It must therefore be taken as a flat fundamental modern fact, whether we
like it or not, that whilst many of us cannot believe that Jesus got his
curious grip of our souls by mere sentimentality, neither can we believe
that he was John Barleycorn. The more our reason and study lead us to
believe that Jesus was talking the most penetrating good sense when he
preached Communism; when he declared that the reality behind the popular
belief in God was a creative spirit in ourselves, called by him the
Heavenly Father and by us Evolution, Elan Vital, Life Force and other
names; when he protested against the claims of marriage and the family
to appropriate that high part of our energy that was meant for the
service of his Father, the more impossible it becomes for us to believe
that he was talking equally good sense when he so suddenly announced
that he was himself a visible concrete God; that his flesh and blood
were miraculous food for us; that he must be tortured and slain in the
traditional manner and would rise from the dead after three days; and
that at his second coming the stars would fall from heaven and he become
king of an earthly paradise. But it is easy and reasonable to believe
that an overwrought preacher at last went mad as Swift and Ruskin and
Nietzsche went mad. Every asylum has in it a patient suffering from the
delusion that he is a god, yet otherwise sane enough. These patients do
not nowadays declare that they will be barbarously slain and will rise
from the dead, because they have lost that tradition of the destiny
of godhead; but they claim everything appertaining to divinity that is
within their knowledge.
Thus the gospels as memoirs and suggestive statements of sociological
and biological doctrine, highly relevant to modern civilization, though
ending in the history of a psycopathic delusion, are quite credible,
intelligible, and interesting to modern thinkers. In any other light
they are neither credible, intelligible, nor interesting except to
people upon whom the delusion imposes.
"THE HIGHER CRITICISM."
Historical research and paleographic criticism will no doubt continue
their demonstrations that the New Testament, like the Old, seldom tells
a single story or expounds a single doctrine, and gives us often an
accretion and conglomeration of widely discrete and even unrelated
traditions and doctrines. But these disintegrations, though technically
interesting to scholars, and gratifying or exasperating, as the case
may be, to people who are merely defending or attacking the paper
fortifications of the infallibility of the Bible, have hardly anything
to do with the purpose of these pages. I have mentioned the fact that
most of the authorities are now agreed (for the moment) that the date
of the birth of Jesus may be placed at about 7 B.C.; but they do not
therefore date their letters 1923, nor, I presume, do they expect me to
do so. What I am engaged in is a criticism (in the Kantian sense) of an
established body of belief which has become an actual part of the mental
fabric of my readers; and I should be the most exasperating of triflers
and pedants if I were to digress into a criticism of some other belief
or no-belief which my readers might conceivably profess if they were
erudite Scriptural paleographers and historians, in which case, by the
way, they would have to change their views so frequently that the gospel
they received in their childhood would dominate them after all by its
superior persistency. The chaos of mere facts in which the Sermon on the
Mount and the Ode to Charity suggest nothing but disputes as to whether
they are interpolations or not, in which Jesus becomes nothing but
a name suspected of belonging to ten different prophets or executed
persons, in which Paul is only the man who could not possibly have
written the epistles attributed to him, in which Chinese sages,
Greek philosophers, Latin authors, and writers of ancient anonymous
inscriptions are thrown at our heads as the sources of this or that
scrap of the Bible, is neither a religion nor a criticism of religion:
one does not offer the fact that a good deal of the medieval building
in Peterborough Cathedral was found to be flagrant jerry-building as
a criticism of the Dean's sermons. For good or evil, we have made
a synthesis out of the literature we call the Bible; and though the
discovery that there is a good deal of jerry-building in the Bible
is interesting in its way, because everything about the Bible is
interesting, it does not alter the synthesis very materially even for
the paleographers, and does not alter it at all for those who know
no more about modern paleography than Archbishop Ussher did. I have
therefore indicated little more of the discoveries than Archbishop
Ussher might have guessed for himself if he had read the Bible without
prepossessions.
For the rest, I have taken the synthesis as it really lives and works in
men. After all, a synthesis is what you want: it is the case you have to
judge brought to an apprehensible issue for you. Even if you have
little more respect for synthetic biography than for synthetic rubber,
synthetic milk, and the still unachieved synthetic protoplasm which
is to enable us to make different sorts of men as a pastry cook makes
different sorts of tarts, the practical issue still lies as plainly
before you as before the most credulous votaries of what pontificates as
the Higher Criticism.