The Rabbinists separate more accurately two conceptions of the Messiah. According to one, in the character of a descendant of David and a great and divine hero he was to release the Jews from servitude, found the promised world-wide empire, and sit in judgment over men. This is the Jewish conception of the Messiah, of which King David was the ideal.103 According to the other he was to assemble the ten tribes in Galilee and lead them against Jerusalem, only to be overthrown, however, in the battle against Gog and Magog under the leadership of Armillus on account of Jeroboam’s sin – that is, on account of the secession of the Israelites from the Jews. The Talmud describes the last-mentioned Messiah, in distinction from the first, as the son of Joseph or Ephraim. This is done with reference to the fact that the kingdom of Israel included above all the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, and that these traced back their origin to the mythical Joseph. He is thus the Messiah of the Israelites who had separated from the Jews, and especially, as it appears, of the Samaritans. This Messiah, “the son of Joseph,” it is said, “will offer himself in sacrifice and pour forth his soul in death, and his blood will atone for the people of God.” He himself will go to heaven. Then, however, the other Messiah, “the son of David,” the Messiah of the Jews in a narrower sense, will come and fulfil the promises made to them, in which connection Zech. xii. 10 sq. and xiv. 3 sq. seem to have influenced this whole doctrine.104 According to Dalman,105 the figure of the Messiah ben Joseph first appeared in the second or third century after Christ. Bousset too appears to consider it a “later” tradition, although he cannot deny that the Jewish Apocalypses of the end of the first thousand years after Christ, which are the first to make extensive mention of the matter, may have contained “very ancient” traditions. According to Persian beliefs, too, Mithras was the suffering Redeemer and mediator between God and the world, while Saoshyant, on the other hand, was the judge of the world who would appear at the end of all time and obtain the victory over Ariman (Armillus). In the same way the Greek myth distinguished from the older Dionysus, Zagreus, the son of Persephone, who died a cruel death at the hands of the Titans, a younger God of the same name, son of Zeus and Semele, who was to deliver the world from the shackles of darkness. Precisely the same relationship exists between Prometheus, the suffering, and Heracles, the triumphant deliverer of the world. We thus obviously have to do here with a very old and wide-spread myth, and it is scarcely necessary to point out how closely the two figures of the Samaritan and Jewish Messiahs correspond to the Haman and Mardachai of the Jewish Purim feast, in order to prove the extreme antiquity of this whole conception. The Gospel united into one the two figures of the Messiah, which had been originally separate. From the Messiah ben Joseph it made the human Messiah, born in Galilee, and setting out from there with his followers for Jerusalem, there to succumb to his adversaries. On the other hand, from the Messiah ben David it made the Messiah of return and resurrection. At the same time it elevated and deepened the whole idea of the Messiah in the highest degree by commingling the conception of the self-sacrificing Messiah with that of the Paschal victim, and this again with that of the God who offers his own son in sacrifice. Along with the Jews it looked upon Jesus as the “son” of King David, at the same time, however, preserving a remembrance of the Israelite Messiah in that it also gave him Joseph as father; and while it said with respect to the first idea that he was born at Bethlehem, the city of David, it assigned him in connection with the latter Nazareth of Galilee as his birthplace, and invented the abstruse story of the journey of his parents to Bethlehem in order to be perfectly impartial towards both views.
And now, who is this Joseph, as son of whom the Messiah was to be a suffering and dying creature like any ordinary man? Winckler has pointed out in his “Geschichte Israels” that under the figure of the Joseph of the Old Testament, just as under that of Joshua, an ancient Ephraimitic tribal God is concealed. Joseph is, as Winckler expresses it, “the heroic offspring of Baal of Garizim, an offshoot of the Sun-God, to whom at the same time characteristics of Tammuz, the God of the Spring Sun, are transferred.”106 Just as Tammuz had to descend into the under-world, so was Joseph cast into the well, in which, according to the “Testament of the twelve Patriarchs,”107 he spent three months and five days. This betokens the winter months and five additional days during which the sun remains in the under-world. And again he is cast into prison; and just as Tammuz, after his return from the under-world, brings a new spring to the earth, so does Joseph, after his release from confinement, introduce a season of peace and happiness for Egypt.108 On this account he was called in Egypt Psontomphanech, that is, Deliverer of the World, in view of his divine nature, and later passed among the Jews also as a prototype of the Messiah. Indeed, it appears that the Evangelists themselves regarded him in such a light, for the story of the two fellow-prisoners of Joseph, the baker and cupbearer of Pharaoh, one of whom, as Joseph foretold, was hanged,109 while the other was again received into favour by the king, was transformed by them into the story of the two robbers who were executed at the same time as Jesus, one of whom mocked the Saviour while the other besought him to remember him when he entered into his heavenly kingdom.110
But the Ephraimitic Joshua too must have been a kind of Tammuz or Adonis. His name (Joshua, Syrian, Jeshu) characterises him as saviour and deliverer. As such he also appears in the Old Testament, finally leading the people of Israel into the promised land after long privations and sufferings. According to the Jewish Calendar the commencement of his activity was upon the tenth of Nisan, on which the Paschal lamb was chosen, and it ended with the Feast of the Pasch. Moses introduced the custom of circumcision and the redemption of the first-born male, and Joshua was supposed to have revived it.111 At the same time he is said to have replaced the child victims, which it had been customary to offer to Jahwe in early days, by the offering of the