50 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[January 1, 1887. 



to this account— calls Zacharias, son of Barachias, and 

 "whom," he says, "ye slevy between the temple and the 

 altar." Zechariah prophesied five centuries before, and 

 has been apparently mixed up by the narrator (six cen- 

 turies after the prophet's time) both with a much earlier 

 Zechariah the son of .Jehoiada, who was stoned about 840 

 years before Christ, at the command of King Joash, " in the 

 court of the house of the Ijord " (2 Chronicles xxiv. 

 20-22), and with Zacharias, the son of Baruch, who was 

 slain in the midst of the temple, as related by .Josephus, 

 about a third of a century after the death of .Jesus the 

 Christ, according to the Gospel record. 



Seventhly, it is a simple fact (be the explanation what it 

 may) that the teachings in the New Testament, not only in 

 their ethical aspect, but in method, and often in actual 

 wording, are such as Gautama and his disciples preached 

 long before, and as holy Aryans had taught long before 

 Gautama. Max Miiller dwells on the " strange coinci- 

 dences" which there are "between the language of the 

 Buddha and his disciples and the language of Christ 

 and his apostles. Even," he proceeds, " some of the 

 Buddhist legends and parables sound as if taken from 

 the New Testament, though we know that many of them 

 existed before the Christian era," which is Prof. Midler's 

 quaintly cautious way of saying that the New Testament 

 stories read as if derived from those earlier legends. There 

 is not one of the teachings regarded as most chai'acteristic of 

 Christianity which is not more ancient than Christianity by 

 many hundieds of years, albeit to the Jewish people 

 those teachings were new, as they were also to those Western 

 C-ientilcs whom the early apostles of Christianity chietly 

 taught. We cannot explain this l)y suggesting simply that 

 Jesus Christ was an Essene, though it seems tolerably clear 

 that he had been trained by teachers belonging to that sect ; 

 or by suggesting, farther, that the Essenes had received their 

 doctrines from Buddhist teachers, though there is strong 

 evidence that they had. There was more in the teaching of 

 Jesus, as there was more in the teaching of Paul, than 

 either had derived directly from the earlier leaders of the 

 Essenes ; and in the doctrines of the Essenes there were 

 details which had not been derived from Buddhist mission- 

 aries, either directly or indirectly — details which belonged 

 to the Semitic character, and without which no doctrines of 

 purely Aryan origin could ever have found favour among 

 the .Tews. Moreover, moral teachings must ever be expected 

 to grow purer and lietter as the human race advances, inso- 

 much that we can never hope to account for the full value 

 of the best teachings of one age by referring them to the 

 departed teachers of a less advanced one. 



Such being the facts to which I have adverted with 

 greater or less fulness in these pages during the last twelve 

 months, I am asked what I myself believe in regard to 

 them, and how I explain the difficidties which to many they 

 appear to suggest. What is really wanted of me, I fancy, 

 is that I should mention what 1 do not believe — that I 

 should say not what I accept, but what I reject. I prefer, 

 however, to answei- the question precisely as it is put. In 

 fact, I must decline to do more, on the grounds both of 

 inclination .and of duty. 



. Here, then, are some of the conclusions I accept, and 

 I imagine I shall find few Christian readers of these pages 

 who do not agree with me in accepting the teachings thus 

 suggested. 



At any rate we can never go far wrong in adopting 

 inferences which either result directly from ascertained 

 facts, or are at least entirely consistent with them. I 

 believe that early in the first century a teacher of great 

 power, and of singulaidy earnest character, who was called 

 Jesus, and early known as the Christ or the Anointed, arose 



among the Jews. I believe that this teacher, a man of 

 pure and blameless life (whatever else, higher yet, he may 

 have been) brought before that people more effectively than 

 any before, the better part of the doctrines — obviously Arj'an 

 in origin (whatever Semitic colouring they may have ac- 

 quired) by which the Essenes had long been distinguished 

 from other sects. I believe that the other sects, and 

 especially the Pharisees, offended both by the doctrines and 

 by the success of this teacher, opposed Jesus and his disciples 

 bitterly at every turn. 



Among those who sought most ze.alously to check the 

 progress of the Essenes, and in particular of the followers 

 of Jesus, was Paul of Tarsus (by birth a Roman citizen), of 

 the tribe of Benjamin, and belonging to the most rigid sect 

 of the Pharisees. Educated in the learning of his day, for 

 which, Strabo tells us, Tarsus was celebrated, Paul went to 

 Jerusalem to study the laws and traditions of his people 

 under Gamaliel, one of the most distinguished of the Rabbis. 

 (His work in tent-making was simply carried out in pur- 

 suance of a Jewish custom, not with the intention of making 

 such work his trade.) He was present when still a young 

 man (according to the Pauline author of the Acts of the 

 Apostles, written long after Paul's death) when Stephen 

 was killed. As has often happened in such cases, his 

 earnest and fiery zeal for institutions which he regarded as 

 especially Jewish, was converted into a still more earnest 

 and fiery zeal for the doctrines which he had helped to 

 oppose, so soon as he recognised in the first place their 

 inherent beauty and value, and in the second the integrity 

 and devotion of those who accepted them. He not only 

 became a believer in the " foreign " doctrines, but was 

 moved to teach those doctrines to Gentile races. He had 

 known of Jesus Christ as the chief teacher of the new 

 doctrines, and now taught them himself in the name of 

 Jesus, and as a follower of Him who though dead sjioko 

 now through him, and whose resurrection from the dead 

 he taught as an essential part of the new doctrine. 



Among the earlier Jewish apostles the views of Paul 

 were strenuously opposed, and by none more zealously than 

 by John, the only other contemporary of Jesus whose actual 

 writings have reached us (unless we accept as genuine the 

 Epistle of Jude, rendered doubtful by the reference to the 

 Gospel of " Enoch, the seventh from Adam," a work with 

 which Enoch had certainly nothing to do), which are quoted 

 probably from Matthew's record. Matthew appears to 

 have left a record in writing of the teachings of Christ. 

 This Gospel appeared in all probability about thirty years 

 after Matthew's death, which we m.ay assume occurred near 

 the year 70. The Gospel according to Matthew has an 

 Ebionite and anti-Pauline tone, which the strongly Pauline 

 Ciospel '• .according to" Luke seems to have been intended to 

 correct. The Gospel (really the second, though placed third) 

 prob.ibly appeared about the year 115. In the Gospel 

 "according to" Maik, probably produced about twenty 

 years later, there seems to be an endeavour to reconcile the 

 opposing doctrines. But by this time the Pauline views, on 

 which in fact the establishment of Christianity essentially 

 depended, were generally accepted. 



The Go.spel according to John cannot have been in exist- 

 ence A.D. 168; for, in the Quartodeciman controversy in 

 that year, the authority of John was cited in direct contra- 

 diction to the doctrines which the fourth Gospel urgently 

 maintains. Possibly the appearance of that Gospel very 

 soon afterwards may be attributed to this circumstance. 



With regard to the life of .Jesus, it is certain that long 

 after he had passed away events were narrated in regard to 

 him such as — either by some strange coincidence or other- 

 wise — were recorded by Josephus as having happened to 

 other persons to his own knowledge, while another series of 



