[38] Tacitus very likely wrote Chrestiani. He says the mob called them such, but adds that the author of the name was Christ, so implying that Christianus was the true form, and Chrestianus a popular malformation thereof. The Roman mob would be likely to deform a name they did not understand, just as a jack-tar turns Bellerophon into Billy Ruffian. Chrestos was a common name among oriental slaves, and a Roman mob would naturally assume that Christos, which they could not understand, was a form of it.
[39] Mr. Robertson recognizes (p. 124), though without realizing how much it damages his theory, that the miracles of the Gospels are "visibly unknown to the Paulinists"--presumably the early churches addressed by Paul in his Epistle. Do we not here get a glimpse of an early stage of the story of Jesus before it was overlaid with miracles? Yet Mr. Robertson, in defiance of logic, argues that the absence of miraculous tales of Jesus in the Paulines confirms what he calls "the mythological argument."
[40] It is true that this is from a speech put into Paul's mouth by the author of Acts; but Paul himself is no less emphatic in Romans i, 23, where of the Greeks he writes that, "though they knew God, they glorified him not as God.... Professing themselves wise, they were turned into fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of a corruptible man." Such were the feelings excited in Paul by a statue of Pheidias; how different from those it roused in his contemporary Dion, who wrote as follows of it: "Whoever among mortal men is most utterly toilworn in spirit, having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before this image must utterly forget all the terrors and woes of this mortal life." So strong was the prejudice of the Church (due exclusively to its Jewish origin) against plastic or pictorial art that Eusebius and Epiphanius condemned pictures of Christ as late as the fourth century, while the Eastern churches, even to-day, forbid statues of Jesus and of the Saints. Of the great gulf which separated Jew from Gentile on such points Mr. Robertson seems not to have the faintest notion.
[41] I trust my readers will forgive my use of a fox-hunting phrase in so serious a context, but I cannot think of any other so apt.