One more circumstance must be noted as gathered from Matthew. Though he
begins his story in such a way as to suggest that Jesus belonged to the
privileged classes, he mentions later on that when Jesus attempted to
preach in his own country, and had no success there, the people said,
"Is not this the carpenter's son?" But Jesus's manner throughout is that
of an aristocrat, or at the very least the son of a rich bourgeois, and
by no means a lowly-minded one at that. We must be careful therefore
to conceive Joseph, not as a modern proletarian carpenter working for
weekly wages, but as a master craftsman of royal descent. John the
Baptist may have been a Keir Hardie; but the Jesus of Matthew is of the
Ruskin-Morris class.
This haughty characterization is so marked that if we had no other
documents concerning Jesus than the gospel of Matthew, we should not
feel as we do about him. We should have been much less loth to say,
"There is a man here who was sane until Peter hailed him as the Christ,
and who then became a monomaniac." We should have pointed out that
his delusion is a very common delusion among the insane, and that such
insanity is quite consistent with the retention of the argumentative
cunning and penetration which Jesus displayed in Jerusalem after his
delusion had taken complete hold of him. We should feel horrified at the
scourging and mocking and crucifixion just as we should if Ruskin had
been treated in that way when he also went mad, instead of being cared
for as an invalid. And we should have had no clear perception of any
special significance in his way of calling the Son of God the Son of
Man. We should have noticed that he was a Communist; that he regarded
much of what we call law and order as machinery for robbing the poor
under legal forms; that he thought domestic ties a snare for the soul;
that he agreed with the proverb "The nearer the Church, the farther from
God;" that he saw very plainly that the masters of the community should
be its servants and not its oppressors and parasites; and that though he
did not tell us not to fight our enemies, he did tell us to love them,
and warned us that they who draw the sword shall perish by the sword.
All this shows a great power of seeing through vulgar illusions, and
a capacity for a higher morality than has yet been established in any
civilized community; but it does not place Jesus above Confucius or
Plato, not to mention more modern philosophers and moralists.