The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity

IX.
JESUS

It will be remarked that in the foregoing chapters no account is given of Jesus, and no account made of him. His name has not been written except where the common usage of speech made it necessary. The writer has carefully avoided occasion for expressing an opinion in regard to his character, his performance, or his claim; has carefully avoided so doing; the omission has been intentional. The purpose of his essay is to give the history of an idea, not the history of a person, to trace the development of a thought, not the influence of a life, letting it be inferred whether the life were necessary, and if necessary, wherein and how far necessary to the shaping of the thought. But this task will not be judged to have been fairly discharged unless he declares the nature of the inference he himself draws. The question "What think ye of the Christ?" meaning "What think ye of Jesus?" may be fairly put to him, and should be frankly answered. That there are two distinct questions here proposed, need not at the close of this essay be said. Jesus is the name of a man; Christ, or rather The Christ, is the name of an idea. The history of Jesus is the history of an individual; the history of the Christ is the history of a doctrine. An essay on the Christ-idea touches the person of Jesus, only as he is associated with the Christ-idea or is made a representative of it. Had he not been associated with that idea, either through his own design or in the belief of his countrymen, the omission of all mention of his name would provoke no criticism. The common opinion that he was in some sense the Christ; that but for him the Christ-idea would not have been made conspicuous in the way and at the time it was; that the existence of the Christian Church, the conversion of Paul, the composition of the New Testament, the course of religious thought in the eastern and western world was directed by his mind; that the social life, – the morals and manners, the heart, conscience, feeling, soul – of mankind, in the earlier and later centuries of his era was determined by his character, renders necessary a word of comment on the validity of his individual claim.

If either of the four gospels is to be accepted as biography it must be the first, as being the earliest in date, and as containing less than either of the others of speculative admixture. The first gospel rests, according to an ancient tradition, on memoranda or notes taken by a companion of Jesus and afterwards written out, in the popular language of the country, for the use of the disciples and others in Judæa and Galilee. The disappearance of all save a few fragments of this book, and of any writing answering in description to it, the impossibility of identifying it with the present Gospel of Matthew, or of proving that the existing Gospel of Matthew rests upon it;¹⁰ the comparatively late date to which our Greek Matthew must be assigned – thirty years at least, probably fifty or sixty after Jesus' death, and the absolute failure of all attempts to trace its records to an eye witness of any sort, (say nothing of a competent eye witness, clear of head, tenacious of memory, veracious in speech,) all conspire to stamp with imprudence the conjecture that the Christ of Matthew and the Jesus of history were one and the same. This would be the case were the picture harmoniously proportioned, as it is not.

The fourth Gospel is usually accepted as the work of a disciple, the "loved disciple," the bosom friend, whose apprehension of the spiritual character of Jesus was much keener and truer than that of any business man, any mere follower, any commonplace, inconspicuous person like Matthew. But the fourth Gospel, allowing that it was written by John the disciple, must, to insist on a former remark, have been written in his extreme old age, and after a mental and spiritual transformation so complete as to leave no trace of the Galilean youth whom Jesus took to his heart. The zealot has become a mystic; the Palestinian Jew has become an Asiatic Greek: the "son of thunder" is a philosopher; the fisherman is a cultivated writer, acquainted with the subtlest forms of speculation. Is it conceivable that such a man should have retained his impressions of biographical incidents and personal traits, or that retaining them he should have allowed them their due prominence in his record? can his picture be accepted as a portrait?

Certainly, some are impatient to say, and for this very reason; as the perfect, the only portrait; the picture of the very man, the biography of his soul; we accept it as we accept Plato's portrait of Socrates. But do we accept Plato's portrait of Socrates, as a piece done to the life? Plato was a great artist, as all the world knows from his authentic works. But even in his case, we do not know whether he, in depicting Socrates, meant to paint the man as he really was, or an ideal head, conceived according to the Socratic type. To compare John's portrait of Jesus with Plato's portrait of Socrates, is besides, a proceeding quite illogical; for we must assume, in the first place, that John painted this portrait of Jesus, and in the next place that the portrait must be a good one because he painted it, – this being the only piece of his ever on exhibition.

To say with Renan and others that the idealized likeness must from the nature of the case be the correct one, because such a person as Jesus was, is best seen at a distance and by poetic gaze, is again to beg the question. How do we know that Jesus was such a person? How do we know that the most spiritual apprehension of him, was the truest; that they judged him most justly, who judged him from the highest point; that the glorifying imaginations alone presented his full stature and proportions, that the ordinary minds immediately about him necessarily misconstrued and misrepresented him? In the order of experience, historical and biographical truth is discovered by stripping off layer after layer of exaggeration and going back to the statements of contemporaries. As a rule, figures are reduced, not enlarged, by criticism. The influence of admiration is recognized as distorting and falsifying, while exalting. The process of legend-making begins immediately, goes on rapidly and with accelerating speed, and must be liberally allowed for by the seeker after truth. In scores of instances the historical individual turns out to be very much smaller than he was painted by his terrified or loving worshippers. In no single case has it been established that he was greater, or as great. It is no doubt, conceivable that such a case should occur, but it never has occurred, in known instances, and cannot be presumed to have occurred in any particular instance. The presumptions are against the correctness of the glorified image. The disposition to exaggerate is so much stronger than the disposition to underrate, that even really great men are placed higher than they belong oftener than lower. The historical method works backwards. Knowledge shrinks the man. Eminent examples that jump to recollection instantly confirm this view.

The case of Mahomet is in point. Here, the critical procedure was twofold; first to rescue a figure from the depths of infamy and then to recover the same figure from the cloudland of fancy. Under the pressure of christian hate the fame of Mahomet sank to the lowest point. He was impostor, liar, cheat, name for all shamefulness. From this muck heap he has been plucked by valiant hands, and placed on the list of heroes. Now another process is beginning, to find precisely what kind of hero he was; and it is safe to say that under this process the dimensions of the hero shrink. The arabian estimate of the prophet will not bear close examination. The glamor of pious enthusiasm being dispelled, the traits of nationality show themselves; the ecstasy is seen to be complicated with epilepsy; the revelations partake of the general oriental character; the truths are the cardinal truths of the semitic religions; the personal qualities are of the same cast that distinguishes the arabian mind. The detestation and the homage are both unjustifiable.

Another example in point is Buddha; a name covered by ages of fable, and so thickly that his historical existence was long doubted. It was questioned whether he was anything more substantial than a vision. The mist of legend has already been so far dispersed that a grand form is discerned moving up and down in India. Presently it will be measured and outlined. It is safe to predict intellectual and moral shrinkage of the person under the operation of this scrutiny. Just now the impression of his greatness is somewhat overpowering. He looks morally gigantic as compared with teachers who are better known. We quote his sayings with unbounded admiration; we commend his life as an illustration of whatever most exalts humanity. But if the time ever comes when his lineaments are fully revealed to sight, he will be found neither much greater nor much better than his generation justified.

The critics of Strauss' "Life of Jesus" insisted on the necessity of a historical foundation for his character. Such a person they declared must have lived; he could not have been invented. Strange position to take, in view of the fact that idealization is one of the commonest feats of mankind; that the human imagination is continually constructing heroes out of poltroons, and transmuting lead into gold! Some idealization there is, by the general confession of unprejudiced men. The whole cannot be received as literal fact. There is here and there a bit of color put on to heighten the effect. Who shall decide how much? If the figure is glorified a little, why not a great deal? If a great deal, why not altogether? The materials for constructing the person being given, as they are, in the hebrew genius, and the plastic power being provided as it is, by the hebrew enthusiasm, the result might have been predicted, a good way in advance of history. The argument against Strauss' method proves too much.

The critics of Baur urged with ceaseless iteration the absurdity of accounting for the New Testament, and explaining the developments of the first century, by means of bodiless ideas, substituting phantoms of thought for persons, intellectual issues for the interactions of living men. Life, it was said, presupposes life; life alone generates life. To create a New Testament out of rabbinical fancies is preposterous. True enough. History is not spectral; but neither are ideas spectral. Ideas imply living minds, and living minds are persons. But the persons are not of necessity single individuals. They may be multitudes; they may be generations; they probably are a nation. The individuals that loom up conspicuously represent multitudes, an epoch, of which they are mouth pieces and agents. Do no individuals whatever loom up? None the less creative is the epoch; none the less vital are the ideas. The great events of the world depend not on individuals, but on the cumulative force and providential meeting of wide social tendencies that have been gathering head for ages and pointing in certain directions. Mahomet, a sensitive, receptive, responsive spirit, gave a name to the arabian movement; he neither originated it, nor finally shaped it. Luther, brave, self-poised, independent soul, was not the author of the Reformation, though he gave character to it. Others had gone before him, and broken a way. The time for reformation had come, thousands were watching for the light which Luther descried, and eagerly aided in its diffusion. Innumerable sparks burst into flame. He was child, not father of the movement; so it may have been with Jesus, with Peter, with Paul. They presupposed the ideas of their age, and the agency of living men. The literature of the New Testament, which is all that Baur concerned himself with, stands for what it is, a literature; a product of intellectual activity in the age that created it. The popular notion that Scripture was penned by men whose minds were full of thoughts not their own, but God's, contains a rational truth. All great literature, all literature that is not occasional, incidental, ephemeral, is inspired in this sense. The writers held the pen while the spirit of their age, of many ages, of all ages at length, rolled through them. It is true of all representative, of all national books. It is true of the "Iliad" of Homer, of Dante's Divina Commedia, of the Book of Job, the Koran, the "Three Kings," the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Dhammapada, the elder Edda. Such books as express the mind of an epoch are productions of an era, not of a man. The productive force is in the time. The man is of moment but incidentally. In discussing such works, all consideration of the man may be dispensed with. Strauss and Baur were Hegelians, who regarded the world-movements described in literatures and events, as moments in the experience of God. Nothing to them, therefore, was spectral. In tracing the pedigree of ideas, they felt themselves to be tracing the footprints of Deity.

The difficulty of constructing one harmonious character from the four gospels of the New Testament need not be expatiated on here. It is a difficulty that never has been overcome, and that increases in dimensions with our knowledge of the book. It is, of course possible, not easy, but possible, for one standing at either extreme to drag the opposite extreme into apparent accord. The believer in the divinity of the Christ planting himself on the doctrine of the Logos, reads his theory into the earlier gospels, loads the language with meaning it was never meant to bear, stretches the homely incidents on the rack of his hypothesis, and painfully excavates the figure he has already laid there. The believer in the humanity of the Christ, pursuing the opposite method, belittles the Johannean conception till it comes within the compass of his argument, dilutes the statements, expurgates and attenuates the thought, till nothing remains but sentimentalism. Each vindicates one view by sacrificing the other. To one who would preserve both representations, the task of combination is desperate. They are the centres of two opposite systems. One is a human being, a man; the other is a demi-god. One is a teacher of moral and religious truth; the other is an incarnation of the truth. One indicates the way; the other is the way. One invites to life; the other is the life. One talks about God and immortality; the other manifests God, and is immortality. One points to heaven; the other "is in heaven." One is a helpful human friend; the other is a divine Saviour. One claims allegiance on the ground of his providential calling; the other demands spiritual surrender on the ground of his transcendent nature. One collects a body of disciples; the other forms and consecrates a church, and puts it in charge of a Holy Spirit, that shall save it from error and evil. After what has been said in previous chapters it is unnecessary to enlarge. Let whoever will take Furness' portrait of Jesus on one hand, and Pressensé's on the other; let him place them side by side; let him subject them to close scrutiny, comparing each with the original sketches; and he will rise from the contemplation satisfied that the two pictures cannot represent the same person.

Scarcely less is the difficulty of constructing a harmonious character from the first gospel alone. Renan brought to this experiment rare powers of mind, and a singular skill in letters. An orientalist, well versed in the productions of eastern genius; an accomplished literary investigator, practised in discerning between the genuine and the spurious; without dogmatic prejudice or predilection, neither christian nor anti-christian; enthusiastic, yet critical; approaching the subject from the historical direction; preparing himself laboriously for his task, and devoting to it all the capacity there was in him, Renan yet signally failed to construct a morally harmonious figure. Though conceiving Jesus as simply a man, he was obliged to resort to most obnoxious extravagances to make the narratives cohere. The "Vie de Jesus" is a standing refutation of the theory that the elements of a harmonious biography are to be found in the first gospel. It is the Christ of the first gospel who curses unbelieving and inhospitable cities; who threatens to deny in heaven those that deny him on earth; who speaks of the unpardonable sin, that "shall not be forgiven, either in this world, or in the world to come;" who will have none called "Master" but himself; who condemns to "everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels" those who have not assisted "these my brethren;" who bids his friends regard as no better than "a heathen man and a publican," the offender who will not listen to the Church; who launches indiscriminate invective against scribes and pharisees; who anticipates sitting on a throne, a judge of all nations, with his chosen followers sitting on twelve thrones of authority in the same kingdom. These statements must be qualified, allegorized, "spiritualized" a good deal, before they can be made congenial with the attributes of meekness, humility, gentleness, patience, loving-kindness, human sympathy, benevolence, justice, that adorn the image of a human Jesus. One set of qualities or the other, must be disavowed, unless we would incur the reproach that has fallen on Renan, of transforming Jesus into a terribly magnificent, and superbly unlovely person. Of this there is no necessity, for there is no necessity for constructing a harmonious character, on any hypothesis. We are not called on to construct a character at all. We may frankly own that the materials for constructing a character are not furnished. The first gospels exhibit stages in the development of the Christ idea; they do not give a portraiture of the man Jesus.

The hypothesis of mental and sentimental development in the experience of Jesus comes to the aid of the believers. Signs of such an interior progress do certainly appear, or can be made to appear by force of enthusiastic exegesis. The teacher who admonishes his disciples not to cast their pearls before swine, relates, with approval, the parable of the sower who flung his seed right and left, heedless that some fell on thorns that grew up and choked them, and some on stony ground, where having no root, they withered away. The man who twice frigidly repulsed the Canaanite woman who begged on her knees the boon of his compassion, telling her that he was not sent, save to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, adding, "it is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs," not only extends his effectual sympathy to her in her immediate need, but is found afterward, seeking and saving these very lost, going into the wilderness to find them that had gone astray, visiting the country of the pagan Gergesenes, and opening the blind eyes of Samaritans. The twelve disciples called and sent to the twelve tribes of Israel, one to each tribe, none to spare for the people beyond the borders of Palestine, became later seventy apostles commissioned to carry the message of the kingdom to all the tribes of the earth. The exorciser of evil spirits begins by casting devils into the herd of swine, thus "spoiling the pig-market" of a village, herein showing himself a true Jew, and ends by sitting at meat with publicans and sinners. By ingenious piecing, light skipping over dates and discrepancies careless of sequence and consequence, with resolute purpose to extract from the documents, by all or any means, a consistent human character, the development theory may be pushed a little way. But it soon comes against an insurmountable difficulty; the stream narrows just where it ought to widen, namely, as it approaches the ocean. It is towards the end of his career that the fanaticism discloses itself. The terrible outbreaks of anger, the invectives, the diatribes, the superb claims of authority, the horrid descriptions of the day of judgment, the discouragement and despair, come at the last. The serenity disappears; the sunlight pales; the day closes in mist. The man shrinks, instead of expanding, as he grows.

This is Renan's account of it; an account more deeply colored with gloom than need be; for that the baffled, tortured Jesus, lost his moral poise, and became a deliberate impostor, is not fairly deducible from any text; but the account is still essentially close and natural. Starting, as Renan does, from the position that the four gospels contain materials for an intelligible portraiture of Jesus; that those materials may be discovered, sifted, and arranged so as to produce a well proportioned figure; and that the principle of this human construction, must, on the supposition, be the principle according to which the characters of men are and must be constructed, namely, by tracing the actions and reactions between them and the circumstances of their time and place; starting, we say, from this position, it is difficult to avoid the inferences that he draws in regard to the disastrous effect that skepticism and opposition had on the mental and moral character of the hero. That "he made no concession to necessity;" that "he boldly declared war against nature, a complete rupture with kindred;" that "he exacted from his associates an utter abandonment of terrestrial satisfactions, an absolute consecration to his work," is no more than the plain texts imply. Renan does not strain language when he says: "In his excess of rigor, he went so far as to suppress natural desire. His requirements knew no bounds. Scorning the wholesome limitations of human nature, he would have people live for him only, love him alone." "Something preternatural and strange mingled with his discourse; as if a fire was consuming the roots of his life, and reducing the whole to a frightful desert. The sentiment of disgust towards the world, gloomy and bitter, of excessive abnegation which characterizes christian perfection, had for its author, not the sensitive joyous moralist of the earlier time, but the sombre titan, whom a vast and appalling presentiment carried further and further away from humanity. It looks as though, in these moments of conflict with the most legitimate desires of the heart, he forgot the pleasure of living and loving, of seeing and feeling." "It is easy to believe that from the view of Jesus, at this epoch of his life, every thought save for the kingdom of God, had wholly disappeared. He was, so to speak, entirely out of nature; family, friends, country had no meaning to him." "A strange passion for suffering and persecution possessed him. His blood seemed the water of a second baptism he must be bathed in, and he had the air of one driven by a singular impulse to anticipate this baptism which alone could quench his thirst." "At times his reason seemed disturbed. He experienced inward agitations and agonies. The tremendous vision of the kingdom of God, ceaselessly flaming before his eyes, made him giddy. His friends thought him, at moments, beside himself. His enemies declared him possessed by a devil. His passionate temperament, carried him, in an instant, over the borders of human nature. * * * Urgent, imperious, he brooked no opposition. His native gentleness left him; he was at times rude and fantastical. * * * At times his ill humor against all opposition pushed him to actions unaccountable and preposterous. It was not that his virtue sank; his struggle against reality in the name of the ideal became insupportable. He hurled himself in angry revolt against the world. * * * The tone he had assumed could not be sustained more than a few months. It was time for death to put an end to a situation strained to excess, to snatch him from the embarrassments of a path that had no issue, and, delivered from a trial too protracted, to introduce him, stainless, into the serenity of his heaven."

This is strong language, even shocking to minds accustomed to worship a character of ideal perfection. But it is scarcely bolder than the case warrants. The privilege to pick and choose material has its limits. We have no right to take what pleases us and leave the rest. Statements that rest on equal evidence deserve equal acceptance. If the result be not agreeable, the responsibility is not with the critic.

The only wonder is that such a person as the literal record justifies, should be accepted as the founder of a religion. How can Renan stand before his portrait of Jesus, and say, "the man here delineated merits a place at the summit of human grandeur;" "this is the supreme man; a sublime personage;" "every day he presides over the destiny of the world; to call him divine is no exaggeration; amid the columns that, in vulgar uniformity crowd the plain, there are some that point to the skies and attest a nobler destiny for man; Jesus is the loftiest of these; in him is concentred all that is highest and best in human nature." Such a conclusion is not justified by the premises. The homage is not warranted by the facts. It will not do to make out a catalogue of human weaknesses, and then urge those very weaknesses as a chief title to glory.

In the opinion of some it is wiser and kinder to confess at once that the image of Jesus has been irrecoverably lost. In the judgment of these, it is unphilosophical to set up an ideal where none is required. No doubt every effect must have a cause, but to assume the cause, or to insist on the validity of any single or special cause, is unscientific. Each event has many causes, a complexity of causes. Renan himself says: "It is undeniable that circumstances told for much, in the success of this wonderful revolution. Each stage in the development of humanity has its privileged epoch, in which it reaches perfection without effort, by a sort of spontaneous instinct. The Jewish state offered the most remarkable intellectual and moral conditions that the human race ever presented. It was one of those divine moments when a thousand hidden forces conspire to produce grand results, when fine spirits are supported by floods of admiration and sympathy."

In truth, was such a person as Jesus is presumed to have been, necessary to account for the existence of the religion afterwards called Christian? As an impelling force he was not required, for his age was throbbing and bursting with suppressed energy. The pressure of the Roman empire was required to keep it down. The Messianic hope had such vitality that it condensed into moments the moral results of ages. The common people were watching to see the heavens open, interpreted peals of thunder as angel voices, and saw divine portents in the flight of birds. Mothers dreamed that their boys would be Messiah. The wildest preacher drew a crowd. The heart of the nation swelled big with the conviction that the hour of destiny was about to strike, that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. The crown was ready for any kingly head that might dare to assume it. That in such a state of things anticipation should fulfil itself, the dream become real, the vision become solid, is not surprising. It was not the first time faith has become fact. The first generation of our era exhibited no phenomena that preceding generations had not prepared for and could not produce. No surprising original force need have been manifested. The spirit was the native spirit of the old vine growing in the old vineyard.

Jesus is not necessary to account for the ethics of the New Testament. They were as has been said, the native ethics of Judaism, unqualified. The breadth and the limitation, the ideal beauty and the practical point were alike Jewish. The gorgeous abstractions, gathered up in one discourse, look like fresh revelations of God; as autumn leaves plucked and set in a vase seem more luminous than do myriads of the same leaves covering the mountains and the meadows, their crimson and gold blending with the brown of the soil and the infinite blue of the sky. The ethics of the New Testament, like the ethics of the Old, have their root in the faith that Israel was a chosen people; in the expectation of a king in whom the faith should be crowned; in the anticipation of a judgment day, a national restoration, a celestial sun-burst, a final felicity for the faithful of Israel. The enthusiasm, the extravagance, the fanaticism, the passive trust, the active intolerance, the asceticism, the arbitrariness, bespeak in the one case as in the other, the presence of an intense but narrow spirit. They are not the ethics of this world. They are not temporal. The power of an original, creative soul should be attested by some modification of the popular code, rather than by an exaggeration of it. We should look for something new, not for a more emphatic repetition of the old. But nothing new appears. The exaggerations are exaggerated; the precepts suggested by the distant prospect of the kingdom are simply reiterated in view of its speedy establishment. Trust in Providence and faith in the Messiah are all in all; the virtues of common existence are less and less. The inhumanities that Renan ascribes to an access of fanaticism in Jesus are the humanities of an unreal Utopia.

The prodigious manifestation of mental and spiritual force that broke out in Paul requires no explanation apart from his own genius. He never saw Jesus and apparently was incurious about him. His originality was intellectual, and his system bears no trace of a foreign personality. As Renan says: "The Christ who communicates private revelations to him is a phantom of his own making;" "It is himself he listens to, while fancying that he hears Jesus." If ever man was self-motived, self-impelled, self-actuated, it was he. He needed no prompter. Hot of brain and heart, he was only too swift to move. Whether, as some think, driven by over-mastering ambition to lead a new movement, or, as others contend, constrained by inward urgency to attempt a moral reform on a speculative basis, or, according to yet a third supposition, eager to bear the glad tidings of the gospel to the gentile world, his own genius was from first to last, his guide and inspiration. There is no evidence to prove that his "conversion" added anything new to the mass of his moral nature, or changed the quality of ruling attributes, or determined the bent of his will to unpremeditated issues. He was converted to the Christ, not to Jesus; and his conversion to the Christ, was nothing absolutely unprepared for. His zeal for Israel blazed furiously against the disciples who claimed that the Christ had come, and to the end of his stormy days it still continued to burn against disciples of the narrow school who would not believe he had come to any but Jews. His zeal for Israel, sent him away by himself to meditate a grander Christ. The Christ, not Jesus, was his watch-cry. A man of ideas, intensely interested in speculative questions, keenly alive to the joy of controversy and the ecstasy of propagandism, he filled his boiler with water as he rushed along, leaving Peter and the rest to fill theirs at the nazarene spring. So little is Jesus to be credited with Paul's achievement, that it is the fashion to call his a distinct movement. Enthusiastic admirers of his genius, call him the real founder of Christianity. Severe critics of his claim accuse him of corrupting the religion of Jesus in its spirit, and diverting it from its purpose. On either supposition, he was not a disciple.