There is not much of a vegetation-god story about the above concise narrative, which, however, is strikingly independent of the Gospel legends concerning the burial and resurrection of Jesus; for, according to them, it was the friends and adherents of Jesus, and not the rulers, who condemned him, that were careful to bury him; and his post-resurrectional appearances are here confined to his Galilean followers, who, by virtue of their longer association and intimacy with him, would be more likely than others to see him after death in dreams and visions.
[Six independent and early documents involve a real Jesus] I have now reviewed the historical books of the New Testament. We have in them at least six monuments--to wit, Mark, the non-Marcan document, the parts of the First and Third Gospels peculiar to their authors, the Fourth Gospel, and the history of Paul and his mission given in chapters xiii to xxviii of Acts. Perhaps I ought to add the first twelve chapters of Acts, of which the information, according to Van Manen, was derived from an early and lost document, the Acts of Peter. That would make seven monuments. Unless all philological analysis is false, the Third Gospel and Acts are from the pen of a companion of Paul, and cannot be set later than about 90 A.D. Mark, which he used, must be indefinitely earlier, and I have pointed out that there are good reasons for setting its date before the year 70. The non-Marcan document, which critics have agreed to call Q (Quelle), cannot be later than Mark, and is probably much earlier, judging from the fact that it as yet reported no miracles of Jesus, nor hints of his death and resurrection. Now all these documents are independent of one another in style and contents, yet they all have a common interest--namely, the memory of a historical man Jesus; and such data as they isolatedly afford about Jesus agree on the whole as closely as any profane documents ever agreed which, being written independently and from very different standpoints, yet refer to one and the same person. If we see a number of convergent rays of light streaming down under clouds across a widely extended landscape, we infer a central sun behind the clouds by which they are all emitted. Similarly, we have here several traditions and documents which converge on a single man, and are all and severally meaningless, and their genesis impossible of explanation unless we assume that he lived. It is sufficiently incredible that one tradition should (to take the hypothesis of non-historicity in its most rational form--that, namely, of Professor W. B. Smith) allegorize the myth of a Saviour God as the career of a man, and that man a Galilean teacher, in whose humanity the Church believed from the first. That six or seven parallel traditions should all have hit on the same form of deception and allegory is, as I said before, as incredible as that several roulette tables at Monte Carlo should independently and at one and the same time throw up an identical series of numbers. Credat Judæus Apella, These writers who develop the thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus because miracles came to be attributed to him--how could they not in that age and social medium?--ask us to believe in a miracle which far outweighs any which any religionists ever reported of their founder; they themselves have fallen into fathomless depths of credulity.
