THE JESUS-FIGURE OF M. LOISY
It is the same, finally, with the story of the original evangel as
with the story of the tragedy; M. Loisy fails to come within sight
of historicity in the one case as in the other. Having fallen back
on the thesis, so popularized by Renan, that faith in the necessary
resurrection of the Messiah created the legend of the empty tomb and
the divine apparitions, he proceeds to formulate the Teaching which
had created the faith. The historic creed of Christianity is thus
figured as a pyramid poised on the apex of a hallucination; but we
are assured that the hallucination resulted from the greatness of
the Personality of the slain Teacher.
Taking no note of any other conception of a possible origination of
the cult, M. Loisy pronounces that to explain it we must hold that the
"group of adherents" had before the crucifixion evolved a "religious
life" sufficiently deep to sustain the feeling that the death of
the Master was an accident, "grave no doubt [!] and perturbing, but
reparable"; [175] and to explain this religious life he goes back
to the Master's doctrine. And the moment he begins his exposition he
vacillates anew over the old dilemma:--
Jesus pursued a work, not the propagation of a belief; he did
not explain theoretically the Kingdom of Heaven, he prepared its
coming by exhorting men to repent. Nevertheless even the work
of Jesus attaches itself to the idea of the celestial kingdom;
it defines itself in that idea, which presupposes, implies, or
involves with it other ideas. It is this combination of ideas
familiar to Christ that we must reconstruct with the help of
the Gospels.... The idea of the kingdom of God is, in a sense,
all the Gospel; but it is also all Judaism.... [176]
Exactly. Jesus, in effect, preached just what the Baptist is said
to have preached; only without baptism. The monition to repent was
simply the monition of all the prophets and all the eschatologists;
and it had not the attraction of baptism which the evangel of the
Baptist was said to have. So that the Twelve, on the showing of
M. Loisy, went through Jewry uttering only one familiar phrase--and
casting out devils--and dooming those who refused to hear them. And,
by their own report, it was in casting out devils that they had
their success. The simple name of Jesus, according to the Gospels,
availed for that where he had never appeared in person. Yet, again,
the name is used by non-adherents for the same purpose (Mk. ix,
38). And still M. Loisy confidently claims that there is no trace of
a pre-Christian Jesus cult in Palestine! [177]
Concerning the nullity of the original evangel he is quite unwittingly
explicit when he is resisting the myth theory; albeit in the act of
contradicting himself:--
Paul, indeed, proclaims [se réclame du] an immortal Christ, or
more exactly a Christ dead and re-arisen, not the Jesus preaching
the evangel in Galilee and at Jerusalem. But his attitude is easy
to explain.... He was aware of the circumstances of the death of
Christ, and of what was preached by his followers.... If he boasted
of having learned nothing from the old [sic] apostles, it was that,
in reality, he had never been at their school.... But he was able
[il lui arrive] also to affirm the conformity of his teaching
with theirs: that is what he did in the passage ... touching the
death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul converted had nothing to
demand of the first apostles of Jesus, because he knew already
what they had preached. [178]
So that the doctrine of an immortal or resurrected Christ was the
sole doctrine of the Apostles. There was no other evangel. And this
doctrine, which had just been declared to be born of the personal
impression made by Jesus on his followers, is also the doctrine of
Paul, who had never seen Jesus.
The primary evangel having thus simply disappeared, we revert to
the Jesuine Teaching (addressed in large part only to the disciples)
which had formed among disciples and adherents such a "religious life"
as served to develop the conviction that the Master could not really
die, and so prepared the foundation upon which Paul built historic
Christianity. [179] We have seen how M. Loisy vacillates over the
Founder's conception of the Kingdom of God in relation to his moral
teaching. When it is a question of a myth theory, M. Loisy insists
upon exactitude. "In order that the thesis should be sustainable,
it would be necessary that a well-defined myth should have existed in
some Jewish sect." [180] But there is no call for well-defined proofs
or notions when it is a question of defending the tradition. For
our critic, Jesus is first and foremost an intense believer in a
miraculous advent of that Kingdom which had come simply to mean "the
sovereignty of God." [181] Even this conception is of necessity vague
to the last degree:--
The primitive nationalism subsisted at least in the framework
[cadre] and the exterior economy of the kingdom of God; it
maintained itself also in [jusque dans] the evangel of Jesus. At
the same time the kingdom of God is not a simple moral reform,
to safeguard the law of the celestial Sovereign and guarantee the
happiness of the faithful. The action of Yahweh ... governs the
entire universe.... [The cosmological tradition] developed the
idea of a definite triumph of light over darkness, of order over
chaos, a triumph which was to be the final victory of good over
evil.... The terrestrial kingdoms ... were to disappear, to give
place to the reign of Israel, which was the reign of the just,
the reign of God. In this great instauration of the divine order,
in this regeneration of the universe, the divine justice was to
manifest itself by the resurrection of all the true faithful. [182]
This transformation, then--the long current dream of Jewry--was to
be a vast miracle, and in that miracle Jesus believed he was to play
the part of the Messiah, the divine representative. That expectation
sustained him till the moment of his death. [183] Nevertheless "his
idea of the reign of God was not a patriotic hallucination or the
dream of an excited [exalté] mystic. The reign of God is the reign of
justice." [184] (As if the second sentence proved the first.) And yet,
all the while: "On the whole, the Gospel ethic is no more consistent
than the hope of the kingdom.... Considered in themselves, as the
Gospel makes them known to us, they are not mythic but mystic." [185]
Thus helped to a definite conception, we turn to the ethic, which we
have seen to be in the main a compilation from Jewish literature. This
fact M. Loisy admits, only to deny that it has any significance:--
He opposes the voice of his conscience to the tradition of the
doctors. There lies precisely the originality of his teaching,
which, if one recomposed the materials piece by piece, could be
found scattered in the Biblical writings or in the sayings of the
rabbis. Like every man who speaks to men, Jesus takes his ideas
in the common treasure of his environment and his time; but as to
what he makes of it [pour le parti qu'il en tire] one does not
say that it proceeds from any one. This independence results,
probably, at once from his character and from the circumstances
of his education. [186]
Thus, as regards the Sermon on the Mount, the act of collecting a
number of ethical precepts and maxims from the current literature and
lore of one's people and curtly enouncing them, without development,
is a proof of supreme moral originality, and is to be regarded as
opposing the voice of one's conscience to tradition. Had the rabbis,
then, no conscience? Was their ethic a mere tradition, even when they
gave out or originated the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount? Was
Hillel but a mouth-piece of the law? M. Loisy must in justice pardon us
for avowing that so far he has but duplicated a worn-out paralogism,
and that he has evaded the plain documentary fact that the Sermon is
a literary compilation, [187] and not a discourse at all.
And when we turn to specific teachings, his commentary does but compel
us to ask how the teaching which he insists upon taking as genuinely
uttered by the Teacher can be associated with the Messianist he has
been describing. Accepting as genuine the story of the woman taken in
adultery, now bracketed in the English Revised Version as being absent
from the most ancient manuscripts, but presumably found in the lost
Gospel of the Hebrews, [188] he remarks that "the elect of the kingdom
must not use marriage; they were to be as the angels in heaven"; [189]
and at the same time he describes the veto on divorce as "a trait so
personal to the teaching of Christ, and so difficult to comprehend if
one denies all originality to that teaching." [190] That is to say,
the believer in the speedy end of all marriage relations, and the
establishment of a new and angelic life for all who survive, occupied
himself earnestly with the restriction or abolition of divorce!
At other junctures M. Loisy is ready to see how the doctrines of
sections and movements in the later Christian Church were introduced
into the Gospels. He will not admit of such an explanation here. Does
he then see a supreme moral inspiration in the Montanists and
other Christian sectaries who set their faces against the sexual
instinct? Has he forgotten the text in Malachi (ii, 14-16), vetoing
a heartless divorce? And has he never heard of the saying of Rabbi
Eliezer, echoed elsewhere in the Talmud, that the altar sheds tears
over him who puts away his first wife? Is the moral originality of
the Gospel teaching to be established by merely ignoring all previous
teaching to the same effect?
But it is hardly necessary thus to revert to the question of the
ethical originality of the Gospel teaching: the essential issue
here is the impossible combination presented to us by M. Loisy as
his historical Jesus. Without any sign of misgiving he offers us
the figure of a mystic awaiting the imminent end of the old order of
things and the substitution of a new and heavenly order, doubled with a
moralist deeply preoccupied over certain details of the vanishing life
and a prescription for their regulation in the future in which they
were not to exist. M. Loisy is, indeed, liable to be censured by the
orthodox and the "liberals" alike for his explicit avowal that "It is
very superfluous to seek in the Gospel a doctrine of social economy,
or even a program of moral conduct for individual existences which
were to go on according to the order of nature, in the indefinite
sequence of humanity." [191] This seems to overlook the passage
(Mt. xxv, 34-46) in which eternal life is promised to those who
succour the distressed. Such a rule for conduct does seem to indicate
some regard for the continuance of life on the normal lines. It is,
we know, a simple adaptation from the ritual of the Egyptian Book of
the Dead, but it has had from many commentators even such praise for
"originality" as M. Loisy has bestowed on the Teaching in general.
Such teaching is, in point of fact, quite undeserving of praise for
"spirituality," inasmuch as it in effect recommends benevolence as a
way of securing eternal life. He who succours the distressed on the
motive so supplied is plainly a long way below the Good Samaritan or
the simple compassionate human being of everyday life. But this is
really the ground-note of all the Gospel ethic. The Beatitudes are
promises of compensatory bliss; and, indeed, in a system which founds
upon immortality there is no escape from this kind of motivation. The
Pagan appeal, made alternately to nobleness and to concern for good
repute among one's fellows, is clearly on the higher plane, and would
tend to maintain, so far as mere moral appeal can, a nobler type of
human being. It is not even clear, in the light of the general Judaism
of the doctrine of the Kingdom, whether "one of these my brethren"
can mean more than "one of the faith."
But however that may be, we have to note that for M. Loisy the
promise of reward at the judgment for help given to the distressed
is not a Jesuine utterance. It occurs only in Matthew; and we may
readily agree that, if such an allocution were really delivered by
the alleged Founder, it could not conceivably have been left to one
collector to preserve it. "The redactor of the first Gospel," comments
M. Loisy in his best critical vein, "thought he ought to put this here
to complete his collection of instructions concerning the parousia
and the great judgment. It is ... a piece in which is developed,
from the point of view of the last judgment, the word of the Lord:
'He that receiveth you receiveth me.'" So that a teaching which still
makes a great impression on the Christian consciousness is confessedly
but a development by an unknown hand of a bare Messianic phrase. "It
has been visibly arranged to close the compilation of discourses and
parables made here by the redactor of the first Gospel." [192]
Yet when we come to the parable of the Good Samaritan, which occurs
only in Luke, and which also cannot be conceived as being deliberately
omitted by the previous evangelists if it had been uttered by
the Master, M. Loisy indulges in a very long discourse that reads
like a preserved sermon, only to conclude that "the parable of the
Samaritan thus offers itself as one of the most authentic testimonies
[un témoignage authentique entre tous] of the teaching of Jesus. It
is clear that the evangelist has not invented it, but that he has
found it ready made, and that he has only given it a frame, in his
fashion." [193] It is with a certain embarrassment over the spectacle
of a good scholar's divagation that one proceeds to point to the
absolute non sequitur in M. Loisy's comment. Supposing we agree that
the evangelist found the parable ready made, wherein is this case
differentiated from that of the passage in Matthew last noted? That
is at least as likely to have been found ready made; yet it is not in
that case claimed by M. Loisy that the passage is therefore a record of
a real Jesuine utterance. He sees that it is a "patch," a development.
Now, the parable of the Good Samaritan is a plain documentary "patch,"
an insertion without context, between the address of Jesus to the
disciples after that to the returned Seventy (whose mission M. Loisy
had somewhat nervously dismissed as the evangelist's "figurative
frame for the evangelizing of the pagans" [194]) and the resumption:
"Now, as they went on their way...." It is impossible to imagine a
more palpable insertion. First the mythic Seventy, the creation of
a Gentilizing Christian, make their report on the exact lines of the
report of the Twelve; then Jesus addresses them; then he "rejoices in
the Holy Spirit." Then, "turning to the disciples, he said privately,
Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see...." This last
suggests an earlier allocution to the Twelve which has had to be turned
into a "private" speech to them to distinguish it from the reply to the
Seventy. [195] But however that may be, the natural sequel is verse 38,
"Now, as they went on their way...." And it is between these points
of natural connection that we get the parable episode beginning:
"And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him...."
Well may M. Loisy say that the episode is a thing "found ready made";
it has certainly no place in the original document. But it was
"made" by a later hand, and it was inserted either by him who made
it or by him who "found" it. It is the work of a Gentilizer, aiming
at Jewish priests and Levites, and in a less degree at the scribes,
whom he treats as comparatively open to instruction. It is part of
the Gentilizing propaganda which evolved the story of the mission of
the Seventy, and it is naturally inserted after that episode. But to
admit that to be a work of redaction and to call the parable a genuine
Jesuine utterance is only to give one more distressing illustration of
the common collapse of the simplest principles of documentary criticism
under the sway of conservative prepossession. M. Loisy retains the
parable of the Good Samaritan as Jesuine simply because he feels
that to abandon it is to come near making an end of the claim for the
moral originality of the Gospels. It is probably from a Gentile hand,
though it may conceivably have come from an enlightened Jew.
And so we find M. Loisy, with all his scholarly painstaking and his
laudable measure of candour, presenting us finally with an uncritical
result. His historical Jesus will not cohere. It is a blend of early
Judaic eschatology with later ethical common sense, early Judaic
humanity and particularism with later Gentile universalism; even as
the Gospels are a mosaic of a dozen other diverging and conflicting
tendencies, early and late. "One can explain to oneself Jesus,"
exclaims M. Loisy; "one cannot explain to oneself those who invented
him." [196] Let the reader judge for himself whether M. Loisy has
given us any explanation; and whether, after our survey, there is
any scientific difficulty in the conception of an imaginary personage
produced, like an ideal photograph resulting from a whole series of
superimposed portraits, by the continued travail of generations of
men variously bent on picturing a Messiah for their hopes, a God for
their salvation, and a Teacher for their lives.