Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/221

 means pure fiction, but an indistinguishable compound of fact and fiction, in which the fictitious elements bear so large a proportion that it is impossible to disentangle from them the elements of genuine history. Part of this life moreover is wholly mythical, and of this wholly mythical portion there are certain sections that are constructed on a common plan, the biographers in these sections having only fitted the typical incidents in the lives of great men to the special case of Jesus, the son of Joseph, Not that this need have been done consciously; the probability is that the circumstances and mode of thought which led to the invention of such typical incidents in the lives of others, led to it equally in that of Jesus. However this may be, we shall find in the mythical life of Jesus the following three classes of myths: 1. Myths of the typical order, common to a certain kind of great men in certain ages, and therefore purely unhistorical; 2. Myths peculiar to Jesus, in which the miraculous element so predominates, that it is impossible to recognize any; or more than the very slightest, admixture of history; 3. Myths, peculiar to Jesus, in which there is a more or less considerable admixture of history; And 4. Statements not of necessity mythical, which may or may not be historical, but of which the evidence is inadequate.

At the outset of our task we are met by the assumed genealogy of Jesus, which has caused some trouble to theologians, and which is mainly important as an indication of the degree of credit due to writers who could insert such a document. For these awkward pedigrees afford an absolute proof of the facility with which the Christians of the earliest age supplemented the actual life of Jesus by free invention. We are happily in possession of two conflicting lists of ancestors, and happily also they are both of them lists of the ancestors of Joseph, who, according to the very writers by whom they are supplied, stood in no relation whatever to Christ, the final term of the genealogies. Double discredit thus falls upon the witnesses. In the first place, both lists cannot be true, though both may be false; one of them therefore must be, and each may be, a deliberate fiction. In the second place, both the Gospels bear unconscious testimony to the fact that Joseph was originally supposed to be, by the natural course of things, the father of