118. Chapter 5 - Mythical Interpretation and Form Criticism

Chapter 5 - Mythical Interpretation and Form Criticism Origin of Mythical Interpretation

Although the efforts to reduce the miracles and much of the other historical data of the New Testament to the status of myths are fantastic and utterly devoid of any foundation save mere literary theories, the fact that the mythical interpretation has been adopted and is being propagated with such zeal by so many who hold positions of power in the educational world, compels consideration of the validity of their position. The mythical interpretation is usually said to have been born as a part of the atheistic movement intertwined with the French Revolution and the publication of a work by C. F. Dupuis (1794) in which he tried to prove that all primitive religions were evolved from a system of astral mythology originating in Upper Egypt. But it might be added that the Christian scholars of the early centuries dueled with pagan philosophers like Celsus and with unbelieving Jews who attempted to brush the Gospel accounts aside as mere myths. The Talmud itself is lined with horrible and grotesque distortions which the venom of Jewish unbelief concocted as a line of factory-made myths about Christ to be used in combating the historical accounts of the New Testament and in asserting that the latter were myths. The Apocryphal Gospels contain all sorts of perverted imaginations of ignorant writers among the Christians who attempted to exalt Jesus by creating mythical accounts in His honor, especially concerning His childhood. The denunciation of these Apocryphal Gospels as “poisonous” by the Christian scholars of the early centuries shows that the primitive church did not provide favorable growing ground for myths. They had historic facts upon which to rest. The church which was established upon the basis of public proclamation of the historic facts by competent witnesses, by its very devotion to the truth, to noble living, and to the most democratic enlightenment of all through the proclamation of the gospel, stood as a solid barrier against the creation of myths. It was not until the thirteenth century, when the dark ages had wrested the Bible from the hands of the common people and a corrupt hierarchy exploited them for personal aggrandizement, that the Apocryphal Gospels began to have any vogue among Christians. Even today, about the swiftest and most practical manner to explode the mythical interpretation is to place the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John alongside the piously perverted cartoons to be found in the Apocryphal Gospels. The Apocryphal Gospels prove that there were ignorant and misguided people associated with Christianity in the second and third centuries who attempted to create romantic additions to the Gospel narratives. The fact that these romances were steadfastly rejected by the church is illuminating testimony to the whole historic foundation of Christianity. Only those who wear a blindfold are unable to tell day from night. The second great figure in the modern attempt to interpret the Gospel accounts as myths was D. F. Strauss (1808-74) who admitted such a person as Jesus had once lived, but held that the New Testament accounts about Him were so mythical that practically nothing certain could be learned about his life. His Life of Jesus appeared in German in 1835-6 and was translated into English by George Eliot in 1846. In his final publication of the work, Strauss abandoned the theory that the Gospel accounts were developed from poetic myths and held they were deliberate falsifications by the writers. Strauss was followed by Baur (1809-82) who started out to prove that the originators of Christianity did not create it out of any Messianic expectations of the Old Testament, but rather inserted their own creations into the ideas presented in the Old Testament. He ended by denying that such a person as Jesus of Nazareth ever lived. Rudolf Seydel published in 1882 and in following years, a series of works in which he branched out in a new direction by trying to show that the accounts about Jesus in the New Testament were derived by the authors from Buddhist myths. J. M. Robertson published in 1900 a work entitled Christianity and Mythology in which he attempted to build a fantastic structure of myth built upon myth: Asiatic and European myths combined with early Hebrew myths. Professor W. B. Smith of Tulane University created a mild sensation in America when he published in 1906 a work which followed the same line set forth by Robertson and maintained that “Jesus” is the name of a “Western Semitic mythical god.” P. Jensen, a German Assyriologist, Professor Drews of Karlsruhe, A. Niemojewski, and Fuhrmann are other names in the mythical school who wrote in the first decade of this century.

Thorburn’s Reply The literary theories of this whole group of critics have been carefully examined by T J. Thorburn in his volume: The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels (1916). Thorburn is a modernist, but he crushes the extreme left wing and their mythical interpretations with a collection of learned data from Greek, Buddhist, and Egyptian or Persian legends which contradicts the claims of the mythical interpreters and with citations from the New Testament to prove that the mythical interpreters did not even pause long enough to learn what it teaches before they started on their wild chase through pagan legends to show that the writers of the Scripture copied from them. The Triumphal Entry An excellent place to test the accuracy of the data which the mythical interpreters submit and the validity of their conclusions, is the triumphal entry as described in the four narratives. J. M. Robertson claims that the New Testament account is pure myth invented under the influence of a Greek myth about Bacchus or Dionysus (Greek and Roman names respectively for the god of wine) riding two asses across a marsh, which in turn was invented by the primitive Greek mythologists under the influence of the sign of zodiac called Cancer, so named because the sun seems to be riding two constellations of stars that look like asses. Thorburn describes this attack by Robertson as one of the “most conspicuous, and, at first sight, as the most plausible” of the literary theories which the mythological group presents. Robertson is not willing to admit a single item of credible history in the New Testament account of the triumphal entry, but that it is only “an old myth pseudo-historicised.” The whole method of procedure of the modernists has been fastened in the pillory in the delicious satire of C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters. He says: “The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues), and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question” (p. 139). It is not difficult to understand, in the case of account of miracles in Scripture, that the atheistic turn of the skeptics leads them to search with such bitter malice and such reckless fancy amid all the pagan myths in the world for some slight similarity of details which would give them a start in spinning out their literary theories which charge plagiarism and falsification by the New Testament writers. When they attempt to deny a plain historical account such as the records of the triumphal entry, however, the desperate excess of their bitter hatred of whatever the New Testament records is amazing. The suggestion of C. S Lewis is that one would have to conclude from their method that no sort of historical event could have happened in ancient times; everything would have arisen from the imagination rather than human conduct. The Myth Theory Destroyed In his careful rebuttal of J. M. Robertson’s theory as to the triumphal entry account’s being a work-over of pagan myths, Thorburn proves that the Greek myth was falsified by the mythological critics, since it does not say that Bacchus rode on two asses, but only upon one. Therefore, the Greek myth could not possibly have had any connection with the sign of the zodiac, the Cancer. The Poeticon Astronomicon of a writer named Hyginus (c. a.d. 4) is shown to be the source upon which Robertson rested and is quoted verbatim by Thorburn as saying Bacchus came across two asses and caught one of them so that he rode across the marsh without getting wet. The two stars, gamma and delta, Cancri, in the body of the Crab were named by the astronomer Ptolemy “the two asses”; the luminous patch between the two stars was called the “Manger”; thus, Robertson declares that when the sun is in the midst of the zodiacal sign, the Cancer, it seems to be riding two asses, which stirred the imagination of the Greek mythologists to conjure up the myth about Bacchus. Thorburn in a learned discussion about the zodiac and astronomy shows that at about the time of Christ, the sign of the Crab was not reached until the end of June, whereas the triumphal entry occurred in the spring (April) in the vernal equinox when the sun was in Aries, another sign of the zodiac. Thus the astral phenomenon could not possibly have suggested the Greek myth or be connected with the New Testament account.

Thorburn points out it is an inaccurate translation which says: “Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass” (Matthew 21:5), thus making it sound as if the Messiah would ride two asses in the triumphal entry. Both in the Hebrew text of Zechariah 9:9, and in the Greek text of Matthew in which the prophet is quoted, the proper translation is “Even a colt the foal of an ass.” But at this point, Thorburn falls into the ditch with his critics, by charging that Matthew (and Robertson, in imitation of Matthew) misunderstood the prophecy of Zechariah and thought he said the Messiah would ride two asses into Jerusalem. This is the original charge of Strauss, one of the earliest members of the mythical school, and has been clearly exploded long ago. Thorburn perversely argues on the basis of Matthew 21:7 to make out his case: “And they led the she-ass, and the foal (to Jesus) and placed their cloaks upon them, and he sat upon them.” Thorburn attempts to follow Robertson and Strauss in saying that the pronoun “them” refers to both animals, whereas the immediate antecedent, “cloaks” is plainly the reference Matthew intends. Thus both the a.v. and a.s.v. translate “and they set him thereon”; “and he sat thereon” (on the garments). The disciples put their garments upon both animals because they did not know which animal Jesus intended to ride; Matthew indicates that it was actually the colt upon which Jesus rode. His quotation of the prophecy (Matthew 21:5) and his mention in Matthew 21:7 of the colt, suggest this: “the ass and the colt.” Mark, Luke, and John state clearly that Jesus rode the colt. Not only Strauss and Robertson, but even Thorburn, actually expect us to believe that Matthew declared Jesus to have ridden like a circus performer on two animals at once as He entered the city in triumph. Thorburn labels the proposition of Jesus’ riding two animals at once as “a gross and palpable absurdity to every thoughtful person” and in the same breath charges that Matthew is the author of such an absurdity. Not only is his charge gratuitous, but Thorburn flatly contradicts his own argument at this point for he already has argued at length the Hebrew text of Zechariah 9:9 and Greek text of Matthew 21:5 to mean “upon an ass, even upon a colt the foal of an ass.” This whole fantastic attack was based upon Strauss’ original mistranslation of the passage.

Buddhist Myth Theory The labored effort of Franke to connect the New Testament accounts of the triumphal entry with a Buddhist myth is also cited by Thorburn. The myth describes the entry of Buddha Dipankhara where the people swept a pathway, the gods strewed flowers on the ground and spread branches of coral tree in the way, and men carried branches of various kinds of trees, and the Bodhisattva Sumedha spread his garments in the mire so that the Buddha could walk upon them, and all the gods shouted “All hail.” One would think from such an effort to show that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John copied from this Buddhist legend, that a triumphal entry was an unknown thing in the Greco-Roman world, or any other part of the world. It would have been more plausible to have suggested the New Testament writers manufactured the account from the triumphal processions of Roman Emperors at their capital, but the differences are almost as sharp here as in the comparison with the Buddhist myth; no golden chariots, no prancing horses, no helmeted soldiers, no thousands of captive-slaves such as a Pompey or a Julius Caesar would feature. In the Buddhist myth there are only the most vague similarities: garments, tree branches, and a shout of triumph. There is no mention of sweeping a pathway in the New Testament accounts; nor of flowers, coral tree, or mire; not to mention — no participation by “gods.” It is just too bad for Franke’s theory that angels are not mentioned as sharing in the triumphal entry of Jesus; he certainly would have claimed this a parallel to the Buddhist subordinate “gods” in their part of the Buddhist myth.

Pagan Syncretism The syncretism by which so many pagan religions have adopted various historical events and teachings of Christianity and woven them into their own pagan myths is so well known that it should deter any scholar with a regard for his reputation from promoting any such theory as Franke suggests. This process goes on today before the very eyes of Christian missionaries as Buddhist priests seeing the power of Christian hymns, seize and pervert them to their own pagan use: “Buddha loves me, This I know, For the Pitakas tell me so.” The Buddhist myths are, to use the language of James Orr, “ageless and formless.” The hostile critics who roam around in such pagan territory seeking some means of attacking Christianity are perpetrating a colossal bluff when they try to date these myths and the writings that record them. Early Christian tradition declares that the apostle Thomas went to India and preached the Gospel. The Christian message proclaimed in India in the early centuries undoubtedly brought about the same sort of procedure we see today when Buddhists take over historic facts and teachings of Christianity and change them into Buddhist myths. No scholar can offer evidence that the present copies of the Pitakas, which set forth the teachings of Guatama Buddha, resemble very much the original form in which these myths started, any more than they can date the myths. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are straight historical documents by eye-witnesses and their associates written within 25 years (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) or 65 years (John) of the events to which they testify. To classify historical documents such as the New Testament presents, with Buddhist myths, is to reveal the absurd and unscrupulous lengths to which the enemies of Christianity will go. The seizing and perverting of the facts of the Christian gospel, as amid the darkness of heathenism the Buddhists wove distorted fragments from the Gospels into their pagan myths, is actually illustrated in documented history amid the broad daylight of western civilization. The case in point is the rise of Mohammedanism. Professor G. F. Moore, of Harvard, the foremost authority in the field of the history of religions, whimsically remarked: “Mohammed copied the Koran bodily from the Old and New Testaments. The only time the Koran differs from the Bible is when Mohammed misunderstood what the Bible said, which was exceedingly frequent.” A glance at the Koran will show how the Biblical history was changed and interwoven with Moslem legends. The mythical interpretation of the Gospels is a diabolical dreamcastle of unbelievers inhabited by phantom ogres, a structure which crashes in ruins at the slightest contact with the hard surface of actual history presented in the New Testament. The process has been three-fold: (1) the revelation by God to man; (2) the preservation of this revelation by noble men; (3) its devolution by the base and corrupt men.

Why No Flowers? An interesting side-issue which enters through this study is the proposition as to why flowers were not used in the triumphal entry of Jesus. The picture in the Buddhist myth of flowers being strewn in the path the Buddha Dipankhara was to traverse is nothing more than the universal usage at times of acclaim and rejoicing. Triumphal marches are almost as old and as universal as man himself and the use of flowers on such occasions, the common procedure in the ancient as in the modern world. Why do we not read of flowers at the triumphal entry? If flowers had been used in profusion at the triumphal entry, would not this have been recorded by the narrators? If flowers had been available, would they not probably have been used? If the triumphal entry had been foreseen and planned by the multitude, would they not have been able to secure flowers? The answers to these questions seem affirmative. There are over two thousand varieties of wild flowers growing in Palestine, more than in any equal amount of terrain in the world. During the rainy season, both mountain and desert are a riot of color, but the end of the rainy season brings swift death to the flowers under the scorching rays of the sun. Occupation and cultivation of the land limits the amount of wild flowers, a limitation which increases toward centers of population. Since wild flowers wither immediately, cultivated flowers are better for celebrations. Because of the dry season having withered the wild flowers and because of the location of the triumphal entry, it is probable that wild flowers were not available. Because of the impromptu character of the celebration, cultivated flowers could not be secured in time. The absence of any record of the use of flowers at the triumphal entry is a most convincing historical item. What fiction writer or inventor of myths could possibly have omitted “flowers”?

Greek Mystery Religions In recent decades the bent of the mythical enthusiasts has been toward Greece and especially the Greek mystery religions. But this has proved a futile search in a barren field so far as any success in finding any factual evidence upon which to rest their freakish theories. The reader does not need the promotional description of the author by the publisher of The World Bible to the effect that Mr. Ballou is “an editor, a short-story writer, and a literary consultant,” to realize the nature of the criticism of Christianity which his volume offers. Of a much more scholarly nature are the many-sided discussions of radical writers in the anthology published by T. S. Kepler in 1944: Contemporary Thinking About Jesus. The analysis by such radical scholars as Guignebert, McCown, Lietzmann, and Cadoux of the problem as to whether Jesus is myth or history is of one piece with that of most of their comrades. They admit the historical existence of Jesus, but deny the historical accuracy of the New Testament accounts. The World Bible by Robert A. Ballou (1944) is a typical continuation of this line of attack upon Christianity with constant insinuation that lays the New Testament alongside Buddhist myths and other pagan myths. The absurd extent to which the mythical interpreters go in undertaking to set up some line of parallel, however attentuated the comparison may be, with pagan myths is well illustrated in a study entitled: “The Greek Mysteries and the Gospels” by Slade Butler (The Nineteenth Century and After, March, 1905). Mr. Butler follows the lead of B. W. Bacon and others in supposing that the ministry of Jesus lasted one year, instead of the more than three years clearly set forth in the Gospel narratives. Then he tries to place the triumphal entry alongside the processions of the celebration of the mystery rites at Eleusis in Greece. Those about to be initiated from novices to higher grades in the mystery religion were accompanied by great crowds to the temple. All that Mr. Butler is able to present as parallel is a pagan temple instead of the temple of God in Jerusalem, the entrance of great crowds, and the fact that each of the initiates carried a vessel which contained various fruits given as a votive offering in the temple. Mr. Butler seizes the word “vessel” and tries to tie this up with the declaration of Mark that Jesus forbade any one to carry a vessel through the temple area. Thorburn points out that Mr. Butler did not even read the supposed evidence carefully enough to see that the Greek words are entirely different. The Greek word used in the account of the mystery religions is kernos, which meant a large earthenware dish with hollow spaces in the bottom to hold fruits to be offered in the temple. Mark 11:16 uses the word skeuos, which may mean any sort of vessel or implement, even the sail and tackle of a ship. Jesus was forbidding the use of the temple area as a short cut as people went through carrying the burdens of commerce. This was a part of His sweeping condemnation of the management of the temple when He cleansed it. The “vessels” in Mark 11:16 were not carried by followers of Jesus and had nothing to do with the triumphal entry. Thorburn concludes: “The two stories, indeed, are utterly unlike except for the reference in each to vessels of some kind” (p. 175).

Slade Butler attempts to connect the account of the cursing of the fig tree with the Greek mystery religions because the latter tell of a certain sacred fig tree at Athens where the processions of those performing mystic rites were accustomed to stop and offer sacrifices. Again Thorburn shows the cursing of the fig tree did not occur during the triumphal entry, but on the morning after. It was not any sort of mystic rite Jesus was performing at the fig tree. Such a suggestion is so farfetched as to emphasize the fantastic character of these vague comparisons. Robertson undertakes to connect the use of a whip by Jesus in cleansing the temple (this was the first cleansing, John 2:15, John 2:16, which Robertson characteristically tries to charge is a confused and mislocated account of the cleansing at the triumphal entry) with the fact that “in the Assyrian and Egyptian systems a scourge-bearing god is a very common thing on the monuments.” But a whip has been the universal implement used in driving animals among all peoples and there is not the slightest hint in the New Testament of the whip being used as any sort of symbol of authority in the worship of Jesus. A series of replies to the extreme Christ-myth school, which argued that such a person as Jesus never lived, has been published in a succession of books: The Historical Christ (1914) by F. G. Coneybeare; The Historicity of Jesus (1912 and 1923) by S. J. Case; Jesus the Nazarene-Myth or History? (1926) by M. Goguel; Did Christ Really Live? (1933) by H. G. Wood.

Form Criticism

There is a strange parallel in what has happened to the Two-source Theory and to the mythical interpretation. The Two-source Theory becoming super-inflated by the unceasing pressure of hot air has exploded into the fragments of Form Criticism; the effort to reduce Jesus to a myth has suffered from the same type of inflation and has disintegrated into countless fragments. Instead of claiming that such a person as Jesus never lived, the critics now proceed to set aside this or that miracle or event as history and to claim that the history’ of the Gospel narratives is hopelessly interwoven with the myths. Lietzmann (“Jesus’ Relationship to History” in Kepler’s Contemporary Thinking About Jesus, p. 192) declares what happened as the historic basis of the legend that Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph was that Jesus became exhausted from His long journey from Galilee and borrowed an ass on which to ride, and that unscrupulous writers later invented from this the myth of the triumphal entry with the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9 as their inspiration. Thus, there is the same division among the critics here as in the case of the virgin birth: one group attempts to derive the New Testament record from pagan legends; the other holds that the New Testament account was invented from a study of Isaiah 7:14. The two schools destroy each other. The real reason why they repudiate the New Testament records as “inconceivable” is that they do not believe in God. Since God is merely a mental concept, the mental concept limits what could happen! Their attack on the account of the triumphal entry seems rather the result of force of habit; they must assail the miraculous foresight that Jesus showed in securing the colt and its mother, the miracles He worked after entering the city, and the clinching fulfillment of the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9. It is this last feature which evidently causes them to attack the account of the triumphal entry. They feel they must reduce it to myth or admit a clear-cut Old Testament prophecy fulfilled in the life of the Messiah. The extreme critics who deny that Jesus ever claimed to be the Messiah naturally are compelled to deny the historical verity of the New Testament account concerning the triumphal entry.

Historical Foundation

It should never be overlooked that this whole mythical attack, like the Two-source Theory, was constructed upon the theory of nineteenth-century infidelity that the Gospels were written in the latter part of the second century. Now that actual manuscript evidence, joined with internal evidence and the testimony of early Christian writers, has compelled even the radical scholars to admit that the Gospels were written in the first century’, both theories are absolutely untenable. The Two-source Theory has been shifted over into the multiple sources of Form Criticism. The effort to show such a person as Jesus never lived has been generally abandoned in the renewed attempt to label as myths any historical matter in the Gospel which would controvert their theories. Not even when they try to claim the Synoptics were written about a.d. 70-80 can they escape the deadly fact that thousands of eye-witnesses of the ministry of Jesus were still alive at that time and that their presence would have prevented the falsification of facts into myths. When we recall the overwhelming evidence that the Synoptics were written a.d. 50-60, the force of the presence of a multitude of competent eye-witnesses delivers the coup-de-grace to the mythical interpretation. Furthermore, sealing up the evidence is the fact that the apostle John (still an eye-witness writing in a time when other witnesses would have been living) wrote toward the close of the century of the things which he had seen and heard and upon which he was ready to stake his life. Thus while the Synoptics are only separated from the history they record by a mere twenty-five years, a gap of a third of a century lies between the Synoptics and John, and the critics can not even upset the historical testimony of John! “That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life (and the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us) that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you (1 John 1:1.).

Added to the solid historical basis of the New Testament narratives is the whole bulwark of human history since the time of Christ, which is left without explanation if Christ be a myth. Whence came the church and Christian literature, institutions, art, influence? The Christ-myth school is in precisely the same position as the atheist, who is left with the universe on his hands and no intelligent explanation as to how it came into existence. He can not deny the world in which he lives, actually exists, but he can not explain how it came into being. So with the Christ-myth fanatic. Moreover, the less extreme myth-advocates who admit that Jesus lived but try to theorize that the Gospels are a compound of myth with some history are in the same desperate strait jacket when they try to explain the existence of plain matter-of-fact statements which, in a process of myth accumulation, could never have entered the narrative or survived the myth-method. Observe such a declaration as Matthew 24:36, “But of that day and hour knoweth no man,” plainly limiting the foreknowledge of Jesus; the unbelief of His own brethren and of the apostles themselves in moments of wavering; whence came these?

Schmiedel admitted certain pillars of truth in the Gospel narratives in the form of statements which are derogatory to Christ in the sense of expressing human limitations or His failure to win others to faith in Him. All the rest was open to suspicion as myth-product, according to Schmiedel. But “Schmiedel’s pillar passages” themselves are as unexplainable for the myth enthusiast as is the universe for the atheist or the very existence of Christianity for the Christ-myth school. As a matter of fact, the whole defense of the historicity of the New Testament is welded solidly to the cross itself. What inventive genius would have conjured up such a death? As the death of Christ is the heart of the gospel, so it is the central basis for the historical verity of the gospel records. That history has a way of verifying itself finds its supreme demonstration in the Christian gospel, the New Testament records, and the history of the church. The gospel of redemption by the death of God’s Son is such a mysterious compound of earthly humiliation and heavenly glory that no one but God could have originated the pattern; none but men directly inspired of God could have predicted its details centuries before they were enacted, or have recorded in such unique documents the history of that supreme epoch when “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”