Second Mencken Chrestomathy (17 page)

Of all the so-called learned professions, the law seems to be the least interesting to its practitioners. Relatively few of them are ever impelled to write anything about it, and nine-tenths of them seem eager to get out of it at the first chance—into politics, into business. This is surely not true of medicine. I know hundreds of medical men, but I can’t think of one among them who really wants to abandon his trade. Now and then, of course, they talk against it gloomily, but this is only talk. At bottom, they like it, and for a plain reason: it is interesting and it is reasonably useful. Find a doctor who has political aspirations and five times out of six you have found a quack. But in the law even the best of them are always trying to get out.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Aug. 26, 1929

Human beings spend a great deal of their time in laughing at one another. Every man seems absurd to his neighbor, not only in his diversions, but also in his sober labors. My own favorite object of mirth is one of the most austere and venerable figures in our society, to wit, the judge. If I frequent courtrooms very little, it is only because I have a high theoretical respect for his office, and so do not want to be tempted to laugh at him. That temptation, in his actual presence, is almost irresistible. There he sits for hour after hour, listening to brawling shysters, murkily dozing his way through obvious perjury, contemplating a roomful of smelly loafers, and sadly scratching himself as he wonders what his wife is going to have for dinner, all the while longing horribly for a drink. If he is not a comic figure, then there is none in this world.

Years ago, when I had literary ambitions, I blocked out a one-act play about a judge. Now that I am too old to write it I may as well give it away. The scene is a courtroom, and the learned judge is on the bench, gaping wearily at his customers. They are of the usual sort—witnesses trying to remember what the lawyers told them to say, policemen sweating in their padded uniforms, bailiffs on the lookout for pickpockets, newspaper readers and tobacco chewers, and long ranks of dirty and idiotic old men, come in to get warm. In front of the judge a witness is being examined by a lawyer. To one side twelve jurymen snooze quietly. The place smells like an all-night trolley-car on a Winter night.

The judge, unable to concentrate his attention upon the case at bar, groans wheezily. It is a dreadful life, and he knows it. Of a sudden the opposition lawyer objects to a question put to the witness, and the judge has to pull himself together. The point raised is new to him. In fact, it goes far beyond his law. He decides in loud, peremptory tones, notes the exception, and resumes his bitter meditations. What a life! What a finish for a man who was once a gay dog, with the thirst of an archbishop and an arm for every neck! What a reward for long years of toil and privation! A tear rolls down the judge’s nose.

As he shakes it off his eyes sweep the courtroom, and a strange thrill runs through him. There, on the last seat, sandwiched between a police sergeant and a professional bondsman, is the loveliest cutie ever seen. There, in the midst of the muck, is romance ineffable. The judge shoots his cuffs out of his gown, twirls his moustache, permits a soapy, encouraging smirk to cover his judicial glower, and gives a genial cough. How thrilled the cutie will be when she sees that he notices her. What a day in a poor girl’s life. What an episode to remember—the handsome and amiable judge, the soft exchange of glances. He coughs a bit louder.

The cutie, glancing up, sees him looking at her. Paralyzed with fright, she leaps out of her seat, climbs over the police sergeant, and flees the courtroom.

From the
American Mercury
, Jan., 1933, pp. 121–22.
A review of T
HE
M
YTHOLOGY OF
A
LL
R
ACES
:
V
OL
. V, S
EMITIC
, by Stephen Herbert Langdon; Boston, 1931

I
F THE
standard reference works mention Yahweh at all, it is only to explain, with hollow erudition, that the original form of His name was YHWH, and that it was turned into Jehovah in the Eighth Century
A.D.
by giving YHWH the vowels of Adonai. But where Yahweh Himself came from they do not say. This lack is supplied by Dr. Langdon, who is Professor of Assyriology at Oxford and a man of great learning. His study of the evidence leads him to believe that the original god of the Jews and Christians was not Yahweh at all, but Ilani (later written Elohim), and that this Ilani was picked up from the Babylonians in the dark backward and abysm of time, long before the Jews settled in Palestine. In those days they were a wandering tribe of great pugnacity, and the Babylonians got rid of their raids and forays by making mercenary soldiers of them, and allowing them to engage in trade. They lived this life for five or six centuries at least, and gradually became more or less Babylonianized. For one thing, they adopted a large part of the Babylonian mythology, and through them it has come down to us—the story of the Flood, that of the Tower of Babel, that of the Fall of Man, and so on. And for another thing, they abandoned the primitive gods who had contented them in the desert, and adopted the Babylonian sun-god, who was widely popular among the peoples of Asia Minor and passed under various names. What the Jews called him at the start is unknown, but in the Fifteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
B.C.
, when they began to move
westward toward the Mediterranean, they found that the Phoenicians and Arameans called him El, and this name they presently borrowed.

But El soon had a rival, for in the course of their wanderings in search of land the Jews entered Canaan, and there they found another god, Yahweh. This Yahweh, compared to El, was a somewhat primitive deity. He was not a splendid sun-god but a simple rain-god. El’s province was the whole universe, but Yahweh confined Himself pretty strictly to Canaan. Nevertheless, there was something powerfully attractive about Him, for Canaan was a dry country, and a rain-god was of much more use in it than a sun-god. So the Jews, like the other Semitic tribes who followed them into Canaan, began to incline toward Him, and when they conquered the land and began their history as a settled people they made Him their tribal god. He remains so to this day, and Christians and Moslems in their turn have borrowed Him, but no reader of the Old Testament need be told that He never had it all His own way, even in the palmy days of Israel. On the contrary, He had to meet constant and serious competition from two sides. On the one side were the primitive Baalim or village gods to which the Jews of the remoter settlements were always returning, to the rage and despair of the prophets in practise in Jerusalem. And on the other side was the stately and elegant hierarchy of Babylonian gods, headed by the gorgeous El, for which the sophisticates of the cities, especially in the cosmopolitan North, always had a nostalgic hankering.

In the end the Jewish priests had to make a sort of compromise between Yahweh and El, and the two are amalgamated in the Old Testament into a joint god who is spoken of first under one name and then under the other. But the majority of Jews, at all events in the southern part of Palestine, always leaned toward Yahweh. He was a much more friendly and comfortable god, despite His frequent rages, than El. El was all right in the over-refined cities of the North, but down in the deserts of Judah the herdsmen and shepherds preferred a god who was more approachable and had a better understanding of the needs of simple men. In the Old Testament it is always Yahweh who appears in the most human and charming situations—wrestling with Jacob, taking the air in the
Garden of Eden, suspicious and jealous of the builders of the Tower of Babel, gossiping with Moses, lunching with Abraham. There is nothing subtle about this Yahweh—nothing of the metaphysical elegance of El. He does not appear as the Word, but as a downright and even flat-footed old man—a sort of fatherly general superintendent of the Jews, very friendly when they obey His orders but cruel and vindictive when they try to fool Him.

The modern Jews, and the Christians and Moslems with them, have pretty well forgotten El. He survives only in a few refinements of ritual and in the books of learned divines. Yahweh has swallowed him—Yahweh, the honest old rain-god. He it is that the Jews have long trusted to restore them to the land of their fathers, and He that the Catholics hope will be kind enough to make their stay in Purgatory short, and He that the Methodists count upon joyously to burn all the rest of us in white-hot flames forever. He has been successful among gods largely because of His very crudity. No training in divinity is needed to understand Him. At times, as beseems a god, He may retreat into inscrutability, but in general He is quite comprehensible, and even transparent. His principles, indeed, are so simple that they are taught in the Sunday-schools to children of five or six. As in ancient Palestine, He increases in humanness as He gets away from the cities, and throws off the uncomfortable vestments of El. In the South of this great Republic He returns to the primitive estate of a rain-god, and when there is a drought His votaries turn out exactly as the desert Jews used to turn out in Southern Palestine, to demand confidently that He do something about it.

From the
American Mercury
, Jan., 1932, pp. 125–27.
A review of T
HE
M
ESSIAH
J
ESUS AND
J
OHN THE
B
APTIST
, by Robert Eisler; London, 1931

The problem Dr. Eisler here tackles is this: What actually happened in Jerusalem and thereabout in the first years of the Christian
era? What were the origins of that Jesus of Nazareth who made such an uproar during the administration of the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, and what were the circumstances which made Him the founder of a new religion, the most widespread and powerful that the world has yet seen? The answers that we find in Christian literature are incomplete and unsatisfactory. The New Testament, as we have it, is full of obviously dubious history. It was written, in the main, by men who had not witnessed the events they describe, and hence it bristles with contradictions and absurdities. Worse, it shows plain signs of later tampering, so that the most we can say of it today is that it tells us, not what really happened, but simply what certain Christian theologians of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and even later centuries, thought
may
have happened. Nor is any help to be found in non-Christian chronicles, for, as the great German scholar, Adolf Harnack, once said, all that they have to say might be printed on one quarto sheet of paper.

Dr. Eisler is convinced that it is a gross error to assume, as has been commonly done, that this paucity of records proves only that Jesus attracted little attention among the Romans—that His revolt was of no importance, and hence passed unnoticed. He shows, on the contrary, that they must have taken it very seriously, at all events, in its political aspect, and that it was their custom to keep elaborate official memoranda of such events, and that these memoranda were open to their historians. Why, then, have we so little about Jesus? In particular, why is there so little in the well-known history of Josephus, a Roman court historian, and why is that little so plainly unreliable? Why is the Jew Josephus made to say flatly that Jesus was a teacher of the Truth, that He arose from the dead, and that He was “the Christ ”? Dr. Eisler’s answer is simple. Josephus never said anything of the sort. The
Testimonium Josephi
, like so much of the New Testament, is an interpolation in the original text. What Josephus did say has been taken out, and what the Christians of Constantine’s time wanted him to say has been put in. And what other historians said has been lost to us because, in those days, there was a vigorous and relentless censorship of anti-Christian documents, and every scrap of hostile writing was hunted down and destroyed—all save the few inconsiderable fragments mentioned by Harnack.

So far Dr. Eisler’s case has little support in documentary facts. But he quickly produces an impressive body of such facts from Russia. In the libraries and monasteries of that country are a number of early MSS. of Josephus, mainly in Northern dialects of Old Slavic. They are translations from early Greek MSS. and though there are some traces in them of that Christian tampering which is found in all the Western MSS. of Josephus, many passages remain that have disappeared entirely in the West, and in them the acts and aims of Jesus are dealt with in a detailed and realistic manner. These passages, in not a few cases, are so phrased that they are apparently direct quotations from official records of the events preceding the Crucifixion, and so they are of high historical value. They coincide, broadly speaking, with the narrative in the Gospels, but in many important details they are at variance, for they tell the story from the Roman point of view. It would be going too far to call them impartial, but they are at least free from Christian coloring, and in consequence they answer many questions that the Gospel historians and the sophisticated Western Josephus evade, apparently deliberately.