii. 31.
11 Rom. i. 3, 4.
' i. 18; ii. 1.
,
,
3 I Cor. xii. 3.
k II Cor. i. 66.
1 I Cor. xv. 5.
m I Cor. i. 12; xv. 5.
“ Peter, i. 18; ii. 7, 8, 11, 14 ; Cephas, ii. 9.
°i. 19;ii. 9.
p ii. 9.
s ii. 14.
B
�52 ¥he Mythical Element in Christianity.
known among the Christian community; and confirms
to this extent the story in the Gospels.1
I pass to the third witness mentioned above, the
Apocalypse, of which the general consent of the ablest
critics, founded on the distinct reference to Jeru
salem as still standing in chapter xi., places the date
before the destruction of that city? Now the
Apocalypse professes to be “a revelation from Jesus
Christ, which God gave unto him, to show his ser
vants things which must shortly come to pass”;* whom
it describes as the “ faithful and true witness
“ the
first begotten from the dead;”u “whom every eye
should see, and they also that pierced himand
again, “ as one like unto the Son of Man,v who was
dead and is alive for ever, and has the keys of hell and
of death ;”w and again, as “ the Lamb who has been
slain,” and now “ is worthy to receive power, and
'
» The name Cephas does not occur in the Synoptics. We learn
its application to Peter, positively, only from the fourth Gospel^
i. 42; and, in this Gospel, it is never used again. In the passages
where Peter is afterwards mentioned, he is called Simon Peter, ex
cept where the name occurs several times in the same story, when
the Simon is dropped, xiii. 63; xviii. 11, 16, 17, 18, 26, 27; xx.
3, 4; xxi. 7, 17, 20, 21; and in xxi. 15, 17, where Jesus three;
times addresses him as Simon, son of Jonas. In the Synoptics we
find Peter without the Simon, except on the occasion of his acknow
ledging Jesus as the Christ, Matt. xvi. 16; and his falling at
Christ’s feet, Luke v. 8. But he is several times mentioned as
Simon only, especially in Luke. See Matt. xvi. 17; Mark i. 29,
30, 36; xiv. 37; Luke iv. 38; v, 3, 4, 5, 10; xxvi. 31; xxiv. 34.
» The author of ‘The Twelve Apostles’ has apparently forgotten
this reference when he asserts that the writer of the Apocalypse
says nothing which can identify his Jesus with the Jesus of the
Gospels. (Page 20). Surely he never can have imagined that the
city which is described as the Holy city, containing the Temple of
God, where “our Lord was crucified” xi. 1, 2, 8, is any other city
than Jerusalem, or that the “Lord” can he any other than the
“ Jesus” from whom the whole book purports to proceed.
t i. 1.
u i. 5.
’ The name which Jesus commonly gives himself in the Gospels.
»i. 13; 18.
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. 53
riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and
glory, and blessing ;”x from whose wrath “ the kings
of the earth, and the rich men, and the chief
captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman
and every freeman should hide themselves in the dens
and rocks of the mountains; ” ? with whom the
nations should make war, and who should overcome
them, “for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings;” z
who, accordingly, afterwards rides forth in triumph,
on a white horse, clothed in a vesture dipped in
blood, and followed by the armies of heaven,a to
“ tread the wine-press of the fierceness and wrath
of Almighty God; ” b and who, after his final victory,
appears, as the light of the New Jerusalem which had
descended from heaven, and had twelve foundations,
and “on them the names of the twelve Apostles of
the Lamb.” c Of these apostles the author of ‘ The
Twelve Apostles ’ observes, that the writer does not
mention their names, nor does he say whether they
existed already, or were only to have a future
existence ;d which is no doubt literally true, though, if
so, the exigencies of the fiction would seem to
require that some important part in the events
described in the Apocalypse as immediately immi
nent should be assigned to persons to whom so
striking a position is attributed in their triumphant
issue. But the objector overlooks the fact that the
Apocalypse is fatal to his hypothesis in itself, and
apart from its identification of the Jesus of whom it
speaks with the Jesus of the Gospels. For this
hypothesis is, that the notion of a Messiah who had
suffered and should come in triumph, to deliver his
people and establish his kingdom over the earth,
arose after the destruction of Jerusalem, out of the
» v. 12.
a xix. 11—14.
7 vi. 15.
b xix. 16.
1 xvii. 14.
c xxi. 14.
d P. 20.
�54
Mythical 'Element in Christianity.
reaction of Messianic hopes against the blow inflicted
upon them by the destruction of the Holy city;
while here we have a book full of this idea from be
ginning to end, written while Jerusalem was still
standing, and addressed to bodies of believers in such
a Messiah, who form seven churches in seven of the
principal cities in the Roman province of Asia; a
conclusive proof that, in whatever cause the idea of
a Messiah who should triumph after having suffered
originated, it did not grow out of the destruction of
Jerusalem.
Thus we have in the New Testament, besides the
direct testimony of all four Evangelists, three inde
pendent witnesses, whose evidence indirectly, but in
each case conclusively, negatives this mythical hypo
thesis. Let us go one step further, to the next
generation of Christian writers, and take the evidence
of Papias, bishop of Hieropolis, in the beginning of
the second century, from whose writings we possess
various passages, preserved by Eusebius. Papias,
says Eusebius,e in the preface to his work, by
no means gives us to understand that he had been
an eye and ear witness of the holy apostles, but that
he had received the orthodox doctrine from those who
had known them. These are his words : “ I have no
hesitation in interweaving in my interpretation what
I have learned from the presbyters, and impressed
on my memory, since I am assured of their truth.
For I did not attend, as the great mass are wont to
do, especially to those who are only great talkers, but
I directed my eyes to those who could testify to the
truth. Not to those I turned who repeated by rote state
ments about which they knew nothing, but to those
who knew the rules prescribed by the Lord himself
e ‘ Ecc. Hist.’ iii. 39; Exegesis ton Tcuriakon logion.
�1 The Mythical Element in Christianity. 55
for the faith. When I fell in with any one who had
enjoyed the teaching of the elders, I inquired of him
w’hat they had spoken ? What, I asked, have
Andrew, what Peter, what Philip, Thomas, James,
what John, what Matthew said ? or what do the
disciples of the Lord, men like Aristion and the
Presbyter John, say ? ” f Here we find Papias distin
guishing two generations of teachers, both older than
himself; the first, including the well-known names
of six out of the twelve Apostles, of which he speaks
as wholly passed away ; the second, disciples still alive,
though his own seniors; each of whom he mentions
equally as real persons, from whose teachings he
hoped to receive instruction. The statement is very
intelligible and natural, if there had really existed
in the last generation men well known as the
apostles of Jesus, but very inconceivable, if the only
answer which Papias could have obtained to his in
quiries had been, what it must have been supposing
the hypothesis under our consideration to be true,
“we have never met with any such persons, nor know
of any one who has seen them. We know only, that
we have heard them tallied about, during the last
twenty or thirty years, as the apostles of a Jesus
who is said to have been crucified eighty years since.”
Regarded as a statement really made by a writer who
lived in the age of Papias, the passage becomes, on
this hypothesis, absurd; while, if it were not a
genuine statement of Papias, but one made up, in
order to give credence to the story of there having
been a body of apostles, the inventor must have
been a great bungler, to make his witness testify only
to what he had heard, instead of boldly putting into
his mouth the assertion that he had seen and conf Ti Petros eipen., ti Philippos,
ti legousin Aristion, &c.
�$6 The Mythical Element in Christianity.
versed with apostles of the Lord, as he might easily
have done, if any of these apostles had lived to old
age. On the other hand, if the statement is not
concocted, it furnishes one of those indirect proofs
that Jesus and his Apostles are not mythical but
historical persons, which are the more convincing
because their evidence is undesigned.
It would be easy to heap up testimony to the same
effect out of the writers who succeeded Papias. But
as this testimony would carry us too far from the
original sources, I abstain from going into it, and
confine myself to one additional piece of evidence, the
lists of names of the Christian bishops in the patriar
chal sees of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and
Rome, preserved in the Chronicon of Eusebius ; of
which I may observe that it is not a record confined
to ecclesiastical incidents, but a general chronicle of
important events, from the earliest times to the age
of Eusebius, containing the names of the different
bishops of these great sees, introduced under their
proper dates. The names and dates are as follows :
Antioch.
A.D.
Alexandria.
A.D.
•
# 65 Euodius
. 43
Annianus
Asilus
85 Ignatius .
. 71
. 115
Cerdon .
98 Heros
Jerusalem.
Rome. Chron. H.E.
Petrus
36
James
(Ko dates.)
Linus
Simeon
66
68
80
Anacletus
Justus
79
99
92
87
Then twelve others, down Clemens
100
96
to the time of Hadrian. Evaristus
It will be seen that, in each of the great
capitals, Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome, the list of
names, excluding Peter, goes up beyond the time
when, according to the mythical hypothesis, the idea
�The Mythical Element in Christianity. 57
of Christianity arose. Yet the statements of Eusebius
appear to have been founded in every case on docu
ments preserved in the respective churches.? borne
uncertainty seems to have attached to these Jjeco}’ s
in the case of Rome ; where Augustine gives another
list of bishops, in which Clemens precedes Anacletus
instead of following him, and the dates given by
Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History slightly differ
from those given in his Chronicon. But though some
suspicion is thus cast on the accuracy of the 1S^®’1
is difficult to suppose that in all these great cities
the Christians deliberately fabricated the names o
bishops who never existed, in order to give counte
nance to the notion that the Christian religion _ began
to be taught half a century earlier than was in tact
the case. And the difficulty of this supposition is
increased by the circumstance that neither in Antioch
nor Alexandria is the first bishop one of the Apost es,
to whom the inventors of an imaginary succession o
bishops would have naturally attributed the founda
tion of the great Christian churches; they are per
sons, for the introduction of whose names no other
reason can be given than the simple one that they did
historically fill the office of bishops in the places and
at the times where and when they are mentioned.
What is there to oppose to the accumulative force
of these distinct lines of evidence, from writers who
were not Christians and writers who were Christians,
from histories, and memoirs, and letters, and pro
phetic anticipations, and autbiographical notices, and
official lists of names, all combining to prove that
Christianity arose out of the reverence felt for an
historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, who was
crucified by order of Pontius Pilate, but of whom his
8 See the passages in Fynes Clinton, ‘ Fasti Romani,’ ii. 535.
�58
The Mythical Element in Christianity.
disciples believed that he had risen from the dead, and
would shortly come in the clouds as the judge of
all mankind. Absolutely nothing but that certain
writers do not mention Christianity, the character of
whose writings gives us no reason for expecting that
they would mention it; and that, when we enter into
the details of the stories preserved to us about Jesus,
we find ourselves involved in such a mass of contra
dictory statements that we do not know on what to
rely, beyond the broad facts stated above ; and the
evidence as to his character furnished by the sayings
attributed to him, and the impression which he
appears to have produced on those among whom he
lived and worked.
It does not fall within my present object to
consider this historical element, either in itself or in
its bearing upon religious faith. I wish only to show
what I hope to have succeeded in showing, that
there is far more of unwarranted assumption and
unreasoning credulity involved in the disbelief of the
historical origin of Christianity out of reverence for
the person of Jesus of Nazareth, than is involved in
the belief that it did thus originate.
But this belief, if it be confined to that which is
historically proveable, must take up an attitude very
different from the one which the defenders of what
is called Orthodox Christianity commonly assume.
If Jesus of Nazareth can be proved, beyond any
reasonable doubt, to have been a person, of whose
actions and sayings we know enough to show that
he exhibited a very remarkable phase of religious feel
ing, which produced among his disciples an unbounded
reverence for him ; whose death was attended by the
remarkable incident, that it was followed by the firm
belief of these disciples in his resurrection from the
dead ; and who appeared at an epoch in the spiritual
�The Mythical Element in Christianity, $9
development of our race, which has given to this
reverence and belief a most important influence on
the religious history of mankind, still, here the voice
of history stops. When we attempt to pass beyond
these limits, into the details of what are generally
called the evidences of the Christian religion,—the
direct external proofs of supernatural action,—we find
ourselves in the domain of legend and myth; and all
certainty as to the supposed facts vanishes with the
traditional, imaginative, and contradictory character
of the testimony adduced for them. If the Catholic
faith as to the person of Jesus is to continue, the
grounds for it must then be taken from other sources
than these details; where the opponents of the belief
of the Church have, I conceive, as decisive a victory
in the argument as its defenders have on the question
whether the Christian faith did not arise from that
reverence for the person of Jesus, and persuasion that
he had risen from the dead, to which the New Testa
ment traces it.
That a new and more radical contest concerning
the claims of Christianity will be carried on upon
this ground I expect; and its result will, in my
judgment, not be such as is usually assumed at the
present day by those who contend for the application
to the New Testament of the strict rules of historical
criticism. But neither can it be such as those assume
who contest the legitimacy of this application. Reli
gious faith may, and I believe will, find a secure
refuge in the supersensual world of ideal truths, and
the external affirmation to them given by the course
of man’s religious development. But this faith will
no longer be able to isolate itself from the general
progress of the race, or represent itself as the
exclusive sesame of an arbitrary salvation. It must
be based on trust in the Universal Father, whose
�6o ’The Mythical Element in Christianity.
love embraces all his creatures, a trust which the
revelation of His nature, made through the course of
human history, may affirm, but for which it cannot
be a substitute. And the feeling engendered by it
towards the ancient channels of religious influence
may, I conceive, be summed up in Goethe’s words :11
Ich wandle auf weiter, bunter Flur,
Urspringlicher Natur,
Eine heilige Quelle in welchem ich hade,
1st Ueberlieferung, ist Gnade.
b Gott Gemiith und Welt, ii, 227. Edition of 1828.
I rove o’er the broad and varied field,
Of primitive nature;
A sacred spring in which I bathe
Is tradition—is grace.
�
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The mythical element of Christianity
Creator
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Neale, Edward Vansittart
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 60 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway and part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Printed by C.W. Reynell, Little Pulteney Street, London. Sticker placed over original imprint reads London: T. Scott. Cutting attached to p. [3] 'Prayer' reprinted from 'The Examiner', September 7, 1872. This may be a response to Annie Besant's article 'On Prayer', the preceding item bound in Conway Tracts 31. Includes bibliographical references.
Publisher
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Thomas Scott
Date
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[1872]
Identifier
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G5475
N513
RA1830
Subject
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Christianity
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The mythical element of Christianity), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
Jesus Christ-Rationalistic Interpretations
NSS