itself a literary masterpiece. With a kind of effortless ease he makes his
readers acquainted with the criticism of Strauss, of Baur, of Reuss, of
Colani. He does not argue, but simply sets the result vividly before the
reader, who finds himself at once at home in the new world of ideas. He
avoids any hard or glaring effects; by means of that skilful transition
from point to point which Wagner in one of his letters praises as the
highest art, everything is surrounded with atmosphere. But how much
trickery and illusion there is in this art! In a few strokes he indicates
the relation of John to the Synoptists; the dilemma is made clear, it
seems as if one horn or the other must be chosen. Then he begins by artful
touches to soften down the contrast. The discourses of John are not
authentic; the historical Jesus cannot have spoken thus. But what about
the statements of fact? Here Renan declares himself convinced by the
graphic presentment of the passion story. Touches like “it was night,”
“they had lighted a fire of coals,” “the coat was without seam,” cannot
have been invented. Therefore the Gospel must in some way go back to the
disciple whom Jesus loved. It is possible, nay certain, that when as an
old man he read the other Gospels, he was displeased by certain
inaccuracies, and perhaps vexed that he was given so small a place in the
history. He began to dictate a number of things which he had better means
of knowing than the others; partly, too, with the purpose of showing that
in many cases where Peter only had been mentioned he also had played a
part, and indeed the principal part. Sometimes his recollection was quite
fresh, sometimes it had been modified by time. When he wrote down the
discourses, he had forgotten the Lake of Gennesareth and the winsome words
which he had listened to upon its shores. He was now living in quite a
different world. The events of the year 70 destroyed his hopes of the
return of his Master. His Jewish prejudices fell away, and as he was still
young, he adapted himself to the syncretistic, philosophic, gnostic
environment amid which he found himself in Ephesus. Thus even Jesus’ world
of thought took on a new shape for him; although the discourses are
perhaps rather to be referred to his school than to himself. But, when all
is said, John remains the best biographer. Or, to put it more accurately,
while all the Gospels are biographies, they are legendary biographies,
even though they come down from the first century. Their texts need
interpretation, and the clue to the interpretation can be supplied by
aesthetic feeling. They must be subjected to a gentle pressure to bring
them together, and make them coalesce into a unity in which all the data
are happily combined.
How this is to be done Renan shows later in his description of the death
of Jesus. “Suddenly,” he says, “Jesus gave a terrible cry in which some
thought they heard ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,’ but which
others, whose thoughts were running on the fulfilment of prophecy,
reported as ‘It is finished.’ ”
The authentic sayings of Jesus are more or less self‐evidencing. Coming in
contact with one of them amid the welter of heterogeneous traditions, you
feel a thrill of recognition. They leap forth and take their proper place,
where their vivid power becomes apparent. For one who writes the life of
Jesus on His native soil, the Gospels are not so much sources of
information as incentives to revelation. “I had,” Renan avows, “a fifth
Gospel before my eyes, mutilated in parts, but still legible, and taking
it for my guide I saw behind the narratives of Matthew and Mark, instead
of an ideal Being of whom it might be maintained that He had never
existed, a glorious human countenance full of life and movement.” It is
this Jesus of the fifth Gospel that he desires to portray.
In looking at the picture, the reader must not allow the vexed question of
miracle to distract him and disturb the proper frame of mind. The author
refuses to assert either the possibility or the impossibility of miracle,
but speaks only as an historian. “We do not say miracle is impossible, we
say only that there has never been a satisfactorily authenticated
miracle.”
In view of the method of treatment adopted by Renan there can, of course,
be no question of an historical plan. He brings in each saying at the
point where it seems most appropriate. None of them is passed over, but
none of them appears in its historical setting. He shifts individual
incidents hither and thither in the most arbitrary fashion. For example,
the coming of Jesus’ mother to seek Him (in the belief that He is beside
Himself) must belong to the later part of Jesus’ life, since it is out of
tone with the happy innocence of the earlier period. Certain scenes are
transposed from the later period to the earlier, because they are not
gloomy enough for the later time. Others again are made the basis of an
unwarranted generalisation. It is not enough that Jesus once rode upon an
ass while the disciples in the intoxication of joy cast their garments in
the way; according to Renan, He constantly rode about, even in Galilee,
upon a mule, “that favourite riding‐animal of the East, which is so docile
and sure‐footed and whose great dark eyes, shaded by long lashes, are full
of gentleness.” Sometimes the disciples surrounded Him with rustic pomp,
using their garments by way of carpeting. They laid them upon the mule
which carried Him, or spread them before Him on the way.
Scenes of little significance are sometimes elaborately described by Renan
while more important ones are barely touched on. “One day, indeed,” he
remarks in describing the first visit to Jerusalem, “anger seems to have,
as the saying goes, overmastered Him; He struck some of the miserable
chafferers with the scourge, and overthrew their tables.” Such is the
incidental fashion in which the cleansing of the temple was brought in. In
this way it is possible to smuggle in a miracle without giving any further
explanation of it. The miracle at Cana is brought, by means of the
following unobtrusive turn of phrase, into the account of the period of
success in Galilee. “One of His miracles was done by Jesus for the sole
purpose of increasing the happiness of a wedding‐party in a little country
town.”
This Life of Jesus is introduced by a kind of prelude. Jesus had been
living in Galilee before He came to the Baptist; when He heard of the
latter’s success He went to him with His little company of followers. They
were both young, and Jesus became the imitator of the Baptist. Fortunately
the latter soon disappeared from the scene, for his influence on Jesus was
in some respects injurious. The Galilaean teacher was on the verge of
losing the sunny religion which He had learned from His only teacher, the
glorious natural scenery which surrounded His home, and of becoming a
gloomy Jewish fanatic. But this influence fell away from Him again; when
He returned to Galilee He became Himself once more. The only thing which
He had gained from John was some knowledge of the art of preaching. He had
learned from him how to influence masses of men. From that time forward He
preached with much more power and gained greater ascendancy over the
people.
With the return to Galilee begins the first act of the piece. The story of
the rise of Christianity is a pastoral play. Bauer, in his “Philo,
Strauss, and Renan,” writes with biting sarcasm: “Renan, who is at once
the author of the play, the stage‐manager, and the director of the
theatre, gives the signal to begin, and at a sign from him the electric
lights are put on full power, the Bengal fires flare up, the footlights
are turned higher, and while the flutes and shawms of the orchestra strike
up the overture, the people enter and take their places among the bushes
and by the shore of the Lake.” And how confiding they were, this gentle
and peaceful company of Galilaean fisher folk! And He, the young
carpenter, conjured the Kingdom of Heaven down to earth for a year, by the
spell of the infinite tenderness which radiated from Him. A company of men
and women, all of the same youthful integrity and simple innocence, became
His followers and constantly repeated “Thou art the Messiah.” By the women
He was more beloved than He Himself liked, but from His passion for the
glory of His Father He was content to attract these “fair creatures”
(_belles créatures_) and suffered them to serve Him, and God through Him.
Three or four devoted Galilaean women constantly accompanied Him and
strove with one another for the pleasure (_le plaisir_) of listening to
His teaching and attending to His comfort. Some of them were wealthy and
used their means to enable the “amiable” (_charmant_) prophet to live
without needing to practise His handicraft. The most devoted of all was
Mary Magdalene, whose disordered mind had been healed by the influence of
the pure and gracious beauty (_par la beauté pure et douce_) of the young
Rabbi.
Thus He rode, on His long‐eyelashed gentle mule, from village to village,
from town to town. The sweet theology of love (_la délicieuse théologie de
l’amour_) won Him all hearts. His preaching was gentle and mild (_suave et
douce_), full of nature and the fragrance of the country. Wherever He went
the people kept festival. At marriages He was a welcome guest; to the
feasts which He gave He invited women who were sinners, and publicans like
the good Zacchaeus.
“The Frenchman,” remarks Noack, “takes the mummied figure of the Galilaean
Rabbi, which criticism has exhumed, endows it with life and energy, and
brings Him upon the stage, first amid the lustre of the earthly happiness
which it was His pleasure to bestow, and then in the moving aspect of one
doomed to suffer.”
When Jesus goes up to the Passover at the end of this first year, He comes
into conflict with the Rabbis of the capital. The “winsome teacher, who
offered forgiveness to all on the sole condition of loving Him,” found in
the capital people upon whom His charm had no effect. When He returned to
Galilee He had entirely abandoned His Jewish beliefs, and a revolutionary
ardour glowed in His heart. The second act begins. “The action becomes
more serious and gloomy, and the pupil of Strauss turns down the
footlights of his stage.”(108) The erstwhile “winsome moralist” has become
a transcendental revolutionary. Up to this point He had thought to bring
about the triumph of the Kingdom of God by natural means, by teaching and
influencing men. The Jewish eschatology stood vaguely in the background.
Now it becomes prominent. The tension set up between His purely ethical
ideas and these eschatological expectations gives His words from this time
forward a special force. The period of joyous simplicity is past.
Even the character of the hero loses its simplicity. In the furtherance of
His cause He becomes a wonder‐worker. It is true that even before He had
sometimes practised innocent arts such as Joan of Arc made use of
later.(109) He had, for instance, pretended to know the unspoken thoughts
of one whom He desired to win, had reminded him, perhaps, of some
experience of which he cherished the memory. He allowed the people to
believe that He received knowledge of certain matters through a kind of
revelation. Finally, it came to be whispered that He had spoken with Moses
and Elias upon the mountains. But He now finds Himself compelled to adopt
in earnest the rôle which He had formerly taken, as it were, in play.
Against His will He is compelled to found His work upon miracle. He must
face the alternative of either renouncing His mission or becoming a
thaumaturge. He consented, therefore, to play an active part in many
miracles. In this astute friends gave Him their aid. At Bethany something
happened which could be regarded as a raising of the dead. Perhaps this
miracle was arranged by Lazarus himself. When very ill he had allowed
himself to be wrapped in the cerements of the dead and laid in the grave.
His sisters sent for Jesus and brought Him to the tomb. He desired to look
once more upon His friend, and when, overcome with grief, He cried his
name aloud, Lazarus came forth from the grave. Why should the brother and
sisters have hesitated to provide a miracle for the Master, in whose
miracle‐working power they, indeed, believed? Where, then, was Renan’s
allegiance to his “honoured master” Strauss, when he thus enrolled himself
among the rationalists?
On these lines Jesus played His part for eighteen months, from the Easter
of 31 to the Feast of Tabernacles of 32. How great is the change from the
gentle teacher of the Sermon on the Mount! His discourse takes on a
certain hardness of tone. In the synagogue at Capernaum He drives many
from Him, offended by the saying about eating and drinking His flesh and
blood. The “extreme materialism of the expression,” which in Him had
always been the natural counterpoise to the “extreme idealism of the
thought,” becomes more and more pronounced. His “Kingdom of God” was
indeed still essentially the kingdom of the poor, the kingdom of the soul,
the great spiritual kingdom; but He now preached it as the kingdom of the
apocalyptic writings. And yet in the very moment when He seems to be
staking everything upon a supernatural fulfilment of His hopes, He
provides with remarkable prescience the basis of a permanent Church. He
appoints the Twelve Apostles and institutes the fellowship‐meal. It is
certain, Renan thinks, that the “Supper” was not first instituted on that
last evening; even in the second Galilaean period He must have practised
with His followers the mystic rite of the Breaking of Bread, which in some
way symbolised His death.
By the end of this period He had cast off all earthly ambitions. Nothing
of earth existed for Him any more. A strange longing for persecution and
martyrdom had taken possession of Him. It was not, however, the resolve to
offer an atonement for the sins of His people which familiarised Him with
the thought of death; it was forced upon Him by the knowledge that He had
entered upon a path in which it was impossible for Him to sustain His rôle
for more than a few months, or perhaps even weeks. So He sets out for
Jerusalem, outwardly a hero, inwardly half in despair because He has
turned aside from His true path. The gentle, faithful, long‐eyelashed mule
bears Him, amid the acclamations of the multitude, through the gate of the
capital.
The third act begins: the stage is dark and becomes constantly darker,
until at last, through the darkness of the scene, there is faintly visible
only the figure of a woman—of her who in her deep grief beside the grave
was by her vision to call to life again Him whom she loved. There was
darkness, too, in the souls of the disciples, and in that of the Master.
The bitter jealousy between Judas and John made one of them a traitor. As
for Jesus, He had His hour of gloom to fight through in Gethsemane. For a
moment His human nature awakened in Him; all that He thought He had slain
and put behind Him for ever rose up and confronted Him as He knelt there
upon the ground. “Did He remember the clear brooks of Galilee at which He
might have slaked His thirst—the vine and the fig‐tree beneath which He
might have rested—the maidens who would perhaps have been willing to love
Him? Did He regret His too exalted nature? Did He, a martyr to His own
greatness, weep that He had not remained the simple carpenter of Nazareth?
We do not know!”
He is dead. Renan, as though he stood in Père Lachaise, commissioned to
pronounce the final allocution over a member of the Academy, apostrophises
Him thus: “Rest now, amid Thy glory, noble pioneer. Thou conqueror of
death, take the sceptre of Thy Kingdom, into which so many centuries of
Thy worshippers shall follow Thee, by the highway which Thou hast opened
up.”
The bell rings; the curtain begins to fall; the swing‐seats tilt. The
epilogue is scarcely heard: “Jesus will never have a rival. His religion
will again and again renew itself; His story will call forth endless
tears: His sufferings will soften the hearts of the best; every successive
century will proclaim that among the sons of men there hath not arisen a
greater than Jesus.”
The book passed through eight editions in three months. The writings of
those who opposed it had an equal vogue. That of Freppel had reached its
twelfth edition in 1864.(110) Their name was legion. Whatever wore a
soutane and could wield a pen charged against Renan, the bishops leading
the van. The tone of these attacks was not always very elevated, nor their
logic very profound. In most cases the writers were only concerned to
defend the Deity of Christ,(111) and the miracles, and are satisfied that
they have done so when they have pointed out some of the glaring
inconsistencies in Renan’s work. Here and there, however, among these
refutations we catch the tone of a loftier ethical spirit which has
recognised the fundamental weakness of the work, the lack of any definite
ethical principles in the writer’s outlook upon life.(112) There were some
indeed who were not content with a refutation; they would gladly have seen
active measures taken against Renan. One of his most embittered
adversaries, Amadée Nicolas,(113) reckons up in an appendix to his work
the maximum penalties authorised by the existing enactments against free‐
thought, and would welcome the application of the law of the 25th of March
1822, according to which five years’ imprisonment could be imposed for the
crime of “insulting or making ridiculous a religion recognised by the
state.”
Renan was defended by the _Siècle_, the _Débats_, at that time the leading
French newspaper, and the _Temps_, in which Scherer published five
articles upon the book. Even the _Revue des deux mondes_, which had
formerly raised a warning voice against Strauss, allowed itself to go with
the stream, and published in its August number of 1863 a critical analysis
by Havet(114) who hailed Renan’s work as a great achievement, and
criticised only the inconsistencies by which he had endeavoured to soften
down the radical character of his undertaking. Later on the _Revue_
changed its attitude and sided with Renan’s opponents. In the Protestant
camp there was an even keener sense of distaste than in the Catholic for
the sentimental gloss which Renan had spread over his work to make it
attractive to the multitude by its iridescent colours. In four remarkable
letters Athanase Coquerel the younger took the author to task for
this.(115) From the standpoint of orthodox scholarship E. de Pressensé
condemned him;(116) and proceeded without loss of time to refute him in a
large‐scale Life of Jesus.(117) He was answered by Albert Réville,(118)
who claims recognition for Renan’s services to criticism.
In general, however, the rising French school of critical theology was
disappointed in Renan. Their spokesman was Colani. “This is not the Christ
of history, the Christ of the Synoptics,” he writes in 1864 in the _Revue
de théologie_, “but the Christ of the Fourth Gospel, though without His
metaphysical halo, and painted over with a brush which has been dipped in
the melancholy blue of modern poetry, in the rose of the eighteenth‐
century idyll, and in the grey of a moral philosophy which seems to be
derived from La Rochefoucauld.” “In expressing this opinion,” he adds, “I
believe I am speaking in the name of those who belong to what is known as
the new Protestant theology, or the Strassburg school. We opened M.
Renan’s book with sympathetic interest; we closed it with deep
disappointment.”(119)
The Strassburg school had good cause to complain of Renan, for he had
trampled their growing crops. They had just begun to arouse some interest,
and slowly and surely to exercise an influence upon the whole spiritual
life of France. Sainte‐Beuve had called attention to the work of Reuss,
Colani, Réville, and Scherer. Others of the school were Michel Nicolas of
Montauban and Gustave d’Eichthal. Nefftzer, the editor of the _Temps_, who
was at the same time a prophet of coming political events, defended their
cause in the Parisian literary world. The _Revue germanique_ of that
period, the influence of which upon French literature can hardly be over‐
estimated, was their sworn ally. Then came Renan and threw public opinion
into a ferment of excitement. Everything in the nature of criticism, and
of progress in religious thought, was associated with his name, and was
thereby discredited. By his untimely and over‐easy popularisation of the
ideas of the critical school he ruined their quiet work. The excitement
roused by his book swept away all that had been done by those noble and
lofty spirits, who now found themselves involved in a struggle with the
outraged orthodoxy of Paris, and were hard put to it to defend themselves.
Even down to the present day Renan’s work forms the greatest hindrance to
any serious advance in French religious thought.
The excitement aroused upon the other side of the Rhine was scarcely less
than in Paris. Within a year there appeared five different German
translations, and many of the French criticisms of Renan were also
translated.(120) The German Catholic press was wildly excited;(121) the
Protestant press was more restrained, more inclined to give the author a
fair hearing, and even ventured to express admiration of the historical
merits of his performance. Beyschlag(122) saw in Renan an advance upon
Strauss, inasmuch as for him the life of Jesus as narrated in the Gospels,
while not, indeed, in any sense supernatural, is nevertheless historical.
For a certain school of theology, therefore, Renan was a deliverer from
Strauss; they were especially grateful to him for his defence, sophistical
though it was, of the Fourth Gospel. Weizsäcker expressed his admiration.
Strauss, far from directing his “Life of Jesus for the German People,”
with which he was then occupied, against the superficial and frivolous
French treatment of the subject—as has sometimes been alleged—hailed Renan
in his preface as a kindred spirit and ally, and “shook hands with him
across the Rhine.” Luthardt,(123) however, remained inexorable. “What is
there lacking in Renan’s work?” he asks. And he replies, “It lacks
conscience.”
That is a just judgment. From this lack of conscience, Renan has not been
scrupulous where he ought to have been so. There is a kind of insincerity
in the book from beginning to end. Renan professes to depict the Christ of
the Fourth Gospel, though he does not believe in the authenticity or the
miracles of that Gospel. He professes to write a scientific work, and is
always thinking of the great public and how to interest it. He has thus
fused together two works of disparate character. The historian finds it
hard to forgive him for not going more deeply into the problem of the
development in the thought of Jesus, with which he was brought face to
face by the emphasis which he laid on eschatology, and for offering in
place of a solution the highly‐coloured phrases of the novelist.
Nevertheless, this work will always retain a certain interest, both for
Frenchmen and for Germans. The German is often so completely fascinated by
it as to lose his power of criticism, because he finds in it German
thought in a novel and piquant form. Conversely the Frenchman discovers in
it, behind the familiar form, which is here handled in such a masterly
fashion, ideas belonging to a world which is foreign to him, ideas which
he can never completely assimilate, but which yet continually attract him.
In this double character of the work lies its imperishable charm.
And its weakness? That it is written by one to whom the New Testament was
to the last something foreign, who had not read it from his youth up in
the mother‐tongue, who was not accustomed to breathe freely in its simple
and pure world, but must perfume it with sentimentality in order to feel
himself at home in it.
XIV. THE “LIBERAL” LIVES OF JESUS
_David Friedrich Strauss._ Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk
bearbeitet. (A Life of Jesus for the German People.) Leipzig,
1864. 631 pp.
Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte. Eine
Kritik des Schleiermacher’schen Lebens Jesu. (The Christ of Faith
and the Jesus of History, a Criticism of Schleiermacher’s Life of
Jesus.) Berlin, 1865. 223 pp. Appendix, pp. 224‐240.
Der Schenkel’sche Handel in Baden. (The Schenkel Affair in Baden.)
A corrected reprint from No. 441 of the _National‐Zeitung_, of the
21st September 1864.
Die Halben und die Ganzen. (The Half‐way‐ers and the Whole‐way‐
ers.) 1865.
_Daniel Schenkel._ Das Charakterbild Jesu. (The Portrait of
Jesus.) Wiesbaden, 1864 (ed. 1 and 2). 405 pp. Fourth edition,
with a preface opposing Strauss’s “Der alte und der neue Glaube”
(The Old Faith and the New), 1873.
_Karl Heinrich Weizsäcker._ Untersuchungen über die evangelische
Geschichte, ihre Quellen und den Gang ihrer Entwicklung. (Studies
in the Gospel History, its Sources and the Progress of its
Development.) Gotha, 1864. 580 pp.
_Heinrich Julius Holtzmann._ Die synoptischen Evangelien. Ihr
Ursprung und geschichtlicher Charakter. (The Synoptic Gospels.
Their Origin and Historical Character.) Leipzig, 1863. 514 pp.
_Theodor Keim._ Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara. (The History of
Jesus of Nazara.) 3 vols., Zurich; vol. i., 1867, 446 pp.; vol.
ii., 1871, 616 pp.; vol. iii., 1872, 667 pp.
Die Geschichte Jesu. Zurich, 1872. 398 pp.
_Karl Hase._ Geschichte Jesu. Nach akademischen Vorlesungen. (The
History of Jesus. Academic Lectures, revised.) Leipzig, 1876. 612
pp.
_Willibald Beyschlag._ Das Leben Jesu. First Part: Preliminary
Investigations, 1885, 450 pp. Second Part: Narrative, 1886, 495
pp.; 2nd ed., 1887‐1888.
_Bernhard Weiss._ Das Leben Jesu. 1st ed., 2 vols., 1882; 2nd ed.,
1884. First vol., down to the Baptist’s question, 556 pp. Second
vol., 617 pp.