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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 3a

The new Testament Problem Solved — Brethren and Sisters in the Monotheistic Faith:

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The new Testament Problem Solved

Brethren and Sisters in the Monotheistic Faith:

In view of what I purpose saying to-night, which will be different in some respects from the ordinary run of Unitarian teaching in the past, and so novel to some of my hearers, it seems to me desirable I should repeat a caution I have uttered more than once here on previous occasions, to the effect that for the opinions expressed in this address to-night the present speaker is alone responsible; neither the Unitarian denomination as a whole, nor this congregation in particular, must be held answerable for them; certainly the regular Minister of this congregation is not in any way committed to them; nay, even I myself to-night do not speak in my official character as President of the Unitarian Society of Wellington, but simply in my private capacity as a student and thinker. It is only just to others I should enter this caveat; but now, having done so, I shall speak out boldly all that I think on the great subject before us, relying with full confidence on your kind indulgence of me, and knowing well that each and all of you are animated by the great Unitarian principle to open your minds expansively to all new light, and listen gladly to both sides of every great question, reserving to yourselves, of course, your individual right to reject or accept the new ideas according as seems good to you.

I shall begin, however, with a platitude, and a well-worn one too, viz., that we ourselves are living in a most remarkable age. Yes, you will say, there is not much heresy about that statement anyway. But I go even further than that, and maintain that our age is remarkable to a degree even greater than we ourselves are apt to perceive. Thus, fifty years ago we used to think we page 4 showed our smartness by boasting that we travelled by steam and talked by lightning, but anyone who should think that a smart thing to say now, would show himself hopelessly behind the times. Why we travel by lightning now in this very city of Wellington; and, as to talking, the absent, and even the very dead, can do that to us still through the wonderful machinery of the phonograph. So also our parents thought they had done something wonderful when they invented the art of photography and actually obliged the material god of the solar system to register their features in a picture by means of his own rays instantaneously applied. But who thinks of that as anything marvellous now? We not only do that, but we make the very figures in our picture alive, or apparently so, and mystify the uninitiated spectator by the marvels of the kinematograph. It is true we cannot as yet pay visits to our neighbours in the planet Mars, but we can do something little less wonderful; by means of our spectroscope we can tell you with absolute certainty, the chemical composition not only of the planet Mars but of stars and suns in the remotest regions of space. Or, returning to the earth, and to other departments of mental activity, we can recover lost languages, tongues, some of which had been dead languages before Abraham had abandoned the plains of Mesopotamia, and the very key to which had been absolutely lost ere the Romans conquered the East, or the Christian Church had any existence. Nay, human society itself has changed in our time; not only has democracy become supreme amongst us, but our women possess the political franchise and vote at elections for members of Parliament; whilst in our scholastic institutions, not only has the University of Cambridge, which fifty years ago would not grant its humblest degree to anyone except a pledged Anglican—not only has the University of Cambridge recently appointed a layman as its Professor of Divinity, but our schoolmasters generally have actually banished Euclid's Elements of Geometry from their schools as a text book behind the times and so injurious to the mental development of our young people. Some would say we have done a good deal more than that, we have actually changed our religion, we have abolished hell itself, and, as Lord Chancellor Bethel said when he did it, with costs as against Christianity; nay, we have even reduced the Bible to the level of an ordinary book, and, to come to my subject for this evening, our profoundest scholars now publish theological works on topics that would absolutely have had no meaning to our ancestors, being expressed in titles that would have seemed to them simply self-contradictions. To one of these, styled "The Pre-Christian Jesus," and written page 5 by Professor W. B. Smith, of the Talune University, New Orleans, in the United States of America, I wish now to direct your attention for a few moments.

The book is a paradox in more than its title. It is a work on theology, written by a college professor, but a professor, not of theology, but of mathematics. Again, the author is an American, and so, in speech, an Englishman. He wrote his book in English, but for some reason or other, hasn't published it in that language, but in German only. I cannot say heartily may the Powers forgive him for that aberration. Further, the writer actually distinguishes between the personalities of Jesus and Christ, and speaks of the one as antecedent to the other, "the pre-Christian Jesus." And, lastly, he has got the famous Swiss scholar, Professor Schmiedel, to write the preface to his book, a preface in which Dr Schmiedel actually informs the reader that he himself doesn't believe at all in the conclusion at which the author has arrived.

But it is time we addressed ourselves to the substance of the book, which, however, can hardly be understood without a few preliminary remarks. When the revolutionary criticism which has so completely changed our idea of the Old Testament, and especially of the Pentateuch, was first applied to those portions of the Bible, the religious public was warned against the principle by conservative theologians, and that on the incontestible ground that, if once admitted as valid in the case of the Old Testament, it would inevitably be applied, sooner or later, to the New Testament, and that with results destructive to church creeds beyond anything at that time contemplated even by the rationalist critics themselves. The prediction has been more than fulfilled; similar radical criticism has now been applied to the New Testament, and that with consequences not confined to the orthodox alone. On the contrary, some of our most rationalistic scholars now find themselves regarded as conservatives, and appealed to to change their old fashioned ideas, and to do so, however unwillingly, in the most absolute manner and with reference to the fundamentals of historical Christianity itself.

But our own individual experience will perhaps form a better introduction to what I am anxious to say. Most of us, I presume, as soon as we found ourselves unable to accept any longer the orthodox teaching, say, on the subject of the proper Deity of Jesus Christ, fell back automatically on the theory of page 6 his proper humanity. We at once adopted the view that Jesus of Nazareth was just a typical human being, who had lived in Palestine in the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, had become a public character in comparatively early life and adopted the role of a great religious reformer, a sort of Jewish Martin Luther. Through the force of his personality he had actually founded a new religion, and that although, after a very short public career, he had met with a violent death at the hands of the Government of the day. Such was our creed, such probably is still the creed of most of us here to-night, and such in fact was my own belief until very recently. We eliminated from our New Testament in thought all the supernatural element in its life of Christ, and then accepted all the rest as probably, and even certainly, historic truth. We did so, not because of any evidence we possessed in favour of such a belief, but because it seemed to us at the time the only alternative. We reasoned, if we reasoned at all on the matter, in this way. The Christian church certainly exists to-day, it must therefore have had a founder, and there is no reason to suppose that founder was any other than its own sacred books disclose to us. We acknowledged the gospel accounts were largely fabulous, but rather illogically assumed, in spite of that, that the small remainder of them was worthy of all confidence. However inadvertently we built our house upon the sand.

And now the floods have come and the winds are blowing and that with more than Wellington violence. Certain pestilent critics, who will not let people alone, call our attention to the fact that a third alternative is possible, and even highly probable. They ask us what right we have to assume that the Jesus of the New Testament is a historical character at all. They point out that if the books of the New Testament are to be regarded as authoritative on the subject in any way, then the Jesus of whom they speak is not a human being but a demigod, a divine being, though certainly not the supreme divine being. That is the teaching of the New Testament, they say, and, if the authority of the New Testament is not good enough for that, and does not convince us of that, if there are no demigods in our pantheon today, then the logical alternative is, that there has been no historical Jesus at all. The New Testament does not take cognizance of any Jesus less than a demigod. If you cannot admit a historical demigod into your mind, then you have nothing left of your Jesus but a fiction, a myth, an ideal figure; the noblest ideal, perhaps, ever submitted to humanity, but all the same, a creation of the human imagination alone. Thus, those of you who read page 7 the Hibbert Journal will remember an article very much to this effect in its latest number (July, 1907,) entitled, "Who is the Christian Deity?" and written by James Collier, of Sydney, formerly of Wellington, N.Z., an article in which the writer maintains that all the early Christian literature reveals to us a new god come into the world, that really the Deity worshipped by the earliest Christians was not God the Father at all, but God the Son, and that Jesus is and always has been, even from the beginning, the God of the Christian Church. You will say indeed that, if Rationalists now adopt this view, they will have to recant some things they have formerly affirmed, that this looks very much like playing into the hands of the orthodox, uttering the Catholic shibboleths and reciting the Catholic creeds. No orthodox man, however, who grasps the full significance of what Mr. Collier says, will think so for a moment; or, he will acknowledge his church has won, at the best, merely a Pyrrhic victory which spells ruin to the victor. For, after all, this view only completes the idea towards which Rationalist scholars have been working for some generations past, though, perhaps, more or less unconsciously to themselves. Thus Rationalist scholars have all long since recognised that the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel at least is a mythical being, the mysterious Word of God, i.e., just a fanciful conceit of the writer—nothing more. No one can say that John's Jesus is merely a human being, he who declares "Before Abraham was I am." And, as we know, the same conclusion has been come to of late in the case of the Pauline epistles, and that without any reference to the question of their unauthenticity. The Jesus of these epistles is altogether a fabulous being, a celestial man, the typical man of the Platonic philosophy, and therefore as fanciful and baseless as that philosophy itself. Plainly he is one of the demigods of mythology, as appears from the fact that, according to the Pauline writer, he pre-existed in Heaven, and even assisted the Almighty in the creation of the world; or, as the anonymous author of the epistle to the Hebrews puts it, "By whom God made the worlds." Indeed, in view of these circumstances, we should almost have imagined him to be the Demiurge of Gnosticism did we not know from other passages that he is just the Adam Kadmon, or Original Man, of the Jewish Platonists of Alexandria. Anyway the Jesus of the Pauline letters can never be regarded as a historical human being.

Again, there is no book of the New Testament so calculated to foster the idea of the mythical Jesus as that which we call "The Revelation of St, John." This is admittedly a strange page 8 book, and we need not wonder that it had to fight hard and long for its admission into the Canon. If it were not in the Canon I should certainly be inclined to say it is an early edition of Zadkiel's Almanac. Undoubtedly it was written under the influence of the pseudo-science of astrology, and shows us plainly in what dark and superstitious mysteries orthodox Christanity originated. Its facts are all fables, and its hero apparently strictly allied to those powers of the air, like the Archangels Gabriel and Michael, which are realities to the ignorant and credulous, but to them alone. Confessedly its contents are a vision, and it is of course an artificial vision, fabricated by the author of the book, and not until its fancies are proved to be realities can we regard its Jesus as a historical character on its authority alone. On the contrary, he answers exactly to what the new school of critics affirm Jesus to have really been, an obscure mythological being, worshipped by an early Gnostic sect. Anyway he is no human being in the eyes of the apocalyptic writer, but rather such a supernatural personality as we find the Son of Man to be in the gloomy visions of the apocryphal book of Enoch. I cannot help thinking that this book of Revelation is the one we must study in the future if we wish to find out the true genesis of the Christian Jesus. That too seems to be the opinion held by scholars like Professor Cheyne, of Oxford University, as we see from that critic's new book, Bible Problems and the new Material for their Solution."Truly it is a most significant conclusion for an Anglican Professor of Divinity and Canon of Rochester Cathedral to come to.

There remains of our New Testament only the Synoptic Gospels, and it is to these that the believers in a historic human Jesus have usually been content to pin their faith. Yet surely nothing but our life-long identification with these little pamphlets, and our consequent inability to view them from a distance, and so impartially, can have so obscured the true nature of their contents from our minds. From beginning to end of them their Jesus is a supernatural being, and, if so, surely a mythical being. Like Hercules, and the pagan demigods generally, he was born miraculously and of divine parentage; whilst, at the other end of his career, he bursts the bands of death itself like Osiris of Egypt or Ishtar of Assyria. Did Paul of Tarsus ever do that? or even Mohammed of Mecca, real human beings? Are the grotesque adventures of Jesus and the Devil op the Mount of Temptation and elsewhere compatible with the thought that the hero of them is a historical character? Or, when the ghosts of Moses and Elijah appear on the scene on the Mountain of page 9 Transfiguration, should not the third figure, the middle figure, be a ghost too? Anyway his body is evidently only a magical one, which he can annihilate and renew again at any moment, as the early Christian heretics, the Docetae, actually claimed it was. Or, lastly; dare any human being usurp the functions of the Almighty God himself, and actually condone the offences of his fellow mortal at the divine bar? "Who can forgive sins but God only?" truly say the scribes in the synoptic writer. Hardly could the hero whom that writer had in his mind have been a simple human being. Surely he was rather a personality from another world, the deputy of the Supreme Existence. He was the prophet Daniel's Son of Man, as popularly interpreted, once enthroned upon the clouds of Heaven, and destined to be so again. He was almost what the orthodox represent him to have been, with the element of reality knocked out of their picture.

Ah, but you say, surely there is one scene in that synoptic narrative only too circumstantial and with verisimilitude not to be mistaken. We surrender all the rest, but surely the story of the crucifixion is too natural, too lifelike, to be an unreality; the protagonist of that tragedy cannot have been merely a fiction-writer's invention. Well, I grant this at once, if there is anything at all in the synoptic gospel that is historic, that does describe an actual occurrence, it is that pathetic narrative of the crucifixion; and I grant further that at a superficial glance, which is all that it generally gets from the reader, its historicity seems to be self-evident. Pontius Pilate is certainly a well-known historic character, why then may not his victim have been the same?

And yet, notwithstanding all that, if instead of merely reading the story superficially, you dissect and analyze it, not only does its verisimilitude vanish, the story becomes almost an impossibility, nothing else but Jewish haggada, i.e. a fabricated story with a moral purpose, a fiction to embody a great ideal; in this case, the ideal of the suffering Messiah.

Remember then, if you please, that the Jewish judicial system was in practice a very noble one, one of which the Jews were very proud. In particular it was a humane system for those days; human life was a sacred thing in the eyes of the Jews. It is true the system included capital punishment, bat only in the most extreme cases, and under the very strongest safeguards against any miscarriage of justice. An accused per- page 10 son could only be condemned capitally after trial by a committee of the great Sanhedrim, a committee of 23 in number, sitting by daylight in its own official hall in the Temple Buildings; nor was sentence ever passed until twenty-four hours had elapsed from the completion of the trial. But far more than that. Should an accused person be found guilty and condemned to death a long interval was prescribed between sentence and execution. For forty days the convict was kept in prison, while, on each one of those forty days, he was publicly paraded through the streets of Jerusalem, attended by the public crier, who repeatedly announced his name, crime, and sentence, adding that if any citizen present knew of any circumstance favourable to the prisoner, by his allegiance to Jahveh he should stand forward and declare it. And it was not until all these precautions had been taken that the capital sentence was executed. (See Mead's" Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?" p. 178.)

Even if I were to stop here what has become of the verisimilitude of our gospel-story now? What is the account in the Synoptics? The victim was arrested, examined, tried, convicted, sentenced, executed, and buried, all in far less than twenty-four hours! He was apprehended in the night, immediately dragged before, not the Committee of twenty-three, of which the synoptic writer evidently knows nothing, but apparently the whole Sanhedrim, and that sitting, not in the public court of justice in the Temple, but in the high-priest's own private residence on Mount Olivet. Here, strange to say, a large number of witnesses were ready collected in the dead of night, and the examination proceeds at once. Compare that with what happens in our own Courts here to-day, with all our facilities of communication. Why here, in the most trumpery case before the magistrate? the police almost invariably plead that, as the prisoner has been only just arrested, it is necessary to ask for a remand, perhaps for a week, in order to get up the case and summon the witnesses. According to our evangelical narratives, however, they got on faster than that in Jerusalem, in the year 30 A.D. The examination and cross-examination of many witnesses were got through in what remained of the night, and, without any delay for deliberation, the High Priest at once announced the finding of the Court, guilty of blasphemy and deserving of death. You think perhaps the wearied officials then retired to obtain the night's sleep out of which they had been cheated, but not at all, everybody apparently is still as fresh as a lark, and at once, early in the morning as it is, carry the page 11 prisoner before the Roman Procurator, where in the most naive manner a different charge is at once substituted for the original one, involving of course an entirely different set of witnesses. The prisoner is no longer accused of transgressing the Jewish law of blasphemy but of rebellion against the Roman Emperor. As this is a new charge surely we shall have a remand now to get the new set of witnesses together. But not at all, they are all here waiting, and, early as it is, the august Roman procurator is waiting in court too. Plainly this is not a scene from real life, but a theatrical drama; it is, in fact, a sacred drama founded on the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, the chapter I read in your hearing this evening. Indeed this conclusion is almost self-evident, for the story is a religious drama still and celebrated as such once every five years at Oberammergau in Germany.

But further, the Romans, we know, were as proud of their judicial system as were ever the Jews of theirs; yet, on the present occasion, a high Roman official with little delay sentenced to an immediate and cruel death a prisoner who is not only innocent of the charge brought against him, but is repeatedly declared to be innocent by the Roman Procurator himself. The whole thing is absurd on the face of it.

But that is not all. A still more extraordinary fact is this. The whole incident is said to have occurred at the feast of the Passover, while the feast of the Passover was in full celebration. Jesus, you remember, had just celebrated the Passover supper with his disciples before he was arrested; whilst he was put to death next day, i.e., on the first and great day of the feast Now the Passover-festival, as we know, was a most sacred solemnity for the Jews, no private or public business of 'any kind must be allowed to interfere with its due celebration by everybody. Especially must every father of a family be at the Temple, or else at home, indoors, acting as priest to his own family in the celebration; and, more particularly, on the first day of the Feast, which included the evening before with its Passover-supper. There must be no secular business of any kind transacted by anybody at this sacred season, but all must be holy rejoicing and religious worship. But if that was true of the Jews generally, how especially true was it of the High Priest and members of the Sanhedrim, who must set the example to the nation as its religious chiefs. Yet this was the occasion, if you please, specially selected by the High Priest himself for the arrest, trial, and execution of a popular hero, an arrangement, I would almost venture to say, which was never heard of, before or page 12 since, in Jewish judicial history. The whole thing is a fiction, a historical impossibility, and has often been denounced as such by Jewish commentators. It is, in fact, an integral part of the story of the Resurrection which follows, and is as historical as that is, and no more. One is almost driven to the belief that our synoptic narrative generally was written, not by a Jew, but a Gentile, a Gentile too only very imperfectly acquainted with Jewish life and customs. Evidently indeed there is a great deal to be said for a very sagacious remark made by Mr Hubbard, of the Roycrofters, in his recent work entitled "The Man of Sorrows," a remark to the effect that Christianity is not what Rationalists have sometimes said it is, Judaism qualified by Paganism, but vice versa, it is Paganism though qualified by Judaism.

But it is now time we turned from these preliminary remarks to the volume which Professor Smith has given us, and again ask the question, Js the victim in this tragedy as imaginary as all the rest? Professor Smith implies that he is, and to his argument I will now turn.

His work then consists of five different essays bound up together, all bearing of course on the same subject, although the title, "The Pre-Christian Jesus," properly belongs to the first one only; the other four being respectively, "On the Significance of the Surname Nazarene," "The Resurrection," "The Parable of the Sower," and "The Silence of the Age" in respect to the so-called Epistle of Paul to the Romans, which, bettering Van Mahen, Professor Smith affirms had no existence before the year 160 A.D. I shall not touch to-night on the three last essays, and, of the other two, I will take the second first. It is, as I have just said, on the significance of the surname applied to Jesus in our New Testament, viz., the Nazarene, or, in the original Greek, Jesous ho Nazoraios.

This term, Nazoraios then is the usual epithet applied to Jesus in the Synoptic gospels, and, until the last few years, nobody hesitated for a moment to translate the phrase Jesous ho Nazoraios as Jesus the Nazarene, meaning thereby Jesus of Nazareth. Professor Smith, however, following, I must acknowledge, the writers of the Encyclopedia Biblica, makes the following astounding statement. But before I mention that statement, I will tell you the effect the first reading of a similar one made upon me, when I first came across it in the Encyclopedia Biblica less than six years ago. Well, it made me page 13 angry. "No" I said, "that is carrying scepticism too far; I refuse to admit that;" and it was not till I came upon the overwhelming evidence in its favour that I acknowledged its truth, and turned my indignation against those ecclesaistical authorities who had so grossly deceived me through a long life-time. The statement then is this:—There is no evidence whatever for the existence of any town or village of Nazareth in Palestine as early as the days of Herod and Pontius Pilate. The Jesus of our gospels cannot have been Jesus of Nazareth because, as far as we know, there was no Nazareth at the commencement of the Christian era. And here is the evidence for that extraordinary statement. No town or village of Nazareth is ever once mentioned in the whole of the Old Testament literature, in the whole of the works of the Jewish historian Josephus, in the whole of the Talmud, voluminous as that work is, and, finally, in the whole of the Old Testament Apocrypha, i.e., in the whole literature of the ancient world in which it was possible for that town to be mentioned if it had existed. And Professor Smith goes even one step further. He points out that the Talmud actually does mention no less than sixty-three towns as existing in the small province of Galilee, but that Nazareth is not one of the sixty-three (page 43). In fact, the earliest mention we have of any Nazareth outside the covers of the New Testament is in the pages of the Christian writer, Julius Africanus, as quoted by the historian, Eusebius. Africanus lived in Palestine at the beginning of the third century A.D. But even this quotation is very little to the purpose, for the Nazareth which Africanus mentions is, he says, not in Galilee, but in Judea; which surely makes confusion worse confounded.

You now begin to see how completely the whole evangelical story is up in the clouds, and should have, in consequence, no place in history. But Professor Smith has a positive side as well as a negative side to this argument of his. Having pointed out that the epithet Nazoraios cannot have been originally the geographical expression it is supposed to have been, he proceeds to show his readers what it really was in his judgment. He calls attention to the fact that in the Talmud the Christian hero is always called Jesus the Nozri, and that both Nozri and Nazoraios may very well have been derived from a well-known Hebrew root Nazar, which means to protect, to deliver, to save. Hence Jesus the Nozri, or Jesus Nazoraios may very well have meant Jesus the Protector, Jesus the Saviour. In antiquity a divine being always had an epithet of this kind applied to him. Thus in Greek we read of Zeus Xenios, i.e., Jupiter the friend and page 14 protector of man; and in the same way in the Old Testament we meet repeatedly with the expression Jahveh Sabaoth, i.e., Jehovah of hosts. In Professor Smith's judgment therefore we have in the phrase Jesus Nazoraios, or Jesus the Saviour, another proof that the hero of the New Testament was a divine being, a mythological being, from the very first. Thus the surname in question has nothing to do with any birthplace of Jesus, but only with his function as a supernatural being, a Saviour. Especially does he save his servants from the power of evil spirits, as we see in the fact that the apostles were in the habit of exorcising the demons from the possessed by invoking the name of Jesous ho Nazoraios.

Bold as is this argument of Professor Smith it wanes in audacity before another of which he is the author. Not only does he hold that Jesus was originally a demigod, and that prior to the age in which appeared, he informs us definitely who exactly these earlier worshippers of Jesus were, and has made our reviews and periodicals ring with their name. Needless to say they were a sect of the Gnostics; not however the Gnostics of the second century A.D., of whom we heard so much in the Van Manen discussions, but the far earlier Jewish Gnostics who are known to have existed amongst the Jews of the Dispersion before the days of the Christian era. The Pauline letters, you remember, when we studied them two or three years ago, showed us plainly enough that Christianity was in some way or other a derivative of Gnosticism, that in its gloomy portals the new religion was born; well Professor Smith improves on that, and shows us the precise room in the building in which the accouchement took place. Whether he is right or wrong at this point, only the future can finally determine. But let us hear what this most profound and erudite Professor has got to tell us.

The Gnostic philosophy, as many of you know, was a strange compound of Oriental and Grecian thought. One of its chief principles was that of the inherent evil of matter. The material world was wholly and entirely bad, so that man himself, by reason of his material body, was a foul and corrupt creature, the sport of passion, and crushed under a load of sin. It was, you remember, from this Gnostic principle that the Pauline writer obtained that cheerful dogma of his, the Fall of Man and the inherent depravity of everybody, a dogma as false and mischievous as Gnosticism itself. Not less fantastic in this system of philosophy was its doctrine of the Divine, which taught the existence of two Deities, the good God, and the just God, i.e. page 15 the kind God, and the merely righteous God. This latter was called the Demiurge, and was identified by some with Jahveh, the God of the Jews. Hence it was the Demiurge who created the world and superintended the history of the Jews through the centuries of their national existence, because the good God was far too exalted and pure a being to come into contact with material things and material creatures. In the process of the ages, however, the good God threw off various emanations of himself, called Aeons, which of course were themselves all divine. They were also personalities, and so themselves Gods, but of course only subordinate Gods. One of them was the divine Reason, the Logos, or Word of God, and this we know the Fourth Gospeller tells us became incarnate in Jesus. Another of these Aeons was Sophia, or the Wisdom of God, and it is the worshippers of this Aeon with whom we have to do new, and who were called Ophites, or Naassenes. The two words mean the same thing, Ophis being the Greek word for a serpent, and Nahash its Hebrew or Syriac equivalent. You must not, however, think of these Naassenes as serpent worshippers, but rather as people devoted to the pursuit of wisdom, worshippers of the Aeon Sophia, the serpent being always in antiquity the symbol of wisdom. The Naassenes, therefore, were just a sect of the Gnostic school, probably the earliest of all the Gnostic sects, of which there were a great many. Their Aramaic name, Naassenes, marks out their locality unmistakably; they resided in Syria, and, if they were not actually Jews, they were very close neighbours to the Jews, and probably had much intercourse with them.

Now it is these little known Naassenes to whom Professor Smith introduces us. They produced a literature, and some of that literature has come down to our own time, though, apparently, only as quotations in the early Christian Fathers. Now it is in the pages of one of these early Christian Fathers, by name Hippolytus, Bishop of the Port of Rome, and who seems to have flourished at the beginning of the third century, A.D.—it is in the pages of this Hippolytus that Professor Smith has found a very ancient Naassene Hymn, a hymn too in which the name of Jesus occurs, and that as a God in Heaven addressing his Father there. The Naassene poet has been describing the spiritual storms by which the soul of man is visited in the wilderness of life, and he then proceeds thus:—"Thereupon spake Jesus: Behold, O Father, there is battle with the Evil Ones upon earth. Of thy breath man wanders forth; he seeks to escape from the bitter Chaos, and knows not how he shall come page 16 through it. Therefore, do thou send me. O Father; with the seals in my hand will I descend. Through all worlds will I journey, all mysteries will I reveal. Also the forms of the deities will I unveil. And everything which was concealed of thy holy way, that will I liberate with the name of knowledge," i.e., of course in Greek, Gnosis, Gnosticism, (p. 31.)

On this Hymn Professor Smith very properly remarks thus:—"In this old, and nobody can say how old hymn, Jesus appears unmistakably as a divine being, as the Son, who rests on the heart of the Father, and who begs to be sent away to suffering, error-led humanity, in order to liberate it through the holy way called Gnosis. The seals which he carries are possibly the sacraments, possibly the gifts of the spirit; it does'nt matter which; each was, in the consciousness of antiquity, not complete without the other. The saving effect of Gnosis is also visible in the New Testament; thus we have in Luke (I. 77) "to give the Gnosis of salvation," i.e., the knowledge of salvation, "unto his people." . . . Hence it is plain that the Naassenes who reach back into the remotest antiquity worshipped Jesus as a God." (p. 32.)

So far Professor Smith, and to this I will only add that we plainly have in this hymn, not only the earliest Gnosticism, but, apparently, some colour of Pagan Gnosticism, for the writer, you observe, speaks of the forms of the deities, deities in the plural number, whilst yet Jesus is one of the gods mentioned, and his mission to earth for the salvation of man is as plainly set forth as if the hymn were a passage from one of our New Testament books. It is this half-Pagan Gnostic Jesus, of times indefinitely remote, which Professor Smith means when he speaks of "the pre-Christian Jesus."

Well, that is one of our author's discoveries, but we have yet another (p.38.) This time it is not the Gnostic Naassenes but the Jewish Essenes who provide him with an argument, or so he thinks. An ancient Greek M.S. preserved in Paris, probably in the great National Library there, the largest in the world, I believe, has recently been printed and published. Professor Smith calls it a Magic Papyrus; he means it is a collection of ancient magical formulae, formulae warranted to be efficacious in the expulsion of demons or evil spirits from the human body, a proceeding of which, you remember, we hear so much in the New Testament. In these degenerate days in which we live this expulsion of demons is a lost art; we cannot, unfortunately, page 17 expel even the demon of drunkenness from men. In antiquity, however, especially among the Jews, there were many professors of the art of exorcism; in fact every Jewish scribe was believed to possess this skill more or less. "By whom do your children cast them out," are, as we know, the words put into the mouth of Jesus in connection with this subject. And the most efficacious formula for the purpose of this exorcism was the invocation of some god, mentioned by name. The devils always felt themselves bound to obey then, and depart at once, bag and baggage, from their unhappy host. In the Acts of the Apostles, you remember, it is the name of Jesus himself that is used by his disciples in all their attempts at exorcism. Thus at Philippi (xvi., 8), when Paul was there, we find him addressing a demon thus:—"I charge thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And we are then told the demon came out that very hour. But now suppose this identical formula were found to have been used for a similar purpose in days far antecedent to those of Paul and his brethren! What are we to infer from that? Yet that is what Professor Smith maintains he has made highly probable. Anyway here is one of the formulae employed in the Magic Papyrus of which I spoke a moment ago. "I adjure you," it says, "by Jesus the God of the Hebrews," (p. 38.) This formula an early copyist of the Papyrus M.S. attributes to a people he calls "The Pure"; and "The Pure," we know, was a name of the Essenes. I shall not delay at this late stage of my address to descant upon the Essenes, especially as you can easily learn all about them in the pages of Josephus. They were certainly a pre-Christian sect, so that here again, if we are to believe Professor Smith, we have our Jesus as well known in the capacity of a God, and worshipped as such amongst a sect of the Jews who were organised as a church as far back as the times of the Maccabean Kings, i.e., in the 2nd century B.C. And some confirmation of this startling conclusion is found in the fact that this formula is part of a Hebrew utterance in the Magic Papyrus.

Such then are the leading ideas of Professor Smith's book. Much of the work is far too learned and too minutely elaborated, not to say too far fetched, for reproduction in a popular lecture, and I will therefore conclude my exposition of his argument by giving you the last two paragraphs of his first essay; and that although his final words contain rather a hard hit at us Unitarians of to-day.

"We dare therefore," he says, "we dare with great confidence maintain that the phrase 'Jesous ho Nazoraius,' 'Jesus page 18 the Nazarene,' means nothing else than Jesus the Protector, the Guardian, Jesus the Deliverer or Saviour, so that the expression is entirely parallel with combinations such as Zeus Xenios, Hermes Psychopompos, Jahveh Sabaoth, and innumerable others both in the classical and Semitic languages. Since Jesus in addition to this also is named "Lord" (Gr. kurios) which in the septuagint is the usual if not everywhere the equivalent reproduction of the divine name, Jahveh, it is clear that Jesus from the beginning was nothing else than a deity, and certainly a deity under a definite point of view, viz., considered as the Liberator, the Guardian, the Saviour. So also Christ signified the like deity under a slightly different point of view, viz., as the Messiah, the King, the Judge. The Mightier One who should come after the preaching of the Baptist was no other than God himself, as Malachi prophesied. It was the union of these two points of view, the more friendly Jesus, and the mightier Christ, which gave as a result Jesus the Christ, the Lord God of the oldest Christianity; his announcement was the refrain of the first preaching."

"It is not possible," Professor Smith continues, "in the foregoing discussion to set forth more accurately the thoughts and conjectures which crop up at this place. One thought is, however, too important, and at the same time also too easily imagined to be wholly suppressed. We understand now clearly the secret, plain before us to-day—the secret of the victory of Athanasius, and of the consequently necessary defeat of Arianism, as well in antiquity as also in its modern form. No demonstration, let it rest upon ever so high philosophical authorization, no exposition, be it ever so studied, logically grounded, and produced from the most zealous devotedness, no learning, be it ever so extolled—the attempt to derive Christianity from a man must always miscarry. For the Jesus Christ of the original Christianity was not of human but of divine nature, the King of all Kings, the Lord of all Lords, the Redeemer, the Deliverer, the Protecting God." (p. 41.)

Now that, I think, is pretty well for a man who does not believe that such a person as Jesus Christ ever really existed. The utterance undoubtedly has the most orthodox sound, but, as it is meant by the author, is more fatal to orthodoxy and, therefore, more obnoxious to orthodox people, than even old fashioned Unitarianism itself. According to Professor Smith, Jesus was never other than a myth, and our gospels, even the synoptics, are the merest fictions, describing only an ideal life. As we have not exhausted Professor Smith's book, we have page 19 hardly the right to criticise his argument as a whole, but I think you will agree with me when I say that, as far as we have gone, his basis of argument is too slender to carry such a colossal superstructure as the conclusion he deduces from it. Granting he is right in his view of the surname Nazoraios, as I certainly think he is, we still require a little more than two quotations from documents of very uncertain date to demonstrate Jesus, on that account alone, a mythological being of a pre-Christian age. The conclusion may be right, but you must look elsewhere for adequate proof of it.

Of course I am not going to discuss that "elsewhere" to-night, but, were there time to do so, it would not be difficult to produce many recent writers in support of Professor Smith's conclusion. Thus in England we have Mr. J. M. Robertson, now M.P. for Tyneside, who advocates the new view in two most masterly volumes, one entitled Christianity and Mythology," and the other "Pagan Christs." What the state of thought on the matter is on the Continent of Europe will best appear from a sentence or two I may be allowed to quote from a little work just published by Professor Schmiedel, entitled "Jesus in Modern Criticism" (p. 12). Dr Schmiedel, as I have already said, is not yet in sympathy with the mythical view, but this is what he says of its progress:—"Doubts as to the reliability of our authorities have recently increased to such an extent that for about six years past, the view that Jesus never really lived has gained an ever-growing number of supporters. It is no use to ignore it, or to frame resolutions against it in meetings of non-theologians. It is little use merely to say in a vague and general way that the figure of Jesus, as portrayed in the gospels, could not possibly have been invented. In the case of the Fourth Gospel, a school of theology of a seriously scientific character does not itself make this contention; and, since it finds very much even in the first three gospels that is a product of later myth-making, it may easily seem that the advance would not be so very great if the whole record of Jesus' life were referred to the domain of myth."

One word more and then I will conclude with a few remarks on the personal bearings of the subject. There is no doubt that what has produced this revolutionary criticism of the New Testament to-day is, not so much the more minute examination of the text of that book, as the advances made in the new science of authropology, the publication of such books as Mr. Fraser's "Golden Bough." The subject is absorbingly interesting, but I page 20 will only say this:—Mr. Fraser's book shows us that in the great controversy on the Eucharist waged between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Churches, the weight of evidence for the historical view maintained by the Roman Catholic Church is increasing. The Roman Catholic at the celebration of the Eucharist to-day eats his God, and that because, presumably now, the primitive Christian did the same. Primitive man used at certain sacred festivals to eat his totem-god, and that is what his ecclesiastical descendant does to-day at the Eucharist, he is a theophagist, he eats his totem-god. And, if so, the Roman Catholic Church to-day has not deviated from, but only perpetuated, primitive principles. The totem in this case, representing the god Jesus, was a lamb, the lamb of the book of Revelation. Once it was a real lamb, then a loaf of bread in the form of a lamb, than a wafer of bread with the figure of a lamb stamped upon it; at which it remains to-day. Therefore I say it is in the antiquities of the Roman Catholic Church, in its mysteries, in its superstitions, in its darkness, not in the bright and sunny little fictions you call synoptic gospels, that you must look for the real origin of Christianity. The synoptic gospels are, like the Fourth Gospel, simply a late attempt to provide with a human life, a pre-existing mythological figure such as is found in the Pauline epistles and elsewhere in the New Testament.

I have spoken too long to-night, but you will see I have, after all, only blocked out the subject in the rudest and most desultory manner. Especially I have said nothing on the many objections that will rise up in the minds of hearers spontaneously at their first contact with the principle of this discourse. More particularly I have omitted all reference to the argument to be drawn in favour of a historical Jesus from the reference to him to be found in the works of Pagan writers, such for instance as "The Annals" of the historian Tacitus. No more, however, can be done now, and so I will only say that, in my judgment, these pagan testimonies, what there is of them, form by no means an insuperable barrier to the acceptance of the mythical explanation of Christian origins. One of them in fact, the letter of the younger Pliny to the Roman Emperor Trajan, is emphatically in favour of it, since Pliny there declares that the Christians used to meet in their assemblies before it was light and there sing a hymn to Christ as to a God.

You will perhaps expect me to say a final word as to whether or not I myself regard this mythical hypothesis as fully established. I have put it forward boldly to-night and urged page 21 the arguments in favour of it with all the little skill of which I am master. I acknowledge that to me the theory seems not only possible but highly probable; it appears to me to solve more difficulties than the one to which we Rationalists have hitherto been inclined. But that it has yet been thoroughly demonstrated so that it will be henceforth impossible for reasonable and unprejudiced people to hold any other view I am not at all prepared to admit. For one thing, no conclusion is certain that has not been submitted to the ordeal of time; it is time and time alone that proves all things, and for that test to be applied we must wait. It is quite true that the mythical theory in its general form is by no means a new one, but it has only recently been placed in the fierce light of public notice and criticism, in that storm of controversy which truth alone can weather; and therefore we should all, I think, act very unwisely, to do other than accept or reject it conditionally at the present stage of the controversy. We shall do all that duty requires of us if we keep an open mind towards it, if we fully recognise that there is another possible solution of the problem of Christianity than that which has hitherto commended itself to the Unitarian Church, and, above all, if we personally investigate the question for ourselves, and welcome all light upon it from whatever quarter it may come. We must achieve that most difficult of all tasks required of the philosopher, hold our judgment in suspense.

And yet the Unitarian philosopher should have little difficulty in maintaining himself on that high plane of duty in reference to this subject To himself the issue at stake should be merely a question of history and little more, like that of the reality or otherwise of the seven early Kings of Rome. His soul is free, or professes to be free, from the profanation of idolatry; he has, so he says, never looked for salvation to any but God alone. In the highest sense he has called no man master on earth, not even Jesus Christ. To the Unitarian there is only one necessary factor in religion and that is Deity himself. The new hypothesis will not deprive the Unitarian of his God. On the contrary, it will, I venture to think, leave him alone with his Heavenly Father in a more perfect sanctity than heretofore. The Form that in other churches interposes between the worshipping child and his divine Father is to the Unitarian, however noble a form it may be, a hindrance rather than a help to fellowship between the two. To the Unitarian, should the new view prevail, even the shadow of that Form will be gone now.

page 22

"Ah but," you say, "will not our human ideal be lost to us? Will there not be a vacant niche there where our Elder Brother used to stand?" I reply, I hardly think so, at least it will be no more vacant than it was before. You will have the ideal still, though not the ideal realised. But are you quite sure you ever had the ideal realised even on the old hypothesis? You always acknowledged the unreliableness of the record; so that, although you felt sure of the life, you could never be sure of its perfection. Now the case will be merely reversed; you will have the perfection still, but not the life; you will still have the noble ideal, even though it has not yet been embodied in a human life. But indeed I venture to say, an avowed fiction is better, and exercises a more attractive influence than an impossible reality, if I may so express myself. What attractiveness there is in fiction, and in a fictitious character, let any one say who has ever made the acquaintance, for instance, of the heroine, Helen Ward, in Mrs. Deland's novel of "John Ward, Preacher." And, in the same manner, the great ideal built up of traits gathered from a galaxy of Old Testament worthies by the loving hand of some austere Essene will lose but little of its attractive power when all disguises have been stripped from it. An ideal that has won the affectionate homage of two millenniums in the past has indeed stood the test of time; it already belongs to humanity and will not lose its virtue till humanity itself has passed away. For myself I venture to think it will even gain in power when we are able to conceive of it without any confusion of thought. At present we call it a human personality and then proceed to ascribe to it every perfection of which the human mind can form an idea, a process which makes us "uncomfortably conscious that we have destroyed its humanity in eliminating from it all weaknesses. On the new hypothesis it may without any impropriety be perfect because it is ideal and ideal only.

Yes, you say, but why disturb people's minis? Why not be content with the very fair approximation to truth you have already attained to? Why not let sleeping dogs lie? Why run the risk of losing any of your church members and the subscriptions they bring with them? Surely you are a little Qnixotic.

I reply, what you ask is an impossibility, at least on the part of the Unitarian Church. The discussion is in the air already, the reviews and magazines are taking cognisance of it. To attempt to ignore the subject is simply to shrink into your shell, to stultify yourself, to forfeit your legitimate influence in the world. It is either to show yourself not up to date, or a soldier shirking the page 23 battle. All such worldly considerations are utterly unworthy of the Unitarian Church which has been built up on the principle that fidelity to truth is man's supreme duty. To hide your convictions because perhaps they may not be popular is to forego the blessedness that is peculiarly the Unitarian's, that of the pioneer in the sacred cause of human enlightenment. Truth must be, like virtue, its own reward. The ideal Unitarian is he who sacrifices a lifetime in the pursuit of the Angel of Truth, and who at the end of it, if he do but secure one small white feather from that Angel's wing, deems the reward cheap at the price.—Amen.