THE METHOD OF M. LOISY
Turning away, so to speak, to the Gentiles, we concentrate our case
in countering that of the "emancipated" defenders of the historicity
of the Founder, as put by M. Loisy, the equal of any of the German or
English professionals in scholarly competence, and the superior of
some of them in candour. Precisely because Catholicism yields least
preparation for the work of critical science, one who slowly makes his
way out of it into the "liberal" position is reasonably to be credited
with a special capacity for the task. And he is on the whole the most
useful theorist for the purposes of the "liberal" school, inasmuch
as he is prepared to give up many documentary items to which others
needlessly cling. Nonetheless, M. Loisy is a confident champion of the
historicity of the gospel Jesus. He does not indeed combine his summary
presentment of his case with a discussion of the myth theory--that
he is content to put aside in mass with the epithet "superficial";
but he puts his own construction all the more unreservedly.
It is interesting to note his certitudes. No one of his school,
perhaps, has more frequently claimed indubitability on points of
inference. For instance:--
The advent of Jesus in the time of the procurator Pontius Pilate
is a fact as certain as a thousand other facts on the subject
of which no one dreams of raising the slightest suspicion; it is
not doubtful that he announced the speedy coming of the kingdom
of God ... since that idea ... which is the fundamental idea of
the preaching of Christ in the synoptics, was incontestably that
of his first disciples and Paul....
Great as are the real obscurities of the evangelical history,
they are less numerous than they seem, and without doubt also
less considerable on the important points.
Paul ... does not say that Jesus predicted his death and
resurrection. He does not even say what was the ground for his
execution; but it does not seem doubtful that this ground was
precisely the announcement of that kingdom of God which the
apostles and Paul himself preached.
Paul and the other apostles practised exorcisms in the name of
Jesus on certain patients. It is told that Jesus had done the
same, and without doubt he had really done it, with still more
assurance and more success than his disciples.
He [Jesus] without doubt never frequented the schools of the
rabbins.
His family was certainly pious.
One fact is certain, that a seizure was concerted of which he
[Judas] was the principal agent.
It was without doubt arranged [at the house of the high priest
at earliest daylight] that they should content themselves with
denouncing the Galilean prophet to the Roman authority.
Without doubt he [Jesus] expected to his last moment the succour
which only death could bring him.
It was Peter, it would seem, who first obtained the proof and
the definitive certainty [of the resurrection] that faith called
for. One day, at dawn, fishing on the lake of Tiberias, he saw
Jesus. Already, without doubt, he had assembled around him the
other disciples. [139]
It is enviable to be so sans doute on so many points in a narrative
of which so much has had to be abandoned as myth. The odd thing is
that with all these certitudes M. Loisy introduces his book with
the declaration, "We must [il faut] now renounce writing the life
of Jesus. All the critics agree in recognizing that the materials
are insufficient for such an enterprise." [140] And then, after
an introduction in which he contests the view that nothing can be
written with certainty, he gives us a Life of Jesus which is simply
Renan revised!
It is certainly brief; but that is because he is content to say only
what he thinks there is to say, whereas his predecessors were at
more or less pains to embed the thin thread of biography in a large
mat of non-biographical material. M. Loisy seems to have become a
little confused in the process of prefixing a critical introduction
to three chapters of the former introduction to his commentary on the
synoptics. "The present little book," he writes, "does not pretend
to be that history which it is impossible to recover." Naturally
not. But it proffers a Life of Jesus all the same.
M. Loisy is quite satisfied that there was a Jesus of Nazareth,
son of Joseph, a "worker in wood, carpenter, furniture maker,
wheelwright." [141] "And Jesus followed originally the same
profession." When he began his preaching of the speedy coming of
the heavenly kingdom, "his mother Mary was a widow, with numerous
children. It is not certain that Jesus was the eldest...." "It was
probably John the Baptist who, unknowingly, awoke the vocation of
the young carpenter of Nazareth. The crisis which traversed Judæa
had evoked a prophet.... This preaching of terror made a great
impression.... John was usually on the Jordan, baptizing in the
river those touched by his burning words. Jesus was drawn like many
others.... He was baptized, and remained some time in the desert."
And so it goes on. "What appears most probable" is that Jesus had
already "passed some time in solitude. A time of reflection and of
preparation was indispensable between the life of the carpenter and the
manifestation of the preacher of the evangel. Pushed to the desert by
the sentiment of his vocation, Jesus was bound (devait) to be pursued
by a more and more clear consciousness of that vocation." Thus M. Loisy
can after all expand his sources. It was after the imprisonment of the
Baptist that Jesus felt he "was to replace him, and by the better title
because he felt himself predestined to become the human chief of the
Kingdom, there to fill the function of Messiah." But "almost in spite
of himself" he worked miracles. From his first stay at Capernaum the
sick were brought to him to heal; and, fearing that the thaumaturg
might hurt the preacher of the Kingdom, he left the place, only to
be followed up and forced to make cures. "He operated with a peculiar
efficacy on the category of patients supposed to be specially possessed
by the demon.... He spoke to them with authority, and calm returned,
at least for a time, to those troubled and unquiet souls." As to the
greater cures, M. Loisy observes that "perhaps" there was ascribed to
the healer the revivification of a dead maiden. On the instantaneous
cures of lepers and the blind he naturally says nothing whatever.
The dilemma of M. Loisy here recalls that of Professor Schmiedel over
the same problem. The latter, claiming that it would be "difficult to
deny" healing powers to Jesus, in view of the testimonies, is fain to
argue that the Healer's personal claim (Mt. xi, 5; Lk. vii, 22; not
in Mk.) to have healed the sick, the blind, the deaf, the lepers, and
raised the dead, meant only a spiritual ministration, inasmuch as the
claim concludes: "the poor also have the Gospel preached to them." On
this view the assumed healing power really counts for nothing; and
the last clause, which Schmiedel contends would be an anti-climax
if the healings were real, becomes absolutely an anti-climax of
the most hopeless kind. One day men will dismiss such confusions
by noting that the theory of spiritual healing, an attempt to evade
the mass of miracle, is only miracle-mongering of another kind. Are
we to take it that regeneration of the morally dead, deaf, blind,
and leprous is to be effected wholesale by a little preaching? Did
the Christian community then consist wholly or mainly of these?
M. Loisy in turn blenches at a claim in which "raising the dead"
figures as a customary thing, with cures of leprosy and blindness;
and he too falls back on the "spiritual" interpretation, [142] failing
to note the flat fallacy of making the preaching to the poor at once
a contrast and a climax to the spiritual healings, which also, on
the hypothesis, are precisely matters of preaching. The Teacher is
made to say: "I raise the spiritually dead, and cure the spiritually
leprous, deaf, and blind, by preaching to them: to the poor I just
preach." Schmiedel does not see that the preaching of the Gospel to
the poor is added as the one thing that could be said to be done for
them, who would otherwise have had no benefit; and that on his own
view he ought to treat this as a late addition. On the contrary, he
insists that the "evangelists" could not have thought of adding it;
and that it makes an excellent climax if we take the healings to be
purely spiritual.
The rational argument would be, of course, that the first writer did
make the Lord talk figuratively; and that a later redactor, taking
the words literally, added the item of the poor, which he could not
have done if he took them figuratively. But the irreducible fallacy is
the assumption that as a figurative claim the speech is historic, one
order of miracle being held allowable when another is not. Schmiedel
has exemplified his own saying that "with very few exceptions all
critics fall into the very grave error of immediately accepting a
thing as true as soon as they have found themselves able to trace
it to a 'source'." [143] It does not in the least follow that by
substituting spiritual for physical miracle we acquire a right to
claim historicity. And by the claim we simply cancel the "fame"
of the records.
M. Loisy, committing himself to some acts of healing where Schmiedel,
after accepting the general claim, commits himself to none, balances
vaguely between acts of faith-healing so-called and cures of sheer
insanity, and accepts the tradition of
an unfruitful point at Nazareth. [144] "A prophet is not without
honour, save in his own country and among his own kin, and in
his own house," Jesus had said before the disdainful astonishment
of his fellow-citizens and the incredulity of his family; and he
could work no miracle in that place.
M. Loisy, it will be observed, here assumes that we are dealing with
real cures, and tacitly rejects the qualifying clauses in Mark vi,
5, and Matthew xiii, 58, as he well may. They are indeed stamped
with manipulation. "He could there do no mighty work save that he
laid his hands upon a few sick folk and healed them," says the first;
"he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief," says
the other. Such passages raise in an acute form the question how any
statement in the Gospels can reasonably be taken as historical. What
were the alleged mighty works done elsewhere save acts of healing the
sick? And how many cases for such healing would naturally be presented
by one small hamlet? If, again, all the healings were spiritual,
what are we left with beyond the truism that sinners who did not
believe were unbelieving?
As the modifications produce pure counter-sense, it is critically
permissible to surmise that they were lacking in the first copies,
and were inserted merely to guard against profane cavils. But as the
whole episode is found only in Matthew and Mark, it cannot figure
in Dr. Petrie's Nucleus; and for similar reasons it is absent from
the Primitive Gospel of the school of Bernhard Weiss. M. Loisy,
recognizing that it is the kind of item that Luke would avoid for
tactical reasons, is loyal enough to accept it as historical without
the modifying words, and seeks no better explanation than that given
in the cited words of Jesus.
For those who aim at a rational comprehension of the documents,
the critical induction is that the story was inserted for a reason;
and the explanation which satisfies M. Loisy is so ill-considered
that it only emphasizes the need. A prophet is likely to be looked
at askance by his own people: yes, if he be an unimpressive one;
but upon what critical principles is M. Loisy entitled to assume,
as he constantly does, that the historic Jesus made a profound
and ineffaceable impression upon all who came in contact with him,
from the moment of his call to his disciples, and that nevertheless
he had not made the slightest impression of superiority upon his own
kinsmen and fellow-villagers, up to the age of thirty? How can such
propositions cohere? Jesus has only to leave Nazareth and to command
men to follow him, in order to be reverently recognized as a Superman:
for M. Loisy, it is his mere personality that creates the faith which,
after his death, makes his adherents proclaim him as a re-arisen
God. Is this the kind of personality that in an eastern village would
be known merely as that of "the carpenter," or the carpenter's son?
M. Loisy, it is true, claims that Jesus had needed a period of solitude
and meditation in the desert to make him a teacher, thus partly
implying that before that experience the destined prophet might not be
recognizable as such. But is it a historic proposition that the short
time of solitude had worked a complete transformation? Was a quite
normal or commonplace personality capable of such a transfiguration
in a natural sense? That the critic had not even asked himself the
question is made plain by his complete failure to raise the cognate
question in regard to the marvellous healing powers with which he
unhesitatingly credits the teacher, on the strength of the wholly
supernaturalist testimony of the Gospels. These powers, according
to M. Loisy, were also the instantaneous result of the short period
of solitude in the desert. What pretensions can such a theory make
to be in conformity with historical principles? Cannot M. Loisy see
that he has only been miracle-mongering with a difference?
It is bad enough that we should be asked to take for granted, on the
strength of a typically Eastern record of wholesale thaumaturgy, a
real "natural" gift for healing a variety of nervous disorders. But
a natural gift of such a kind at least presupposes some process of
development. M. Loisy obliviously asks us to believe that all of a
sudden a man who had throughout his life shown no abnormal powers
or qualities whatever, began to exercise them upon the largest scale
almost immediately after he had left his native village. Now, whatever
view be taken of the cynical formula that a prophet has no honour in
his own village, it is idle to ask us to believe that a great healer
has none. The local healer of any sort has an easy opening; and the
redacted Gospels indicate uneasy recognition of the plain truth that
Jesus needed only to heal the sick at Nazareth as elsewhere to conquer
unbelief. It was precisely the cures that, in the Gospel story, had
won him fame in the surrounding country. M. Loisy has merely burked
the problem.
A little later he takes as historical the "terrible invectives"
pronounced against Capernaum and the neighbouring cities, which he
attempts to explain. After all, the multitude had not gone beyond a
"benevolent curiosity, quite ready to transform itself into an ironical
incredulity. They had seen the miracles; they awaited meantime the
kingdom, without otherwise preparing for it; and as the kingdom did
not come they inclined less and less to believe in it." So they were
doomed to a terrible judgment for their faithlessness. But why then was
nothing said of the wholly unbelieving Nazareth? [145] If the towns
which would not receive the disciples were to be testified against,
what should be the fate of the hostile birthplace?
Before such problems, the method of "liberal" accommodation here as
always breaks down. To the eye of the evolutionist there is no great
mystery. The avowal that the Founder either could not or did not
work wonders at Nazareth might serve any one of several conceivable
purposes. It might meet the cavils of those who in a later day found
and said that nothing was known at Nazareth of a wonder-working Jesus
who had dwelt there; even as the often-repeated story of the command
to healed persons to keep silence could avail to turn the attacks of
investigating doubters in regard to the miraculous cures. Or it might
serve either to impugn the pretensions of those who at one stage of the
movement called themselves "Nazarenes" in the sense of followers of the
man of Nazareth, or to include the birthplace with the family and the
disciples in that disparagement of the Jewish surroundings which would
arise step for step with the spread of the Gentile movement. Any of
these explanations is reasonable beside the thesis that a man gifted
with marvellous healing powers, suddenly developed without any previous
sign of them, could either find no one in his own village to let him
try them, or to recognize them even when applied there, while the
country round about, ex hypothesi, was ringing with his fame. And
the criticism which puts us off with such solutions is really not
well entitled to impute "superficiality" to those who reject it.
The whole "carpenter" story, in which M. Loisy sees no difficulty, is
one of the weakest of the Gospel attempts at circumstantiality. A trade
or calling for the Messiah, as a true Jew, was perhaps as requisite
in the eyes of some Jews as either a Davidic descent or an argument
to prove that Davidic descent was for the Messiah unnecessary--both of
which requirements the Gospels meet. Every good Jew, we are told, was
required to have a handicraft or profession. A "Ben-Joseph," again,
was called-for to meet the requirement, common among the Samaritans
but not confined to them, of a Messiah so named. [146] But how came
it that "the carpenter" of Mark is only "the carpenter's son" in
Matthew? We can conceive the Gentilizing Luke putting both statements
aside as ill-suited to his purpose, his Jesus being a God competing
with Gentile Gods; but if there really was an early knowledge that
Jesus was a carpenter, why should Matthew minimize it? And how came
it that Origen [147] knew of no Gospel "current in the churches"
in which Jesus was described as a carpenter?
In this matter, as about the Infancy generally, the apocryphal gospels
are as rich in detail as the canonical are poor. Again and again
does Joseph figure in them as a working carpenter, or plough-maker,
or house-builder. [148] The words of Origen might imply that it was
from some such source that Celsus drew his statement that Jesus was
a carpenter; and yet none of the preserved apocrypha speaks of Jesus
as working at carpentry save by way of such miracles as that of the
elongation of the piece of wood. Having regard to the mythical aspect
of the whole, we suggest an easily misinterpreted Gnostic source
for the basis. For some schools of the Gnostics, the Jewish God
was the Demiourgos, the Artisan or Creator, a subordinate being in
their divine hierarchy. The word could mean an artisan of any kind;
and architector, the term in the Latin version of Thomas, points to
a reflex of the idea of "creator" which attached to the Gnostic term.
That the doctrine of the Demiourgos was already current in Jewish
circles before the period commonly assigned to Christian Gnosticism
has been shown with much probability by Dr. S. Karppe. In a Talmudic
passage given as cited by Rabbi Jochanan ben Saccai before the middle
of the first century, C.E., there is denunciation of those who "spare
not the glory of the Creator"; and other passages interpret this
in the sense of a heresy which "diminishes God" and "sows division
between Israel and his God." [149] Debate of this kind emerges with
the name of the Judæo-Christian heretic Cerinthus. For him, Jesus,
though naturally born, was entered at his baptism by Christ, the son
not of the Jewish God, the Demiourgos, but of the Supreme God. [150]
There might well be, however, round Cerinthus, who retained Jewish
leanings, Jews who held to the Judæo-Christian primary position
that Jesus was the son of Yahweh. By some early Gnostics he could
hardly fail to be so named. Could not then the Gnostic "Son of the
Demiourgos," the Artificer, become for more literal Christists "son
of the carpenter," even as the mystic seamless robe of Pagan myth
became for some a garment which had to be cut in pieces to be divided?
Met by such suggestions, M. Loisy tells us that we are superficial. But
is he otherwise? Is he not simply evading his problem? Can he
see nothing strange in the sudden mention of the carpenter in a
"primary" gospel which had set out with a divine personage and had
never mentioned his parents or upbringing? On the mythic theory the
apparition of the Messiah without antecedents is precisely what was to
be expected; if there was any clear Jewish expectation on the point,
it was that he should come unlooked for, unheralded save, on one view,
by "Elias." [151] Thus the Gospel record fits into the myth theory
from the outset, while on the assumption of historicity it is but a
series of enigmas.
Holding by that assumption, M. Loisy is forced to violent measures to
reconcile the isolated Marcan mention of "the son of Mary and brother
of James and Joses and Judas and Simon" with the repeated mentions
in the closing chapters of (1) "Mary the mother of James the less
and of Joses and Salome; who when he was in Galilee followed [Jesus]
and ministered unto him"; (2) "Mary the mother of Joses"; and (3)
"Mary the mother of James and Salome." In these closing chapters this
Mary the mother of James and Joses and Salome figures first as simply
one who followed and ministered to Jesus, then as the mother of Joses,
then as the mother of James and Salome, but never as the mother of
Jesus. By what right does M. Loisy extract his certitude from the
prior text?
His simple course is to decide that Mary the mother of James and of
Joses and of Salome in the closing chapters is not Mary the mother of
James and Joses and Judas and Simon in chapter vi. "Certain Fathers,"
he had noted in his great work on the Synoptics (citing in particular
Chrysostom), "desirous of making the synoptics accord with John,
identify Mary the mother of James and Joses [in ch. xv] with the
mother of Jesus; but it is evident that if the synoptics had thought
of the mother of the Saviour they would not have thus designated
her." [152] Precisely! And if the Gospel of Mark in its original form
had contained the passage in chapter vi, how could it possibly have
spoken in chapter xv of a Mary the mother of James and Joses without
indicating either that she was or was not the same Mary? Would it
have deliberately specified two Maries, each the mother of a James
and a Joses, without a word of differentiation?
To the faithful critic there is only one course open. He is bound to
conclude that the passage in chapter vi is a late interpolation, the
work of an inventor who had perhaps either accepted or anticipated
the Johannine record that Mary the mother of Jesus was present at
the crucifixion, but who did not--perhaps in his copy of Mark could
not--completely carry out his purpose by making the Mary at the
crucifixion the mother of the crucified Lord.
We are not here concerned with the exegesis of those Fathers who
desired to save the perpetual virginity of Mary; our business is
simply with the texts. And we can but say that if, with M. Loisy, we
make the Mary of chapter xv another Mary than her of chapter vi, we
are bound on the same principle to find a third and a fourth Mary in
"the mother of Joses" (xv, 47) and the "mother of James and Salome"
(xvi, 1). [153] It will really not do. The mythological theory, which
traces the mourning Maries to an ancient liturgy of a God-sacrifice
and finds the mother-Mary of chapter vi an alien element, may seem
to M. Loisy superficial, but it meets a problem which he simply evades.
The only serious difficulties for M. Loisy, apparently, are the
miracles and the prophecies. On the latter he makes no use of the
Savonarola argument; and in his smaller work he ignores the "rock"
text; but for him "the scene of Cæsarea Philippi, with the Messianic
confession of Peter, seems thoroughly historic"; and on the other hand
the story of Peter's denial of his Master causes him no misgiving. For
a rational reader, the conception of the shamed Peter figuring
soon afterwards as the merciless judge and supernatural slayer of
the unhappy Ananias is extremely indigestible. The personage thus
evolved is not only detestable but incredible. How could the coward
apostle figure primarily and continuously as a pillar of the Church
described? Harnack's method, as Professor Blass complains, [154]
treats the denigration of Peter as the result of the strife between
the Judaizing and the Gentilizing sections of the early Church; it
is the natural hypothesis. Without it we are left to the detestable
and impossible figure of the apostle who denies his Lord and has no
mercy for a weak brother who merely keeps back part of a sum of money
when professing freely to donate the whole. The critical reader will
prefer to follow Harnack.
But if we give up the story of the Denial, how shall we retain
those which exalt and glorify the Judaizing apostle? If we give up
Matthew's "rock" texts, with what consistency can we take as pure
history the episode in Mark in which Peter, first of the twelve,
declares "Thou art the Christ," eliciting the charge to "tell no
man of him," followed by the prediction of death and resurrection,
spoken "openly"? The episode in Mark passes into, and in Matthew
is followed by, the fierce rebuke to the expostulating Peter, "Get
thee behind me, Satan, for thou mindest not the things of God, but
the things of men"--a strange sequel to Matthew's "Blessed art thou,
Simon Bar-Jonah; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee,
but my Father which is in Heaven."
This is one of the passages that force the conclusion either that
"Mark" had before him the fuller record, in "Matthew" or elsewhere, and
turned it from a Petrine to an anti-Petrine purpose, or that a redactor
did so. There is no escape from the evidence that we are dealing with
two sharply conflicting constructions. The "Blessed art thou" passage
and the "Satan" passage will not cohere. Which came first? Had "Luke"
either before him? His "Get thee behind me, Satan" (iv, 8; A.V.),
addressed to the devil in the Temptation, is ejected from the revised
text as being absent from most of the ancient codices; and its presence
in the Alexandrine suggests an attempt to get in somewhere a saying
which otherwise had no place in the third Gospel. The absence alike
of the blessing and the aspersion on Peter sets up the surmise that
both are quite late, and that the insertion of one elicited the other.
Again and again we find in the Gospels such traces of a strife over
Petrine pretensions. In the story of the Denial, which we have found
so incompatible with the attitude ascribed to Peter in the Acts,
everyone since Strauss has recognized a process of redaction and
interpolation. M. Loisy, saying nothing of the central problem,
avowedly finds in Mark "a manipulation, deliberate and ill-managed,
of a more simple statement." [155] This might have sufficed to put
him on his guard; but all he has to say, after reducing the confused
details to the inferred "simpler statement," is that "if there is
in any part of the second Gospel a personal recollection of Peter it
is the story of the denial in the form in which Mark found it." [156]
Which makes sad havoc of the Peter-Mark tradition; for the story of the
denial betrays itself as a late anti-Petrine invention, as aforesaid.