IS JESUS AN IDEAL JEW OF THE TIME OF TIBERIUS?
We will consider the notion that Jesus is the product of dramatic
genius from other stand-points. Have the evangelists given form and
voice to national ideals?
Jesus cannot be in those writings the crystallization of national
legends; there are no such legends. Had these writers constructed the
character out of national legends or national hopes Jesus would have
been a national deliverer, not a personal Saviour, talking to men of
sin and salvation. He was not at all, as these writings and as other
Hebrew writings make plain, the nation’s ideal of a hero and deliverer.
Jesus was any thing but such an ideal; he utterly spoiled the national
ideal of the Shiloh who was to come; he disappointed every expectation
that rose to greet him.
Once, when the people and the priests thought they might use him as a
national leader, they tried to force a king’s crown upon his head. He
refused their crown, and they crucified him.
There is another fatal objection to the notion that Jesus is only the
invention of four romance writers, suddenly springing up among a people
who did not write romances. If they invented him we should have four
Christs, not one.
There are differences enough in their statements that we cannot explain
in any honest way, but that would, I suppose, cease to be differences
if only we knew all the facts to show that these writers were not in
collusion to tell a story that would hold together. We do not know all
the facts; St. John, you will remember, tells us that many things are
not recorded; perhaps we have only the smaller part of them.
These four men are not alike; no two men are. They differ in style and,
therefore, in temperament, gifts, training, and character. They are as
different as any four writers you know; for illustration, as Carlyle,
Emerson, Macaulay, and Irving differ.
To make plainer the thought I wish you to consider, take Satan as a
character in literature. Compare the Satans of Milton, Goethe, Bailey,
Browning, and Byron. These writers show us five, not one chief of
devils. They are as unlike as their authors; and they are like their
authors.
Only a woman could have drawn the Satan of Mrs. Browning. Milton’s
Satan is a copy of the Miltonic intellect and character--grand,
scholarly, metaphysical, austere; Puritan is the hero of the _Paradise
Lost_. Bailey’s Satan grew in the atmosphere of Temple Court, and is a
London lawyer of the first order with a diabolical nature. Byron’s is
like Byron--brilliant, moody, desperate, and vain. Goethe’s is German,
and brought up in Weimar. He is like the high-priest and poet of
materialism who gave us _Faust_; like Goethe, university bred, learned,
scientific, literary, all-accomplished, gay and cynical by turns, a man
of the world, gentlemanly even in diabolisms, one familiar with the
best society, cosmopolitan in his tastes, and nineteenth century in
dress and manners as well as in his opinions and habits.
But these four men who wrote of Jesus, these men so different in their
training and manner of life--Matthew, who had been a tax-collector
under the Roman Government; Mark, a mere child when Jesus was among
men, and brought up under a careful mother; Luke, a “physician
beloved;” and John, a fisherman of Galilee--these have given us one
Jesus, not four. The differences are such as four photographs of one
man show in different postures taken by the same artist in the same
day. No matter by whose pen recorded, the words and deeds of Jesus in
the four gospels are the words and deeds of one man.
But there is another view of the notion that the evangelists invented
the character of Jesus.
Granting that these men had the mental and spiritual capacity to have
created such a character as that of Jesus; granting that, by some
strange chance, although without precedent or succession, and in utter
contradiction of all we know of the laws of the human mind, these
writers, in themselves and their circumstances so different, invented
not four, but one character, there is another thing to be considered,
and it alone is conclusive: they were bound to have invented a
different Jesus from the Jesus of the gospels.
It is impossible but that these men were under the influences that
not only characterized their times but made them what they were. The
gospels themselves show that these men were not only thoroughly Hebrew
in their thoughts and dispositions, but Hebrews of that period. No
writer can any more escape the intellectual and moral atmosphere of
his time than he can escape the heredity that is in his blood. These
influences will show themselves in any work of the imagination as
certainly as children will resemble their ancestors.
Now Jesus, though a Jew, is not like his time or people. He is a Jew
only in blood; he is not a Jew in thought or character.
The Jew of that period, saying nothing of what was past or of
what was to come to that most wonderful people, was narrow in his
sympathies; Jesus was as broad as humanity. The Jew was exclusive;
Jesus made welcome all who came to him. The Jew had small toleration
for opinions that were not his own, and none for men of other races;
no cosmopolitanism, or even Christian charity, has ever yet reached
the divine tolerance of Jesus. The Jew felt only contempt for the
mongrel tribes of Samaria; Jesus makes a Samaritan teach us universal
brotherhood. The Jew felt that contact with other nations defiled him;
there is not in Jesus the faintest flavor of any sort of race or caste
prejudice.
The master passion that dominated Jewish life in the days of Jesus
was a fierce patriotism that expended its fires in bitter and undying
hatred of Rome; Jesus, while loving his people and weeping over their
impending calamities, said, “Love your enemies.” If these writers were
inventing a character when they wrote the gospels their hero would have
been in sympathy with his time and people. Such a Christ would have
unfurled the lion-ensign of Judah, and every sword would have leaped
from its scabbard from the mountains of Lebanon to the borders of Edom.
But Jesus paid tribute to Cæsar and commanded his disciples to do it.
Of Jesus we may well say what he said of himself: he is “The Son of
man.” He belongs to all; he is a universal character, and the only one
in history. He is brother to every human being; he loves one as well as
another and each one perfectly. He means as much to us of to-day as to
those friends in Bethany whom he loved, or as he meant to that “beloved
disciple” who leaned upon his breast at the Last Supper.
The necessary conclusion is, such a character could not have been
created by dramatic genius, least of all by the four writers of that
period who have given us the gospels. The Jesus of the gospels must
have lived, to have been conceived or described.
This conclusion agrees with the method these writers adopt in
presenting this character to us. It is the method of perfect
simplicity. They nowhere try to tell us what he was or what he
was like. There are no comparisons, no analyses of qualities, no
character-sketching; there is no effort, not the least, to draw a
portrait of him. They simply write down what they saw him do and what
they heard him say; and they make it plain that they understood neither
his deeds nor his words, and that least of all they understood him.
The loftiest genius could not have invented the character of Jesus.
Plain men, like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, could write of a life
that was lived; they could write down the words they heard him speak;
they could record the story of the good works they saw him do, and so
make us to know Jesus, “who and what manner of man he was.”