It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.’ (John II, 50.) You will remember that those words are attributed by the Fourth Gospel to Caiaphas, and that it tells us that ‘he spoke not of himself, but being the high priest for that year, he prophesied’. We are told that it was this official utterance of the High Priest that decided the authorities to put Jesus of Nazareth to death.

This remarkable fact is nowhere mentioned, so far as I can recall, in the twelve large volumes of Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Yet the pronouncement of Caiaphas might well have served as a motto for the whole work. Frazer, combining encyclopaedic knowledge with rare literary grace and dramatic effect, and with much of the excitement of a detective story, set out to solve a mystery—the mystery of a haggard, hunted ‘priest of the wood’ by the shores of Lake Nemi long ago, a priest who had plucked a golden bough, a priest who had murdered his predecessor, and who was now sleeplessly awaiting his own murderer and successor. And you remember how clue leads to clue as Frazer’s vast researches fan out into space and time, ransacking the annals of history, archaeology, the literature of all nations, comparative religion, anthropology, folklore. Slowly there emerges the hint of a worldwide pattern of belief and practice according to which it is expedient that one should die for the people that the whole nation perish not; that the slayer and the slain should alike be some embodiment of divinity, a divine king or priest or his son, or some representative or substitute or effigy, whose death and torment is somehow necessary if the life or power which he embodies, and on which the people depend, is to survive or revive.