Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/272

 With the death of Christ, and indeed immediately before it, we pass from the region of mixed history and mythology into that of pure mythology. With the exception of his burial, all that follows has been deliberately invented. The wonders attendant upon his closing hours belong in part to the typical order of myths, and in part to an order peculiar to himself. The darkness from the sixth to the ninth hour, the rending of the temple veil, the earthquake, the rending of the rocks, are altogether like the prodigies attending the decease of other great men. The centurion's exclamation, "Truly this man was just," or "Truly this man was the son of God" (it is differently reported), is a myth belonging. peculiarly to Christ, and designed to exhibit the enforced confession of his greatness by an incredulous Roman. In Matthew, where the more modest narratives of Mark and Luke are greatly improved upon by additional details, it is further added that many bodies of saints arose, and after the resurrection appeared to many in Jerusalem (Mk. xv. 33-39; Mt. xxvii. 45, and 51-54; Lu. xxiii. 44-47))

John, who knows nothing whatever of the darkness, the accident to the temple veil, the revival of the saints, or the centurion's exclamation, has a myth of his own constructed for the especial purpose of fulfilling certain prophecies. The next day being a festival, the Jews, he says, were anxious that the bodies should not remain on the crosses. They therefore requested Pilate to break their legs and remove them. He ordered this to be done, and the legs of the two criminals were broken, but not those of Jesus, who was already dead; one of the soldiers, however, pierced his side, from which blood and water gushed out. The writer adds a strong asseveration of his veracity, but immediately betrays himself by letting out that in relating the omission to break the legs of Jesus he was comparing him to the Paschal lamb, of whom not a bone was to be broken; while in telling of the soldier who pierced his side, he was thinking of a phrase in Zechariah: "They shall look upon me whom they have pierced" (Zech. xii. 10; Jo. xix. 31-37).

The burial of the body took place quietly. Joseph of Arimathæa, a secret admirer of Jesus, placed it in a new sepulchre of his own. With him John associates a character who exists only in his Gospel, Nicodemus, and whom he introduces here