THE MAN OF GALILEE
BY
ATTICUS G. HAYGOOD
Lord, to whom shall we go but unto thee? Thou hast the words of
eternal life.--_Simon Peter._
_NEW YORK: HUNT & EATON
CINCINNATI: CRANSTON & STOWE_
1889
Copyright, 1889, by
ATTICUS G. HAYGOOD,
NEW YORK.
TO
THE “EMORY BOYS,”
WHO WERE WITH ME IN THE OLD COLLEGE IN 1876-84,
THIS LITTLE BOOK IS
Dedicated
BY ONE WHO LOVES THEM ALL.
THE AUTHOR.
DECATUR, GA., _April 9, 1889_.
PREFATORY.
DECATUR, GA., _April 9, 1889_.
MY DEAR LUNDY:
You and many others of my students at Emory of the years 1876-1884 have
often asked me to put into permanent form the thoughts concerning “The
Man of Galilee”--“Jesus of Nazareth”--I brought before you when we were
together at the old college in Oxford. In this little book I have had
the boys in mind all the way through, as if they were before me in my
lecture-room in “Seney Hall.” Many times the very faces of the boys
seemed to be about me as I have written, and I could almost hear them
ask me questions as they used to do.
Scattered about the world now--not a few of them in distant mission
fields--my heart follows them every one, and these pages, which would
never have appeared but for them, bear them the assurance of an
interest in them that can never die.
Your friend,
ATTICUS G. HAYGOOD.
The REV. LUNDY H. HARRIS,
_Professor in Emory College, Oxford, Ga._
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
Did the Evangelists Invent Jesus? 9
CHAPTER II.
“No Dramatist Can Draw Taller Men than Himself” 18
CHAPTER III.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Neither Good nor Great Enough 24
CHAPTER IV.
Is Jesus an Ideal Jew of the Time of Tiberius? 35
CHAPTER V.
Jesus and Myths 42
CHAPTER VI.
Jesus and Hebrew Human Nature 51
CHAPTER VII.
His Method of Thought Differences Him from Men 60
CHAPTER VIII.
“Never Man Spake Like this Man” 68
CHAPTER IX.
The Son of Man and Sin 80
CHAPTER X.
The Magnitude of the End He Proposed and Set About 92
CHAPTER XI.
Never Man Planned Like this Man 97
CHAPTER XII.
Jesus Neither Theologian nor Ecclesiastic 109
CHAPTER XIII.
“Jesus Christ Took the Way of Perishing” 116
CHAPTER XIV.
His Grasp upon Mankind 123
CHAPTER XV.
What Jesus Claims and Demands 133
CHAPTER XVI.
Jesus the One Universal Character 141
CHAPTER XVII.
The Christ, the Son of the Living God 148
THE MAN OF GALILEE.
CHAPTER I.
DID THE EVANGELISTS INVENT JESUS?
Who and what was Jesus of Nazareth? In this question and its answer is
involved the whole of what we mean by Christianity.
If it could be demonstrably proved that there never existed such a
person as Jesus, Christianity, as a living force, would cease from
the earth. There would indeed be a history, a literature that would
interest people according to their tastes; but there would be no
heart-changing, world-up-lifting system of vital and vitalizing truths
and corresponding duties, binding upon the conscience of every human
being and inspiring hope in every breast.
In the discussions we are about to enter nothing will be assumed except
what is too obvious to question. It will not be assumed that the little
books called “gospels” were inspired at all. You will not be asked to
consider any miracle, said to have been performed by Jesus, as making
proof of his divinity. Nor will I quote proof-texts to show that he is
divine.
The first question to ask is this: Did such a person as Jesus is
described to have been ever really exist? Did Jesus really live in
Nazareth and work in Joseph’s shop? Did he, for some three years and
six months, go to and fro among men teaching them? Was there, in the
days of Herod and Pilate, a Jesus as surely as there was a Cæsar?
This much is certain: we have in these four little books--compared
with what is every day written about common men how small they
are!--attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, a most distinct
character, known to us and known to history as Jesus. Whether the men
whose names the little books bear, or some other men whose names are
lost to us wrote them, matters not in the least. What books contain is
more important than the question of authorship. No matter who wrote
them, the character we know as Jesus is in the books; there can be no
dispute about this; here it is, before our eyes. And this character is
as surely in history, in literature, in men’s thoughts, in all that we
mean by Christian civilization, as it is in the writings of the four
men we call evangelists.
Not only do we have the character, but we see clearly that it is
a character absolutely unique. It is unique in many respects, but
pre-eminently in this--it is the one perfect character that has
appeared in the world that ever had a place in the history or the
thought of men. It is said that the volatile Voltaire once compared
Jesus to Fletcher of Madeley, thinking him as good a man as the
Nazarene. But the light Frenchman understood neither the one nor the
other. As one said of an unfit biographer of Fletcher’s great friend,
John Wesley: “He had nothing to draw with, and the well was deep.”
Is there one solitary defect, the very least, in this character that
we find in the evangelists? Is there one weak spot, or suggestion
of fault, or intimation of infirmity, or suspicion of failure, the
slightest, to do and to be what was right for him to do and to be?
Look at him as he is set before us in these brief writings; look,
reverently if you will, but with open and fearless eyes, to see all
that may be seen of him. What least flaw can be found in him? Is
there the least possible shadow of reason for reversing, or so much
as questioning, Pilate’s verdict, “I find no fault in him?” Is there
in all history one other character of which you can say or believe as
much? Is there any other you are willing to name second to him?
If you are making an estimate of any other character--whether of a
real person, as a sage, a statesman, or a philanthropist, or of some
imaginary person, as the hero of a story--how would you judge him most
severely? You would compare him with Jesus. We must remember that it
is to Jesus we owe those higher standards by which we judge men in our
times. Christ-likeness expresses the highest ideal of character we are
capable of conceiving.
Some writers, as you know, have denied that Jesus, the Jesus of the
four gospels, did at any time really live, a man among men. Of far
more importance than any mere denials in books is the failure of many
thousands to realize in their inmost consciousness that the story of
the evangelists is the record of a life actually lived.
We will demand of those who deny or doubt that Jesus really lived to
account to us for the existence of the character. This they must do,
for the existence of the character they cannot deny; it is here before
men’s eyes, as it is in men’s thoughts and lives. This character is not
in these little books only; it is in a hundred thousand books. It was
not only in the minds of four writers long ago; it is in the minds of
millions of men, women, and children to-day. If any deny or doubt the
historic Jesus, let them explain to us how this character, flawless
and perfect, ever got itself into the thoughts of men and is now in
history, literature, art, law, custom, in human life itself.
Some have tried to explain the existence of the character, while
denying that Jesus really lived among men, by telling us the
evangelists invented the Jesus of these stories. They tell us Jesus is
the product of the dramatic genius of the four men whose names go with
the brief account we have of him, his words, and his deeds. It would
not alter the case to deny that these four wrote the books, and to say
some other writers whose names we do not know invented the character.
Let us look carefully and fairly at this view of the subject. If it be
reasonable it may be true; if it be true we need not fear to accept
it. Nothing in Jesus calls on men to profess to believe what to them
is not the truth; nothing can be more unlike him than to use words
without convictions. We cannot do otherwise than “hold fast that which
is true” to us; indeed we cannot hold fast to any thing else, though it
be called truth by never so many voices of men.
The theory that Jesus is an invention is another way of saying that
he is the hero of a romance, a creation of constructive imagination.
It involves this: four Jews at about the same time, among a people
not given to making books of any kind--least of all books of the
imagination--were seized with desire to write books, and thus it came
about that they have given to the world, as the product of dramatic
genius, this character of Jesus. As, for illustration, it may be said,
in a sense, that Bulwer invented the “Margrave” of _A Strange Story_.
Let us inquire into the antecedent probabilities that these men would
naturally attempt to construct and put into form such a work of the
imagination; nay, more: whether they were likely to attempt any
dramatic work at all.
We are not left to guesses in considering such questions. It is
historically certain that the Hebrew mind in ancient days was not given
to this sort of literary work. The Greek mind gave dramas to the world,
matchless of their kind; the Hebrew mind gave none. There is nothing
in Hebrew literature of the period assigned to Jesus, of the period
succeeding him, or from the time of Moses, to indicate so much as a
tendency to such creations of the imagination.
We have much to judge by, and there can be no mistake. We have the
Old Testament Scriptures, the apocryphal books, the comments of the
scribes--called Targums--upon their sacred writing, the little book
called “Acts of the Apostles,” the other New Testament writings, and
the works of Josephus as specimens, showing the trend and method of
Hebrew literature.
The Hebrew mind in ancient days was not given to art, but to morals.
The Jew did not develop art impulses till he had become cosmopolitan
and Christianity had changed the world. In ancient Hebrew literature,
whether in plain prose--in history, statute laws, or proverbs; whether
in psalms or other poetry; whether in the magnificent imagery of the
prophets, we find that morals, not art, inspire the thought and form
the expression. There are neither paintings, nor statues, nor dramas.
Their architecture was borrowed from the Phenicians; they were original
in their ideas of morals and in their laws and customs relating to
rights and wrongs. Their literature is dominated by religion, and not
by art, in any of its manifold developments.
Read it all--all ancient Hebrew literature; we have history, laws,
proverbs, poetry, prophecies, but we have no dramas.
You may cite me to the book of Job. This is more like a drama than any
other. If this be allowed, it is the one exception. But it belongs to a
period very remote from that of the evangelists, and if it be a drama
it is, as may be shown, such a work as a Hebrew might have written. But
the story of Jesus is not such a drama as a Hebrew of his period might
have written, allowing, what is not true, that at some other period it
might have been imagined by a Hebrew, or any other writer of books. As
to the book of Job, it is in harmony with Hebrew characteristics and
with the time and country in which its scenes are laid. The books of
the evangelists are not in harmony with them; they contradict them all
and utterly.
Consider well the four little books of the evangelists that we call
gospels; study them just as you would any other ancient writings. See
what is in them, that you may know what manner of men they were who
wrote them. Reject them all, if there be reason, but look carefully
to this one thing--whether these writers were given to dramatic
creations, or, indeed, had faculty for such work. There is evidence
enough in their writings that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not
of the literary and book-making classes. They were of the common
people; unlearned and unskilled in literature, laboring and business
men, trained as laymen. Their lives were very far removed from the
occupations and influences that dominated the very feeble literary
instinct that belonged to that period of Hebrew literature.
I conclude that it was antecedently as improbable that the evangelists
would have attempted the production of any drama whatever, as I will
show that it was impossible, had they made the attempt, for them to
have invented such a story as they tell us of “The Man of Galilee.”