In accordance with this postulate of esoterism and cult secrecy among the pre-Christian Nazarenes, who subsequently revealed themselves to the world as the Christian Church, though even then they "maintained for generations the secrecy [44] of their Jesus cult," the Gospels, as I said, are an allegory or a charade. Their prima facie meaning is never the true one, never more than symbolic of a moral and spiritual undersense such as old allegorists like Philo and Origen loved to discover in the Bible. Thus, as we saw above, when Jesus is reported to have cast out of the Jews who thronged around him devils of blindness, deafness, lameness, leprosy, death, what is really intended is that he argued pagans out of their polytheism. "It was spiritual maladies, and only spiritual, that he was healing" (p. 38). We ask of Mr. Smith, why was so much mystification necessary? We are only told that "it was in the main a prudential measure, well enough justified, but intended to be only temporary" (p. 39). What exact risks they were to shun which the sect kept itself secret, and only spake in far-fetched allegory, Mr. Smith does not inform us. Is he, too, afraid of being regarded as a "tell-tale" (p. 48)?
[Professor Smith resolves all the New Testament as symbolic and allegorical] As with the exorcisms, so with all else told of Jesus. None of it really happened. As he never lived, so he never died. His human life and death are an allegory of the spiritual cult and mysteries which the pre-Christian Nazarenes and their descendants, the Christians, so jealously and for so long guarded in silence. If he never lived, then he never taught, not even in parables. By consequence the entire record of his parables, still more of his having chosen the parable as his medium of instruction in order to veil his real meaning from his audience, is all moonshine. Here, as elsewhere, the Gospel text does not mean what it says, but is itself only a Nazarene parable conveying, or rather concealing, a Nazarene secret--what sort of secret no one, save Professor Smith, the self-appointed revealer of their mysterious lore, can tell, and he is silent on the point. On Mr. Smith's premisses, then, we cannot rely on the Gospels to inform us of anything historical, and, so far as we can follow him, we must, if we would discern through them the mind of their Nazarene authors, take them upside down. We must discern a pagan medium and homilies against polytheism in discourses addressed to monotheistic Jews who needed no warnings against idolatry; we must also read the stories of Jesus healing paralytics and demoniacs as secret and disguised polemics against idolatry.