[Worship of a slain God no part of the earliest Christianity] Messrs. Robertson and Drews similarly insist that Jesus was from the first worshipped as a slain God. In the Gospel documents there is no sign of anything of the sort. It was Paul who first diffused the idea that the crucified Jesus was a victim slain for the redemption of human sins. We already have Philo proclaiming that the just man is the ransom of the many, so that there is no need to go to pagan circles, no need to go outside the pale of Greek Jews, of whom Paul was one, for the origin of the idea. He probably found it even in the teaching of Gamaliel, in which he was brought up. Mark asks no more of his readers than to attribute the Messiahship--a thoroughly human rôle--to his hero, Jesus of Nazareth. Nor does Matthew, who seeks at every turn to prove that the actions of Jesus reported by Mark were those which, according to the old prophets, a Messiah might be expected to perform. How can writers who end their record of Jesus by telling us how in the moment of death he cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" realizing no doubt that all his expectations of the advent of God's kingdom were frustrated and set at naught; how, I say, can such writers have believed that Jesus was Jehovah? The idea is monstrous. The truth is these writers transport back into the first age of Christianity the ideas and beliefs of developed Catholicism, and are resolved that the first shall be last and the last first. They have no perspective, and no capacity for understanding the successive phases through which a primitive Messianism, at first thoroughly monotheistic and exclusively Jewish in outlook and ideals, gradually evolved itself, with the help of the Logos teaching, into the Athanasian cult of an eternal and consubstantial Son of God.
[Abuse of the comparative method by this school of writers] Thirdly, these writers abuse the comparative method. Applied discreetly and rationally, this method helps us to trace myths and beliefs back to their homes and earlier forms. Thus M. Emmanuel Cosquin (in Romania; Paris, 1912) takes the story of the cat and the candle, and traces out its ramifications in the mediæval literature and modern folklore of Europe, and outside Europe, in the legends of the Pendjab, of Cashmir, Bengal, Ceylon, Tibet, Tunisia, Annam, and elsewhere. But the theme is always sufficiently like itself to be really recognizable in the various folklore frames in which it is found encased. The old philologists saw in the most superficial resemblance of sound a reason for connecting words in different languages. They never asked themselves how a word got out of Hebrew, say, into Greek, or out of Greek into Mexican. Volumes were filled with these haphazard etymologies, and the idea of the classification of languages into great connected families only slowly made its way among us in the last century. I have pointed out that in regard to names Messrs. Drews and Robertson are still in this prephilological stage of inquiry; as regards myths or stories of incident, they are wholly immersed in it. [They fit anything on to anything no matter how ineptly,] They never trouble themselves to make sure that the stories they connect bear any real resemblance to one another. For example, what have the Zodiacal signs and the Apostles of Jesus in common except the number twelve? As if number was not the most superficial of attributes, the least characteristic and essential. The scene of the Gospel is laid in Judæa, where from remote antiquity the Jews had classed themselves in twelve tribes. Is it not more likely that this suggested the twelve missionaries sent out by Jesus to announce the coming kingdom than the twelve signs of the Zodiac? Even if the story of the Twelve be legendary, need we go outside Judaism for our explanation of its origin?