J. M. Robertson

J. M. Robertson

John Mackinnon Robertson PC (14 November 1856 – 5 January 1933) was a prolific journalist, advocate of rationalism and secularism, and Liberal Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom for Tyneside from 1906 to 1918.

Biography

Robertson was born in Brodrick the Isle of Arran but his father moved the family to Stirling while he was still young where he attended school until the age of 13. He worked first as a clerk and then as a journalist, eventually becoming assistant editor of the Edinburgh Evening News.

He wrote in February 1906 to a friend that he "gave up the 'divine'" when he was a teenager. His first contact with the freethought movement was as lecture by Charles Bradlaugh in Edinburgh in 1878 and became active in the Edinburgh Secular Society, soon after. It was through the Edinburgh Secular Society that he met William Archer and became writer for the Edinburgh Evening News. Before moving to London to become assistant editor of Bradlaugh's paper National Reformer, subsequently taking over as editor on Bradlaugh's death in 1891. The National Reformer finally closed in 1893. Robertson was also an appointed lecturer for the freethinking South Place Ethical Society from 1899 until the 1920s.

An advocate of the "New Liberalism," Robertson's political radicalism developed in the 1880s and 1890s, and he first stood for Parliament in 1895, failing to win Bradlaugh's old seat in Northampton as an independent radical liberal. Robertson was a staunch free trader and his Trade and Tariffs (1908) "became a bible for free-traders pursuing the case for cheap food and the expansion of trade".

In 1915 he was appointed to the Privy council.

At the 1918 General election, as a Liberal candidate he contested Wallsend, a constituency based largely on his Tyneside seat, but finished third. In 1923 he contested the General Election as Liberal candidate for Hendon without success.

Robertson died in London in 1933.

Views

Economically, Robertson has been described as an underconsumptionist, and he gave an early form, perhaps the earliest formal statement, of the paradox of thrift in his 1892 book The Fallacy of Saving.

Robertson was an advocate of the Jesus-Myth theory, and in several books he argued against the historicity of Jesus. According to Robertson, the character of Jesus in the New Testament developed from a Jewish cult of Joshua, whom he identifies as a solar deity.

• 1900 Christianity and Mythology ;

  Long before Biblical Judaism was known, the people of Palestine shared in the universal rituals of the primeval cults of sun and moon, Nature and symbol; and the successive waves of conquest, physical and mystical, have only transformed the primordial hallucination.

• 1902 A Short History of Christianity ;

  The older portions of the Pauline epistles show no knowledge of any Jesuine biography or any Jesuine teaching —a circumstance which suggests that the Jesus of Paul is much more remote from Paul's day than is admitted by the records.

Oxford theologian and orientalist Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare wrote a book titled, The Historical Christ; or, An investigation of the views of Mr. J. M. Robertson, Dr. A. Drews, and Prof. W. B. Smith (1913), directed against the Christ myth theory defended by the three authors.

Selected works

• History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century, (1899)
• (1900)
• (1902)
• (1905, 2nd edition)
• (2 vols, 1915)
• The Baconian Heresy: A Confutation (1913)
• The Historical Jesus (1916)
• The Jesus Problem (1917)
• Shakespeare and Chapman (1917)
• Short History of Morals (1920)
• The Shakespeare Canon (1922-1932)
• Jesus and Judas (1927)

References and sources

References

Sources

• Robertson, J.M. (1889). Miscellanies. Essays. From Internet Archive.
• Dekkers, Odin (1998).J. M. Robertson. Ashgate.

External links

• Works written by or about John Mackinnon Robertson at Wikisource
• Works by J. M. Robertson at Project Gutenberg

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Hugh Crawford Smith	Member of Parliament for Tyneside 1906–1918	Constituency abolished
Political offices
Preceded by Harold Tennant	Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade 1911–1915	Succeeded by E. G. Pretyman
Party political offices
Preceded by George Lunn	President of the National Liberal Federation 1920–1923	Succeeded by Donald Maclean