To the hypothesis that there was a pre-Christian cult of a Jesus-God, the traditionalist--above all, the Unitarian, who seems to feel the pinch here most acutely--retorts with a volley of indignant contempt. He can see no sign of any such cult. In the mind's eye he can see, as a historic process, twelve Apostles creating a Christian community by simply crying aloud that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, excommunicating for the after life those who will not listen, and all the while assiduously casting out devils. His records baldly tell him that this happened; and "we believe in baptism because we have seen it done." But whereas, in the nature of the case, the reconstruction of the real historic process must be by tentative inference from a variety of data which for the most part the records as a matter of course obscured, he makes loud play with the simple fact that the records lack the required clear mention, and brands as "unsupported conjecture" the theorem offered in place of the plain untruth with which he has so long been satisfied.
In his own sifted and "primitive" records we have the narration of the carrying of the Divine Man to a height ("pinnacle of the temple" only in the supposed primitive Gospel) by Satan for purposes of temptation. For a mythologist this myth easily falls into line as a variant of the series of Pan and the young Zeus at the altar on the mountain top, Pan and Apollo competing on the top of Mount Tmolus, Apollo and Marsyas, all deriving from the Babylonian figures of the Goat-God (Capricorn) and the Sun-God on the Mountain of the World, representing the starting of the sun on his yearly course. That assignment explains at once the Pagan myths and the Christian, which is thus shown to have borrowed from the myth material of the Greco-Oriental world in an early documentary stage. Challenged to evade that solution, he mentions only the Pan-Zeus story, says nothing of the series of variants or of the Babylonian original, and replies that he is
unable to trace any real and fundamental connection between the stories. In the Buddhist narrative [which had been cited as an analogue [42]] the "temptation" to satisfy the cravings of hunger, the promptings of ambition, and the doubts as to the overruling Providence of God, are all wanting. In the Roman story, too, Pan, as representing in satyr-form the lower and animal propensities of man, is a very different being to the Hebrew Satan; moreover, there is no tempting of Jupiter, as there is of Jesus. Jupiter, likewise, is wholly a god; Jesus is a sorely bested Man, although divine. There is, in short, not the least affinity between any of these narratives beyond the general idea of trial. [43]