The Christ Myth. Drews Arthur
of the world he kept the universe standing in its struggle against its enemies. At the head of the heavenly host he fought for God, and with his sword of flame he drove the Dæmons of Darkness in terror back into the shadows. To take part in this combat on the side of God, to build up the future kingdom of God by the work of a life-giving civilisation, by the rendering fruitful of sterile wastes, the extinction of noxious animals, and by moral self-education, seemed the proper end of human existence. But when the time should have been fulfilled and the present epoch come to an end, according to Persian belief, Ahuramazda was then to raise up from the seed of Zarathustra, the founder of this religion, the “virgin’s son,” Saoshyant (Sraosha, Sosiosch, which signifies the Saviour), or, as it ran according to another rendering, Mithras himself should descend upon the earth and in a last fierce struggle overwhelm Angromainyu and his hosts, and cast them down into the Nether World. He would then raise the dead in bodily shape, and after a General Judgment of the whole world, in which the wicked should be condemned to the punishments of hell and the good raised to heavenly glory, establish the “millennial Kingdom of Peace.” Hell itself was not to last for ever, for a great reconciliation was to be finally held out even to the damned. Then Angromainyu also would make peace with Ahuramazda, and upon a new earth beneath a new heaven all were to be united to one another in everlasting blessedness.
These ideas entered the circle of Jewish thought and there brought about a complete transformation of the former belief in a Messiah.
Messiah – that is, the Anointed (in Greek, Christos) – originally signified the king as representative of Jahwe before the people and of the people before Jahwe. According to 2 Sam. vii. 13 sq., he was placed in the same relation of an obedient “son” to his “father,” in which the whole people was conscious of standing.17 Then the opposition between the holy dignity of the “Anointed” of God and the humanly imperfect personality of the Jewish kings led to the ideal of the Messiah being transferred to the future and the complete realisation of the rule of Jahwe over his people being expected only then. In this sense the ancient prophets had already celebrated the Messiah as an ideal King of the future, who would experience in the fullest sense the high assurances of Jahwe’s favour, of which David had been deemed worthy, since he would be completely worthy of them. They had described him as the Hero, who would be more than Moses and Joshua, who would establish the promised glory of Israel, dispose the people anew, and bring Jahwe’s religion even to the heathen.18 They had glorified him in that he would span the heavens afresh, establish a new earth, and make Israel Lord over all nations.19 In this they had at first understood the Messiah only as a human being, as a new David or of his seed – theocratic king, divinely favoured prince of peace and just ruler over his people, just as the Persian Saoshyant was to be a man of the seed of Zarathustra. In this sense a Cyrus, the deliverer of the people from the Babylonian captivity, the rescuer and overlord of Israel, had been acclaimed Messiah.20 But just as Saoshyant had been undesignedly transfigured in the imagination of the people into a divine being and made one with the figure of Mithras,21 so also among the prophets the Messiah was more and more assigned the part of a divine king. He was called “divine hero,” “Father of Eternity,” and the prophet Isaiah indulged in a description of his kingdom of peace, in which the wolf would lie down by the lamb, men would no longer die before their time, and would enjoy the fruit of their fields without tithe, while right and justice would reign upon earth under this king of a golden age as it had never done before.22 Secret and supernatural, as was his nature, so should the birth of the Messiah be. Though a divine child, he was to be born in lowly state.23 The personality of the Messiah mingled with that of Jahwe himself, as though it were God himself of whose ascending the throne and journey heavenwards the Psalmists sing.24
These alternations of the Messiah between a human and a divine nature appear still more clearly in the Jewish apocalyptics of the last century before and the first century after Christ. Thus the Apocalypse of Daniel (about 165 B.C.) speaks of one who as Son of Man will descend upon the clouds of heaven and will be brought before the “Ancient of Days.” The whole tone of the passage leaves no doubt that the Son of Man (barnasa) is a superhuman being representing the Deity. To him the majesty and kingdom of God have been entrusted in order that, at the end of the existing epoch, he should descend upon the clouds of heaven, surrounded by a troop of angels, and establish an everlasting power, a Kingdom of Heaven. In the picture-language of Enoch (in the last decade before Christ) the Messiah, the “Chosen One,” the “Son of Man,” appears as a supernatural pre-existing being, who was hidden in God before the world was created, whose glory continues from eternity to eternity and his might from generation to generation, in whom the spirit of wisdom and power dwells, who judges hidden things, punishes the wicked, but will save the holy and just.25 Indeed, the Apocalypse of Esdras (the so-called fourth Book of Esdras) expressly combats the opinion that the judgment of the world will come through another than God, and likewise describes the Messiah as a kind of “second God,” as the “Son of God,” as the human incarnation of the Godhead.26
In all of this the influence of Persian beliefs is unmistakable, whether these arose in Iran itself directly, or whether the idea of a God-appointed king and deliverer of the world was borrowed by the Persians from the circle of Babylonian ideas. Here this conception had taken deep root and was applied at different times now to this king, now to that.27 Just as in the Persian religion the image of Saoshyant, so also in the Jewish view the picture of the Messiah wavered between a human king of the race of David and a supernatural being of divine nature descended from heaven. And just as in the Persian representation of the coming of Saoshyant and the final victory of the Kingdom of Light there would be a preceding period during which threatening signs would appear in the heavens, the whole of nature would find itself in upheaval and mankind would be scourged with fearful plagues, so also the Jewish Apocalypse speaks of the “woes” of the Messiah and describes a period of terror which would precede the coming of the Messiah. The coming of the power of God was looked upon as a miraculous catastrophe suddenly breaking in from on high, as a conflagration of the world followed by a new creation. The Jewish agreed with the Persian view in this also, that it made a heavenly kingdom of undisturbed bliss “in the light of the everlasting life and in likeness of the angels” follow the earthly world-wide empire of the Messiah. This they imagined on exactly the same lines as the Persian Paradise. There would the holy drink of the “Water of Life” and nourish themselves on the fruit which hang upon the “Tree of Life.” The wicked, on the other hand, would be cast into hell and suffer in fearful torments the just punishment of their sins.28
The conception of a resurrection of the dead and a last judgment had hitherto been strange to the Jews. In pre-exilic days they allowed the body to die and the soul after death to go down as a shadow without feeling into Hades (Sheol), without disturbing themselves further about its fate. Now, however, with the doctrine of the destruction of the world by fire and the general judgment, the idea of personal immortality entered the world of Jewish thought. Thus it is said by Daniel that on the day of judgment the dead will rise again, some waking to everlasting life, others to everlasting perdition. “But the teachers will shine as the brightness of heaven, and those who led the multitude to justice as the stars for ever and ever.”29 With the acceptance of personal immortality the whole tone of religious thought was deepened and enriched in the direction of thought for the individual. Former Jewish morality had been essentially of a collective kind. It was not so much the individual as the people viewed collectively that was looked upon as the object of divine solicitude. At this point the position, the road to which had been already prepared by the prophets, was definitely established, that the individual hoped for a personal religious salvation and as a consequence felt in direct personal relationship with Jahwe. God indeed remained, as the Persians had taught them to
Exod. iv. 22; Deut. xxxii. 6; Hosea xi. 1.
Isa. xlix. 6, 8.
Isa. xliv. 28, xlv. 1
Cumont, “Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra,” 1899, vol. i. 188.
Isa. xi. 65, 17
Isa. ix. 6; Micah v. 1.
Psa. xlvii. 6, 9, lvii. 12.
Ch. xlv.–li.
Ch. vi. 1
Cf. Gunkel, “Zum religionsgesch. Verständnis des Neuen Testaments,” 1903, p. 23, note 4.
Revelation xxii.; cf. Pfleiderer, “Das Urchristentum. Seine Schriften und seine Lehren,” 2nd edit., 1902, vol. ii. 54
Dan. xii. 3.