ILLUSIONS AS TO GOSPEL ETHIC
Strictly speaking, the whole problem of the moral value and the
historical effects of Christianity lies outside the present issue;
but we are forced to face it when the question of the truth of its
historic basis is dismissed by a professed logician with a rhetorical
thesis to the effect that "religion cannot be said to have made a
bad choice in pitching on" the personality of which he is challenged
to prove the historicity. Mill answers the challenge by begging the
question; and where he was capable of such a course multitudes, lay
and clerical, will long continue to be so. For Mill the problem was
something extraneous to his whole way of thought. Broadly speaking,
he never handled a historical problem, properly so called. Other
defenders of the historicity of Jesus, in turn, charge a want of
historic sense upon all who venture to put the hypothesis that the
Gospel Jesus is a mythical creation. The charge has been repeatedly
made by men who can make no pretence of having ever independently
elucidated any historical problem; and in one notable case, that of
Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter, it is made by a scholar who has committed
himself to the assertion of the historicity of Krishna. Such resorts
to blank asseveration in such matters are on all fours with the blank
asseveration that the Gospel Jesus, in virtue of the teachings ascribed
to him, is a figure too sublime for human invention.
The slightest reflection might obtrude the thought that it is precisely
the invented figure that can most easily be made quasi-sublime. Is it
pretended that Yahweh is not sublime? Is the Book of Job pretended
to be historical? The Gospel Jesus is never shown to us save in a
series of statuesque presentments, healing, preaching, prophesying,
blessing, denouncing, suffering; he is expressly detached from domestic
relationships; of his life apart from his Messianic career there is
not a vestige of trace that is not nakedly mythical; of his mental
processes there is not an attempt at explanation save in glosses
often palpably incompetent; and of his plan or purpose, his hopes or
expectations, no exegete has ever framed a non-theological theory that
will stand an hour's examination. Those who claim as an evidence of
uniqueness the fact that he is never accused by the evangelists of
any wrong act do but prove their unpreparedness to debate any of the
problems involved. A figure presented as divine, in a document that
aims at establishing a cult, is ipso facto denuded of errancy so far
as the judgment of the framers of the picture can carry them. But
all that the framers and redactors of the Gospels could achieve was
to outline a figure answering to their standards of perfection, free
of what they regarded as sin or error. Going to work in an age and
an environment in which ascetic principles were commonly posited as
against normal practice, they guard the God from every suggestion
of carnal appetite; and the dialecticians of faith childishly ask
us to contrast him with ancient Pagan deities whose legends are the
unsifted survivals of savage folklore. As if any new Sacred Book in
the same age would not have proceeded on the same standards; and as
if the religious Jewish literature of the age of Christian beginnings
were not as ascetic as the other. But inasmuch as the compilers of
the Gospels could not transcend the moral standard of their time,
they constantly obtrude its limitations and its blemishes. Had Mill
attempted anything beyond his dithyramb, he would have been hard put
to it to apply his ecstatic epithets to such teachings as these:--
Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or tittle shall in no
wise pass away from the law [of Moses].
Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of
fire. [Compare Matt. xxiii, 17: "Ye fools and blind"; and Luke xii,
20: "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee."]
Whosoever shall marry her [the woman divorced without good cause]
shall commit adultery.
Give to him that asketh thee.
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth. Seek ye first
[God's] kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things
[that were to be disregarded] shall be added unto you.
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing,
but inwardly are ravening wolves. [Compare the warning against
saying, Thou fool.]
Go not into any way of the Gentiles, and enter not into any city
of the Samaritans.
Whosoever shall not receive you, ... as ye go forth out of that
house or that city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I
say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom
and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city.
I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.
Think not that I come to send peace on the earth: I came not to
send peace, but a sword.... He that loveth father or mother more
than me is not worthy of me.
It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of
judgment than for you [Chorazin and Bethsaida; because of
non-acceptance of the teacher].... It shall be more tolerable
for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for you.
Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account
thereof in the day of judgment.
Therefore speak I to them in parables, because seeing they see not,
and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
In the end of the world the angels shall ... sever the wicked
from the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire.
In vain do they worship me, teaching as their doctrines the
precepts of men.
Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? [retort
for the employer who pays the same for a day's work and for
an hour's].
If ye have faith and doubt not ... even if ye shall say unto this
mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea, it shall be done.
And his lord commended the unrighteous steward because he had
done wisely.... And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends by
means of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when it shall fail,
they may receive you into the eternal tabernacles.
I say unto you that unto everyone that hath shall be given; but
from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors.... So
also shall my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not
everyone his brother from your hearts.
When such a mass of unmanageable doctrines is forced on the
notice of the dithyrambists, there promptly begins a process of
elimination--the method of Arnold, to which Mill would doubtless
have subscribed, denying as he did that Jesus ever claimed to be the
Son of God. Whatever is not sweetly reasonable in the Gospels, said
Arnold, cannot be the word of Jesus; let us then pick and choose as we
will. And justly enough may it be argued that we have been listening to
different voices. It cannot be the same man who prohibited all anger,
vetoing even the use of "Thou fool," and then proceeded to vituperate
Scribes and Pharisees in the mass as sons of hell; to curse a barren
tree; and to call the erring "Ye fools and blind"--any more than it
was the same man who said, "I am meek and lowly in heart," and "A
greater than Solomon is here," or annulled precepts of the law after
declaring that not a jot or tittle of it should pass away. But with
what semblance of critical righteousness shall it be pretended that in
a compilation thus palpably composite it was the teacher who said all
the right things and others who said all the wrong, when as a matter of
documentary fact the better sayings can all be paralleled in older or
contemporary writings? That challenge is never so much as faced by the
dithyrambists; to face it honestly would be the beginning of their end.
Some seem prepared to stake all on such a teaching as the parable
of the Good Samaritan, which actually teaches that a man of the
religiously despised race could humanely succour one of the despising
race when religious men of the same race passed him by. Is the
parable then assimilated by those who stress it? Can they conceive
that a Samaritan could so act? If yes, why cannot they conceive
that a Samaritan, or another Jew than one, could put forth such a
doctrine? Here is a story of actual human-kindness, paralleled in a
hundred tales and romances of later times, a story which, appealing
as it does to every reader, may reasonably be believed to have been
enacted a thousand times by simple human beings who never heard of
the Gospels. Yet we are asked to believe that only one Jewish or
Gentile mind in the age of Virgil was capable of drawing the moral
that the kindly and helpful soul is the true neighbour, and that the
good man will be neighbourly to all; so rebuking the tribalism of
the average Jew.
When, fifteen years ago, I wrote of "the moderate ethical height of
the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is partly precedented in Old
Testament teaching [Deut. xxiii, 7--an interpolation; cp. the Book
of Ruth]," Dr. J. E. Carpenter indignantly replied: "The field of
Greek literature is open; will Mr. Robertson take the Good Samaritan
and from Plato to Plotinus find his match?" And the Rev. Thomas James
Thorburn, D.D., LL.D., in his later work Jesus the Christ: Historical
or Mythical? (1912), wrote (p. 68):--
Dr. Estlin Carpenter has invited (we believe, in
vain!) Mr. Robertson to produce an equal to this same parable
out of the whole range of Greek literature, which undoubtedly
contains the choicest teaching of the ancient world.
Dr. Thorburn in his bibliography cited the first and second (1912)
editions of Pagan Christs; he thoughtfully omitted, in launching his
"we believe, in vain!", to ascertain whether there had been a second
edition of Christianity and Mythology, in which any reply I might
have to make to Dr. Carpenter might naturally be expected to appear,
that critic having challenged the proposition as put in the first
edition. A second edition had appeared, in 1910, and there I had duly
given the simple answer which the two learned Doctors of Divinity,
so conscious of knowing all Greek literature from Plato to Plotinus,
were unable to think of for themselves. The field of Greek literature,
as Dr. Carpenter justly observes, is open; and it would have been
fitting on his part to perambulate a little therein. The demanded
instance lay to the hand of unlearned people in so familiar an author
as Plutarch--in the tale of Lycurgus and Alcander. As Dr. Thorburn
and Dr. Carpenter, however, must be supposed to have been ignorant
of that story, it may be well to tell it briefly here.
Lycurgus having greatly exasperated the rich citizens by proposing
the institution of frugal common meals, they made a tumult and stoned
him in the market-place, so that he had to run for sanctuary in a
temple. But one of his pursuers, a violent youth named Alcander, caught
up with him, and, striking him with a club as he turned round, dashed
out one of his eyes. Lycurgus then stood calmly facing the citizens,
letting them see his bleeding face, and his eye destroyed. All who
saw him were filled with shame and remorse. They gave up Alcander
to his mercy, and conducted Lycurgus in procession to his house to
show their sympathy. He thanked them and dismissed them, but kept
Alcander with him. He did him no harm, and used no reproachful words,
but kept him as his servant, sending away all others. And Alcander,
dwelling with Lycurgus, noting his serenity of temper and simplicity
of life and his unwearying labours, became his warmest admirer, and
ever after told his friends that Lycurgus was the best of men. In
one version of the tale Lycurgus gave back his freedom to Alcander
in presence of the citizens, saying, You gave me a bad citizen;
I give you back a good one.
If our Doctors of Divinity are unable to see that this represents
a rarer strain of goodness than the deed of the Good Samaritan,
they must be told that they are lacking in that very moral judgment
upon which they plume themselves. Forever sitting in the chair of
judgment, defaming all who dissent from them, they are ethically less
percipient than the cultured laity. Thousands of kindly human beings,
I repeat, have succoured wounded strangers, even those of hostile
races; and the tone held over the Gospel parable by some Christians
is but the measure of their misconception of human nature. Their
sectarian creed has bred in them a habit of aspersing all humanity,
all character, save the Christian, thus stultifying the very lesson
of their parable, the framer of which would fain have taught men to
transcend these very fanaticisms. They will not be "neighbours" to
the pagan to the extent of crediting him with their own appreciation
of magnanimity and human-kindness; they cannot even discuss his
claim without seeking arrogantly to browbeat his favourers. Forever
acclaiming the beauty of the command to forgive injuries, they cannot
even debate without insolence where they know their sectarian claims
are called in question. And I shall be agreeably disappointed if they
proceed to handle the tale of Lycurgus and Alcander without seeking
to demonstrate that somehow it falls below the level of the Gospels,
where, as it happens, the endurance of violence and death by the
God-man is in effect presented as God-like. But for that matter,
even the oft-cited saying "Father, forgive them," occurs only in
Luke of all the Gospels, and, being absent from two of the most
ancient codices, betrays itself as a late addition to the text. It
may be either Jewish or Gentile. For Plutarch, the Spartan tale is
something edifying and gratifying, but he makes no parade of it as
a marvel; and in his essay Of Profiting by our Enemies he speaks of
the forgiveness of enemies as a thing not rarely to be met with:--
To forbear to be revenged of an enemy if opportunity and occasion
is offered, and to let him go when he is in thy hands, is a point
of great humanity and courtesy; but him that hath compassion of
him when he is fallen into adversity, succoureth him in distress,
at his request is ready to show goodwill to his children, and an
affection to sustain the state of his house and family being in
affliction, who doth not love for this kindness, nor praise the
goodness of his nature? (Holland's translation.)
Had that passage appeared in a Gospel, how would not our Doctors of
Divinity have exclaimed over the moral superiority of Christian ethic,
demonstrating that it alone appealed to the heart! In actual fact
we find them denying that such passages exist. The most disgraceful
instance known to me appears to implicate an Austrian theologian. In
the "Editor's Forewords" to the Early English Text Society's volume
of Queen Elizabeth's Englishings there is a note on Plutarch's De
Curiositate, àpropos of Elizabeth's translation of that essay:--
In De Curiositate, as well as in his other writings, Plutarch
proves himself to be a true Stoic philosopher, to possess
first-rate moral principles and great fear of God.... His
religious views sometimes remind us, like those of Seneca,
of Christian teaching; but here there is always one important
omission--viz., the commendation of charity or brotherly love; of
this Christian virtue the stoic, so virtuous in his own relations,
knows absolutely nothing.
At the close of the "Forewords" the Editor, Miss Caroline Pemberton,
mentions that "The comments on the writings of Boethius and Plutarch
are by Dr. J. Schenk, of Meran, Tyrol." To Dr. Schenk, then, must
apparently be credited the high-water mark in Christian false-witness
against paganism. Either he did or he did not know that Plutarch in
other writings had given full expression to the ethic of brotherly
love. If he did not know, he was not only framing a wanton libel
in sheer ignorance but giving a particularly deadly proof of his
own destitution of the very virtue he was so unctuously denying
to the pagan. A man devoid not merely of charity but of decent
concern for simple justice poses as a moral teacher in virtue of his
Christianism; even as the professional encomiasts of the parable of
the Good Samaritan demonstrate their own blindness to its meaning,
playing the Levite to the Pagan.
Plutarch, so much better a man than his Christian critic, was in turn
no innovator in ethics. As every student knows, such doctrines as those
above cited from him are far older than the Christian religion. Five
centuries before the Christian era Confucius put the law of reciprocity
in the sane form of the precept that we should not do unto others
what we would not that they should do unto us. Are we to suppose that
the rule had been left to Confucius to invent? Christians who cannot
conform to it are not ashamed to disparage the precept of Confucius as
a "negative" teaching, implying that there is a higher moral strain in
their formula which prescribes the doing to others what we would wish
them to do to us. There, if any difference of code be really intended,
we are urged to confer benefits in order to have them returned. If
no difference is intended, the disparagement is mere deceit. In
the ancient Hindu epic, the Mahâbhârata, it is declared that "The
Gods regard with delight the man who ... when struck does not strike
again," and that "The good, when they promote the welfare of others,
expect no reciprocity." How long are we to listen to the childish
claim that moral maxims which in India were delivered millenniums
ago by forgotten men were framable in Seneca's day only in Syria,
and there only by one "unique and effulgent" personality, whose mere
teaching lifted humanity to new heights? Had no nameless man or woman
in Greece ever urged the beauty of non-retaliation before Plato?
If clerics cannot rise above the old disingenuous sectarian spirit,
it is time at least that laymen should. The more historic comprehension
a man has of the ancient world, of Plutarch's world, with all its sins
and delusions, the less can he harbour the notion of the moral miracle
involved in the thesis of the unique teacher, suddenly revealing to an
amazed humanity heights of moral aspiration before undreamt of. And
any considerate scrutiny of the logia of the Gospels will inevitably
force the open-minded student to recognize multiplicity of thought and
ideal, and compel him to seek some explanation. An effort to detach
a possible personality by the elimination of impossible adjuncts is
the next natural step.