Gospel tradition which leads to the hypothesis that we have to do with
redactions of the Gospels. Either Jesus was the Jewish Messiah of the
Synoptics, or a Son of God in the Greek, spiritual sense, whose self‐
consciousness must be interpreted by means of the Logos doctrine: He
cannot have been both at the same time. But it is inconceivable that a
Jewish claimant of the Messiahship would have been left unmolested up to
the last, and have had virtually to force the authorities to put him to
death. On the other hand, if He were a simple enthusiast claiming to be a
Son of God, a man who lived only for his own “self‐consciousness,” He
might from the beginning have taken up this attitude without being in any
way molested, except by the scorn of men. In this respect also, therefore,
the primitive Gospel which we can recover from John has the advantage. It
was only later that this “Son of God” became the Jewish Messiah.
We arrive at the primitive Johannine writing when we cancel in the Fourth
Gospel all Jewish doctrine and all miracles.(104) Its date is the year 60
and it was composed by—Judas, the beloved disciple. This primitive Gospel
received little modification and still shows clearly “the wonderful
reality of its history.” It aims only at giving a section of Jesus’
history, a representation of His attitude of mind and spirit. With “simple
ingenuousness” it gives, “along with the kernel of the historical material
of the Gospel, Jesus’ thoughts about His own Person in the mysterious
oracular sayings and deeply thoughtful and moving discourses by which the
Nazarene stirred rather than enlightened the world.” Events of a striking
character were, however, absent from it. The feeding of the multitude was
represented in it as effected by natural means. It was a philanthropic
feeding of a multitude which certainly did not number thousands, the
numbers are a later insertion; Jesus fed them with bread and fish which He
purchased from a “sutler‐lad.” The healing of the lame man at the pool of
Bethesda was the unmasking of a malingerer, whom the Lord exposed and
ordered to depart. As He had bidden him carry his bed, and it was on the
Sabbath, this brought Him into conflict with the authorities. His only
“acts” were acts of self‐revelation—mystical sayings which He threw out to
the people. “The problem which meets us in His history is in truth a
psychological problem, how, namely, His exalted view of Himself came to be
accepted as the purest and highest truth—in His lifetime, it is true, only
by a limited circle of disciples, but after His departure by a constantly
growing multitude of believing followers.” The gospel of the beloved
disciple Judas made its way quietly into the world, understood by few,
even as Jesus Himself had been understood by a few only.
About ten years later, according to Noack, appeared the original form of
Luke, which we can reconstruct from what is known of Marcion’s Luke.(105)
This Evangelist is under Pauline influence, and writes with an apologetic
purpose. He desires to refute the calumny that Jesus was “possessed of a
devil,” and he does this by making Him cast out devils. It was in this way
that miracle forced itself into the Gospel history.
But this primitive Luke, as Noack reconstructs it by combining the
statements of the Fathers regarding Marcion’s Gospel, knows nothing of
Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem to die. This circumstance is of capital
importance to Noack, because in the course of his attempt to bring the
topography of the Fourth Gospel into harmony with that of the Synoptics he
had arrived at the remarkable result that the Johannine Christ worked in
Galilee, not in Judaea. On the basis of the _Onomasticon_ of
Eusebius—which Noack, with the aid of topographical traditions derived
from the Crusaders and statements of Mohammedan writers, interprets with a
recklessness which is nothing short of criminal—Cana and Bethany
(Bethabara) were not in the latitude of Jerusalem, but “near the head‐
waters of the Jordan in the upper part of the Jordan valley before it
flows into the lake of Huleh. There, in Coele‐Syria, on the southern slope
of Hermon, was the scene of John the Baptist’s labours; there Jesus began
His ministry; thither He returned to die.” “It is in the Galilaean
district which forms the scene of the Song of Solomon that the reader of
this book must be prepared to find the Golgotha of the cross.” That is the
sentence with which Noack’s account of the Life of Jesus opens. This
alludes to an idea which had already been worked out in his “Studies on
the Song of Solomon,”(106) namely, that the mountain country surrounding
the upper Jordan was the pre‐exilic Judaea, and that the “city of David”
was situated there. The Jews on their return from exile had at first
endeavoured to rebuild that Coele‐Syrian city of David with the ruins of
Solomon’s Temple, but had been driven away from it and had then taken the
desperate resolution to build the temple of Zerubbabel upon the high
plateau lying far to the south of ancient Israel. Ezra the Scribe
interpolated the forgery on the ground of which this site began to be
accepted as the former city of David. Under the Syrian oppression all
remembrance of the ancient city of David entirely disappeared.
This fantastic edifice, in the construction of which the wildest
etymologies play a part, is founded on the just recognition that a
reconciliation of John with the Synoptists can only be effected by
transferring some of the Johannine localities to the North; but this
involves not only finding Bethany, Arimathea and the other places, but
even the scene of Jesus’ death in this district. The brook Kedron
conveniently becomes the “brook of Cedars.”
For fifty years the two earliest Evangelists, in spite of their poverty of
incident, sufficed for the needs of the Christians. The “fire of Jesus”
was fed chiefly by the Pauline Gospel. The original form of the Gospel of
Luke accordingly became the starting‐point of the next stage of
development. Thus arose the Gospel of Mark. Mark was not a native of
Palestine, but a man of Roman extraction living in Decapolis, who had not
the slightest knowledge of the localities in which the life of Jesus was
really passed. He undertook, about the year 130, “in the interest of the
new Christian settlement at Jerusalem in Hadrian’s time, deliberately and
consciously to transform the original plan of the Gospel history and to
represent the Lord as crucified at Jerusalem.” The man who from the year
132 onward, as Mark the Bishop, preached the word of the Crucified to a
Gentile Christian community amid the ruins of the holy city, had
previously, as Mark the Evangelist, taken care that a prophet should not
perish out of Jerusalem. In composing his Gospel he made use, in addition
to Luke, of a traditional source which he found in Decapolis. He
deliberately omitted the frequent journeys to Jerusalem which were still
found in the original Luke, and inserted instead Jesus’ journey to His
death. He it was, also, who made the Nazarite into the Nazarene, laying
the scene of Jesus’ youth in Nazareth. To the cures of demoniacs he added
magical acts such as the feeding of the multitude and the resurrection.
In Matthew, who appeared about 135, legend and fiction riot unchecked. In
addition, Jewish parables and sayings are put into the mouth of Jesus,
whereas He really had nothing to do with the Jewish world of ideas. For if
anything is certain, it is that the moral maxims of the latest Gospel are
of a distinctively Jewish origin. About the middle of the second century
the originals of John and Luke underwent redaction. The redaction of the
Logos Gospel was completed by the addition of the twenty‐first chapter;
the last redaction of Luke was perhaps carried out by Justin Martyr, fresh
from completing his “Dialogue with Trypho”! Thus John and Luke are, in
this final form, which is full of contradictions, the latest Gospels, and
the saying is fulfilled about the first being last, and the last first.
Arbitrary as these suggestions are, there is nevertheless something
impressive in the attempt to explain the remarkable inconsistencies which
are found within the Gospel tradition by considerations relating to its
origin and development. Despite all his far‐fetched ideas, Noack really
stands higher than some of his contemporaries who showed more prudence in
their theological enterprises, and about that time were earning the
applause of the faculty, and quieting the minds of the laity, by
performing once more the old conjuring trick—assisted by some new feats of
legerdemain—of harmonising John with the Synoptists in such a way as to
produce a Life of Jesus which could be turned to the service of
ecclesiastical theology.
The outline of the public Life of Jesus, as reconstructed by Noack, is as
follows. It lasted from early in the year 35 to the 14th Nisan of the year
37, and began in the moment when Jesus revealed His consciousness of what
He was. We do not know how long previously He had cherished it in secret.
It is certain that the Baptist helped to bring about this revelation. This
is the only part which he plays in the Gospel of John. He was neither a
preacher of repentance, nor an Elias, nor the forerunner of Jesus, nor a
mere signpost pointing to the Messiah, such as the secondary tradition
makes him out to be.
Similarly everything that is Messianic in the consciousness of Jesus is
secondary. The lines of His thought were guided by the Greek ideas about
sons of God, for the soil of northern Galilee was saturated with these
ideas. Other sources which contributed something were the personification
of the Divine Wisdom in the “Wisdom Literature” and some of Philo’s
doctrines. Jesus became the son of God in an ecstatic trance! Had not
Philo recognised ecstasy as the last and highest means of rising to union
with the Divine?
Jesus’ temperament, according to Noack, was pre‐disposed to ecstasy, since
He was born out of wedlock. One who had this burden upon His spirit may
well have early taken refuge in His own thoughts, above the clouds, in the
presence of the God of His fathers. Assailed in a thousand ways by the
cruelty of the world, it would seem to Him as though His Heavenly Father,
though unseen, was stretching out to Him the arms of consolation.
Imagination, which ever mercifully lightens for men the yoke of misery,
charmed the fatherless child out of His earthly sufferings and put into
His hand a coloured glass through which He saw the world and life in a
false light. Ecstatic enthusiasm had carried Him up to the dizzy height of
spiritual union with the Father in Heaven. A hundred times He was cast
down out of His dreams into the hard world of reality, to experience once
more His earthly distresses, but ever anew He won His way by fasting,
vigil, and prayer to the starry heaven of ecstasy.
“Jesus,” Noack explains, “had in thought projected Himself beyond His
earthly nativity and risen to the conception that His ego had been in
existence before this earthly body in which He stood visibly upon the
stage of the world. He felt that His ego had had being and life before He
became incarnate upon earth.... This new conception of Himself, born of
His solitary musings, was incorporated into the very substance of His
natural personal ego. A new ego had superseded the old natural,
corporeally conditioned ego.”
Ambition, too, came into play—the high ambition to do God a service by the
offering up of Himself. The passion of self‐sacrifice is characteristic of
a consciousness such as this. According to the document which underlies
the Johannine Gospel it was not in consequence of outward events that
Jesus took His resolve to die. “It was the later Gospel tradition which
exhibited His fate as an inevitable consequence of His conflict with a
world impervious to spiritual impression.” In the original Gospel that
fate was freely embraced from the outset as belonging to the vocation of
the Son of God. Only by the constant presence of the thought of death
could a life which for two years walked the razor edge of such dizzy
dreams have been preserved from falling. The conviction, or perhaps rather
the instinctive feeling, that the rôle of a Son of God upon earth was not
one to be maintained for decades was the necessary counterpoise to the
enthusiasm of Jesus’ spirit. From the first He was as much at home with
the thought of death as with His Heavenly Father.
This Son of Man—according to Noack’s interpretation the title is
equivalent to Son of Hope—requires of the multitude that they shall take
His lofty dream for solid reality. “He revealed His message from heaven to
the world at the Paschal Feast of the year 35, by throwing out a challenge
to the Sadducaean hierarchy in Jerusalem.” In the time between John’s
removal from the scene and John’s death, there falls the visit of Jesus to
Samaria and a sojourn in the neighbourhood of His Galilaean home. At the
Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem in the autumn of that year, the healing
of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda led to a breach with the Sabbatic
regulations of the Pharisees. Later on, in consequence of His generous
feeding of the multitude in the Gaulonite table‐land, there is an attempt
to make Him into a Messianic King; which He, however, repudiates. At the
time of the Passover in Galilee in the year 36, in the synagogue at
Capernaum, He tests the spiritual insight of those who may, He hopes, be
ripe for the higher teaching concerning the Son of God made flesh, by the
touchstone of His mystical words about the bread of life. At the next
Feast of Tabernacles, in the city of Zion, He makes a last desperate
attempt to move men’s hearts by the parable of the Good Shepherd who is
ready to lay down His life for His sheep, the people of Israel.
But His adversaries are remorseless; they wound Him to the very depths of
His spirit by bringing to Him the woman taken in adultery, and asking Him
what they are to do with her. When this question was sprung upon Him, He
saw in a moment the public humiliation designed by His adversaries. All
eyes were turned upon Him, and for a few moments the embarrassment of One
who was usually so self‐possessed was patent to all. He stooped as though
He desired to write with His finger upon the ground. Was it shame at His
dishonourable birth that compelled Him thus to lower His gaze? But the
painful silence of expectation among the spectators did not last long. His
adversaries repeated their question, He raised His head and spoke the
undying words: “Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone
at her.”
Incensed by His constant references to His heavenly Sonship, they
endeavour at last to stone Him. He flees from the Temple and takes refuge
in the Jordan uplands. His purpose is, at the next Passover, that of the
year 37, here in the mountains which were blessed as Joseph’s portion, to
offer His atoning death as that of the true paschal lamb, and with this
act to quit the stage of the world’s history. He remained in hiding in
order to avoid the risk of assassination by the emissaries of the
Pharisees. In Bethany He receives the mysterious visit of the Greeks, who
doubtless desired to tempt Him to raise the standard of revolt as a
claimant of the Messiahship, but He refuses to be shaken in His
determination to die. The washing of the disciples’ feet signifies their
baptism with water, that they might thereafter receive the baptism of the
Holy Spirit.
Judas, the disciple whom Jesus loved, who was a man of much resource,
helped Him to avoid being arrested as a disturber of the peace by
arranging that the “betrayal” should take place on the evening before the
Passover, in order that Jesus might die, as He desired, on the day of the
Passover. For this service of love he was, in the secondary tradition,
torn from the bosom of the Lord and branded as a traitor.
XIII. RENAN
_Ernest Renan._ La Vie de Jésus. 1863. Paris, Michel Lévy Frères.
462 pp.
_E. de Pressensé._ Jésus‐Christ, son temps, sa vie, son œuvre.
Paris, 1865. 684 pp.
Ernest Renan was born in 1823 at Tréguier in Brittany. Intended for the
priesthood, he entered the seminary of St. Sulpice in Paris, but there, in
consequence of reading the German critical theology, he began to doubt the
truth of Christianity and of its history. In October 1845, shortly before
the time arrived for him to be ordained a sub‐deacon, he left the seminary
and began to work for his living as a private teacher. In 1849 he received
a government grant to enable him to make a journey to Italy for the
prosecution of his studies, the fruits of which appeared in his _Averroès
et l’Averroïsme_ (Paris, 1852); in 1856 he was made a member of the
Académie des Inscriptions; in 1860 he received from Napoléon III. the
means to make a journey to Phoenicia and Syria. After his return in 1862
he obtained the professorship of Semitic Languages at the Collège de
France. But the widespread indignation aroused by his Life of Jesus, which
appeared in the following year, forced the Government to remove him from
his office. He refused a post as Librarian of the Imperial Library, and
lived in retirement until the Republic of 1871 restored him to his
professorship. In politics, as in religion, his position was somewhat
indefinite. In religion he was no longer a Catholic; avowed free‐thought
was too plebeian for his taste, and in Protestantism the multiplicity of
sects repelled him. Similarly in politics, in the period immediately
following the fall of the Empire, he was in turn Royalist, Republican, and
Bonapartist. At bottom he was a sceptic. He died in 1892, already half‐
forgotten by the public; until his imposing funeral and interment in the
Panthéon recalled him to its memory.
Like Strauss, Renan designed his Life of Jesus to form part of a complete
account of the history and dogma of the early Church. His purpose,
however, was purely historical; it was no part of his project to set up,
on the basis of the history, a new system of dogma, as Strauss had desired
to do. This plan was not only conceived, but carried out. _Les Apôtres_
appeared in 1866; _St. Paul_ in 1869; _L’Anté‐Christ_ in 1873; _Les
Évangiles_ in 1877; _L’Église chrétienne_ in 1879; _Marc‐Aurèle et la fin
du monde antique_ in 1881. Several of these works were more valuable than
the one which opened the series, but for the world Renan continued to be
the author of the _Vie de Jésus_, and of that alone.
He planned the work at Gaza, and he dedicated it to his sister Henriette,
who died soon after, in Syria, and lies buried at Byblus.
This was the first Life of Jesus for the Catholic world, which had
scarcely been touched—the Latin peoples least of all—by the two and a half
generations of critical study which had been devoted to the subject. It is
true, Strauss’s work had been translated into French,(107) but it had made
only a passing stir, and that only among a little circle of intellectuals.
Now came a writer with the characteristic French mental accent, who gave
to the Latin world in a single book the result of the whole process of
German criticism.
But Renan’s work marked an epoch, not for the Catholic world only, but for
general literature. He laid the problem which had hitherto occupied only
theologians before the whole cultured world. And not as a problem, but as
a question of which he, by means of his historical science and aesthetic
power of reviving the past, could provide a solution. He offered his
readers a Jesus who was alive, whom he, with his artistic imagination, had
met under the blue heaven of Galilee, and whose lineaments his inspired
pencil had seized. Men’s attention was arrested, and they thought to see
Jesus, because Renan had the skill to make them see blue skies, seas of
waving corn, distant mountains, gleaming lilies, in a landscape with the
Lake of Gennesareth for its centre, and to hear with him in the whispering
of the reeds the eternal melody of the Sermon on the Mount.
Yet the aesthetic feeling for nature which gave birth to this Life of
Jesus was, it must be confessed, neither pure nor profound. It is a
standing enigma why French art, which in painting grasps nature with a
directness and vigour, with an objectivity in the best sense of the word,
such as is scarcely to be found in the art of any other nation, has in
poetry treated it in a fashion which scarcely ever goes beyond the lyrical
and sentimental, the artificial, the subjective, in the worst sense of the
word. Renan is no exception to this rule, any more than Lamartine or
Pierre Loti. He looks at the landscape with the eye of a decorative
painter seeking a _motif_ for a lyrical composition upon which he is
engaged. But that was not noticed by the many, because they, after all,
were accustomed to have nature dressed up for them, and had had their
taste so corrupted by a certain kind of lyricism that they had lost the
power of distinguishing between truth and artificiality. Even those who
might have noticed it were so astonished and delighted at being shown
Jesus in the Galilaean landscape that they were content to yield to the
enchantment.
Along with this artificial feeling for nature a good many other things
were accepted without question. There is scarcely any other work on the
subject which so abounds in lapses of taste—and those of the most
distressing kind—as Renan’s _Vie de Jésus_. It is Christian art in the
worst sense of the term—the art of the wax image. The gentle Jesus, the
beautiful Mary, the fair Galilaeans who formed the retinue of the “amiable
carpenter,” might have been taken over in a body from the shop‐window of
an ecclesiastical art emporium in the Place St. Sulpice. Nevertheless,
there is something magical about the work. It offends and yet it attracts.
It will never be quite forgotten, nor is it ever likely to be surpassed in
its own line, for nature is not prodigal of masters of style, and rarely
is a book so directly born of enthusiasm as that which Renan planned among
the Galilaean hills.