I am listing all the references by Reinach to the archives mentioned by Ignatius.
34.
Bishop Ignatius of Antioch, in a very obscure phrase, wrote, about 110 a.d., against certain people who declared: “What we do not find in the [Roman?] archives, we cannot accept in the Gospel.”
This seems to be the first allusion to critical research, about which we regret to know nothing more.
35. A very old Christian sect, that of the Docetes, contended that Jesus had been but a phantom, that he had only assumed the semblance of a body—and this, exclaimed St. Jerome, when the blood of Jesus was not yet dry in Judaea! The great antiquity of the sect is confirmed by two letters attributed to St. John, which are partly directed against Docetism, and perhaps also by the passage in the fourth Gospel (xx, 24) concerning the unbelief of St. Thomas. Works by Docetes have not come down to us, and we have no adequate knowledge of their tenets. One thing, however, is certain: the so-called extreme Docetes denied the Crucifixion. Irenaeus ( c. 180 A.n.) says that the heretic Basilides (c. 125) related the Crucifixion as follows: “Simon of Cyrene was crucified by mistake and Jesus himself took the form of Simon and stood by and laughed at the executioners.” Foolish as that may be, the Manicheans maintained it, and the formula of abjuration which they were invited to sign ran thus: “I anathematize those who say that our Lord only suffered in appearance, and that there was a man on the cross and another one at a distance who laughed because the former suffered in his place.” Indeed, several apocryphal writings of early Christianity are tainted with the same belief, which may have not been unknown to the author of the second Gospel (xv, 21).* *‘And they compel one Simon a Cyrenian, who passed by, coming out of the country,
the father of Alexander and Rufus, to bear his cross.” This seems to be an appeal to two witnesses who said (in Rome?) that Simon had carried the cross, but not that he had been crucified instead of Jesus, as maintained by Basilides and no doubt others before him.
36. The uncertainty and legendary character of the Christian tradition concerning Jesus does not warrant, however, an expression of radical disbelief. The first trace of such extreme criticism appeared in Lord Bolingbroke’s free-thinking circle (c. ITSO). Voltaire censured it, but not so Volney and Dupuis, two French scholars of the latter part of the eighteenth century, who considered the Christ of history as a solar myth. This explains why Napoleon, meeting Wieland in 1808, asked him if he believed in the existence of Jesus. The same scepticism was put forward, but on so- called historical grounds, by the German critic Bruno Bauer (1842), who attributed the Gospel story to
one forger, and later on, as a result of comparative mythology and folklore, by many writers, Robertson, Benj. Smith, Drews, Couchoud, etc. However, the best liberal theologians of our age never consented to go so far, though admitting that, except the death of Jesus, there was much more legend than history in the Gospel narrative. (p. 245-246)
