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Exercise 6.1

a) What does this application do?

"World of Zuul" is a very simple, text based adventure game. Users can walk around
some scenery. That's all.

b) What commands does the game accept?

help
quit
go "somewhere"

c) What does each command do?

help: Gives information about the commands available
quit: Exits the game
go "somewhere": Goes through the door in the specified direction. Directions can be
one of these: north, east, south, and west.

d) How many rooms are in the scenario?

There are 5 rooms.

e) Draw a map of the existing rooms.

Exercise 6.2

The descriptions below are taken from the documentation in the source code of the
classes

Parser:
This parser reads user input and tries to interpret it as an "Adventure" command.
Every time it is called it reads a line from the terminal and tries to interpret the line as
a two-word command. It returns the command as an object of class Command.
The parser has a set of known command words. It checks user input against the
known commands, and if the input is not one of the known commands, it returns a
command object that is marked as an unknown command.

Game:
This class is the main class of the "World of Zuul" application.
To play this game, create an instance of this class and call the "play" method.
This main class creates and initializes all the others: it creates all rooms, creates the
parser and starts the game. It also evaluates and executes the commands that the
parser returns.

Command:
This class holds information about a command that was issued by the user. A
command currently consists of two strings: a command word and a second word (for
example, if the command was "take map", then the two strings obviously are "take"
and "map").
The way this is used is: Commands are already checked for being valid command
words. If the user entered an invalid command (a word that is not known) then the
command word is <null>.
If the command had only one word, then the second word is <null>.

CommandWords:
This class holds an enumeration of all command words known to the game. It is used
to recognize commands as they are typed in.

Room:
A "Room" represents one location in the scenery of the game. It is connected to other
rooms via exits. The exits are labeled north, east, south, west. For each direction, the
room stores a reference to the neighboring room, or null if there is no exit in that
direction.

Exercise 6.5

Add the method printLocationInfo() from Code 6.2 to the class Game. Then
replace the corresponding lines from the method printWelcome() and goRoom() with
a call to the method: printLocationInfo()

Exercise 6.7

Add this method to the Room class:

/**
* Return a string describing the room's exits, for example
* "Exits: north west".
*/
public String getExitString()
{
String returnString = "Exits: ";
if(northExit != null) {
returnString += "north ";
}
if(eastExit != null) {
returnString += "east ";
}
if(southExit != null) {
returnString += "south ";
}
if(westExit != null) {
 returnString += "west ";
}
return returnString;
}

Modify printLocationInfo() in the Game class like this:

private void printLocationInfo()

{
System.out.println("You are " +
currentRoom.getDescription());
System.out.print(currentRoom.getExitString());
System.out.println();
}

Exercise 6.8

See the zuul-better project included on the CD.

Exercise 6.9

Taken from the API documentation:

“Returns a Set view of the keys contained in this map. The set is backed by the map,
so changes to the map are reflected in the set, and vice-versa. If the map is modified
while an iteration over the set is in progress (except through the iterator's own remove
operation), the results of the iteration are undefined. The set supports element
removal, which removes the corresponding mapping from the map, via the
Iterator.remove, Set.remove, removeAll, retainAll, and clear operations. It
does not support the add or addAll operations.”

Exercise 6.10

First, a string called returnString is created with the initial text "Exits: ". We will
then add the exits to this string and finally return it. The names of the available exits
are added by retrieving the set of keys from the HashMap of exits. We then iterate
through the set of keys and in each iteration we add the key of the exit to
returnString.

Exercise 6.11

See the zuul-better project included on the CD.

Exercise 6.12

The objects are:

game1:Game
-->parser:Parser
--> commands:CommandWords
-->outside:Room
-->theatre:Room
-->lab:Room
-->office:Room
-->pub:Room
Exercise 6.13

The reference from game1:Game to the outside:Room is changed to the new room
that we have moved into. If we use the command go east the reference will be to
theatre:Room.

Exercise 6.14

See page 216 of the fifth edition for the implementation details.

Exercise 6.15

private void eat()

{
System.out.println(“You have eaten now and you are not hungry any
more”):
}

adding:

else if(commandWord.equals("eat")) {
eat();
}

to the command-testing statements.

Exercise 6.17

No, you don't need to change Game class.

The list of commands which are printed out is generated from the array of
validCommands, and will therefore automatically include any new commands that
have been added to this array.

Exercise 6.18

Modify the printHelp() method in Game so the last lines is:

System.out.println(parser.getCommandList());

Add the following method to Parser:

public String getCommandList()

{
return commands.getCommandList();
}

And remove the now obsolete showCommands() from Parser (if you implemented
this in Exercise 6.16)

In CommandWords add this method:

public String getCommandList()

 {
String commandList = "";
for(String command : validCommands) {
commandList += command + " ";
}
return commandList;
}

And remove the now obsolete showCommands() from CommandWords (if you
implemented this in Exercise 6.16)

Exercise 6.19

Information about the model-view-control (MVC) pattern can be found here:

http://www.enode.com/x/markup/tutorial/mvc.html

A simple example of a Java program that uses MVC:

http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/mvc/mvcgui.html

For more examples of the MVC pattern look at the Java Swing implementation which
makes heavy use of the MVC pattern.

The MVC pattern is related to the discussion in this chapter because it is a pattern that
decouples objects into three types of objects: Model objects which represent the data;
View objects which handle the display; and Control objects which handle events that
modify the View or Model objects. In this chapter we only discussed the separation of
View and Model - adding another level of decoupling makes the design even more
flexible.

To apply the MVC pattern to the Zuul game, we need to split the application into a
model, view and control. We might do something like this:

Model: The Game and Room classes represent the model. We might split the Game class
into two classes one which represents the model and one which does the rest. The
changes we make to the model while playing the game, is to change the game object's
reference to the current room. Whenever we change this reference the model should
fire an event to all registered listeners (the View).

View: We should create a new class which handles the view of the model - that is,
printing the text to the screen when an update is received from the model.

Controller: As it is now, the control of the game is done from the Game class in the
play() and processCommand(Command command) methods.

An example of Zuul with the MVC pattern applied can be downloaded here: 06-19-
zuul-mvc.zip

Exercise 6.20
See Exercise 6.22. (Although the rooms can hold several items)

Exercise 6.21

a) How should the information about an item present in a room be produced?

The items are in the rooms, and hence the room should produce the information about
items present.

b) Which class should produce the string describing the item?

The Item class should produce the string.

c) Which class should print the description of the item?

The Game class is responsible for printing, and hence should also print the description
of an item. It is, however, not necessary to explicitly print the item description in the
game class if the description of the room includes the description of the item in the
room.

Exercise 6.22

Download: 06-22-zuul-with-items.zip

Exercise 6.23

Add the command "back" to the CommandWords.

The rest of the modifications are in the Game class:

Add a field:

private Room previousRoom;

In processCommand() add:

else if (commandWord.equals("back")) {
goBack(command);
}

Introduce a new method enterRoom, which stores the previousRoom. Update the
method goRoom() to use this method.

/**
* Enters the specified room and prints the description.
*/
private void enterRoom(Room nextRoom)
{
previousRoom = currentRoom;
currentRoom = nextRoom;
System.out.println(currentRoom.getLongDescription());
}
Add this method:

/**
* Go back to the previous room.
*/
private void goBack(Command command)
{
if(command.hasSecondWord()) {
System.out.println("Back where?");
return;
}
if (previousRoom == null) {
System.out.println("You have nowhere to go back to!");
}
else {
enterRoom(previousRoom);
}
}

Exercise 6.24

When a second word is typed after back, it prints an error message: "Go where?"

Another case of negative testing: When the game is just started, there is no previous
room. In the above implementation this is handled by printing a message to the user:
"You can't go back to nothing!"

Exercise 6.25

If back is typed in twice you end up in the same room as where you were when you
typed back the first time. Yes this is sensible, but it might be more useful to be able to
go back several steps - see the next exercise.

Exercise 6.26

Download: 06-26-zuul-back.zip

Exercise 6.27

There are many possible tests for the zuul project. It is important to have both positive
and negative tests.

Some of the tests could be:

- testing that the rooms are properly connected.

- testing that all the commands are recognised and works as expected.
- testing the back command as explained in the solution to Exercise 6.24

Exercise 6.28

Download: 06-28-zuul-refactored.zip
Exercise 6.29 - 6.33

All the modifications suggested in Exercises 6.29 through 6.33 is implemented in this
project:

Download: 06-33-zuul-with-player.zip

Exercise 6.35

Add this in Game.processCommand:

else if (commandWord == CommandWord.LOOK) {

look();
}

And add this method to Game:

private void look()

{
System.out.println(currentRoom.longDescription());
}

And finally, modify the CommandWord to include the new value LOOK:

public enum CommandWord

{
// A value for each command word, plus one for unrecognised
// commands.
GO, QUIT, HELP, LOOK, UNKNOWN;
}

Oh, and don't forget to specify the text associated with the command in the
CommandWords constructor:

validCommands.put("look", CommandWord.LOOK);

Exercise 6.36

Using different command words only requires changes in the CommandWords class.

Exercise 6.37

When the command word for help is changed it is NOT changed in the welcome
message.

Exercise 6.38

public enum Position

{
TOP, MIDDLE, BOTTOM
}
Exercise 6.39

Almost. You also need to add the functionality of it to the Game class. Compared to
Exercise 6.35 you have one less class to modify in this exercise.

Exercise 6.40

Yes. It is just using the enum itself: CommandWord.HELP. This will return the
command string because toString() has been overridden in CommandWord.

Exercise 6.41

Download: 06-41-zuul-with-timelimit.zip

Exercise 6.42

To implement a trapdoor (one way door), simply remove one of the exits. For
instance, you could remove the exit from the pub to the outside by removing this line:

pub.setExit("east", outside);

Exercise 6.43

Download: 06-43-zuul-with-beamer.zip

Exercise 6.44

Download: 06-44-zuul-with-doors.zip

Exercise 6.45

Download: 06-45-zuul-with-transporter.zip

Exercise 6.46

Download: 06-46-zuul-even-better.zip

Exercise 6.49

The method signature is:

static int max(int a, int b);

Exercise 6.50

The methods in the Math class are static because they implement mathematical
function operations – their results do not depend on an object's state and they always
return the same results given the same arguments. Therefore we do not need an object
with state to use them. It is also more convenient that you do not have to create an
object before calling the method.
Yes, they could have been instance methods, but that would require that you create an
instance of the Math class before you could use the methods. The object would have
no useful mutable state, only methods.

Exercise 6.51

public static long testLoopTime()

{
long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
for(int i = 1; i <= 100; i++) {
// Do nothing!
}
long endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
return endTime - startTime;
}

Exercise 6.52

The main method could look like this:

public static void main(String args[])

{
Game game = new Game();

game.play();
}

Exercise 6.54

The main method could look like this:

public static void main(String args[])

{
SupportSystem system = new SupportSystem();

system.start();
}

Exercise 6.55

a) Yes, you can call a static method from an instance method.

b) No, you cannot call an instance method from a static method (at least not without
first creating an object to call it on).

c) Yes, you can call a static method from a static method.

Exercise 6.56

Yes, you can use a static field and the constructor(s) of the class to count the number
of instantiations. If you have more that one constructor, you would need to increase
the count in each of the constructors. This is one way to do it:

public class Test

{
private static int instanceCount = 0;

public Test()
{
instanceCount++;
}

public Test(String something)

{
instanceCount++;
}

public static int numberOfInstances()

{
return instanceCount;
}
}

It is actually possible to avoid the incrementation in each constructor. You can use an
initialiser block which is invoked before the constructor call. This is not a structure
that is used very often, and you might be best off without telling your students about
it. But if someone should ask you about it, here is how it looks:

public class Test

{
private static int instanceCount = 0;

{
instanceCount++;
}

public Test()
{
}

public Test(String something)

{
}

public static int numberOfInstances()

{
return instanceCount
}
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
 hand; repent ye, and believe in the Gospel [not a word of which has been
communicated].

And passing along by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of
Simon casting a net in the sea; for they were fishers. And Jesus said unto them,
Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men. And
straightway they left the nets, and followed him. And going on a little further, he
saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who also were in the boat
mending the nets. And straightway he called them; and they left their father
Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and went after him.

This “episode,” for Mr. Sinclair, “seems to belong to real life, to be told of a
real human being with distinct individuality.” For critical readers it is a
primitive “conventional” narrative, told by a writer who has absolutely no
historic knowledge to communicate. Of the preaching of the Saviour he has
no more to tell than of the preaching of the Baptist. Both are as purely
“conventional,” so far, as an archaic statue of Hermes. Of “the freedom and
variety of life” there is not a trace; Mr. Sinclair, who professes to find these
qualities, is talking in the manner of a showman at a fair. The important
process of making disciples resolves itself into a fairy tale: “Come and I
will make you fishers of men; and they came.” A measure of “literary
artifice” is perhaps to be assigned to the items of “casting a net,” “mending
the net,” and “left their father in the boat with the hired servants”;4 but it is
the literary art of a thousand fairy tales, savage and civilized, and stands for
the method of a narrator who is dealing with purely conventional figures,
not with characters concerning which he has knowledge. The calling of the
first disciples in the rejected Fourth Gospel has much more semblance of
reality.

If the cautious reader is slow to see these plain facts on the pointing of one
who is avowedly an unbeliever in the historic tradition, let him listen to a
scholar of the highest eminence, who, after proving himself a master in Old
Testament criticism, set himself to specialize on the New. Says Wellhausen:
“The Gospel of Mark, in its entirety, lacks the character of history.”5 And he
makes good his judgment in detail:—
 Names of persons are rare: even Jairus is not named in [codex] D. Among the
dramatis personæ it is only Jesus who distinctively speaks and acts; the
antagonists provoke him; the disciples are only figures in the background. But of
what he lived by, how he dwelt, ate, and drank, bore himself with his companions,
nothing is vouchsafed. It is told that he taught in the synagogue on the Sabbath,
but no notion is given of the how; we get only something of what he said outside
the synagogue, usually through a special incident which elicits it. The normal
things are never related, only the extraordinary.... The scantiness of the tradition is
remarkable.6

The local connection of the events, the itinerary, leaves as much to be desired as
the chronological; seldom is the transit indicated in the change of scene. Single
incidents are often set forth in a lively way, and this without any unreal or merely
rhetorical devices, but they are only anecdotally related, rari nantes in gurgite
vasto. They do not amount to material for a life of Jesus. And one never gets the
impression that an attempt had been made among those who had eaten and drunk
with him to give others a notion of his personality.7

Wellhausen, it is true, finds suggestions of a real and commanding

personality; but they are very scanty, the only concrete detail being the
watching the people as they drop their offerings into the collecting-chest!
“Passionate moral sensibility distinguishes him. He gives way to divine
feeling in anger against the oppressors of the people and in sympathy with
the lowly.” But here too there is qualification:—

But in Mark this motive for miracles seldom comes out. They are meant to be
mainly displays of the Messiah’s power. Mark does not write de vita et moribus
Jesu: he has not the aim of making his person distinguishable, or even intelligible.
It is lost for him in the divine vocation; he means to show that Jesus is the Christ.8

Then we have a significant balancing between the perception that Mark is

not history, and that, after all, it is practically all there is:—

Already the oral tradition which he found had been condensed under the influence
of the standpoint from which he set out. He is silent on this and that which he can
omit as being known to his readers—for instance, the names of the parents of
Jesus (!). Nevertheless, he has left little that is properly historical for his
successors to glean after him; and what they know in addition is of doubtful
worth....
 Why is not something more, and something more trustworthy, reported of the
intercourse of the Master with his disciples? It would rather seem that the
narrative tradition in Mark did not come directly from the intimates of Jesus. It
has on the whole a somewhat rude and demotic cast, as if it had previously by a
long circulation in the mouth of the people come to the rough and drastic style in
which it lies before us.... Mark took up what the tradition carried to him.

Such is the outcome of a close examination by an original scholar who

takes for granted the historicity of Jesus. It is a poor support to a pretence of
finding a lifelike narrative.

If the reader under Mr. Sinclair’s tutelage will at this point vary his study
somewhat (at the cost of a few extra hours) by reading samples of quite
primitive folk-lore—say the Hottentot Fables and Tales collected by Dr.
Bleek, in which the characters are mostly, but not always, animals; or some
of the fairy tales in Gill’s Myths and Songs of the South Pacific—and
then proceed to the tale of Tom Tit Tot, as given by Mr. Edward Clodd in
the dialect of East Anglia, he will perhaps begin to realize that
unsophisticated narrators not only can but frequently do give certain
touches of quasi-reality to “episodes” which no civilized reader can suppose
to have been real. In particular he will find in the vivacious Tom Tit Tot an
amount of “the freedom and variety of life” in comparison with which the
archaic stiffness and bareness of the Gospel narrative is as dumb-show
beside drama. And if he will next pay some attention to the narrative of
Homer, in which Zeus and Hêrê are so much more life-like than a multitude
of the human personages of the epic, and then turn to see how Plutarch
writes professed biography, some of it absolutely mythical, but all of it on a
documentary basis of some kind, he will perhaps begin to suspect that Mr.
Sinclair has not even perceived the nature of the problem on which he
pronounces, and so is not in a position to “consider” it at all. Plutarch is
nearly as circumstantial about Theseus and Herakles and Romulus as about
Solon. But when he has real biographical material to go upon as to real
personages he gives us a “freedom and variety of life” which is as far as the
poles asunder from the hieratic figures of the Christian Gospel. Take his
Fabius Maximus. After the pedigree, with its due touch of myth, we read:—
 His own personal nickname was Verrucosus, because he had a little wart growing
on his upper lip. The name of Ovicula, signifying sheep, was also given him while
yet a child, because of his slow and gentle disposition. He was quiet and silent,
very cautious in taking part in children’s games, and learned his lessons slowly
and with difficulty, which, combined with his easy obliging ways with his
comrades, made those who did not know him think that he was dull and stupid.
Few there were who could discern, hidden in the depths of his soul, his glorious
and lion-like character.

This is biography, accurate or otherwise. Take again the Life of Pericles,

where after the brief account of parentage, with the item of the mother’s
dream, we get this:—

His body was symmetrical, but his head was long out of all proportion; for which
reason in nearly all his statues he is represented wearing a helmet; as the sculptors
did not wish, I suppose, to reproach him with this blemish.... Most writers tell us
that his tutor in music was Damon, whose name they say should be pronounced
with the first syllable short. Aristotle, however, says that he studied under
Pythocleides. This Damon, it seems, was a sophist of the highest order....

The “biographer” who so satisfies Mr. Sinclair’s sense of actuality has not
one word of this kind to say of the youth, upbringing, birthplace, or
appearance of the Teacher, who for him was either God or Supreme Man.
Seeking for the alleged “freedom and variety of life” in the narrative, we go
on to read:—

And they go into Capernaum; and straightway on the sabbath day he entered into
the synagogue and taught. And they were astonished at his teaching: for he taught
them as having authority, and not as the scribes. And straightway there was in
their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit—

and straightway we are back in the miraculous. Mr. Joseph McCabe, who in
his excellent book on the Sources of the Morality of the Gospels
avows that he holds by the belief in a historical Jesus, though unable to
assign to him with confidence any one utterance in the record, fatally
anticipates Mr. Sinclair by remarking that “If the inquirer will try the simple
and interesting experiment of eliminating from the Gospel of Mark all the
episodes which essentially involve miracle, he will find the remainder of
the narrative amazingly paltry.” To which verdict does the independent
reader begin to incline? Thus the “episodes” continue, after three
paragraphs of the miraculous:—

And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose up and went out, and
departed into a desert place, and there prayed. And Simon and they that were with
him followed after him; and they found him, and say unto him, All are seeking
thee. And he saith unto them, Let us go elsewhere into the next towns, that I may
preach there also; for to this end came I forth. And he went into their synagogues
throughout all Galilee, preaching and casting out devils.

It would seem sufficient to say that Mr. Sinclair, with his “freedom and
variety of life,” is incapable of critical reflection upon what he reads. In the
opening chapter we have not a single touch of actuality; the three
meaningless and valueless touches of detail (“a great while before day” is
the third) serve only to reveal the absolute deficit of biographical
knowledge. We have reiterated statements that there was teaching, and not a
syllable of what was taught. The only utterances recorded in the chapter are
parts of the miracle-episodes, which we are supposed to ignore. Let us then
consider the critic’s further asseveration:—

It will be observed that certain distinct traits appear in the central figure, and that
these traits are not merely those of the conventional religious hero, but the more
simple human touches of anger, pity, indignation, despondency, exultation; these
scattered touches, each so vivid, fuse into a natural and intelligible whole. The
Jesus of Mark is a real man, who moves and speaks and feels like a man (!)—“a
creature not too bright or good for human nature’s daily food”—

a notable variation from the more familiar thesis of the “sublime” and
“unique” figure of current polemic. Looking for the alleged details, we find
Jesus calling the fifth disciple: “He saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose
and followed him”—another touch of “freedom and variety.” Then, after a
series of Messianic utterances, including a pronouncement against
Sabbatarianism of the extremer sort, comes the story of the healing of the
withered hand, with its indignant allocution to “them” in the synagogue: “Is
it lawful on the sabbath day to do good, or to do harm, to save a life or to
kill?” Here, in a miracle story, we have an intelligible protest against
Sabbatarianism: is it the protest or the indignation that vouches for the
actuality of the protesting figure? Nay, if we are to elide the miraculous,
how are we to let the allocution stand?

These protests against Sabbatarianism, as it happens, are the first

approximations to actuality in the document; and as such they raise
questions of which the “instinctive” school appear to have no glimpse, but
which we shall later have to consider closely. In the present connection, it
may suffice to ask the question: Was anti-Sabbatarianism, or was it not, the
first concrete issue raised by the alleged Teacher? In the case put, is it likely
to have been? Were the miraculous healing of disease, and the necessity of
feeding the disciples, with the corollary that the Son of Man was Lord of
the Sabbath, salient features in a popular gospel of repentance in view of
the coming of the Kingdom of God? If so, it is in flat negation of the
insistence on the maintenance of the law in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt.
v, 17–20 ), which thus becomes for us a later imposition on the cultus of a
purely Judaic principle, in antagonism to the other. That is to say, a
movement which began with anti-Sabbatarianism was after a time joined or
directed by Sabbatarian Judaists, for whom the complete apparatus of the
law was vital. If, on the other hand, recognizing that anti-Sabbatarianism, in
the terms of the case, was not likely to be a primary element in the new
teaching, that its first obtrusion in the alleged earliest Gospel is in an
expressly Messianic deliverance, and its second in a miracle-story, we
proceed to “strike out” both items upon Mr. Sinclair’s ostensible principles,
we are deprived of the first touch of “indignation” and “anger” which
would otherwise serve to support his very simple thesis.

1 Jésus et la tradition évangélique, 1910, p. 45. ↑

2 It should be explained that in using, for convenience sake, the traditional ascriptions
of the four Gospels, I do not for a moment admit that these hold good of the Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John of the tradition. In not one case is that tradition historically valid. ↑
3 The Rev. A. Wright (N. T. Problems, 1898, p. 15) pronounces it “completely
unchronological.” Sanday acquiesces (id., p. 177). ↑
4 Such details, imposed on an otherwise empty narrative, suggest a pictorial basis, as
does the account of the Baptist. Strauss cites the Hebrew myth-precedent of the calling of
Elisha from the plough by Elijah. ↑
5 Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 1905, p. 51. ↑
6 Id. p. 47. ↑
7 Id. p. 51. ↑
8 Id. p. 52. ↑
Chapter V
 SCHMIEDEL AND DEROGATORY MYTH
From this point onwards, every step in the investigation will be found to
convict the Unitarian thesis of absolute nullity. It is indeed, on the face of it,
an ignorant pronouncement. The characteristics of “anger, pity, indignation,
despondency, exultation,” are all present in the myth of Herakles, of whom
Diodorus Siculus, expressly distinguishing between mythology and history,
declares (i, 2) that “by the confession of all, during his whole life he freely
undertook great and continual labours and dangers, in order that by doing
good to the race of men he might win immortal fame.” Herakles was, in
fact, a Saviour who “went about doing good.”1 The historicity of Herakles
is not on that score accepted by instructed men; though I have known
divinity students no less contemptuous over the description of the cognate
Samson saga as a sun myth than is Mr. Sinclair over the denial of the
historicity of Jesus.

So common a feature of a hundred myths, indeed, is the set of

characteristics founded on, that we may at once come to the basis of his
argument, a blundering reiteration of the famous thesis of Professor
Schmiedel, who is the sole source of Mr. Sinclair’s latent erudition. “The
line of inquiry here suggested,” he explains, “has been worked out in a
pamphlet of Schmiedel, which will be found in the Fellowship library.” But
the dialectic which broadly avails for the Bible class will not serve their
instructor here. The essence of the argument which Professor Schmiedel
urges with scholarlike sobriety is thus put by Mr. Sinclair with the
extravagance natural to his species:—

Many [compare Schmiedel!] of the stories represent him [Jesus] in a light which,
from the point of view of conventional hero-worship, is even derogatory; his
friends come to seize him as a madman; he is estranged from his own mother; he
can do no mighty work in the unsympathetic atmosphere of his own native place.

The traditionalist is here unconsciously substituting a new and different

argument for the first. Hitherto the thesis has been that of the “vividness” of
the record, the “human touches,” the “speaking and feeling like a real man,”
the “freedom and variety of life.” Apparently he has had a shadow of
misgiving over these simple criteria. If, indeed, he had given an hour to the
perusal of Albert Kalthoff’s Rise of Christianity, instead of proceeding to
vilipend a literature of which he had read nothing, he would have learned
that his preliminary thesis is there anticipated and demolished. Kalthoff
meets it by the simple observation that the books of Ruth and Jonah
supply “human touches” and “freedom and variety of life” to a far greater
degree than does the Gospel story considered as a life of Jesus; though
practically all scholars are now agreed that both of the former books are
deliberately planned fictions, or early “novels with a purpose.” Ruth is
skilfully framed to contend against the Jewish bigotry of race; and Jonah to
substitute a humane ideal for the ferocious one embalmed in so much of the
sacred literature. Yet so “vividly” are the central personages portrayed that
down till the other day all the generations of Christendom, educated and
uneducated alike, accepted them unquestioningly as real records, whatever
might be thought by the judicious few of the miracle element in Jonah.

It is thus ostensibly quite expedient to substitute for the simple thesis of

“vividness” in regard to the second Gospel the quite different argument that
some of the details exclude the notion that “the author” regarded Jesus as a
supernatural person. But this thesis instantly involves the defence in fresh
trouble, besides breaking down utterly on its own merits. In the early
chapters of Mark, Jesus is emphatically presented as a supernormal person
—the deity’s “beloved Son,” “the Holy One of God,” who has the divine
power of forgiving sins, is “lord even of the sabbath,” and is hailed by the
defeated spirits of evil as “the Son of God,” and the “Son of the Most High
God.” Either the conception of Jesus in Mark vi is compatible with all this
or it is not. If not, the case collapses, for the “derogatory” episode must be
at once branded as an interpolation. And if it be argued that even as an
interpolation it testifies at once to a non-supernaturalist view of the
Founder’s function and a real knowledge of his life and actions, we have
only to give a list of more or less mythical names in rebuttal. To claim that
the episode in Mark vi, 1–6 , is “derogatory from the point of view of
conventional hero-worship,” and therefore presumptively historical, is to
ignore alike Jewish and Gentile hero-worship. In the Old Testament Adam,
Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Judah, Moses, Aaron, Samson, David, and Solomon
are all successively placed in “derogatory” positions; and the Pagan hero-
worshippers of antiquity are equally with the Jewish recalcitrant to Mr.
Sinclair’s conviction of what they ought to do.

Professor Schmiedel is aware, though Mr. Sinclair apparently is not, that

Herakles in the myth is repeatedly placed in “derogatory” positions, and is
not only seized as a madman but actually driven mad. The reader who will
further extend Mr. Sinclair’s brief curriculum to a perusal of the Bacchæ of
Euripides will find that the God, who in another story is temporarily driven
mad by Juno, is there subjected to even greater indignities than those so
triumphantly specified by our hierologist. Herakles and Dionysos, we may
be told, were only demigods, not Gods. But Professor Schmiedel’s thesis is
that for the writer of Mark or of his original document Jesus was only a
holy man. On the other hand—to say nothing of the myths of Zeus and
Hêrê, Arês and Aphroditê, Hephaistos and Poseidon—Apollo, certainly a
God for the framers of his myth, is there actually represented as being
banished from heaven and living in a state of servitude to Admetus for nine
years. A God, then, could be conceived in civilized antiquity as undergoing
many and serious indignities. These simple à priori arguments are apt to
miscarry even in the hands of careful and scrupulous scholars like Professor
Schmiedel, who have failed to realize that no amount of textual scholarship
can suffice to settle problems which in their very nature involve
fundamental issues of anthropology, mythology, and hierology. As
Professor Schmiedel is never guilty of browbeating, I make no
disparagement of his solid work on the score that he has not taken account
of these fields in his argument; but when his untenable thesis is brandished
by men who have neither his form of scholarship nor any other, it is apt to
incur summary handling.

Elsewhere I have examined Professor Schmiedel’s thesis in detail.2 Here it

may suffice to point out (1) as aforesaid, that the argument from derogatory
treatment is not in the least a proof that in an ancient narrative a personage
is not regarded as superhuman; (2) that a suffering Messiah was expressly
formulated in Jewish literature in the pre-Christian period;3 and (3) that
there are extremely strong grounds for inferring purposive invention—of
that naïf kind which marks the whole mass of early hierology—in the very
episodes upon which he founds. The first concrete details of the Founder’s
propaganda in Mark, as we have seen, exhibit him as clashing with the
Judaic environment. In later episodes he clashes with it yet further. The
“derogatory” episodes exhibit him as clashing with his personal
environment, his family and kin, concerning whom there has been no
mention whatever at the outset, where we should expect to find it. All this is
in line with the anti-Judaic element of the Gospel. If at early stages in the
larger Jesuine movement there were reasons why the Founder should be
represented as detaching himself from the Mosaic law; as being
misunderstood and deserted by his disciples; and as disparaging even the
listening Jewish multitude (concerning whom Mark, iv, 10 sq., makes him
say that “unto them that are without, all things are done in parables, that
seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not
understand, lest haply they should turn again, and it should be forgiven
them”), is there anything unlikely in his being inventively represented as
meeting antipathetic treatment from his family?4 At a time when so-called
“brothers of the Lord” ostensibly claimed authority in the Judæo-Gentile
community, an invented tale of original domestic hostility to the Teacher
would be as likely as the presence of authorities so styled is unlikely on the
assumption that the story in Mark was all along current. The very fact that
allusions to the family of the Lord suddenly appear in a record which had
introduced him as a heavenly messenger, without mention of home or
kindred or preparation, tells wholly against the originality of the later
details, which in the case of the naming of “the carpenter” and his mother
have a polemic purpose.5

1 Note the identity of terms, εὐεργετῶν in Acts (x, 38), εὐεργετήσας in Diodorus. ↑
2 Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 441 sq.; Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 229–236.
A notably effective criticism is passed on the thesis in Prof. W. B. Smith’s Ecce Deus, p.
177 sq. Mr. Sinclair, of course, does not dream of meeting such replies. ↑
3 What else is signified by Acts iii, 18 ; xvii, 3 ? ↑
4 Dr. W. B. Smith sees in the story a mere symbolizing of the rejection of Jesus by the
Jews. This may very well be the case. ↑
5 Dr. Flinders Petrie even infers a “late” reference to the Virgin-Birth. The Growth of
the Gospels, 1910, p. 86. This Loisy rejects. ↑
Chapter VI
 THE VISIONARY EVANGEL
All this applies, of course, to the “Primitive Gospel” held to underlie all of
the synoptics, Mark included—a datum which reduces to comparative
unimportance the question of priority among these. As collected by the
school of Bernhard Weiss,1 the primitive Gospel, like Mark, set out with a
non-historical introduction of the Messiah to be baptized by John. It then
gives the temptation myth in full; and immediately afterwards the Teacher
is made to address to disciples (who have not previously been mentioned or
in any way accounted for) the Sermon on the Mount, with variations, and
without any mount. In this place we have the uncompromising insistence on
the Mosaic law; and soon, after some miracles of healing and some
Messianic discourses, including the liturgical “Come unto me all ye that
labour,” we have the Sabbatarian question raised on the miracle of the
healing of the man with the dropsy, but without the argument from the
Davidic eating of the shewbread.2

There is no more of the colour of history here than in Mark: so obviously is

it wanting in both that the really considerate exegetes are driven to explain
that history was not the object in either writing. In both “the twelve” are
suddenly sent—in the case of Mark, after a list of twelve had been inserted
without any reference to the first specified five; in the reconstructed
“primitive” document without any list whatever—to preach the blank
gospel, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” with menaces for the non-
recipient, the allocutions to Chorazin and Bethsaida being here made part of
the instructions to the apostles.

What, then, are the disciples supposed to have preached? What had the
Teacher preached as an evangel of “the Kingdom”? The record has
expressly represented that his parables were incomprehensible to his own
disciples; and when they ask for an explanation they are told that the
parables are expressly meant to be unintelligible, but that to them an
explanation is vouchsafed. It is to the effect that “the seed is the word.”
What word? The “Kingdom”? The mystic allegories on that head are
avowedly not for the multitude: they could not have been. Yet those
allegories are the sole explanations ever afforded in the Gospels of the
formula of “the Kingdom” which was to be the purport of the evangel of the
apostles to the multitude. They themselves had failed to understand the
parables; and they were forbidden to convey the explanation. What, then,
had they to convey?

And that issue raises another. Why were there disciples at all? Disciples are
understood to be prepared as participants in or propagandists of somebody’s
teaching—a lore either exoteric or esoteric. But no intelligible view has
ever been given of the purpose of the Gospel Jesus in creating his group of
Twelve. If we ask what he taught them, the only answer given by the
documents is: (1) Casting out devils; (2) The meaning of parables which
were meant to be unintelligible to the people: that is, either sheer
thaumaturgy or a teaching which was never to be passed on. On the
economic life of the group not one gleam of light is cast. Judas carried a
“bag,” but as to whence came its contents there is no hint. The whole
concept hangs in the air, a baseless dream. The myth-makers have not even
tried to make it plausible.

The problems thus raised are not only not faced by the orthodox exegetes;
they are not seen by them. They take the most laudable pains to ascertain
what the primitive Gospel was like, and, having settled it to the satisfaction
of a certain number, they rest from their labours. Yet we are only at the
beginning of the main, the historic problem, from which Baur recalled
Strauss to the documentary, with the virtual promise that its solution would
clear up the other.

A “higher” criticism than that so-called, it is clear, must set about the task;
and its first conclusion, I suggest, must be that there never was any
Christian evangel by the Christ and the Twelve. These allegories of the
Kingdom are framed to conceal the fact that the gospel-makers had no
evangel to describe; though it may be claimed as a proof of their forensic
simplicity that they actually represent the Founder as vetoing all popular
explanation of the very formula which they say he sent his disciples to
preach to the populace. An idea of the Kingdom of God, it may be argued,
was already current among the Jews: the documents assert that that was the
theme of the Baptist. Precisely, but was the evangel of Jesus then simply the
evangel of John, which it was to supersede? And was the evangel of John
only the old evangel, preached by Pharisees and others from the time of the
Maccabees onwards?3 Whatever it was, what is the meaning of the repeated
Gospel declaration that the nature of the Kingdom must not be explained to
the people? There is only one inference. The story of the sending forth of
the twelve is as plainly mythical as is Luke’s story of the sending forth of
the seventy, which even the orthodox exegetes abandon as a “symmetrical”
myth; though they retain the allocution embodied in it. What is in theory the
supreme episode in the early propaganda of the cult is found to have neither
historical content nor moral significance. Not only is there not a word of
explanation of the formula of the evangel, there is not a word of description
of the apostles’ experience, but simply the usual negation of knowledge:—

And the disciples returned and told him all that they had done, saying, Lord, even
the devils are subject unto us through thy name. And he said, I beheld Satan as
lightning fall from heaven; behold I have given you power to tread on serpents
and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy; notwithstanding, in this
rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you, but rejoice because your names
are written in heaven.... (Luke x, 17–20 , with “the disciples” for “the seventy”).

And this is history, or what the early Christian leaders thought fit to put in
place of history, for Christian edification. The disciples, be it observed, had
exorcized in the name of Jesus where Jesus had never been, a detail
accepted by the faithful unsuspectingly, and temporized over no less
unsuspectingly by the “liberal” school, but serving for the critical student to
raise the question: Was there, then, an older cult of a Jesus-God in
Palestine? Leaving that problem for the present, we can but note that the
report in effect tells that there was no evangel to preach. To any reflecting
mind, it is the utterance of men who had nothing to relate, but are inserting
an empty framework, wholly mythical, in a void past. Themselves ruled by
the crudest superstition, they do but make the Divine Teacher talk on their
own level, babbling of Satan falling from heaven, and of treading on
serpents. All the labours of the generations of laborious scholars who have
striven to get to the foundations of their documents have resulted in a
pastiche which only the more clearly reveals the total absence of a historic
basis such as the Gospels more circumstantially suggest. In the end we have
neither history nor biography, but an absolutely enigmatic evangel, set in a
miscellany of miracles and of discourses which are but devices to disguise
the fact that there had been no original evangel to preach. If the early
church had any creed, it was not this. It originated in a rite, not in an
evangel.

One hypothesis might, indeed, be hazarded to save the possibility of an

actual evangel by the Founder. If, taking him to be historical, we assume
him to have preached a political doctrine subversive of the Roman rule, and
to have thereby met his death, we could understand that, in a later period in
which the writers connected with the movement were much concerned to
conciliate the Romans, it might have been felt expedient, and indeed
imperative, to suppress the facts. They would not specify the evangel,
because they dared not. On this view the Founder was a Messiah of the
ordinary Jewish type, aiming at the restoration of the Jewish State. But such
a Jesus would not be the “Jesus of the Gospels” at all. He would merely be
a personage of the same (common) name, who in no way answered to the
Gospel figure, but had been wholly denaturalized to make him a cult-centre.
On this hypothesis there has been no escape from the “myth-theory,” but
merely a restatement of it. A Jesus put to death by the Romans as a rebel
Mahdi refuses to compose with the Teacher who sends out his apostles to
preach his evangel; who proclaims, if anything, a purely spiritual kingdom;
and who is put to death as seeking to subvert the Jewish faith, the Roman
governor giving only a passive and reluctant assent. On the political
hypothesis, as on the myth-theory here put, the whole Gospel narrative of
the Tragedy which establishes the cult remains mythical. We have but to
proceed, then, with the analysis which reveals the manner of its
composition and of its inclusion in the record.

It is admitted by the reconstructors that the primitive Gospel had no

conclusion, telling nothing of Last Supper, Agony, Betrayal, Crucifixion, or
Resurrection. It did not even name Judas as the betrayer. And they explain
that it was because of lacking these details that it passed out of use,
superseded by the Gospels which gave them. As if the conclusion, were it
compiled in the same fashion, could not have been added to the original
document, which ex hypothesi had the prestige of priority. Why the
composer of the original did not add the required chapters is a question to
which we get only the most futile answers, as is natural when the exegetes
have not critically scrutinized the later matter. Thus even Mr. Jolley is
content to say:—

The omission of any account of the Passion or Resurrection is natural enough in a

writing primarily intended for the Christians of Judæa, some of them witnesses of
the Crucifixion, and all, probably, familiar with the incidents of the Saviour’s
Judæan ministry, as well as with the events preceding and following the Passion,
especially when we remember that the author had no intention (!) of writing a
biography.4

Here the alleged fact that only some had seen the Crucifixion, while all
knew all about the ministry, is given as a reason why the ministry should be
described and the Crucifixion left undescribed and unmentioned!

The problem thus impossibly disposed of is really of capital importance.

Any complete solution must remain hypothetical in the nature of the case;
but at least we are bound to recognize that the Primitive Gospel may have
had a different conclusion, as it may further have contained matter not
preserved in the synoptics. That might well be a sufficient ground for its
abandonment by the Christian community; and some such suspicion simply
cannot be excluded, though it cannot be proved. But whatever we may
surmise as to what may have been in the original document, we can offer a
decisive reason why the existing conclusion should not have been part of it.
That conclusion is primarily extraneous to any gospel, and is not originally
a piece of narrative at all.

Bernhard Weiss ascribes to Mark the original narrative of the closing

events, making Matthew a simple copyist—a matter of no ultimate
importance, seeing that it is the same impossible and unhistorical narrative
in both documents. Like all the other professional exegetes, Bernhard Weiss
and his school have failed to discern that the document reveals not only that
it is not an original narrative at all, but that it could not possibly be a
narrative. “It was only in the history of the passion,” writes Weiss, “that
Mark could give a somewhat connected account partly of what he himself
had seen and partly of what he gathered from those who witnessed the
crucifixion.”5 Whether “passion” here includes the Agony in the Garden is
not clear: as it is expressly distinguished from the crucifixion, which Mark
by implication had not seen, the meaning remains obscure. Like the
ordinary traditionalists, Weiss assumes that “after Peter’s death Mark began
to note down his recollections of what the Apostle had told him of the acts
and discourses of Jesus.” Supposing this to include the record of the night
of the Betrayal, what were Mark’s possible sources for the description of
the Agony, with its prayers, its entrances and exits, when the only disciples
present are alleged to have been asleep?

It is the inconceivable omission of the exegetes to face such problems that

forces us finally to insist on their serious inadequacy in this regard. They
laboriously conduct an investigation up to the point at which it leaves us,
more certainly than ever, facing the incredible, and there they leave it. Their
work is done. That the story of the Last Night was never framed as a
narrative, but is primarily a drama, which the Gospel simply transcribes, is
manifest in every section, and is definitely proved by the verses (Mk. xiv,
41–42 ) in which, without an intervening exit, Jesus says: “Sleep on now,
and take your rest.... Arise, let us be going.” The moment the document is
realized to be a transcript of a drama it becomes clear that the “Sleep on
now, and take your rest” should be inserted before the otherwise speechless
exit in verse 40, where the text says that “they wist not what to answer
him.” Two divergent speeches have by an oversight in transcription been
fused into one.

That the story of the tragedy is a separate composition has been partly
perceived by critics of different schools without drawing any elucidating
inference. Wellhausen pronounces that the Passion cannot be excepted from
the verdict that Mark as a whole lacks the character of history. “Nothing is
motived and explained by preliminaries.”6 But “we learn as much about the
week in Jerusalem as about the year in Galilee.”7 And the Rev. Mr. Wright
gets further, though following a wrong track:—
 The very fact that S. Mark devotes six chapters out of sixteen to events which
took place in the precincts of Jerusalem makes me suspicious. Important though
the passion was, it seems to be narrated at undue length. The proportions of the
history are destroyed.8

Precisely. The story of the events in Jerusalem is no proper part either of a

primary document or of the first or second Gospel. In its detail it has no
congruity with the scanty and incoherent narrative of Mark. It is of another
provenance, although, as Wellhausen notes, quite as unhistorical as the rest.
The non-historicity of the entire action is as plain as in the case of any
episode in the Gospels. Judas is paid to betray a man who could easily have
been arrested without any process of betrayal; and the conducting of the
trial immediately upon the arrest, throughout the night, the very witnesses
being “sought for” in the darkness, is plain fiction, explicable only by the
dramatic obligation to continuous action.

1 See the useful work of Mr. A. J. Jolley, The Synoptic Problem for English Readers,
1893. ↑
2 Yet B. Weiss had contended (Manual, Eng. tr. ii, 224) that Mark ii, 24 ff., 28 ,
“must be taken from a larger collection of sayings in which the utterances of Jesus
respecting the keeping of the Sabbath were put together (Matt. xii, 2–8 ).” ↑
3 Cp. Dr. R. H. Charles, The Book of Jubilees, 1902, p. xiv. ↑
4 Work cited, p. 94. ↑
5 Manual of Introd. to the N. T., Eng. tr. 1888, ii, 261. ↑
6 Einleitung, p. 51. ↑
7 Id. p. 49. ↑
8 Some N. T. Problems, 1898, p. 176. ↑
Chapter VII
 THE ALLEGED CONSENSUS OF SCHOLARS
Such is the historical impasse at which open-minded students find
themselves when they would finally frame a reasoned conception of the
origin of the Christian religion. The documentary analysis having yielded
results which absolutely repel the accepted tradition, however denuded of
supernaturalism, we are driven to seek a solution which shall be compatible
with the data. And some of us, after spending many years in shaping a
sequence which should retain the figure of the Founder and his twelve
disciples, have found ourselves forced step by step to the conclusion that
these are all alike products of myth, intelligible and explicable only as such.
And when, in absolute loyalty to all the clues, with no foregone conclusions
to support—unless the rejection of supernaturalism be counted such—we
tentatively frame for ourselves a hypothesis of a remote origin in a
sacramental cult of human sacrifice, with a probable Jesus-God for its
centre in Palestine, we are not surprised at being met by the kind of
explosion that has met every step in the disintegration of traditional beliefs
from Copernicus to Darwin. The compendious Mr. Sinclair, who makes no
pretension to have read any of the works setting forth the new theories, thus
describes them:—

The arguments of Baconians and mythomaniacs are alike made up of the merest
blunders as to fact and the sheerest misunderstanding of the meaning of facts.
Grotesque etymologies,1 arbitrary and tasteless emendations of texts, forced
parallels, unrestrained license of conjecture, the setting of conjecture above
reasonably established fact, chains of argument in which every link is of straw,
appeals to anti-theological bias and to the miserable egotism which sees heroes
with the eyes of the valet—these are some of the formidable “evidences” in
deference to which we are asked to reverse the verdicts of tradition, scholarship,
and common sense. They have never imposed on anyone fairly conversant with
the facts. Those who have not such knowledge may either simply appeal to the
authority of scholars, OR, BETTER STILL, SUPPORT that authority by
exercizing their own IMAGINATION AND COMMON SENSE.
That tirade has seemed to me worth preserving. It is perhaps a monition to
scholars, whose function is something higher than vituperation, to note how
their inadequacies are sought to be eked out by zeal without either
scholarship or judgment, and, finally, without intellectual sincerity. The
publicist who alternately tells the unread that they ought to accept the
verdict of scholars, and that it is “better still” to “support” that verdict by
unaided “imagination and common sense,” has given us once for all his
moral measure.

Dismissing him as having served his turn in illustrating compendiously the

temper which survives in Unitarian as in Trinitarian traditionalism, we may
conclude this preliminary survey with a comment on the proposition that we
should take the “verdict of scholars.” It has been put by men, themselves
scholars in other fields, whom to bracket with Mr. Sinclair would be an
impertinence. But I have always been puzzled by their attitude. They
proceed upon three assumptions, which are all alike delusions. The first is
that there is a consensus of scholars on the details of this problem. The
second is that the professional scholars have a command of a quite
recondite knowledge as regards the central issue. The third is that there is
such a thing as professional expertise in the diagnosis of Gods, Demigods,
and real Founders in religious history. Once more, the nature of the problem
has not been realized.

Let us take first the case of a real scholar in the strictest sense of the term,
Professor Gustaf Dalman, of Leipzig, author of “The Words of Jesus,
considered in the light of Post-Biblical Jewish Writings and the Aramaic
Language.”2 To me, Professor Dalman appears to be an expert of high
competence, alike in Hebrew and Aramaic—a double qualification
possessed by very few of those to whose “verdict” we are told to bow. By
his account few previous experts in the same field have escaped bad
miscarriages, as a handful of excerpts will show:—

M. Friedmann, Onkelos und Akylas, 1896, still holds fast to the traditional opinion
that even Ezra had an Aramaic version of the Tora. In this he is mistaken.

H. Laible, in Dalman-Laible’s Jesus Christ in the Talmud, etc., incorrectly refers it

[the phrase “bastard of a wedded wife”] to Jesus. The discussion treats merely of
the definition of the term “bastard.”

Adequate proof for all three parts of this assertion [A. Neubauer’s as to the use of
Aramaic in parts of Palestine] is awanting.

F. Blass ... characterizes as Aramaisms idioms which in some cases are equally
good Hebraisms, and in others are pure Hebraisms and not Aramaisms at all.

P. W. Schmiedel ... does not succeed in reaching any really tenable separation of
Aramaisms and Hebraisms.

Resch entirely abandons the region of what is linguistically admissible.... And the
statement of the same writer that this ... “belongs very specially to the epic style
of narration in the Old Testament” is incomprehensible.

The idioms discussed above ... show at once the incorrectness of Schmiedel’s
contention that the narrative style of the Gospels and the Acts is the best witness
of the Greek that was spoken among the Jews. The fact is that the narrative
sections of the Synoptists have more Hebrew features than the discourses of Jesus
communicated by them.

Such a book as Wünsche’s Neue Beiträge, by reason of quite superficial and

inaccurate assertions and faulty translations, must even be characterized as
directly misleading and confusing.

The want of due precaution in the use made of [the Jerusalem Targums of the
Pentateuch] by J. T. Marshall is one of the things which were bound to render his
efforts to reproduce the “Aramaic Gospel” a failure.

Harnack supposes it to be an ancient Jewish conception that “everything of

genuine value which successively appears upon earth has its existence in heaven
—i.e., it exists with God—meaning in the cognition of God, and therefore really.”
But this idea must be pronounced thoroughly un-Jewish, at all events un-
Palestinian, although the medieval Kabbala certainly harbours notions of this sort.

Holtzmann ... thereby evinces merely his own ignorance of Jewish legal
processes.

Especially must his [R. H. Charles’s] attempts at retranslation [of the Assumptio
Mosis] be pronounced almost throughout a failure.

[Even in the pertinent observations of Wellhausen and Nestle] we feel the absence
of a careful separation of Hebrew and Aramaic possibilities.... He [Wellhausen]
must be reminded that the Jewish literature to this day is still mainly composed in
Hebrew.
These may suffice to illustrate the point. Few of the other experts escape
Dalman’s Ithuriel spear; and as he frankly confesses past blunders of his
own, it is not to be doubted that some of the others have returned his
thrusts.3 Supposing then that this body of experts, so many of them deep in
Aramaic, so opposed to each other on so many issues clearly within the
field of their special studies, were to unite in affirming the historicity of the
Gospel Jesus, what would their consensus signify? Simply that they were
agreed in affirming the unknown, the improbable, and the unprovable,
while they disputed over the known. Their special studies do not give them
the slightest special authority to pronounce upon such an issue. It is one of
historic inference upon a mass of data which they among them have made
common property so far as it was not so already, in the main documents and
in previous literature. Dalman, who takes for granted the historicity of Jesus
and apparently of the tradition in general, pronounces (p. 9) that

the actual discourses of Jesus in no way give the impression that He had grown up
in rural solitude and seclusion. It is true only that He, like the Galileans generally
in that region, would have little contact with literary erudition.

If Professor Dalman cannot see that the proposition in the first sentence is
extremely disturbing to the traditional belief in its Unitarian form, and that
the second is a mere petitio principii which cannot save the situation, other
people can see it. His scholarship gives him no “eminent domain” over
logic; and it does not require a knowledge of Aramaic to detect the
weakness of his reasoning. Fifty experts in Aramaic carry no weight for a
thinking man on such a non-linguistic issue; and he who defers to them as if
they did is but throwing away his birthright. When again Dalman writes (p.
60) that “Peter must have appeared (Acts x, 24 ) from a very early date as a
preacher in the Greek language,” he again raises an insoluble problem for
the traditionalists of all schools, and his scholarly status is quite irrelevant
to that.

When, yet again, he writes (p. 71) that “what is firmly established is only
the fact that Jesus spoke in Aramaic to the Jews,” his mastery of Aramaic
has nothing to do with the case. He is merely taking for granted the
historicity of the main tradition; and until he faces the problems he has
ignored (having, as he may fairly claim, been occupied with others), and
repelled the criticisms which that tradition incurs, his vote on the
unconsidered issue has no more value to a rational judgment than any other.
I have seldom read a scholarly treatise more satisfying than his within its
special field, or more provocative of astonishment at the extent to which
specialism can close men’s eyes to the problems which overlap or underlie
theirs.

And that is the consideration that has to be realized by those who talk of
scholarship (meaning simply what is called New Testament scholarship)
settling a historical problem which turns upon anthropology, mythology,
hierology, psychology, and literary and historical science in general. On
these sides the scholars in question, “Wir Gelehrten vom Fach,” as the
German specialists call themselves in the German manner, are not experts at
all, not even amateurs, inasmuch as they have never even realized that those
other sciences are involved. They have fallen into the rôle of the pedant,
properly so-called, who presumes to regulate life by inapplicable
knowledge. And even those who are wholly free of this presumptuous
pedantry, the sober, courteous, and sane scholars like Professor Schmiedel,
whose candour enables him to contribute a preface to such a book as
Professor W. B. Smith’s Der vorchristliche Jesus, to whose thesis he
does not assent—even these, as we have seen, can fail to realize the scope
of the problem to the discussion of which they have contributed.

Professor Schmiedel’s careful argument from “derogatory” episodes in the

gospel of Mark, be it repeated, is not merely inconclusive; it elicits a
rebuttal which turns it into a defeat. Inadequate even on the textual side, it
is wholly fallacious on the hierological and the mythological; and no more
than the ordinary conservative polemic does it recognize the sociological
problem involved. For those who seek to study history comprehensively
and comprehendingly, the residuum of the conservative case is a blank
incredibility. Even Dalman, after the closest linguistic and literary analysis,
has left the meaning of “the Kingdom of God” a conundrum;4 and the
conservative case finally consists in asserting that Christianity as a public
movement arose in the simple announcement of that conundrum—the mere
utterance of the formula—throughout Palestine by a body of twelve
apostles, who for the rest “cast out devils,” as instructed by their Teacher.
The “scholarship” which contentedly rests facing that vacuous conception is
a scholarship not qualified finally to handle a great historical problem as
such. It conducts itself exactly as did Biblical scholarship so long in face of
the revelations of geology, and as did Hebrew scholarship so long over the
problem of the Tabernacle in the wilderness.

Deeply learned men, in the latter case, went on for generations solemnly re-
writing history in the terms of the re-arranged documents, when all the
while the history was historic myth—perceptible as such to a Zulu who had
lived in a desert. And when the Zulu’s teacher proved the case by simple
arithmetic, he met at the hands alike of pedants and of pietists a volley of
malignant vituperation, the “religious” expert Maurice excelling many of
the most orthodox in the virulence of his scorn; while the pontifical Arnold,
from the Olympian height of his amateurism, severely lectured Colenso for
not having written in Latin.

Until the scholars and the amateurs alike renounce their own presumption,
their thrice stultified airs of finality, their estimate of their prejudice and
their personal equation as a revelation from within, and their sacerdotal
conviction that their science is the science of every case, they will have to
be unkindly reminded that they are but blunderers like other men, that in
their own specialties they convict each other of errors without number, and
that the only path to truth is that of the eternal free play and clash of all
manner of criticism. It is an exceptionally candid orthodox scholar who
writes: “It is a law of the human mind that combating error is the best way
to advance knowledge. They who have never joined in controversy have no
firm grasp of truth. Hateful and unchristian as theological disputes are apt to
become, they have this merit, that they open our eyes.”5 Let the
conservative disputants then be content to put their theses and their
arguments like other men, to meet argument with argument when they can,
and to hold their peace when they have nothing better to add than boasts
and declamation.

Before the end of the nineteenth century the very school which we are
asked to regard as endowed with quasi-papal powers in matters of historical