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THE MAN JESUS: 
 
 a Course of lectures* 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN WHITE CHADWICK, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE FAITH OF REASON," "THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY, r 
 "A BOOK OF POEMS," ETC., ETC. 
 
 u His life was gentle ; and the elements 
 So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up 
 And say to all the world, This was a Man I n 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 1881. 
 
Copyright, 1881, 
 By Roberts Brothers. 
 
 University Press: 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 
 
C. P. G. 
 
 If where thou art thou knowest more than I 
 Can know y amid these earthly vapors dim, 
 Of that great Soul, who often, in the days 
 That are no more, allured our common thought, 
 And made our homeward talk grow strangely deep 
 And tender, underneath the quiet stars, — 
 If there thou knowest I have done him wrong, 
 Failing in aught to give him reverence due, 
 Thou wilt forgive ; for surely thou wilt know 
 That truth is now as precious to my soul 
 As in those dear and unforgotten days 
 When life was sweeter than it fer can be 
 Again } until again I am with thee. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Eeligious opinion is the resultant of many 
 infinitesimal shocks, and I shall not be suspected 
 by any generous person of imagining that I have 
 written any final word about a theme which has 
 inspired hundreds and thousands of volumes and 
 will doubtless inspire as many more. I have but 
 endeavored, with the help of many eminent 
 scholars, of whom I would name Theodor Keim 
 with special admiration, to write a book which 
 shall contribute something to a rational under- 
 standing of the human greatness of Jesus in the 
 minds of those who have not the time or oppor- 
 tunity to read those voluminous writings in which 
 the modern study of the life of Jesus has em- 
 bodied its conjectures and results. 
 
 Brooklyn, May 5, 1881. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Sources of Information 11 
 
 II. The Place and Time 45 
 
 III. Birth, Youth, and Training .... 79 
 
 IV. Jesus as Prophet Ill 
 
 V. Jesus as Messiah 149 
 
 VI. The Eesurrection 187 
 
 VII. The Deification 223 
 
THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 "Our highest Orpheus walked in Judea eighteen 
 hundred years ago. His sphere-melody, flowing in 
 wild, native tones, took captive the ravished souls of 
 men ; and, being of a truth sphere-melody, still flows 
 and sounds, though now with thousand-fold accom- 
 paniments and rich symphonies, through all our hearts, 
 and modulates and divinely leads them." 
 
 Sartor Eesartus. 
 
SOUKCES OF INFOEMATION. 
 
" After all that Biblical critics and antiquarian research 
 have raked from the dust of antiquity in proof of the gen- 
 uineness and authenticity of the books of the New Testa- 
 ment, credibility still labors with the fact that the age in 
 which these books were received and put in circulation was 
 one in which the science of criticism as developed by the 
 moderns — the science which scrutinizes statements, bal- 
 ances evidence for and against, and sifts the true from the 
 false — did not exist ; an age when a boundless credulity 
 disposed men to believe in wonders as readily as in ordinary 
 events, requiring no stronger proof in the case of the former 
 than sufficed to establish the latter, namely, hearsay and 
 vulgar report ; an age when literary honesty was a virtue 
 almost unknown, and when, consequently, literary for- 
 geries were as common as genuine productions, and tran- 
 scribers of sacred books did not scruple to alter the text 
 in the interest of personal views and doctrinal preposses- 
 sions." 
 
 Frederic Henry Hedge. 
 
THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 I. 
 
 SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 
 
 IN" studying the life of any person the first ques- 
 tion that presents itself, or ought to present 
 itself, is one of biographical material. Neglecting 
 this, the best intentions frequently come to little or 
 to naught. It often happens that the material is 
 not homogeneous, that the sources of information 
 differ among themselves, and it becomes necessary 
 that we should make, if not an absolute, at least a 
 relative choice. Otherwise an element of confu- 
 sion is introduced into every subsequent stage of 
 our procedure. In the -case of Jesus of Nazareth 
 we are bound by these conditions as unreservedly 
 as in any other, if the historical importance attach- 
 ing to his name does not put us under heavier bonds 
 to proceed from first to last with the utmost cau- 
 tion. Whatever the importance of this study, its 
 interest cannot, I think, be overrated. It would 
 
14 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 argue either exceeding coarseness or dulness not 
 to be profoundly interested in the actual career and 
 character of one whom the most civilized portion 
 of the world for sixteen hundred years has wor- 
 shipped as a god, and who, whatever his original 
 force, has been the most engrossing figure that has 
 ever trod the stage of human history. 
 
 Voltaire is reported as saying of Jesus, "Let 
 me never hear that man's name again ; " and I am 
 not unaware that there are those in this commu- 
 nity who have something of the feeling which that 
 petulant remark expressed. They are tired of hear- 
 ing Aristides called the just. Their sense of dis- 
 proportion between the person and the myth goads 
 them to this extreme. But what may be natural 
 to an unguarded moment ought not to be allowed to 
 become a habit of the mind. Jesus is not respon- 
 sible for the extravagance and absurdity of his 
 mythologists. Because they have enveloped him in 
 legend and fable there is all the more reason why 
 we should seek to penetrate to his actual char- 
 acter. We afe none of us, I hope, indifferent to 
 real greatness, nor feel so rich in what we have 
 already gathered of its fame, that we are not always 
 more than glad to add a little to our store. The 
 presumption is, that behind a myth like that of 
 Jesus there is a man, and it is only honorable and 
 decent for us to see whether it is so or not. Behind 
 the myth of Buddha we are glad to find a man. It 
 
SOUKCES OF INFORMATION. 15 
 
 speaks ill for both our science and morality if we 
 are not equally glad to find one behind the myth 
 of Jesus. Both science and morality demand that 
 we shall approach Jesus with as little hostile bias 
 as characterizes our approach to Buddha or Zoroas- 
 ter or Mohammed. 
 
 An inquiry into the sources of our information 
 concerning Jesus was of comparatively small impor- 
 tance so long as the New Testament was regarded 
 as a miraculously inspired volume, and as such was 
 considered free from any error or exaggeration. 
 There was still room for study of the way in which 
 the miraculous history of the New Testament joined 
 on to the secular history of the times, and of the im- 
 pression it made upon these times ; and within the 
 limits of the New Testament there were elements 
 apparently conflicting which had to be compelled 
 into some show of agreement. The world has 
 hardly anything to show more ingenious than some 
 of the devices which were resorted to under the 
 inspiration of this method. The Fourth Gospel, it 
 was suggested, was supplementary to the other 
 three, and all divergent accounts of an apparently 
 single event were explained as so many different 
 accounts of so many different events. Thus, the 
 critics, if they could not wholly satisfy themselves, 
 satisfied the uncritical, and do unto this day. 
 
 But the doctrine of the New Testament's mirac- 
 ulous inspiration is no longer a doctrine that can 
 
16 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 be entertained by any person who is at the same 
 time honest, thoughtful, and intelligent. This is a 
 frank expression ; but I am confident it is a saying 
 that will stand. Omit the honesty, the intelligence, 
 or the thoughtfulness, and the saying thus mutilated 
 would not hold good. Taken in its entirety, its force 
 cannot be broken. Show me an intelligent man who 
 entertains this doctrine, and the chances are ten to 
 one that he lacks either thoughtfulness or honesty. 
 Show me a thoughtful man who entertains it, and 
 he must be lacking either in honesty or intelligence- 
 Show me an honest man who entertains it, and 
 either intelligence or thoughtfulness is a missing link 
 in the chain of his individual completeness. For 
 every man of honesty, intelligence, and thought- 
 fulness knows that the result of criticism is, that 
 of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament 
 the authorship of only four l is absolutely certain. 
 But to elevate into the position of a supernatural 
 revelation a book the authorship of six-sevenths 
 of which is extremely doubtful, is manifestly an 
 unwarrantable procedure. We may be tolerably 
 sure of the authorship of another seventh. This is 
 the extremity of critical concession. But, in order 
 to maintain the supernatural inspiration of the New 
 Testament, we should be certain not only of the 
 
 1 Romans, First and Second Corinthians, and Galatians. The 
 Pauline authorship of these even is denied by Bruno Bauer, a 
 critic of no mean abilities. 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 17 
 
 authorship of each separate book, but of the super- 
 natural inspiration of each individual author. In 
 fact, our certainty on the head of authorship is con- 
 fined to four books out of twenty-seven; and of 
 the supernatural inspiration of St. Paul, the author 
 of these four, there is not a particle of proof, while 
 there is abundant proof at every turn of human 
 limitation. 
 
 But books which may not wear the honors of a 
 supernatural revelation may, used with sufficient 
 caution, furnish us with biographical material toler- 
 ably satisfactory, even where they must be regarded 
 as anonymous. Whether the New Testament books 
 do furnish us with such material it is the prin- 
 cipal object of this morning's lecture to discover. 
 
 But before addressing ourselves to this, let us 
 inquire what intimation, if any, we have of Jesus, 
 his life and teachings, beyond the confines of the 
 New Testament. Let us begin upon the outmost 
 verge and work our way in towards the centre. 
 That is, let us first consider the heathen testimony, 
 then the Jewish, then the incidental, finally the 
 direct testimony of the New Testament. 
 
 Of contemporary reference to Jesus in pagan 
 writers there is none whatever. The earliest is that 
 of Tacitus, after Thucydides the greatest historian 
 of the ancient world. But this reference is con- 
 fined to a statement of the bare fact that Jesus was 
 " executed in the reign of Tiberius by the procura- 
 
 2 
 
18 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 tor, Pontius Pilate." This was written about sev- 
 enty years after the death of Jesus, at which time 
 Tacitus, the wisest of his generation, regarded the 
 Jews as a people " without religion/' as " haters of 
 the human race," and Christianity as the meanest 
 of the offshoots of Judaism, exitiabilis superstitio, 
 — " a miserable superstition." Suetonius, writing of 
 the Emperor Claudius near the beginning of the 
 second century, has a single reference to Jesus, — 
 " one Chrestos," — whom he imagines to have been 
 a seditious Roman Jew, living in Eome, midway 
 of the first century. And these scanty references 
 to Jesus, the one so bare, the other so absurd, are 
 all l that we have in pagan literature to enlighten 
 us concerning the founder of a religion which in 
 a little more than two centuries after the time of 
 Tacitus and Suetonius became the State religion of 
 the Eoman Empire. Need I remark on the incon- 
 sequence of those who from this paucity of pagan 
 mention infer the non-existence of Jesus ? There 
 were no railroads and telegraphs in the time of Jesus 
 to bind the civilized world together in a network of 
 mutual appreciation. Tacitus's general ignorance of 
 the Jewish people would be unpardonable in any 
 modern person, but the wonder is that he set down 
 correctly the circumstances of the death of Jesus. 
 
 1 The letter of the Younger Pliny from Bithynia, 104 A. D., 
 is vaguely instructive about the Christian community of that 
 time, but contains nothing about Jesus. 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 19 
 
 But that the writings of the Jews themselves, 
 outside of the New Testament, should be as little 
 fruitful of information concerning Jesus as the 
 writings of Suetonius and Tacitus is more remark- 
 able. The first Christian century covered the lit- 
 erary activity of two Jewish writers of remarkable 
 ability, Philo and Josephus. Philo died in 60, 
 Josephus in 95 A. D. But Philo mentions neither 
 Jesus nor the Christians, and of Josephus we are 
 obliged to make substantially the same confession. 
 There are two passages in popular editions of Jo- 
 sephus which refer to Jesus. The less celebrated 
 may possibly contain these authentic words, "James 
 the brother of Jesus, called the Christ ; " although 
 the fact that the passage containing these words was 
 outrageously tampered "with by Christian hands 
 throws doubt on even so much as I have quoted. 
 The more celebrated passage reads : " At that time 
 appeared a certain Jesus, a wise man, if indeed he 
 may be called a man ; for he was a worker of mira- 
 cles, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with 
 joy, and he drew to himself many Jews and many 
 also of the Greeks. This was the Christ. And 
 when, at the instigation of our chief men, Pilate 
 condemned him to the cross, those who had first 
 loved him did not fall away. For he appeared to 
 them alive again on the third day, according as the 
 holy prophets had declared this and a thousand 
 other wonderful things of him. To this day the 
 
20 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 sect of Christians called after him exists." This 
 beautiful passage has been quoted thousands of 
 times, and is still quoted as the testimony of a cul- 
 tured Jew to the substantial truth of the New 
 Testament. But, alas, the early Christian fathers, 
 who knew the writings of Josephus well enough, 
 knew nothing of this passage. When at length it 
 appears in the " Antiquities," it is now in one place 
 and now in another. Efforts the most heroic to 
 save a part of it have proved as futile as the 
 attempt to save the whole. But the significance of 
 the passage cannot be overrated. It is a capital 
 example of the literary ethics of the early Chris- 
 tians. The original interpolator of this passage 
 thought he " verily did God service " when he in- 
 serted it in the " Antiquities " of the Jewish histo- 
 rian. He did nothing that was not done a thousand 
 times from Ezra to Augustine. Pseudonymous 
 writing and interpolation were favorite methods of 
 religious propagandism. 
 
 What are we to infer from the entire silence o: 
 Josephus (or almost entire, allowing the words 
 " James the brother of Jesus, called the Christ/' to 
 be authentic) ? Many have been the conjectures. 
 But the most plausible is, that in the world- view of 
 Josephus, writing fifty years after the time of Jesus, 
 the Christian community was too small a dot to 
 merit his consideration. 
 
 The literature of Judaism outside of Philo and 
 
 s 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 21 
 
 Josephus is equally barren of any real information. 
 The Talnmdic writings do little more than repeat 
 in various forms the slander of his illegitimate birth, 
 — a retort so natural to the assertion of his miracu- 
 lous birth that we encounter it in the earliest writ- 
 ings hostile to Christianity that have come down to 
 us. Shall we be more successful if we seek for infor- 
 mation concerning Jesus in Christian writings of 
 the second century outside of those contained in the 
 New Testament ? This literature, as preserved to 
 us, is neither inconsiderable in bulk nor unimpor- 
 tant, especially as admitting us to the inner life of 
 the Christian community in the second century ; but 
 it adds very little to our New Testament sources, — 
 hardly more than a few sentences of apparent gen- 
 uineness, having on themrthe stamp of Jesus' indi- 
 viduality. If there is any exception to be taken 
 to this statement, it must be in favor of the Gospel 
 according to the Hebrews. Time was when our New 
 Testament Matthew was thought to be a transla- 
 tion of this, but one of the fixed facts of modern 
 criticism is that our Matthew is not a translation. 
 And still its relation to the Gospel according to the 
 Hebrews is one of the most interesting questions 
 of New Testament criticism. The agreements of the 
 two are many, and where they disagree the unca- 
 nonical work sometimes preserves the more reliable 
 tradition. The Gospel of the Hebrews seems to 
 have existed in various forms, in this respect being 
 
22 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 in no wise different perhaps from the New Testa- 
 ment gospels. Whether its earliest form was the 
 germ of our own Matthew, or the two branched 
 from a common stock, is a dilemma which impales 
 on either horn an equal number of New Testament 
 scholars. This much, however, is tolerably certain : 
 that throughout the second century the Gospel 
 according to the Hebrews enjoyed a reputation not 
 inferior to that of our New Testament gospels. The 
 decline of its reputation synchronized with the 
 decay of Jewish Christianity. 
 
 The upshot of these considerations is, that we are 
 thrust back on the New Testament as our only 
 valid source of information concerning the life and 
 character of Jesus. Josephus and other writers are 
 of inestimable value as giving us the political an 
 social and religious setting of his life. But fo: 
 knowledge of the man Jesus, of his idea and his 
 aims, and of the outward form of his career, the New 
 Testament is our only hope. If this hope fails, the 
 pillared firmament of his starry fame is rottenness ; 
 the base of Christianity, so far as it was personal 
 and individual, is built on stubble. 
 
 Within the confines of the New Testament we 
 have a great variety of literature. We have an 
 extensive epistolary portion ; a book of history, the 
 Acts of the Apostles ; a prophetic allegory, the Eev- 
 elation of S,t. John ; and four biographies of Jesus. 
 
 I had written to this point when my attention 
 
 d 
 
 > 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 23 
 
 was called to the following statement of a writer in 
 the New York " Tribune," the vagary of no simple- 
 minded correspondent, but a statement to which 
 this distinguished journal gave the weight of its 
 authority : — 
 
 " The compilation of the New Testament was the 
 " work of six of the Apostles, and two of the dis- 
 "ciples who attended them in their journey ings. 
 " The Four Gospels were the work of men who were 
 " contemporary with Christ : the first of them was 
 " published a few years after his ascension, and cir- 
 culated among the very people in whose midst 
 " his life was passed. The Epistles were written 
 " separately by five of the Apostles, from fifteen to 
 " thirty-five years after the Saviour left this earth. 
 " The history known as the Acts of the Apostles 
 " was published about the year 65 A. D. The book 
 " of Eevelation was written and made known by 
 " John, one of the five above referred to, about the 
 " year 96 A. D. ; and though Martin Luther, among 
 * others equally eminent, doubted that John really 
 " wrote it, the weight of modern critical opinion is 
 " certainly in favor of his authorship." 
 
 Were this a correct statement of the facts in the 
 case, our search for valid information concerning 
 the life and death of Jesus would be a nominal 
 affair. But there is hardly a single sentence in this 
 statement which is not outrageously and ridicu- 
 lously false. It is an admirable summary of the 
 
24 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 popular traditional belief concerning the books of 
 the New Testament. It is a monstrous, if not 
 wicked, perversion of the results of modern scien- 
 tific criticism, even where this is most conservative. 
 It is safe to say that there is not a person living, 
 and having any right to express an opinion on 
 these subjects, who could subscribe to this state- 
 ment, who would not, in fact, reject it altogether. 
 
 To proceed for a moment to details : The book 
 of Eevelation, says this statement, was written about 
 96 A. D. But if there is a single fixed point in 
 the New Testament chronology, it is the date of 
 Eevelation, and this date is 69 A. D. Acts, says 
 this statement, was published about the year 65 
 A. D. About the year 125 a. d., says the intelligent 
 critic. " The Epistles," says this statement, " were 
 written separately by five of the Apostles, from 
 fifteen to thirty-five years after the Saviour left this 
 earth." From twenty to one hundred and forty 
 years after the death of Jesus, says the intelligent 
 critic, who at the same time reduces the number of 
 Apostles who had a hand in them from five to one ; 
 namely, St. Paul, to whom at the utmost eight 
 Epistles are conceded of the thirteen which bear 
 his superscription in the New Testaments of to-day. 
 "The Eour Gospels were the work of men who 
 were contemporary with Christ : the first of them 
 was published a few years after his ascension, and 
 circulated among the very people in whose midst 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 25 
 
 his life was passed." So says the journalist. The 
 intelligent critic says : Of the existence of the 
 Four Gospels we learn with certainty only in the 
 fourth quarter of the second century, one hundred 
 and fifty years after the death of Jesus. Of their 
 authorship we are entirely ignorant. The earliest, 
 Matthew, cannot have received its present form 
 much before the end of the first century. The 
 latest, John, dates from about the year 135. Possi- 
 bly from a few years earlier than this, possibly from 
 a few years later. 
 
 Such being the actual critical result as regards 
 the contents of the New Testament, it is evident 
 that much greater caution must be observed in the 
 use of them than would be necessary if the popular 
 conception corresponded at any single point with 
 the reality. Certain, or tolerably so, that in the 
 genuine Epistles of St. Paul we have a set of writ- 
 ings belonging to a period ranging from twenty to 
 thirty years after the death of Jesus, we turn to 
 these with generous expectations. Surely, here if 
 anywhere, we say, we shall learn something about 
 Jesus that will be interesting and satisfactory. But 
 we are doomed to disappointment t>nce again. Paul 
 is almost absolutely silent concerning the actual 
 life of Jesus. Once, and once only, does he quote 
 his words. He does not make a single reference to 
 any event in his whole life, save as the last supper 
 is implied in his solitary quotation of his words. 
 
26 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 The Christ of Paul was not a person, but an idea. 
 He took no pains to learn the facts about the indi- 
 vidual Jesus. He actually boasted that the Apos- 
 tles had taught him nothing. His Christ was an 
 ideal conception, evolved from his own feeling and 
 imagination, and taking on new powers and attri- 
 butes from year to year to suit each new emergency. 
 Not the life but the death and resurrection of Jesus 
 are his constant theme. Nevertheless, in a general 
 way, the witness of Paul to Jesus is of inestimable 
 value. It is an overwhelming refutation of the 
 hypothesis that the actual Jesus was next to no- 
 body. Only a tremendous personal force could 
 have laid hold on the imagination and the con- 
 science of Paul with overmastering power. The 
 sympathies and admirations of gigantic men do not 
 attach themselves to men of lower stature than 
 their own. 
 
 The writings nearest the time of Jesus after thi 
 Epistles of Paul are the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 (certainly not Paul's) and the book of Eevelation. 
 These were both written from 65 to 70 A. D. But 
 they have for us no illumination. The Epistle to 
 the Hebrews attenuates the personality of Jesus 
 into a dogmatic cloud, less palpable, if possible, than 
 the Christ of Paul. The Eevelationist is too intent 
 upon the Jesus who is coming in the clouds of 
 heaven to have a thought of the Jesus whom he 
 had personally known. He dares not look back- 
 
 I 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 27 
 
 ward for a moment lest he should miss the first 
 premonitory gleam of the approaching day of the 
 Lord. The Epistles other than Paul's and the book 
 of Acts are characterized by a similar paucity of 
 definite information. To the Four Gospels, then, 
 we are driven as our last resort. 
 
 But here again there is an inner and an outer 
 court. The inner court is that of the first three 
 Gospels, called the Synoptics, because a synopsis 
 can be made of their contents taken together ; the 
 j outer court is that of the Fourth Gospel. Were 
 . this written by John, we should be brought by it 
 very near to the person of Jesus. But that it was 
 not written by John may be considered as well- 
 | nigh an established point in modern criticism, 
 I where this is not hopelessly apologetic. It is the 
 policy of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" to put 
 itself on the safe side of every doubtful question. 
 Its articles are generally coextensive with the con- 
 i quered ground of modern science. Now, in the 
 : tenth volume of this Encyclopaedia, recently pub- 
 lished, there is an article on the Four Gospels, writ- 
 I ten by Dr. E. A. Abbott, an English churchman of 
 i high standing and great erudition. The article is 
 : eminently conservative, and assigns to the Synop- 
 tics an earlier date than common, but of the claims 
 of the Fourth Gospel to be the work of the Apostle 
 John or a first-century work of anybody it effect- 
 ually disposes. Of this Gospel, as John's, we have 
 
28 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 no mention till the second century is drawing to its 
 close. Of its existence we have little if any notice 
 earlier than this. But we have ample evidence 
 that if it was in existence midway of the second 
 century, 1 and back of this for five and twenty 
 years, it was little known and less esteemed, and 
 certainly was not regarded as the work of an 
 Apostle. That it was meant to pass for John's 
 there cannot be a doubt ; but so was the book of Dan- 
 iel meant to pass for Daniel's, who had been dead 
 three hundred years when it was written. To seek 
 prestige for one's own thought under the cover of 
 some mighty name was for hundreds of years before 
 and after the time of Jesus the commonest pro- 
 ceeding. It was a species of self-abnegation. The 
 writer sacrificed his personal renown to some high 
 cause that had enlisted his enthusiasm and de- 
 manded his service. 
 
 That one biography of a person is written subse- 
 quently to another is not necessarily a circumstance 
 that is prejudicial to the later work. The latest is 
 frequently the best. But if it is so, it must be in 
 virtue of a closer adherence to, or a more vital ap- 
 preciation of, the fundamental biographical material. 
 The trouble with John's Gospel is not so much that 
 
 1 Dr. Ezra Abbot has argued laboriously that it was in exist- 
 ence at this time, and used by Justin Martyr. But granting so 
 much, the Johannine authorship is still almost as far removed as 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 29 
 
 it was written after the others, as that in its entire 
 tone and structure it is different from the others, 
 and different from them in such a way that we are 
 compelled to feel that we are reading no biography, 
 but a magnificent theological romance, an epic 
 poem of which the hero is the Logos, the incarnate 
 Word. This Gospel was not written as a biogra- 
 phy, but to set forth Jesus as the Logos. Every- 
 thing is made subservient to this end. It is quite 
 possible that it embodies^ sayings and events that 
 have a traditional value over and above those which 
 are freely borrowed from the Synoptists. But they 
 are few and far between. The discourses of the 
 Fourth Gospel are its deepest condemnation, for all 
 the noble passages which they contain. The speech 
 of Dr. Johnson is not so different from that of 
 Robert Burns as the speech of the Fourth Gospel 
 Jesus from that of the Jesus of the Synoptists. 
 " Brief and concise were the sentences uttered by 
 him," says Justin Martyr, — proof positive that he 
 knew nothing of the Fourth Gospel, or gave it no 
 heed. His words are true of Matthew, Mark, and 
 Luke. They mock the endless disquisitions of 
 John. In the Synoptics nothing is so characteris- 
 tic of Jesus as the parables. In the Fourth Gospel 
 there is not a single parable. James Freeman 
 Clarke has recently suggested that Jesus spoke in 
 parables to the simple Galileans, in disquisitions to 
 the temple doctors of Jerusalem. But the longest 
 
30 
 
 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 disquisitions of the Fourth Gospel are addressed, 
 not to the temple doctors, but to his disciples on the 
 last day of his life. Again, the framework of the 
 Fourth Gospel is so different from the framework 
 of the others, making his ministry three years long 
 instead of one, and mainly Juclean instead of 
 mainly Galilean, that we are compelled to make a 
 choice. The time is short for a detailed account of 
 this matter; but were it not I could, I think, con- 
 vince you, as I am myself convinced, that in at- 
 tempting to construct a consistent idea of the life 
 and character of Jesus the Fourth Gospel must be 
 counted out. Ingenuity has exhausted itself in the 
 endeavor to obtain a different result, and all in 
 vain. The Fourth Gospel is not less valuable on 
 this account. Only its value henceforth is that of 
 a contribution to our knowledge of second-century 
 ideas. Every true word that it contains is just as 
 true as ever. Every beautiful thought is just as 
 beautiful now as before. But the character of Jesus 
 gains immensely by this transferrence. He is no 
 longer the scorner and hater of his own people. 
 He is no longer the esoteric theosophist of an inner 
 circle of disciples, praying, if not for these alone, 
 for those only beyond them who shall believe on 
 him through their word, and never rising into the 
 invigorating atmosphere of self-forgetfulness and 
 universal love. Since the sponge dipped in vinegar 
 moistened the dying lips of Jesus, no such service 
 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 31 
 
 has been rendered him as that of the critics who 
 have transferred the Fourth Gospel from the prov- 
 ince of biography to that of theological controversy 
 and imaginative dogma. 
 
 Of the three Gospels that still remain to us the 
 relative values are still in some dispute. That we 
 are certain of the authorship of any one of them 
 only a very ignorant or exceedingly dogmatic per- 
 son would be likely to declare. Nor of the time 
 when they assumed their present shapes can we 
 be more than proximately sure. "We are for the 
 first time definitely aware of their existence as 
 Matthew's, Mark's, and Luke's, from 170 to 180 
 A. D. Nor are we aware of their existence in any 
 shape or under any name at a much earlier period. 
 Writing in the middle of the second century, Jus- 
 tin Martyr quotes from certain "Memoirs of the 
 Apostles," as he calls them, so freely that a con- 
 sistent biography of Jesus might be collected from 
 his quotations. But he never names the authors 
 of these memoirs. His quotations from them often 
 disagree with our Gospels, and seldom agree with 
 them ; and if our Gospels (the Synoptics) were used 
 by him, they were used in conjunction with others 
 which were apparently as highly, if not more highly, 
 esteemed. If we had only external evidence to 
 rely upon, it would be quite impossible to predi- 
 cate the existence of our Synoptic Gospels earlier 
 than the middle of the second century. Later than 
 
32 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 this we cannot put them, because at least a quarter 
 of a century is necessary to establish the reputation 
 they enjoyed in 175-180 a. d. From various evi- 
 dence we may however infer with tolerable safety 
 that Matthew reached its present form near the be- 
 ginning of the second century, Luke about 115 
 A. D., and Mark about 120. This statement differs 
 widely from the journalist's which I have quoted : 
 " The Four Gospels were the work of men who were 
 contemporary with Christ : the first of them was 
 published a few years after his ascension, and cir- 
 culated among the very people in whose midst his 
 life was passed." And some of you may think my 
 statement is -;so different from this that we might 
 as well abandon all attempt to draw out the life 
 and character of Jesus from writings so far removed 
 in time from his own day, — from seventy to 
 ninety years. But Eome was not built in a day, 
 nor were the Synoptic Gospels any more. They 
 were not made ; they grew. And they were long 
 in growing. It would almost appear as if the titles 
 of these Gospels, " according to Matthew," and so 
 on, — according to, not by, — implied a conscious- 
 ness that these writings were impersonal, that to no 
 one man could be assigned their authorship. This 
 is the truth concerning them. Luke, you will re- 
 member, begins his Gospel, " Forasmuch as many 
 have taken in hand to set forth in order a declara- 
 tion of those things which are most surely believed 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 33 
 
 among us ; " and the evidences are plentiful that 
 the author uses these "many" freely, our own 
 Matthew being among them. Everywhere in the 
 Synoptics there is an effect of fragments joined 
 together, not too carefully ; of different traditions ; 
 of different documents freely used with little dis- 
 crimination. Hence in the same Gospel different 
 accounts of one and the same thing, different and 
 sometimes contradictory renderings of one and the 
 same saying, as where Jesus is reported to have 
 said that " a prophet is" and again that " a prophet 
 is not, without honor save in his own country." In 
 Matthew the final editor is evidently less Jewish 
 than his material, and in Luke there is a similar 
 inconsistency. 
 
 These characteristics of the Gospels which, at 
 first thought, affect our valuation of them injuri- 
 ously, prove, in the last analysis, exceedingly for- 
 tunate. For these characteristics to develop, there 
 must have been a considerable extent of time. The 
 mental movement of the time was slow ; intercom- 
 munication between different communities was 
 precarious. And hence the fact that the Synoptics 
 are aggregations proves that the process of their 
 aggregation must have extended back a score or 
 two of years into the first century of our era. There 
 is a tradition common to them all which can be 
 extracted and shown to have a rude integrity. The 
 differentiation of the present Gospels from this 
 
 3 
 
34 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 original tradition could not have been suddenly 
 accomplished. It is even possible that Matthew 
 arrived at a written form before the destruction of 
 Jerusalem in 70 A. i>. It contains sentences that 
 could not have originated after that event, and the 
 crudity of the method of aggregation is evinced by 
 the fact that these sentences are allowed to stand 
 and bear the contradiction of events. The result 
 at which we finally arrive, therefore, is this : That 
 from thirty to forty years after the death of Jesus 
 the tradition of his life and ministry and death had 
 shaped itself into the basis of our present Gospels of 
 Matthew, Mark, and Luke, The contents of this 
 fundamental tradition (fundamental to our Gospels, 
 but in its turn, no doubt, the result of various ac- 
 cretions) — the contents of this tradition are as 
 flattering to the anti-supernaturalist as he could 
 reasonably expect. Accounts of miracles are here, 
 even some of the most startling ; but there is not a 
 hint of the miraculous birth of Jesus, nor of the 
 legends of his infancy, and the tradition ends with 
 the discovery that his tomb is empty, without a 
 word to signalize that he was seen again by any 
 woman or disciple. In this tradition the person- 
 ality of Jesus is revealed in lines so firm and strong 
 that the accretions of a later time add little to 
 their force. The man behind the myth is there, 
 no thin abstraction, but an individual with blood 
 in his veins, and in his heart the love of human 
 kind. 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 35 
 
 I would not have you think that it is my idea 
 that we should do well to reject every subsequent 
 accretion to this primitive tradition. I have no 
 doubt that there are sayings and events in the ac- 
 cretions just as valid as those of the primitive tra- 
 dition, although the tendency away from this is a 
 tendency from fact to fancy. Even beyond the 
 confines of the Synoptics I believe that there' are 
 genuine traditions. In John the story of the woman 
 taken in adultery is an interpolation. It is found in 
 none of the early manuscripts, but it has the stamp 
 of Jesus' individuality as the rest of the Gospel 
 has not. This is the real. Gospel, and the rest is 
 the interpolation. 
 
 To extract from the Synoptics a consistent pic- 
 ture of the life and character of Jesus is no simple 
 task, when we consider the method of their origi- 
 nation. At the very threshold of our task we 
 must abandon the idea of attaining to absolute cer- 
 tainty in regard to any saying or event. But we 
 must remember that where memory is most relied 
 upon it is most exact. We must be on our guard 
 against the afterthoughts of later generations. We 
 must from the consent of various traditions build 
 up a standard of judgment by which we can dis- 
 criminate between the actual speech or incident 
 and the mythical transformation. 
 
 Last, but not least, the question of the miracu- 
 lous narratives embedded in the Gospels, even in 
 
36 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 the tradition fundamental to them all, clamors for a 
 solution. But so far as we are at present concerned, 
 the question is one of simple fact : Did such and 
 such things happen ? This question might be an- 
 swered in the affirmative in every case, and still the 
 cause of theological miracle, of supernatural inter- 
 ference, would not be advanced a single inch. For 
 the essence of the theological miracle is the vio- 
 lation of natural law. The moment the miracle 
 ceases to be this, it ceases to be supernatural and 
 to have any power to prove a supernatural revela- 
 tion. Let the theologian concede that the events 
 in question did not involve violations of law, but 
 only manifestation of some higher law than any 
 known, and he has given up his case. Before it. 
 was discovered, the law of gravitation was a higher 
 law than any known ; but it was not a whit more 
 supernatural before its discovery than it was after- 
 ward. A miracle in the sense of the thorough-going 
 and consistent supernaturalist, the only miracle 
 that can prove a revelation supernatural, is, we are 
 obliged to say, impossible. We are told that to say 
 this is presumptuous. How dare we put a limit to 
 the power of the Eternal ? We put no limit. We 
 only say that the laws of nature, as we call them, 
 are so many subjective classifications of the ob- 
 served facts of nature, and the moment we come 
 upon a fact not included in them we are simply 
 obliged to modify our hitherto unduly narrow con- 
 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 37 
 
 ception of the laws of nature, so that they will 
 include the latest fact. Professor Huxley's illus- 
 tration is here absolutely perfect. " A day-fly/' he 
 says, "has better grounds for calling a thunder- 
 storm supernatural than has man to say that the 
 most astonishing event that can be imagined is 
 beyond the scope of natural causes." .Considering 
 the fractional character of our experience, the pre- 
 sumption is in affirming any fact to be a violation 
 of natural law. 
 
 A supernatural miracle is impossible ; but what 
 of the events recorded in the New Testament, and 
 commonly spoken of as miracles ? If every one of 
 them could be established by sufficient evidence, 
 the result would only be to widen our conception 
 of natural law. But can they be established? 
 There are those who argue that if any of our Gos- 
 pels can be pushed back to within thirty or forty 
 years of Jesus' lifetime, the reality of these events 
 must be conceded. No, not if the Gospels, or their 
 fundamental tradition, could be pushed back to 
 within ten years of the lifetime of Jesus. Ten 
 years, or even five, would be sufficient for the gen- 
 eration of every miraculous story in the New Tes- 
 tament, not here and now, but then and there. For 
 then and there the scientific conception of nature's 
 orderly procedure had not dawned upon the mind. 
 Two centuries later Tertullian said, " I believe be- 
 cause it is impossible." This was a favorite canon 
 
38 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 of belief for hundreds of years before and for hun- 
 dreds of years after the time of Jesus. The mind 
 was predisposed to belief in supernatural events, 
 in prodigies and wonders. Every attempt to cut 
 off the time of Jesus and his Apostles from all 
 earlier and later times has proved entirely futile. 
 The stream of miraculous pretension poured itself 
 through his time, a flood that had been flowing for 
 centuries, and would flow on for centuries to come. 
 There is, indeed, much better evidence for the 
 miracles recorded by St. Augustine than for any 
 recorded in the New Testament. We come much 
 nearer the events, and we know something of the 
 narrators, where in the New Testament we know 
 nothing. Never was there a place and time where 
 and when stories of prodigy and miracle were more 
 likely to be fashioned without any basis of reality, 
 and to obtain credence without any evidence, than 
 in the years immediately succeeding the lifetime 
 of Jesus. Considering the place and time, the won- 
 der is that the miraculous element in the New 
 Testament is not much more obtrusive than it is, 
 much more extravagant. 
 
 For, coming face to face with the Synoptic mira- 
 cles, the highest number that they reach is twenty 
 in Matthew, nineteen in Luke, and eighteen in 
 Mark. There are only eleven miracles, outside the 
 birth and resurrection stories, common to Matthew* 
 Mark, and Luke. It is frequently assumed that if 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 39 
 
 we cannot account for the origin of the narratives 
 of miracle in any other way, then we must allow 
 to them a basis of miraculous fact. As if wonder- 
 ful stories did not every day obtain currency in 
 this humdrum modern life of ours, to account for 
 whose origin is impossible ! And yet we know 
 them to be false. *But it is not impossible to trace 
 with tolerable assurance the development of some 
 of the miraculous narratives from a non-miraculous 
 beginning. There is no one theory that will account 
 for all of them. The vice of criticism has been a 
 contrary persuasion. Hence the mistakes of Paulus, 
 Strauss, and others in pushing their favorite theories 
 too far. In the Fourth Gospel almost every mira- 
 cle-story is the picture of an idea; but in the Synop- 
 tics, where we have growth instead of manufacture, 
 it will be found that almost every miracle-story has 
 a genesis and history peculiar to itself. The myth- 
 ical theory of Strauss accounts for some. That is, 
 the stories are reflections of similar stories in the 
 Old Testament, or inferences from the Messiahship 
 of Jesus. The Messiah was expected to do thus 
 and so : Jesus was the Messiah : Jesus had done 
 thus and so. This was the inevitable argument. 
 In a mediaeval miracle-play, Adam was represented 
 going across the stage, — going to he created. Now, 
 a good many miracle-stories in the New Testament 
 can be surprised in this pre-existent state. Thus, 
 in Luke, Jesus likens the Jewish nation to an un- 
 
40 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 fruitful fig-tree, and curses it as such. This is the 
 miracle of the fig-tree blasted by the curse of Jesus 
 in Matthew and Mark in its pre-existent state, 
 going across the New Testament stage, — going to 
 be created. The feeding of the five thousand is 
 very possibly a parable, — that of the sower, it may 
 be, turned into a miraculous occurrence. So the 
 Lazarus parable of the Third Gospel becomes the 
 Lazarus miracle of the Fourth. Several other mir- 
 acle-stories bear such a close relation to the words 
 of Jesus, that it is difficult to resist the impression 
 that they originated in symbolic utterances, — his 
 own or such as were suggested by his words. 
 
 And these various transformations cf words into 
 miraculous events were made more natural and 
 easy by the fact, which may freely be conceded, 
 that upon a certain class of nervous diseases Jesus 
 exercised a certain influence. This class of diseases 
 was regarded as the result of demoniacal possession. 
 Jesus himself, undoubtedly, shared in the common 
 opinion as to their nature, and thus was in a posi- 
 tion to affect them, which for a sceptic would have 
 been impossible. It was as necessary for him to 
 believe in himself as for the people to believe in 
 him, ere any diseased imagination could be quieted. 
 If any of you think that I am waxing superstitious, 
 I will only say that Strauss concedes as much as 
 this; and one can be as superstitious as Strauss 
 with perfect safety. " It would have been strange, 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 41 
 
 indeed," he says, " if there had been no cases in 
 which the force of excited imagination, impressions 
 half spiritual, half sensuous, produced either actual 
 removal or temporary mitigation of the complaint." 
 But cures of this sort were so far from implying any- 
 thing supernatural that they were scarcely remark- 
 able. The exorcism of demons was exceedingly 
 common. Jesus appeals to it as proof of the va- 
 lidity of his own method. He allows the success 
 of the exorcism. There was no conflict here with 
 modern science. For diseases of the imagination, 
 to this day the most effective remedies are psycho- 
 logical. Much more must it have been so in the 
 time of Jesus, when all concerned were alike under 
 the dominion of an appalling superstition, the belief 
 in demoniacal possession. But given a few cures 
 of the so-called demoniacs by Jesus, also the spir- 
 itual soil and atmosphere of Palestine, and these 
 cures would bring forth in a dozen or twenty years 
 a crop of miracle-stories so extensive that not one 
 quarter of its bulk could be husbanded within the 
 limits of the New Testament. And a few cures of 
 this sort, or temporary alleviations, are, I am per- 
 suaded, the bottom facts which underlie the entire 
 structure of the miraculous in the New Testament, 
 and in Christian history. 1 
 
 1 This is the conclusion reached by Dr. E. A. Abbott, the 
 distinguished Church of England writer, of whom I have already 
 spoken. See his Oxford Sermons. 
 
42 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 Such a conclusion takes nothing from the fame 
 of Jesus which he cannot easily spare. And it 
 takes nothing from the stock of our habitual 
 ideas to which we cannot give the heartiest God- 
 speed. Not faith in miracle but faith in law has 
 been the inspiration of the best endeavor all the 
 centuries down. Because men have believed in 
 the stability of nature they have gone forward, 
 when without such a belief they would have fallen 
 palsied by the way. That what has been will be ; 
 that the great laws will keep their trysts, with men 
 forever without fail, — all science and all civiliza- 
 tion rest upon this faith. The miraculous, in its 
 original sense, is the wonderful, and in this sense 
 — the highest possible — what are the miracles of 
 law's imagined violation to the miracles of invio- 
 late law ? The miraculous birth of Jesus ! As 
 if every birth into this world were not a wonder 
 vast enough to stir 
 
 ■*iD L 
 
 " Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 
 
 His immaculate conception ! Thank God that 
 century-living slur upon the purity of all the 
 mothers in the world but one is hastening to its 
 doom ! The star of Bethlehem ! As if any star 
 that trembles on the edge of dawn or eve, or any 
 of the least in heaven, 
 
 " when the host 
 Is out, at once, to the despair of night," 
 
SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 43 
 
 were not too wonderful for heart to hold ! The 
 feeding of five .thousand ! The feeding of some 
 fourteen hundred millions every day, and these 
 but one of many hundred generations, appeals 
 more powerfully to my imagination. But the res- 
 urrection of Jesus from the dead, — the miracle of 
 miracles ! What shall we say of this ? Say that 
 nothing which deserves the name of proof can be 
 anywhere found for it, and that, if it could be, 
 the isolated, unrelated fact would have for us no 
 instruction and no consolation, while the resur- 
 rection and the life of this fair world of spring, 
 after so many frozen winter days, is an unspeak- 
 able wonder and delight, and a tender pledge and 
 prophecy withal, that seeming death may be the 
 harbinger of higher life to every human soul 
 
 " When Winter comes, can Spring be far behind ? " 
 
n. 
 
 THE PLACE AND TIME. 
 
" A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some 
 spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender 
 kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, 
 for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will 
 give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference 
 amidst the future widening of knowledge : a spot where 
 the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with 
 affection, and kindly acquaintance .with all neighbors, even 
 to the dogs and donkeys, may spread, not by sentimental 
 effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood." 
 
 George Eliot. 
 
II 
 
 THE PLACE AND TIME. 
 
 HOWEVEE exalted the genius of the indi- 
 vidual, it is not independent of the place 
 and time of its appearance among men. What- 
 j ever the original organism, these determine to an 
 i immense degree the outcome of the life. Shak- 
 spere and Dante might have been born exactly 
 as they were, in body and in brain ; but if Shak- 
 I spere had been born in Florence in the twelfth 
 j century, and Dante in England in the sixteenth, 
 we should have had no Shakspere's plays as we 
 now have them, and no Divina Commedia. And 
 so, whatever personal force was lodged in Jesus, its 
 manifestation was determined by his country and 
 his race, and by the immediate social and political 
 and religious conditions of his time. Had these 
 been different, the biography of Jesus would not 
 have been the same. 
 
 Strangely enough, the native country of Jesus 
 is known to us as Palestine. Strangely enough, I 
 say, because this name is evidently only another 
 
48 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 form of Philistine. The most inveterate enemies 
 of Israel have sealed the country with their name. 
 Such is the irony of history. The geographical 
 extent of modern Palestine was never for any con- 
 siderable length of time under a single government. 
 From the invasion, about 1280, to Saul, about 
 1060 B. a, it was the battle-ground of warring 
 tribes. These, forced into a single nation by Saul, 
 and consolidated by David, remained a unit for 
 some eighty years, and then, upon the death of 
 Solomon, split asunder into ten northern and two 
 southern tribes, forming the respective kingdoms 
 of Judah and Israel. The northern kingdom kept 
 the national name; but with the southern went 
 the national genius for religion, and the hard task 
 of maintaining its continuity through an immense 
 variety of political change. Once again, in the 
 time of the heroic Maccabees, in the second cen- 
 tury b. c, the sundered parts gravitated into unity, 
 or where they did not gravitate were forced into 
 it, and John Hyrcanus ruled over an extent of 
 country equal to that of both the northern and 
 the southern kingdoms of an earlier day. But 
 the condition of Judea's universal influence was 
 also the condition of her political instability. So 
 situated that she could diffuse her influence on 
 every side, this situation made her soil the march- 
 ing-ground and . camping-ground and battle-field 
 of contending nations, — Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, 
 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 49 
 
 Syria, Greece, and Eome. The last, invoked as an 
 ally in the second century B. a, in the first he- 
 came a conqueror, Pompeius capturing the Holy 
 City, and forcing his way, with quite un-Boinan 
 disrespect for the religion of an alien people, into 
 the holy of holies, where, to his great astonish- 
 ment, he found — no image of a god ! Hence the 
 inference of Tacitus that the Jews had " no relig- 
 ion." Jerusalem was again besieged twenty-six 
 •years later, — in the year 37 B.C.; this time by 
 1 Herod the Great, a man of evil fame among both 
 Jews and Christians; with good reason in the 
 : former case, but with little in the latter beyond 
 : his general immorality. He died four years before 
 the beoinnino- of the Christian era. 1 Herod was 
 an Idumean, that is, an Edomite ; and by his ac- 
 cession to the throne of Judea a hundred cherished 
 prophecies against the Edomites were brought to 
 grief and shame. Hence, in part, the hatred of the 
 Jews. But it had other grounds. The least of 
 these was his many marriages and murders. His 
 grinding taxation was more deeply felt, but his 
 cordial relations with the Greek and Eoman hea- 
 then world were his capital offence. His subjects 
 saw clearly enough that he had no sympathy with 
 
 1 Which the birth of Jesus antedates some years, — from three 
 to eight. But the "slaughter of the innocents" is not thus 
 made good. This legend of the Infancy is one of the most pal- 
 pably absurd. 
 
 4 
 
50 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 their religion. He might besiege their holy city 
 with manifest unwillingness ; he might allow the 
 sacrificial beasts to be carried into the city all 
 through the siege ; he might even rebuild the tem- 
 ple in a fashion to which Solomon's was cheap; 
 and he might refrain from entering the sanctuary, 
 which was sacred to the priests alone. Neverthe- 
 less, all this was toleration. His heart was with 
 the heathen and their ways. He loved their the- 
 atres and games. He surrounded himself with 
 their courtiers ; he cultivated their manners. The 
 easy-going part of the community forgave him 
 these defects, because his rule brought to them 
 peace and plenty and material splendor. He an- 
 swered pretty well to their idea of the Messiah. 
 But the more religious hated him with perfect 
 hatred. 
 
 I should like to dwell upon the character and 
 career of this man. He is one of the most dramatic 
 figures in all history. Almost as cruel as David, 
 almost as licentious as Solomon, he had great abil- 
 ities and many good qualities. He had a genuine 
 interest in the prosperity of his people, and had 
 not his passion for magnificent buildings made his 
 taxes so excessive, the material conditions of the 
 country would have been unexampled in their pros- 
 perity. But the prosperity must have been aston- 
 ishing for such a drain as. his upon it to be in any 
 way possible. His tragic passion for the beautiful 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 51 
 
 Mariamne might well inspire one of the noblest 
 dramas of Voltaire, and Dean Stanley thinks that 
 to the passionate popular devotion to her and to 
 her name we are indebted for the fact that Mary is 
 the name of names in the New Testament. But 
 the fascination of an individual character must not 
 divert us from more general considerations. 
 
 After much plotting and counter-plotting, much 
 fighting and killing, the kingdom of Herod was 
 divided into three tetrarchies, over each one of 
 i which was set a son of Herod : Archelaus over that 
 I comprising Judea and Samaria, Philip over the 
 j upper country east of the Jordan, Herod Antipas 
 ■ over the lower trans-Jordanic country and Galilee. 
 , Of this Herod Antipas, by no* means a bad ruler 
 \ from a secular point of view, Jesus of Nazareth was 
 a subject all his life long. He and Philip both ruled 
 for a long period ; but Archelaus was deposed after 
 I a few years, and Judea and Samaria became a prov- 
 ince of Eoman Syria, governed by a procurator of 
 ^ the Syrian governor. From 26 to 36 A. D. the pro- 
 ! curator was Pontius Pilate, who little thought what 
 . ignominy he was preparing for himself when he 
 | good-naturedly allowed the populace to have its 
 ! way with a young Galilean who had mortally of- 
 fended its religious sentiments. But I must not 
 anticipate. 
 
 The political divisions of the country suggest a 
 method for our treatment of its physical configura- 
 
52 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 tion and general character. The political divisions 
 correspond to differences of physical geography. 
 Judea was a parched and arid land, as if the fierce 
 heats of its religious enthusiasm had dried up the 
 juices of its soil, the streams among its hills. 
 Galilee was so rich and fertile that the rabbis said 
 the Galilean " waded in oil," and that it was easier 
 to raise a forest of olive-trees in Galilee than one 
 child in Judea. Galilee is not now what it was in 
 the time of Jesus. The saying is, " God made the 
 country, man made the town ; " but the fact is that 
 man makes and unmakes the country hardly less 
 than the city. And when he unmakes it, it is a 
 harder thing to build it up again than " the waste 
 places of Jerusalem." The smoking ruins of a 
 Boston or Chicago give place in a few years to 
 a new growth of stores and houses finer than the 
 old. But an agricultural district, seared and 
 scraped by centuries of careless tillage or neglect, 
 cannot be redeemed so quickly. This is the con- 
 dition of the Galilean hills to-day. The Turk is 
 everywhere the ruin of the soil. Lands which 
 were the very garden of the Lord he has made 
 almost as barren as the rock. And Galilee is 
 no exception to the rule. 
 
 It is a mountainous country. Hermon, in the 
 extreme north, is half as high again as our Mount 
 Washington ; the hills in the vicinity of Nazareth, 
 about as hi^h as our Wachusett. These hills are 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 53 
 
 natural fountains of innumerable streams, which in 
 the time of Jesus made every slope and valley teem 
 with vegetable life. No spot of ground, according 
 to Josephus, was without an owner. The land was 
 too valuable for pasturage. Tillage was universal. 
 On the eastern side of northern Galilee lay the 
 lake called Tiberias and Gennesareth and the Sea 
 of Galilee. Men called it "the Eye of Galilee." 
 It was an eye of heavenly blue, deep set in yel- 
 low limestone mountains. The eastern shore was 
 gloomy with basaltic cliffs. The western, especially 
 the plain of Gennesareth, was simply marvellous 
 in its fertility, in the abundance and variety of its 
 plants and trees. The lake, which is only some 
 twelve or thirteen miles long and six miles broad, 
 had three large towns and many villages upon its 
 shores. Its waters swarmed with fish, which, over 
 and above all the demands of home consumption, 
 gave employment to a host of busy fishermen and 
 traffickers. The surface of the lake must have 
 been almost crowded with the small craft of the 
 fishermen, — the " ships " of our New Testament, 
 which would be boats in a more sensible trans- 
 lation. 
 
 The evidence is abundant that the Galilee of 
 Herod Antipas and Jesus was the scene of an 
 intensely active, thronging, energetic life. It was 
 full of towns and hamlets. Josephus enumerates 
 two hundred and four townships and fifteen forti- 
 
54 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 fied places. These in one thousand square miles, 
 — less than the area of Berkshire County, Massa- 
 chusetts. But his estimate of a population of three 
 million for this district cannot be accepted. Jose- 
 phus drew a long bow sometimes for the admira- 
 tion of his Boman audience. Half as many would 
 have made mountainous Galilee as populous as 
 level Flanders, one of the most populous districts 
 in the world. But without any exaggeration the 
 young eyes of Jesus must have looked out upon 
 a wonderfully crowded, busy life in town and field. 
 The great commercial road connecting Ptolemais 
 on the sea-coast with Damascus, a road along which 
 caravans were always passing east and west, right 
 through the heart of Galilee, touching the lake 
 country at Capernaum, — this great commercial 
 road contributed immensely to the stir and bustle 
 of Galilean life. It brought many foreigners into 
 the country, — Phenicians, Syrians, Arabs, even 
 Greeks. Moreover, it furnished Gentile employ- 
 ment to hundreds of Galileans. They were camel- 
 drivers, they were guides. Here was the secret 
 of the dislike and pity and contempt of the Ju- 
 deans of the south for the people of Galilee. They 
 were too little isolated from the heathen world to 
 suit their exclusive notions of unqualified purity. 
 They had cities * in their midst which were pre- 
 dominantly heathen in their architecture and the 
 
 1 Csesarea Philippi, Sepphoris, Julias. 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 55 
 
 manner of their life. But the Galileans, if not so 
 exclusive as the Jews, had a patriotism of their 
 own which was not less real, and they had the cour- 
 age of their opinions. There were no braver men 
 in Palestine. But their patriotism was more polit- 
 ical than that of the south and less religious. 
 What the Jew dreaded most was the defilement of 
 heathenism. What the Galilean dreaded most was 
 its oppression. But the Galileans were not luke- 
 warm in their religiousness. They went up by 
 thousands to the great feasts at Jerusalem, nearly 
 a hundred miles away. Once there, their rude di- 
 alect made them the laughing-stock of the metro- 
 politan cockneys, but doubtless it was tit for tat. 
 
 I must not make my picture of the Galilean life 
 too charming and idyllic. From overcrowding 
 of the population came frequent poverty. There 
 was, too, much physical degeneracy. There was the 
 restlessness which is inseparable from vivacity. 
 Nervous diseases, allied with Syrian superstitions, 
 produced a plentiful crop of mongrel ailments, 
 half physical, half intellectual. The Galilean tem- 
 perament had Celtic warmth and also Celtic heat. 
 It was a temperament of sudden ebullitions, of 
 action and reaction, inconstant, fickle. In a gen- 
 eral way, the sincerity of our Synoptic Gospels is 
 evinced by their reflection here and there of every 
 trait of Galilean life and character that I have 
 named. These traits may all be gathered from 
 
56 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 beyond the Gospel history. But they might be 
 gathered from that history as well. 1 
 
 Between Galilee and Judea lay the country of 
 Samaria, politically a part of the province of Judea, 
 spiritually abhorring this relation. The Samaria 
 of Jesus' time was a district of some four hundred 
 square miles. This district was hardly less fertile 
 than Galilee, and was noted especially for its noble 
 forests and its rich pasturage. Here too were 
 " leagues of sun-illumined corn." But the country 
 did not begin to be so beautiful as Galilee. Its 
 mountains had not the variety of the north. As 
 were the mountains so were the people, — com- 
 paratively featureless, a mixed race, descended 
 from Persian colonists coalescing with a remnant 
 of the people left upon the soil after the first cap- 
 tivity. 2 The enmity between the Jews and Sa- 
 maritans was a growth of centuries. It began with 
 the rupture of the kingdom on the death of Solo- 
 mon, or with the causes that led to that rupture. 
 It increased with the refusal of the Jews to allow 
 the Samaritans to assist them in rebuilding the 
 temple after the Babylonian captivity, and with 
 the interference of the Samaritans to prevent the 
 
 1 The life of Jesus was so sparingly related to the country- 
 east of the Jordan that I pass it by, though it is not without 
 historic interest, especially as Pella, in trans-Jordanic Galilee, 
 was the retreat of nascent Christianity during the Jewish war. 
 
 2 719 b. c. 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 57 
 
 rebuilding. The conquest of Samaria by John 
 Hyrcanus, a century and a half before the time of 
 Jesus, was a fresh ground of hatred on the Sa- 
 maritan side. The complacency with which the 
 Samaritans accepted the rule of each new con- 
 queror, except Hyrcanus, filled the Jews with 
 pious indignation. They were the Swiss of Pales- 
 tine; their mercenaries were here and there and 
 everywhere. They were on especially good terms 
 with Herod. This was the last offence before the 
 birth of Jesus. The enmity thus generated and 
 increased showed itself in a hundred ways. The 
 New Testament is again true to the life in its re- 
 flection of this enmity. Galileans going to Jeru- 
 salem generally deemed it best to skirt the border 
 of Samaria. There even a cup of cold water was 
 denied the weary pilgrim. Upon the border of 
 Samaria and Judea fight and foray were the order 
 of the day. To -eat bread with a Samaritan was 
 as to eat the flesh of swine. In the Fourth Gospel 
 the woman of Samaria is regarded by some critics 
 as Samaria itself, her five husbands typifying the 
 five gods whom the Samaritans were charged with 
 worshipping. Equally the Samaritans hated the 
 religious pretensions of the Jews. To the punc- 
 tilious formalism of the latter it was essential 
 that the feasts of the new moons should be ex- 
 actly observed, and signals were invented — one 
 of the earliest systems of telegraphy — to inform 
 
58 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 the country round about Jerusalem. But the Sa- 
 maritans maliciously confused the signals, so that 
 other means of information had to be invented. 
 Worst of all, the Samaritans at one time, during 
 the boyhood of Jesus, just before the Feast of the 
 Passover, when all the priests and sacred vessels 
 had been puritied, scattered a lot of human bones 
 in the courts of the temple. The celebrants had 
 to be turned away and the feast put off on account 
 of this act of sacrilege. Against this background 
 of rage and bitterness the parable of the Good Sa- 
 maritan in the New Testament is like a snow-white 
 lily painted upon a canvas smeared with blood. 
 
 The southern borders of Samaria anticipate, to 
 some extent, the barrenness of Judea. This bar- 
 renness was not universal. The hill-country has 
 delightful slopes and valleys fanned by breezes from 
 the sea, and here and there, elsewhere, there are 
 oases in the harsh, arid region, which is embossed 
 with naked limestone mountains, set upon flat, un- 
 interesting plains. Even the valley of the Jordan 
 does not belie the general character of Judea. In 
 summer then, as now, its adjacent country was 
 completely dried up. " The Jordan, with its acacias, 
 tamarisks, and copses of willows and reeds, forms a 
 green riband on a brown plain, surrounded by bar- 
 ren steep slopes, bare limestone ravines, and crum- 
 bling chalk-beds." x " The river tarries," says Pliny, 
 1 Hausrath's New Testament Times, Vol. I. p. 34. 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 59 
 
 " as though it unwillingly approached the abomi- 
 nable sea which swallows it up and spoils its pre- 
 cious waters by uniting them with its own reeking 
 waves." As we approach the Dead Sea, vegetation 
 entirely ceases. Bituminous springs send up their 
 pitchy bubbles to the surface of the sea, and char- 
 acterize the entire country round about. West of 
 the sea are certain grassy plains embosomed in the 
 rocky hills. These were, in Jesus' time, the fa- 
 vorite haunts of the Essenes, as also was En Gedi, 
 the only spot of verdure on the precipitous basaltic 
 banks of the mysterious, melancholy sea whose 
 waters, it is not unlikely, hide the earthquake- 
 buried towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, or certain 
 towns with which these names were traditionally 
 associated. One may admit so much without at- 
 tempting to identify any particular mass of salt or 
 bitumen in the vicinity with Lot's wife, though it 
 is not uncommon for people to become stationary 
 by looking backward when they should be looking 
 forward. 
 
 The history of Judea is the history of its capital, 
 even more than that of Greece or Italy. And, like 
 the sites of Eome and Athens, — one a mere island 
 in a malarious marsh, the other an inhospitable 
 cliff, — the site of Jerusalem was chosen without 
 any reference to its utility, except, perhaps, as a 
 freebooters' stronghold. It is the most forbidding 
 spot in the whole country, — a barren spur of rock 
 
60 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 upon the water-shed between the Jordan and the 
 sea, twelve hours' journey from the former, eight 
 from the latter. It is difficult for the imagination, 
 burdened with impressions of the Jerusalem of to- 
 day, — a squalid mixture of incongruous elements 
 of national and religious life, buried more deeply 
 under pious frauds than under the pulverized 
 ruins of its former splendor, — to make real the 
 city over which Jesus wept. Its general aspect 
 was, perhaps, more forbidding then than it is 
 now. Its triple w^alls, its frowning battlements, 
 its gloomy towers, menacing every gate and an- 
 gle, every possible point of attack, made it a 
 fortress-city. Only as approached from the east, 
 over the Mount of Olives, from which point of 
 view the temple, situated high above the populous 
 portions of the city, crowned the forbidding pile 
 with its magnificence of golden roofs and mar- 
 ble colonnades, was it inviting to the eye. So 
 Jesus must have seen it when, for the first time, 
 he went up with his parents to one of the great 
 feasts, according to the custom of the time. 
 
 Jerusalem was everything to Judea, and the 
 temple was everything to Jerusalem. Washington 
 without the Capitol would be no more insignifi- 
 cant than Jerusalem would have been without the 
 temple. Jerusalem was an ecclesiastical, as Wash- 
 ington is a political city. But the ecclesiastics 
 in that capital were much more numerous than 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 61 
 
 the politicians in ours. Of priests alone, Jose- 
 phus reckons twenty thousand, most of them 
 living in the city. Add to these the swarms of 
 Levites and the " scribes and Pharisees/' and you 
 have a large ecclesiastical fraction of the pop- 
 ulation. Still further add the Oriental pomp of 
 the Herodian government, attractive even while 
 repellent, the throng of courtiers and ambassadors 
 from every quarter, the soldiers of the Eoman gar- 
 rison clanking up and down the hilly streets and 
 through the fore-court of the temple, and you can 
 imagine what a magnet Jerusalem must have been 
 to draw the people to itself, — not only those for 
 whom its brilliant life contrasted with the average 
 dreariness of Judea, but those who had the dew of 
 Hermon on their pilgrim feet. The political unity 
 of the nation having been broken, the unifying 
 impulse of the temple was felt all the more deeply. 
 Galilee and Judea might be under different gov- 
 ernments, but so long as prayerful faces there, as 
 here, turned temple-ward, and eager hearts yearned 
 for the sacred courts, the separation of the parts 
 was superficial. There was an underlying unity. 
 Even when no one of the great feasts was proceed- 
 ing, the temple must have presented a busy scene, 
 with its motley throng of sacrificers, — women, in 
 gratitude for new-born children, bringing thank- 
 offerings, "a pair of turtle-doves or two young 
 pigeons ; " lepers who had been healed ; the bleat- 
 
62 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 ing of the sacrificial sheep and lowing of the oxen, 
 meanwhile, blending with muttered formularies of 
 devotion, and evermore the altars sending up their 
 whirling clouds of smoke, as if to blind the eye of 
 Heaven to the sin and folly of mankind. But, 
 after all, it was the various feasts that measured 
 the significance of the temple-service in its rela- 
 tions to the national life. At the great feasts the 
 city and the surrounding villages were packed 
 with visitors. Country towns at a distance from 
 the city were depopulated to swell the pilgrim- 
 crowd. Villages were emptied of every inhabitant, 
 young or old. A comparatively modest calculation 
 estimates the temporary population of Jerusalem 
 and the vicinity at such times at three millions. 
 A Galilean carpenter and his wife losing their boy 
 in such a crowd as this might well "seek him 
 sorrowing." 
 
 But the importance of Jerusalem to the national 
 life was not exhausted by the temple, its daily rit- 
 ual and periodic festivals. In the time of Jesus 
 the synagogue occupied a more commanding posi- 
 tion in the national sentiment than the temple 
 itself. That the munificence of Herod had built 
 the temple infected it with a subtile taint for the 
 most religious. But the synagogue was wholly 
 without taint. The tradition of the synagogue was 
 that of unqualified patriotism, while the tradition 
 of the temple involved elements of subserviency to 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 63 
 
 foreign rule. And the life of the synagogue culmi- 
 nated in Jerusalem. The Sanhedrin, or high court 
 of Jerusalem, was indeed the national synagogue, 
 a heart whose pulses beat through all the land and 
 sympathized with the most distant perturbations. 
 Every town had its local Sanhedrin, which was a 
 petty court of justice, looking to the high court in 
 Jerusalem for the correct interpretation of the law. 
 But the seat of justice was the synagogue. " Be- 
 ware of men," said Jesus, " for they will deliver you 
 up to the Sanhedrins [the local Sanhedrin is here 
 intended], and they will scourge you in their syna- 
 gogues." Forty stripes was a favorite punishment ; 
 but Paul, as you remember, writes, " Of the Jews 
 five times received I forty stripes save one." Mercy 
 had dictated thirty-nine, lest, the executioner mak- 
 ing a miscount, the punishment should be in excess 
 of the law. But while the functions of the local 
 Sanhedrin were almost purely executive, those of 
 the great Sanhedrin of the capital were largely 
 judicial. Capital punishment it could not execute. 
 The procurator must issue the death-warrant, as in 
 the case of Jesus. The great Sanhedrin was mainly 
 a theological court, principally engrossed in ques- 
 tions relating to the interpretation of the Mosaic 
 law with reference to the temple service and Levit- 
 ical cleanness, and so on. And therefore this na- 
 tional Sanhedrin was much more truly central to 
 the synagogue life of the nation than to the local 
 Sanhedrins. 
 
64 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 The temple was in Jerusalem; the synagogue 
 was omnipresent. The synagogue was the Jewish 
 church or meeting-house, and there were four hun- 
 dred and eighty synagogues in Jerusalem alone, 
 some of them very simple, some of them costly 
 buildings. In the time of Jesus every small town 
 in Judea and Galilee had at least one synagogue, 
 — a plain rectangular hall, with a portico " deco- 
 rated with the tasteless spiral ornamentation of 
 Jewish art." 1 Not only on the Sabbath, but on 
 Mondays and Thursdays, the market-days of every 
 week, the people flocked into the synagogue to hear 
 the Scriptures read and to engage in exercises of 
 devotion. These exercises, with the exposition of 
 the Scriptures, were exceedingly protracted. Some- 
 times debate ran high, and calls to order were as 
 vociferous as in a primary meeting of to-day. It 
 was the scribe, the interpreter of the law, that 
 created the synagogue. But in its turn the syna- 
 gogue had done much to develop the scribes into 
 an influential class. These took their name, " the 
 scribes/' from the fact that they only were entitled 
 to make copies of the law for the use of newly estab- 
 lished synagogues. But in the time of Jesus the 
 scribes included the entire class of persons devoted 
 to the study and the teaching of the law. The rabbi 
 was a developed scribe, one who was qualified and 
 ordained to be a teacher of others. His was one of 
 
 1 Renan, Life of Jesus, Ch. VIII. 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 65 
 
 the chief seats in the synagogue. In the syna- 
 gogue, in his own house, in the chambers of the 
 temple, he gathered his disciples about him. Bab- 
 binism was thoroughly democratic. Any man who 
 could prove himself apt at exposition was welcome 
 to become a rabbi, no matter how humble his po- 
 sition. It is as a rabbi that Jesus makes his first 
 appearance as an independent teacher, after the 
 imprisonment of John. The rabbi could not be a 
 " hireling minister/' He could not teach for money. 
 And therefore frequently the rabbis, even the most 
 celebrated, labored with their hands. Hillel, the 
 most justly celebrated of all rabbis, was a day- 
 laborer. 
 
 It must be confessed that the teachings of the 
 rabbis were often wearisome and petty and inane. 
 Never was such refinement on a written code as 
 theirs. The details of sacrifice and ritualistic purity 
 were elaborated with microscopic nicety. Eab- 
 binism would have had a precept ready for every 
 possible event in life. It would have left nothing 
 in suspense, nothing at the mercy of individual 
 judgment and conscience. Of things allowed and 
 things forbidden it would have made a list that 
 should be absolutely exhaustive. If a sheep fell 
 into a water-tank upon the Sabbath, ^should it be 
 taken out, or fed until the next day in the tank ? If 
 a cow calved upon the Sabbath, should the cow be 
 led to water, or should water be carried to the cow ? 
 
 5 
 
66 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 What ought to be done, when the Passover had 
 begun, if the sacrificial knife had not been properly 
 placed ? Hillel was made the leader of the Great 
 Sanhedrin for his conclusive answer to this impor- 
 tant question. Thanks to this foolish casuistry, 
 many a sensible or at least natural provision of 
 the law was attenuated into the thinnest possible 
 absurdity. The law forbade the cooking of a kid 
 in its mothers milk. Whereupon the rabbis for- 
 bade the eating of kid and milk on the same day, 
 lest, by some dreadful chance, the milk should be 
 that of the kid's mother, and in the stomach of the 
 eater kid and milk be cooked together ! We need 
 tp know all this to comprehend the force and cour- 
 age of Jesus' injunction to his disciples, " Eat such 
 things as are set before you." 
 
 These illustrations might be indefinitely ex- 
 tended ; but if they are amusing they are also sad. 
 And it ought not to be forgotten that there was 
 another side to rabbinism. It had its degrees of 
 absurdity. It had also its degrees of earnestness, 
 nobility, and humanity. It is not too much to say 
 that every noblest saying in the New Testament 
 can find a parallel in the rabbinical teachings. 
 Eenan has called Hillel the teacher of Jesus, and 
 though Hillel died in the year 6 A. D., when Jesus 
 was about ten years old, and though Jesus had 
 probably never set eyes upon him, the saying of 
 Eenan has much to recommend it. For the say- 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 67 
 
 ings of Hillel were upon every breeze that wafted 
 health and joy to the young heart of Jesus. And 
 if he could argue concerning the levitical purity of 
 an egg laid on the Sabbath, he could also enun- 
 ciate the golden rule, and many another precept full 
 of ethical wisdom and humanity. " Do not believe 
 in thyself," he said, "until the day of death." 
 "Do not judge thy neighbor till thou hast stood 
 in his place." "Whosoever does not increase in 
 knowledge decreases." 
 
 It was in their treatment of the Sabbath that 
 the rabbis reached the height of the ridiculous. 
 And yet they taught that danger always super- 
 sedes the Sabbath. Yes, " even for the sake of the 
 tiniest babe," they said it might be broken. " For 
 the babe will keep many a Sabbath yet for the one 
 that has been broken for it." 1 
 
 Eabbinism did not satisfy itself with instructing 
 the grown people of the nation. Its devotion to 
 the children was prophetic of the educational con- 
 science of to-day. " Paradise," it said, " is at the 
 feet of mothers." "The world is only saved by 
 the breath of the school-children." " The schools 
 must not be interrupted for the rebuilding of the 
 temple." 
 
 The religious life of Palestine in the time of 
 Jesus was almost universal, but it was not entirely 
 
 1 For a compact summary of illustrations of the better teach- 
 ing of the rabbis, see Emanuel Deutsch, pp. 55-58. 
 
68 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 homogeneous. Within a century the difference of 
 Pharisees and Sadducees had been signalized by 
 deadly animosities, for whose gratification blood 
 had flowed in torrents. But in the time of Jesus 
 their divergence was less absolute. They sat to- 
 gether in the Sanhedrin. They had much in 
 common. Perhaps the smallness of their differ- 
 ence made their mutual hatred more intense. The 
 origin of both Pharisees and Sadducees is exceed- 
 ingly obscure. In the second century B. c, both 
 parties appear upon the stage in full maturity. 
 At that time the Sadducees were the priestly aris- 
 tocracy, and the Pharisees were the democratic, 
 patriotic advocates of religious and political exclu- 
 siveness. And they were this clown to the time of 
 Jesus and in his time. To identify them with the 
 scribes is a mistake which is too common. The 
 Pharisees were always scribes, in the inclusive sense 
 of men versed in the law, but the scribes were not 
 all Pharisees. In the time of Jesus the rabbis 
 of the Great Sanhedrin were, for the most part, 
 Sadducees. Another mistake is. in supposing that 
 the Sadducees were devoted exclusively to the Law 
 of the Old Testament, and were indifferent to the 
 Prophets and the Writings. That they valued the 
 Law above the Prophets and the Writings is evi- 
 dent, but the Pharisees did the same. Still another 
 mistake is the idea that the Sadducees were wholly 
 averse to the traditional exposition of the Law, 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 69 
 
 wholly confined to the original letter. They had 
 and cherished a body of traditional exposition 
 which they claimed to be an emanation of "the 
 great synagogue/' — a fictitious claim even if the 
 great synagogue itself was a reality. But what is 
 true is that the Pharisees gave to the traditional 
 exposition of the Scriptures a much wider scope 
 than did the Sadducees. The law itself was not 
 underrated. God himself was supposed to study 
 it three hours a day. But the traditional exposi- 
 tion was held in yet higher esteem. "The words 
 of the law are weighty and light; the words of 
 the scribes are all weighty," was a dictum of the 
 Pharisees. The nature of this traditional exposi- 
 tion we have already learned in speaking of the 
 scribes. For the most part it was puerile. But 
 this is not : " Beckon thyself among the op- 
 pressed, not among the oppressors;" nor this, 
 "When reviled, revile not again." "Bepent a 
 day before thy death," said one suspicious # of 
 death-bed repentances. The question, "Is life 
 worth living ? " which has of late been freely agi- 
 tated, convulsed the rival schools of Hillelites and 
 Shammaites for years. The answer was finally, No. 
 " But since man is here," the sages added, " let him 
 be careful in his actions." 
 
 The passion for Levitical purity was, however, 
 the most striking characteristic of the Pharisees, 
 and their discussions were most frequently upon 
 
70 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 this head. Did the flesh only of a carcass defile, 
 or also the hide and the bones ? Did contact with 
 Gentile books defile, or only contact with the sa- 
 cred books of the Gentiles ? Which hand should 
 be washed first ? Should the ablution stop at the 
 wrist ? Should the hands be held up or down ? 
 These refinements reached their acme in the idea 
 that even the Scriptures were outwardly impure, 
 because written upon animal skins. No wonder 
 the Sadducees said, " The Pharisees will wash the 
 face of the sun." 
 
 The patriotism of the Pharisees was of a piece 
 with this passion for Levitical purity. The Phari- 
 sees were always the anti-foreign party, the native 
 Judeans, so to speak, opposed in turn to every rep- 
 resentative of foreign domination. It was not the 
 oppression of the foreigner so much as his contact 
 that made him hateful in Pharisaic eyes. The 
 patriotism of the Pharisee was a corollary of his 
 rejigious exclusiveness. It was not the only patri- 
 otism of the time; but it was the most intense. 
 For example : Pontius Pilate ordered the Eoman 
 standards which bore the emperor's image to be 
 carried into Jerusalem by night. Day brought the 
 knowledge of their presence. Whereupon thou- 
 sands flocked to Caesarea to demand of Pilate their 
 withdrawal from the city. He ordered the peti- 
 tioners away. They would not go. He surrounded 
 them with his soldiery, and threatened to cut them 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 71 
 
 in pieces if they did not cease from their entreaties. 
 They bared their throats, and begged for death in 
 preference to submission. At last, as on another 
 occasion better known, the procurator consented to 
 their will. This was when Jesus was about five 
 and twenty. So when Caligula ordered his image 
 set up in the temple, the fields were left unsown, 
 while thousands went to Ptolemais and begged the 
 governor Petronius to prevent the sacrilege; and 
 he acceded, at the risk of his own life. The senti- 
 ments implied in such terrific scenes were the inev- 
 itable result of Pharisaic teaching. The leaven of 
 the Pharisees may have been hypocrisy, as Jesus 
 said; but only a sublime sincerity could have 
 prompted men to do and dare as thousands of their 
 followers did for their religion. Jesus, however, 
 was not the first to charge them with hypocrisy 
 and self-righteousness. Their own leaders anti- 
 cipated his most drastic sayings. They distin- 
 guished seven different sorts of Pharisee, — the best 
 the Pharisee from love, who obeys God because he 
 loves him with all his heart. 
 
 The most absurd mistake about the Sadducees 
 is the idea that they were the rationalistic party, 
 and that their denial of the resurrection of the 
 body was a result of their rationalism. They were 
 the conservative party. They denied the resurrec- 
 tion of the body because it was not a doctrine of the 
 Law or the Prophets. For the same reason they 
 
72 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 denied the Pharisaic angelology. That they were 
 more complacent than the Pharisees with Herod 
 and the Eomans is a proof not of their progressive 
 instincts, but of their general lack of earnestness. 
 They were the hierarchy, — the courses of the 
 priests were drawn almost entirely from their 
 ranks, — and when did a priestly hierarchy ever 
 do anything but succumb to temporal power, 
 when by so doing it could save its own pres- 
 tige or its own perquisites ? The Sadducees de- 
 mand from us but little sympathy or admiration. 
 Their contention with the Pharisees was largely a 
 contention for their own prerogative. In order to 
 exaggerate this they insisted that the Levitical 
 purity of the priest was all-important. In order 
 to detract from this, the Pharisees insisted that the 
 Levitical purity of the vessels and the instruments 
 of sacrifice was the principal thing. 
 
 The sect or order of the Essenes is a more inter- 
 esting phenomenon. Never mentioned in the New 
 Testament, there are so many striking analogies 
 between their thought and that of Jesus, that many 
 have jumped to the conclusion that Jesus was 
 himself a representative of their school. A close 
 investigation is not confirmatory of this idea. Es- 
 senism was Pharisaism logically carried out. In 
 despair of keeping himself " unspotted from the 
 world " while living in it, the Essene drew apart 
 into a community of his own, in which the doctrines 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 73 
 
 of Levitical purity were developed with unwavering 
 consistency. The result was a strange admixture 
 of conservative and seemingly progressive elements. 
 They rejected sacrifices altogether, but in their ob- 
 servance of the Sabbath there were no such strict 
 constructionists elsewhere in Judea. These traits, 
 apparently contradictory, sprung from a common 
 root. They rejected sacrifices for fear of contract- 
 ing some Levitical taint. They were vegetarians for 
 the same reason. They had a passion for water 
 and for light. Various washings took up no little 
 of their time. There were different grades in 
 the order, and for an Essene of higher grade to 
 touch one of lower grade was defilement, and a 
 bath was an immediate necessity. Celibacy was 
 the ideal and the practice for the most part, but it 
 was not universal. There was a common table 
 and a common purse, but individuals lived apart 
 in houses of their own. There was a time for 
 everything, and everything in its time ; a place for 
 everything, and everything in its place. Success- 
 ful industry was as characteristic of the Essenes as 
 of the Shakers of to-day. Bee-tending was their 
 favorite occupation. Theirs was a peaceful, gentle, 
 and affectionate life, without any freedom or spon- 
 taneity, a confession of the failure of society, a 
 suicidal tendency. The logical outcome of Phari- 
 saism, Essenism nevertheless differed from it in 
 its insistence on the inwardness of personal right- 
 
74 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 eousness. It anticipated the protest of Luther 
 against Eome. If Matthew Arnold is correct in 
 his interpretation, it anticipated at this point the 
 central principle of Jesus, — that character does not 
 depend so much on the objective rightfulness of 
 actions as on their inward disposition. 
 
 There is not a circumstance which I have so 
 far named, whether of physical environment or 
 political rule, whether of ecclesiastical machinery 
 or religious thought, which did not have a certain 
 bearing on the experience of Jesus of Nazareth, an 
 influence to shape his character and determine the 
 limits of his action and desire. But given every 
 one of these circumstances, and to develop the 
 orbit of his career would still be as impossible as 
 to develop the orbit of the earth from planetary 
 data, paying no attention to the sun. These cir- 
 cumstances were the planets of his system, attract- 
 ing and repelling him in various degrees. His 
 sun, the centre of his system, was the Messianic 
 idea of his nation. The orbit of his life described 
 itself around that centre of intolerable heat and 
 flame. This orbit had its aphelion, its point of 
 farthest remove; and its perihelion, its point of 
 nearest approach. The ministry of Jesus lies be- 
 tween the two ; from the former to the latter was 
 the direction of his inner consciousness and out- 
 ward action, until his life was shrivelled in the 
 consuming glare which ever lured him on. 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 75 
 
 Few subjects have received more conscientious 
 study than the Messianic hope, and now, at length, 
 though much remains in doubt, a few clear out- 
 lines have been well made out, which we may hope 
 will not be blurred by any future investigation. 
 These outlines are, however, as different as possible 
 from those of the popular Christian exposition. 
 The gist of this exposition is that the Messianic 
 hope originated in the time of Abraham, was cher- 
 ished by Moses, attained its most complete devel- 
 opment in the age of the prophets, from 800 to 400 
 B. C, and then retired into comparative obscurity 
 for centuries, to await its consummation and fulfil- 
 ment in the birth and life and death of Jesus 
 Christ, Jesus the Christ, that is to say, the Anointed, 
 the Messiah. Such is the popular Christian expo- 
 sition, and the commentary which an intelligent and 
 scientific criticism makes upon it is this : that the 
 Messianic hope displayed itself most characteristi- 
 cally and powerfully, not from 800 to 400 B. C, 
 but from 175 B.C. to 135 a. d., and that from the 
 birth of Jesus onward to the final extinction of the 
 Jewish nation by the Emperor Hadrian was the 
 period of its most remarkable growth. This criti- 
 cism assures us that the Messianic element in the 
 prophetic writings is entirely subordinate ; that 
 much that is accounted Messianic is the reflection 
 back upon the prophets of the Messianic ideas of 
 a later time; that even when the prophets cher- 
 
76 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 ish the idea of a Messianic time, the idea of a per- 
 sonal Messiah is conspicuously absent from the text. 
 The first great outburst of Messianic expectation is 
 illustrated by the book of Daniel, written about 165 
 B. o. The crushing tyranny of the Syrian Seleuci- 
 dae struck out this spark, and from it came full soon 
 the flame of the revolt of the heroic Maccabees. 
 With the success of this revolt and the establish- 
 ing of the Maccabean kingdom the Messianic ex- 
 pectation went into eclipse. It was an expectation 
 that throve upon disaster and oppression, that sick- 
 ened and grew pale on the rich diet of political 
 success and general prosperity. Only with the en- 
 feeblement of the Maccabean dynasty, and the in- 
 coming of the Eoman Pompeius and the Idumean 
 Herod, the hope began to gather strength and force. 
 And so it happened that at the birth of Jesus and 
 all through his life, and for almost exactly one hun- 
 dred years after his death, the hope went on in- 
 creasing in its volume and intensity. The greater 
 the calamity and the more brutal the oppression, 
 the higher soared this hope, and the more raptu- 
 rously it sung. For proof of this we have a con- 
 siderable body of literature outside of the New 
 Testament. We have the book of Enoch, the 
 Psalms of Solomon, the third of the Sibylline 
 books, the Ascension of Moses, the book of Jubi- 
 lees, the fourth book of Esdras, besides much in 
 the Targums and the Talmud, that throws a flood 
 
THE PLACE AND TIME. 77 
 
 of light upon this interesting and important time. 
 But the New Testament is itself an ample witness 
 of the same phenomena. No two books were ever 
 conceived in a more similar spirit than Daniel and 
 Revelation; and as the tyranny of Antiochus 
 Epiphanes struck out the first, so the tyranny of 
 Nero struck out the second. The Jewish hope 
 of a Messiah became in the Christian the hope of 
 Jesus' second coming "in the clouds of heaven 
 with great power and glory." The forms taken 
 upon itself through all this period by the Messianic 
 hope were exceedingly diverse. The factor of a 
 personal Messiah was frequently wanting alto- 
 gether. But in one form or another it was omni- 
 present and omnipotent. From the death of Herod, 
 4 b. 0-, to the death of Bar-Cochba, 132 A. d., no 
 less than fifty different enthusiasts set up as the 
 Messiah, and obtained more or less following. No 
 one of these attained to general recognition before 
 Bar-Cochba, under whose leadership the hope was 
 quenched in seas of blood. Some saw the Messiah 
 even in Herod the Great ! This was the lowest 
 point reached by the Messianic ideal. The Phari- 
 sees, as a rule, advised patience. God knew his 
 own, and he would strike the hour. The Zealots 
 were much more of Luther's mind : God cannot get 
 along without strong men. They did their best to 
 help him, — never were men more brave, — and 
 what came of it was the destruction of Jerusalem 
 
78 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 in 70 A. D., and the grinding of the ruins of the 
 city and the remnant of the people into finer pow- 
 der in the year 132. 
 
 In the fierce heats of this delusive hope the an- 
 cient Scriptures became fluid, and took on the shape 
 of every latest expectation. Let a great soul be 
 born into this perturbed and passionate circle of 
 ideas and events, and he must sooner or later ori- 
 ent himself, — determine his relation to this all- 
 engrossing hope and expectation. He could not be 
 indifferent. He could not pass it by. There was 
 no orthodox standard. The mighty hope took on 
 a hundred various forms. In one form or another 
 the great soul must accept it, or fashion a form of 
 its own out of the union of his private aspirations 
 with the floating elements of psalm and prophecy 
 and apocalyptic vision. There came a great soul 
 into the midst of this enormous ferment of political 
 and religious zeal, — Jesus of Nazareth. This prob- 
 lem was for him to solve. It could not be evaded. 
 And his solution of it made his life the most 
 impressive tragedy which has, up to this time, irra- 
 diated the great stage of history with its marvel- 
 lous brightness, or shadowed it with its pathetic 
 gloom. 
 
Ill 
 
 BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 
 
' l I can remember, many years ago, 
 A little bright-eyed school-boy, a mere stripling, 
 Son of a Galilean carpenter, 
 From Nazareth, I think, who came one day 
 And sat here in the temple with the scribes, 
 Hearing us speak, and asking many questions, 
 And we were all astonished at his quickness. 
 And when his mother came and said, * Behold, 
 Thy father and I have sought thee, sorrowing,' 
 He looked as one astonished, and made answer, 
 ' How is it that ye sought me ? Wist ye not 
 That I must be about my father's business ? ' 
 Often since then I see him here among us, 
 Or dream I see him, with his upraised face 
 Intent and eager, and I often wonder 
 Unto what manner of manhood he hath grown ! 
 Perhaps a poor mechanic, like his father, 
 Lost in his little Galilean village, 
 And toiling at his craft, to die unknown, 
 And be no more remembered among men." 
 
 Longfellow. 
 
III. 
 
 BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 
 
 HAVING completed our investigation of the 
 sources of information concerning Jesus, and 
 of the general place and time of his career, we now 
 come to the consideration of his individual life 
 and character and work. Everything connected 
 with great men has interest, and stories of their 
 childhood and their youth are often emphasized to 
 an extent that is out of all proportion with their 
 intrinsic value. Of such stories concerning the 
 childhood and the yotith of Jesus a few are to be 
 found in the New Testament, and many in the 
 supplementary gospels, of which a great abundance 
 has been preserved. But once for all, upon the 
 very threshold of our task, it must be allowed that 
 concerning the childhood and the youth of Jesus 
 we have no reliable information. If we are to 
 learn anything here, it must be in the way of cau- 
 tious inference. The stories, each and all, in the 
 New Testament and out of it, vanish into thin air, 
 like ghosts at cock-crowing, the moment they are 
 
 6 
 
82 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 submitted to a critical examination. They are not, 
 therefore, without value and importance. If they 
 tell us nothing about Jesus, they tell us much about 
 the growth of his legend, of what men thought and 
 said of him at various stages of this growth. This 
 belongs rather to the history of Christian ideas than 
 to the biography of Jesus, and therefore it is only 
 incidentally for us. As far as the biography of 
 Jesus is concerned, the stories of his birth and in- 
 fancy and of his youth yield only a negative result. 
 Let us not be disheartened upon this account. It 
 was inevitable that such stories should arise. They 
 have been the inspiration of a world of loveliness 
 in Christian art, which has taken its subjects from 
 the apocryphal writings of the Old and New Tes- 
 taments to a much greater extent than from the 
 canonical Scriptures. For the rest, a positive result 
 is not wholly unattainable. By cautious inference 
 something of fact and much of general atmosphere 
 and circumstance can be obtained. Meantime the 
 legends, recognized as such, please the imagination 
 as much as ever, but do not compromise our faith 
 in the majestic order of the world. 
 
 So long as a great man is born, it matters little 
 where he is born, or when, so that the place and 
 time are suitable to his genius. And therefore we 
 shall not be distressed to find that the date of 
 Jesus' birth cannot be definitely fixed, and that 
 his birthplace was not Bethlehem of Judea. Our 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 83 
 
 popular chronology implies that Jesus was born 
 1880 years ago last Christmas-day. But this chro- 
 nology is notoriously inaccurate so far as the year 
 is concerned, and arbitrary as concerns the day. 
 The Christian era, that is, the dating of events from 
 the birth of Jesus, was an invention of the abbot 
 Dionysius in the sixth century after Christ. Before 
 this time events had been dated from the found- 
 ing of Eome, or from the accession of this or that 
 emperor to the throne. But the investigation of 
 Dionysius was conducted without any critical 
 acumen. The Gospels represent Jesus as being 
 born before the death of Herod; but Herod died 
 four years before the beginning of our era. Luke 
 associates the birth of Jesus with a certain taxing 
 of Quirinius. But this taxing was six years after 
 the beginning of our era. The relations of Jesus to 
 John the Baptist afford somewhat more satisfactory 
 data. Beckoning from these, the average of critical 
 opinion gravitates to a point three or four years 
 before the beginning of our era. If Jesus was born, 
 as Keim and others think, before the death of 
 Herod, some three or four years earlier would be 
 the true date, and this year of ours (1881) would 
 properly be the year 1887, 1888, or 1889. Cer- 
 tainty is here impossible. It is only safe to say 
 that Jesus was born from three to eight years 
 before the time suggested by our popular chro- 
 nology. 
 
84 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 If the year of Jesus' birth is uncertain, the day- 
 is much more so. From first to last every month 
 in the year has claimed the honor. April and May 
 were long the favorite months, for the highly poet- 
 ical but extremely uncritical reason that this was 
 the period of nature's transition from barrenness to 
 bloom. Moreover, the shepherds would not have 
 been out upon the hills in December, — an argument 
 as convincing as that of certain Eussian Zealots, 
 that the world must have been made in the fall 
 for the Eve-tempting apples to be ripe. A more 
 convincing argument was the necessity of Chris- 
 tianizing the Eoman Saturnalia, the feast of " the 
 all-conquering sun," which began December 25th. 
 This argument was so persuasive, that in the fourth 
 century this day was generally agreed upon. And, 
 certainty being impossible, what more appropriate 
 than that the first day of More Light should be 
 made the birthday of a new religion. " Christ 
 himself/' said a perhaps over-confident preacher, 
 " chose this day for his birthday upon this very 
 account." Considering what Christmas is to us, 
 we cannot be too glad that such a happy season 
 crowns the ending year, and cheers the winter's 
 barrenness with its perennial bloom. 
 
 The place of Jesus' birth is of much more im- 
 portance than the time. That he began life a year 
 or two before or after the death of Herod would 
 make little^difference. No more would it that he 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 85 
 
 was born in this or that particular town of Pales- 
 tine. But whether he was a Judean or a Galilean 
 is an important question. Fortunately it is one to 
 which a satisfactory answer can be given. Jesus 
 was a Galilean, and he was born in Nazareth. For 
 his birth in Bethlehem we have no evidence beyond 
 the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke ; that 
 is to say, no evidence at all. For these chapters 
 are almost wholly mythical. Moreover, they differ 
 much among themselves. From Matthew we 
 should infer that Bethlehem was the parental 
 home; from Luke, that the birth of Jesus there 
 was on a visit to the ancestral habitat ; and this is 
 plainly a device of the mythologist to reconcile the 
 Bethlehemite birth with the well-known Galilean 
 extraction, — a very clumsy device, the taxing of 
 Quirinius having been ten years or more after 
 the birth of Jesus, and the basis of his taxation 
 having been the dwelling-place and civil abode. 
 But the entire story of the Bethlehemite birth is a 
 tissue of incongruities. How such a story arose is 
 plain enough. It w T as a common belief that the 
 Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. In course 
 of time, Jesus having claimed to be the Messiah, 
 those who acknowledged his claim argued that he 
 must have been born in Bethlehem. This story is 
 no part of the primitive tradition. The Gospel ac- 
 cording to the Hebrews, which enjoyed at least an 
 equal authority with any of our present Gospels 
 
86 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 for some centuries, omits it altogether. So does 
 the second of our canonical Gospels. 
 
 But an important part of the evidence that Jesus 
 was not born in Bethlehem is the frequent testi- 
 mony of the New Testament that he was born and 
 lived in Nazareth. This testimony is all the more 
 striking for being indirect and unconscious. And 
 there was no popular belief to account for this 
 testimony as to account for the Bethlehemite 
 legend. The Fourth Gospel represents the people 
 as missing in Jesus the Messianic sign of Bethle- 
 hemite origin, — a sure indication that in the first 
 quarter of the second century this legend had not 
 obtained general currency. 
 
 Jesus was born in Nazareth, a town of Galilee, 
 as beautiful for situation as any town within the 
 range of Galilean loveliness. It derives all its 
 celebrity from • Jesus. There is no mention of it 
 in the Old Testament, no mention of it in Jose- 
 phus. It lies hid among the mountains, nestling 
 upon the slope of one that rises more than a thou- 
 sand feet above the level of the sea, from whose 
 top the view, all travellers agree, is most entrancing 
 in its loveliness. If ever, pondering his destiny, 
 Jesus sought this mountain-top for loneliness and 
 peace, the scene outspread before him might well 
 have bred in him temporary forgetfulness of every- 
 thing but its own beauty. Northward the poet's 
 vision of an earthly paradise was a substantial fact. 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 87 
 
 Nazareth's straggling village street and the green 
 vale below it lay at his feet ; beyond the hills rolled 
 on successively until the farthest broke like waves 
 against the mass of Hermon's mighty bulk, its 
 summit covered with everlasting snow ; and west- 
 ward was the sparkle of the sea. " In a spot like 
 Nazareth/' says Keim, " it is impossible to imagine 
 a people spiritually destitute, if nature has a word 
 to say in the development of man." 
 
 The stability of Eastern civilization enables us 
 to reproduce with tolerable precision the dwelling 
 in which Jesus pf Nazareth was born, and grew 
 from the pathetic helplessness of infancy into the 
 world-helping strength of his maturity. Imagine a 
 house of only one room, which serves for kitchen, 
 living-room, and sleeping-room, and, when Joseph 
 cannot work out of doors, for workshop also. Im- 
 agine the furniture as simple as the house : a piece 
 of matting, two or three cushions or pillows on the 
 floor of earth, two or three vessels of clay, and a 
 big chest which serves for table, wardrobe, and 
 general receptacle. Every picture, says Euskin, 
 should have " an escape into the infinite. " This 
 picture has such an escape : it is by way of a 
 ladder leading to the roof, where on the warmer 
 nights the growing boy must many a time have 
 fallen asleep, his face upturned to the star-sprinkled 
 sky. 
 
 Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary. Any- 
 
88 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 
 thing to the contrary is without foundation either 
 of historical evidence or moral use. The genesis of 
 the story of the miraculous birth of Jesus is so 
 easily accounted for without supposing any basis 
 of reality, that one must be wilfully credulous to 
 entertain the idea for a single moment. It is of a 
 piece with various stories predicating the miracu- 
 lous birth of famous persons, especially of famous 
 teachers of religion. Buddha and Zoroaster share 
 with Jesus in this doubtful honor. The funda- 
 mental Gospel tradition is wholly innocent of any 
 such idea. So, too, are the Gospels in their present 
 shape, beyond the legends of the infancy. Paul is 
 equally silent where he would have been voluble 
 enough if he had heard or given a moment's heed 
 to such a tale. No, he is contradictory rather than 
 silent. For when he speaks of Jesus as " born of 
 a woman," it is only the madness of dogmatic pre- 
 conception that can imagine any denial of the 
 human father. The expression was the current 
 phrase for human generation. But we have more 
 emphatic contradiction close at hand in the legends 
 of the birth and infancy. Both Matthew and Luke 
 deduce Jesus from David through Joseph. What 
 are we to infer from this remarkable phenomenon, 
 if not that these genealogies were the invention of 
 a time when the miraculous birth of Jesus was an 
 unheard-of fable ? Strange, do you say, that the 
 compilers of Matthew and Luke did not perceive 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 89 
 
 the incongruity between this fable and the geneal- 
 ogies, and left them standing side by side ? No ; it 
 is hardly strange if we consider that the literary 
 productions of the time abound in just such contra- 
 dictory statements. Addition, rather than erasure, 
 was the favorite method of literary emendation. 
 But this particular incongruity did not wait for 
 modern criticism to discover it. The second cen- 
 tury perceived it, and deduced the Davidic geneal- 
 ogy of Jesus through Mary, in order to harmonize 
 it with his miraculous birth. But in those circles 
 of nascent Christianity which were the repositories 
 of its most trustworthy tradition this fable found 
 no credence. The strangest thing of all in this 
 connection is that the Fourth Gospel, cherishing 
 a conception of Jesus as the pre-existent Logos, 
 nevertheless does not avail itself of the miraculous 
 birth, but plainly intimates that Jesus was the son 
 of Joseph in the line of human generation. 
 
 The Davidic origin of Jesus fares no better 
 under the tests of scientific criticism than his 
 miraculous birth. But there is evidence, as we 
 should naturally expect, that the belief in his Da- 
 vidic origin had an earlier existence than the other. 
 Paul doubtfully, and the writer of Eevelation less 
 doubtfully, witnesses such a belief. But their 
 grounds for it were probably no more critical than 
 those implied in the genealogies preserved to us 
 in Matthew and Luke, and these are mutually 
 
90 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 destructive. From Jesus to Abraham, Matthew 
 counts forty -two and Luke seventy-seven genera- 
 tions. Between David and Jesus Luke has four- 
 teen more generations than Matthew. And this 
 is not the worst : the descent of Jesus from David 
 is traced by Luke in an entirely different line from 
 that of Matthew. Luke's is the non-kingly line of 
 David and Nathan. Matthew's is the kingly line 
 of David and Solomon. The names throughout are 
 almost entirely different. That Matthew's geneal- 
 ogy is a purely arbitrary arrangement is evidenced 
 from the fact that it is divided into three groups of 
 fourteen each. To the exigencies of this arrange- 
 ment several generations are sacrificed without 
 remorse. Considering the number of Solomon's 
 wives, it is not unlikely that descendants of his 
 were living in the time of Jesus, but that they 
 were not known as such is proved by the univer- 
 sal failure to seize on any one of them and make 
 a king of him at a time when Judea was so in- 
 tensely eager for deliverance that the most miser- 
 able pretender to Davidic origin would have been 
 hailed with general acclamation. Why Jesus was 
 declared to be " the son of David " is so palpably 
 evident, that the foregoing considerations are a 
 work of supererogation. The general expectation 
 was that the Messiah would be a descendant of 
 David. Therefore, the Messianic claim of Jesus 
 having been acknowledged, the inference was un- 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 91 
 
 avoidable : he must be a descendant of David. 
 Hence the arbitrary patching up of genealogies to 
 prove the claim. We shall waste no regrets upon 
 its unsubstantial character. Strange that men 
 ever thought to honor Jesus by tracing back his 
 pedigree to the adulterous marriage of David with 
 the wife of Uriah the Hittite ! As with the mi- 
 raculous birth, so with the Davidic pedigree : the 
 result of criticism is a consummation for which we 
 cannot be too thankful. The wonder of any birth 
 into this world is incalculably great, unspeakably 
 sublime; and not the dregs of royal houses, but 
 the untainted blood of farmers and mechanics, is 
 best to feed the brain of a great king of thought or 
 warm the heart of a great lover of mankind. 
 
 The indignity which Christian mythology has 
 done to Joseph, the father of Jesus, Jesus himself 
 has recompensed to him a thousand times over, by 
 naming the divine providence, and love, and pity, 
 Abba, Father. Never would this name have been 
 so frequently upon liis lips, as the expression of his 
 highest spiritual . ideal and with such an accent of 
 tenderness, if his own filial experience had not led 
 him to associate with it a hundred thoughts of 
 gratitude and joy. There is more direct testimony 
 concerning the mother, but it is without critical 
 value. But here, too, there is inferential ground 
 upon which we can stand with tolerable confi- 
 dence. That in his mother he saw and rever- 
 
92 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 enced "the ever womanly" is suggested by the 
 exquisite regard for women which pervades like 
 an aroma all his traditional speech and action in 
 respect to them, — a regard which Eenan has 
 smirched with sentimental imputations, the mere 
 reflections of his personal taste, which find no real 
 justification in the New Testament, in or between 
 the lines. The home into which Jesus was born 
 was childless before he came, but ultimately he 
 was one of a great swarm of children. Of brothers 
 there were four at least, of sisters quite as many. 
 These facts but ill comport with Mary's ecclesias- 
 tical reputation ; and as soon as her legend began 
 to shape itself, the attempt was made to show that 
 either the brothers and sisters of Jesus were the 
 children of Joseph by a former marriage, or his 
 cousins-german. The dogmatic animus of these 
 speculations is so apparent that they deserve no 
 consideration. Our respect for Mary will not be 
 diminished, but enhanced, by our conviction that 
 she was the mother of many children. Jesus was 
 her first-born. There is some likelihood in the 
 tradition that Joseph was a good deal older than 
 herself, and that he died about the time when 
 Jesus came to full maturity. 
 
 Concerning the childhood and the youth of Jesus 
 we have no direct testimony which will bear the 
 strain of critical investigation. In Luke the si- 
 lence from his birth to the baptism of John is 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 93 
 
 broken by a charming story of his visit to Jerusa- 
 lem with his parents when he was twelve years 
 old. But the story has much internal incongruity, 
 and is evidently the vanguard of a host of stories 
 of his childhood and his youth, which have been 
 preserved to us in the apocryphal gospels. In 
 these stories Jesus is a worker of miracles from his 
 babyhood. He deputes his father to raise a name- 
 sake from the dead ; he gives a miraculous harvest 
 to the poor; he widens a bedstead for his father 
 by lengthening one of the cross-pieces in a miracu- 
 lous manner. He makes sparrows out of clay and 
 bids them fly, and they obey him. These are the 
 least extravagant narrations, and they are very dif- 
 ferent from the story in Luke, of his being found 
 in the temple conversing with the rabbis. But 
 this is found in company with them in the apoc- 
 ryphal Thomas, and evidently resulted from an 
 impulse common to it and them, — from a desire 
 to till in the gap between the birth and the bap- 
 tism of Jesus, — to make that long and painful 
 silence vocal with his praise. 
 
 Nevertheless, the story in Luke points to the 
 general fact that it was customary for people from 
 all parts of Palestine to go up to Jerusalem to the 
 great feasts. Only the men were commanded to 
 go, but the women were permitted, and children 
 must be taken at the age of twelve. So that it is 
 highly probable that Jesus had been up to the 
 
94 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 Holy City many times before his fatal journey in 
 the last days of his life. The Holy City must have 
 filled an important place in the imagination of 
 every Jewish child. As Joseph bent over his 
 work he must often have told the children playing 
 at his feet of the temple and the other wonders he 
 had seen there, and they, no doubt, out of the chips 
 and shavings falling from his bench, made minia- 
 ture temples and Jerusalems. And when at length 
 Jesus was old enough to go up with his parents it 
 must have been with a great swelling of the heart. 
 The pilgrims assemble in some open place and 
 start off in high spirits, the women and children 
 riding upon mules, the men marching before and 
 behind to protect them against robbers and Samari- 
 tans. There are banners waving, and the pilgrims 
 sing a " psalm of degrees," or steps, like the one 
 hundred and twentieth or one hundred and thirty- 
 fourth, as they wind slowly along. It is a three 
 days' journey. The last night they rest in Jericho, 
 and the next day go over the hills to Jerusalem, 
 climbing at length the Mount of Olives, and from 
 its top seeing the city, with its towers and palaces 
 spread out before them, the golden spikes of the 
 temple roof flashing in the sunlight. And then 
 they sing : — 
 
 " Our feet shall stand within thy gates, Jerusalem ! 
 Jerusalem, the city rebuilt, 
 The city that is joined together, 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 95 
 
 Whither the tribes go up, 
 
 The tribes of the Lord, 
 
 According to the law of Israel. 
 
 Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. 
 
 They shall prosper that love thee. 
 
 Peace be within thy walls, 
 
 And prosperity within thy palaces." 
 
 And singing still, the procession will go down into 
 the valley through which runs the brook Kedron, 
 past the Garden of Gethsemane, and under the 
 great archway into the city. 
 
 In considering the youth and training of Jesus 
 here is the most essential fact of all : that his time 
 and people were religious ; that religion was the 
 great affair of life, the most engrossing theme; 
 that temple and synagogue were the foci of the 
 great ellipse described by the society into which 
 Jesus of Nazareth was born, foci around which it 
 swept with startling vehemence. The instincts of 
 the nation were declared in almost every house- 
 hold in the land. The religious instruction of 
 children was regarded as a sacred trust, and was 
 enforced upon their parents with continual itera- 
 tion. The father, rather than the mother, was the 
 acknowledged guardian of this sacred trust. But 
 the mother was not counted out. " Paradise is at 
 the feet of mothers," was a rabbinic saying. And 
 so, no doubt, from both father and mother, Jesus, 
 the growing boy, big-eyed with wonder, heard of 
 Abraham. Isaac, and Jacob, of Moses and Joshua, 
 
96 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 of Joseph and Samuel and David, of Josiah and 
 Ezra, of the great scribes and prophets, of the he- 
 roic Maccabees, and John Hyrcanus. And he was 
 taught not only the history and the legends, but 
 also the law of his race : not to make fish-pools on 
 the Sabbath, as he is represented doing in the Gos- 
 pel of the Infancy; not to touch various things 
 regarded as impure; not to eat swine's flesh; to 
 dread a dead caterpillar more than a live one; 
 to practise various fasts and purifications. So 
 much at home ; but his parents, we may be sure, 
 were not his only teachers. The village school- 
 master was the hazzan, or reader of the syna- 
 gogue. His teaching was little* more than the 
 deaconing out of certain parts of the Old Tes- 
 tament for the children to memorize. Imagine 
 the young Jesus sitting cross-legged on the floor, 
 reciting texts in concert with his olive-cheeked 
 companions ! No critical knowledge of the Scrip- 
 tures ever came to him from this teaching or the 
 subsequent instruction of the village rabbis. With 
 these, therefore, he accepted all the assumptions of 
 the time concerning the age and authorship of the 
 sacred books. He made no distinction between 
 the first and second Isaiah ; for him the Law was of 
 Mosaic origin, and the book of Daniel a veritable 
 production of the Babylonian prophet. Greek was 
 a language generally comprehensible in Galilee in 
 Jesus' time, especially in such thriving centres as 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 97 
 
 Capernaum. But that Jesus ever spoke it or read 
 it we have no evidence. That his quotations from 
 the Old Testament, as given in the Gospels, are 
 mainly from the Septuagint or Greek translation 
 of the Scriptures is frequently cited as evidence 
 that he was acquainted with the Scriptures in this 
 form. But the evangelists, and not Jesus, are 
 responsible for the form of his quotations, and 
 frequently for their substance also. He is the 
 mouth-piece of their doctrine, and the form of his 
 discourse reflects not so much his culture and habit 
 as their own. 
 
 What was the relation of Jesus to the rabbinical 
 teaching of his time ? Eabbinical schools were com- 
 mon in his day in all the larger towns of Pales- 
 tine. But Nazareth was too insignificant to enjoy 
 this honor, and that Jesus went beyond his native 
 village to secure advantages which he could not 
 find there we have no reason to suppose. On the 
 contrary, we have convincing evidence that he was 
 never deeply indoctrinated in the peculiar learning 
 of the rabbis, — in their hair-splitting distinctions. 
 It may be doubted whether any amount of their 
 teaching could have made Jesus a pedant ; but it 
 does not seem possible that, if he had any regular 
 course of training in their schools, there could 
 have been that divine simplicity and freshness in 
 his words, — as of the hillside lilies, from whose 
 golden cups his thought came back to him bee- 
 
 7 
 
98 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 like, all honey-laden, — which, after all the waste 
 of subsequent manipulation, is still, in the Synop- 
 tic Gospels, our incomparable inheritance. That 
 the teachings of Jesus are entirely free from the 
 rabbinical mannerism of the time it would be idle 
 to contend, and something of this may have in- 
 hered in their original form ; but we have only to 
 compare them in their entirety with the epistles 
 of St. Paul, the superb originality of which is 
 marred at every turn by the pedantic quibbles and 
 conceits which were the natural result of his rab- 
 binical training, to realize how different the teach- 
 ings of Jesus might possibly have been had he 
 been a thorough-going pupil of the rabbis. In 
 that saying preserved to us in the New Testament, 
 " He taught as one having authority and not as the 
 scribes" we seem to have a genuine critical percep- 
 tion. His was not the scholastic, the pedantic 
 manner ; and the natural inference is that he was 
 never in the fullest sense a scribe, a pupil of the 
 rabbis in any one of their innumerable schools. 
 
 But in the time of Jesus the rabbinic teaching 
 was everywhere, like thistle-down in autumn 
 weather. There was no school in Nazareth; but 
 the village synagogue was there, open daily at the 
 three hours of prayer, and on the Sabbath, Mon- 
 days, and Thursdays, for the reading of the Scrip- 
 tures by the hazzan, and its exposition by some 
 local scribe or elder, or some rabbi from abroad. 
 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 99 
 
 To the synagogue Jesus must have resorted with 
 that frequency which was demanded by the custom 
 of the time. There, many a time, he must have 
 listened wearily to the long prayers of the Phari- 
 sees, and seen their ostentatious charity ; also their 
 scramble for the foremost seats, where they were 
 likeliest to get a chance to speak. There, too, he 
 must have heard the learned exposition of the law 
 of ritual cleanness and Sabbatical observance ; but, 
 ever and anon, amid this waste of triviality, a man- 
 lier voice, speaking of " righteousness and judg- 
 ment," of the coming kingdom of God, the hope 
 of Israel, not to be long delayed. The great Hillel 
 had become president of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin 
 some twenty years before the birth of Jesus, and 
 Jesus was a boy of ten or twelve when death knit 
 up for him " the ravelled sleave of care/' During 
 the youth and early manhood of Jesus the maxims 
 of Hillel, many of them so serious, so tender, so 
 humane, were travelling far and wide. These max- 
 ims must have fallen on the ear of Jesus and sunk 
 into his heart ; and with these, no doubt, maxims 
 and ideas of the Essenes. Neighbors had gone to 
 join their peaceful and strange communities by the 
 Dead Sea, and had returned, perhaps, to induce 
 others to unite with them in their bee-tending 
 communism and their stern resolve to keep " un- 
 spotted from the world." There is abundant 
 evidence that the Essene phenomenon w T as an 
 
100 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 important factor in the religious development of 
 Jesus. His ideas of poverty, of non-resistance, 
 of marriage, took color from this soil. 
 
 The political factor must not be overlooked. 
 The political situation was a ferment of impas- 
 sioned thought tending to violent action. The 
 Pharisees had done their best to keep a tight rein 
 upon the popular sentiment ; but this had already 
 taken the bit in its teeth, and was going its own 
 way. The taxing of Quirinius, with which Luke 
 associates the birth of Jesus, but which really hap- 
 pened when he was ten or twelve years old (in 
 6 A. D.), caused an immense excitement in the 
 northern provinces. One Judas of Gamala, a town 
 not far from Nazareth, just over across the lake 
 Tiberias, became the leader of a movement full of 
 the Messianic spirit. No man should be called 
 " master ; " no taxes should be paid to Eome. 
 Judas himself was regarded by many as the Mes- 
 siah. Thousands gathered about him, but the se- 
 dition was effectually crushed by the procurator 
 Coponius. The fervid patriotism which Judas had 
 inherited from his father (to murder whom was 
 Herod's first exploit) he, in turn, bequeathed to 
 his sons, who were conspicuous in the final struggle 
 of Judea with the power of Eome. This move- 
 ment of Judas the Gaulonite must have been the 
 home-talk and street-talk of Nazareth for months 
 and vears. Nor could it have been otherwise with 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 101 
 
 many another ebullition. Jesus was already thirty 
 years of age when the attempt of Pilate to compel 
 the worship of the Eoman emperor raised the blood 
 of his subjects to fever-heat, while Galilee, from 
 Jordan to the sea, thrilled with sympathetic horror, 
 and cried, " How long ! Lord, how long ! " It 
 was not possible for a man of natural sensibility 
 and earnestness to tread this fiery furnace with his 
 feet unscarred. To the young Jesus, these passions 
 and events must have been of boundless interest. 
 Many a time he must have brooded over them as 
 at his bench he drove his plane in patient service 
 of the needs of daily life, until the " word of the 
 Lord was like a fire shut up in his bones," till 
 he was " weary of forbearing," and longed to thrust 
 his gleaming sickle into the whitening harvest of 
 the Messianic year. 
 
 But one thing is absolutely certain; namely, 
 that Jesus did not live either a life of pedantic 
 study or of persistent introspection. There is an 
 expression concerning literary work and public ut- 
 terance: "It smells of the lamp." The public 
 utterance of Jesus had no such odor. It smelt of 
 the town and field, of the wine-presses of Galilee, 
 of the fish-markets of Gennesareth, — an odor 
 sometimes too positive for the enjoyment of the 
 dilettanteish. He was not without precedent for 
 this homely speech in the rabbinical teachings of 
 the time. Especially was the parable a favorite 
 
102 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 vehicle for the conveyance of religious truth. But 
 the speech of Jesus is of such sort that we may be 
 sure its homeliness is not a borrowed article. It 
 is the speech of a man who was no dreamer, no 
 recluse ; whose eyes were open to perceive a 
 hundred various aspects of the busy Galilean life ; 
 the children playing in the market-place, the petty 
 household cares, the man who goes a-borrowing; 
 whose ears were open to take in the multitudinous 
 stir and hum of the lake-side and populous Caper- 
 naum. The teachings of Jesus in the New Testa- 
 ment have a marked individuality, and it is the 
 individuality of a man whose senses were alive 
 and quick to catch the purport of the outward form 
 and beauty of the world, the immense variety and 
 significance of human life. I do not think there 
 can be any doubt of this. 
 
 So much, for all the silence of the Gospel narra- 
 tives concerning the youth and education of Jesus, 
 or their questionable information, we may infer 
 with tolerable certainty from the circumstances of 
 the time and place on which his youth and early 
 manhood fell, and from our knowledge of his sub- 
 sequent career. But in the course of our investi- 
 gations we have at length approached a point 
 where, for the first time, Jesus emerges into the 
 clear light of history. The fundamental tradition 
 common to the Synoptic Gospels begins with the 
 baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. The Gos- 
 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 103 
 
 pel according to the Hebrews, in this respect 
 agreeing with the fundamental tradition and with 
 our canonical Mark, begins abruptly at the same 
 point. And for our knowledge of John the Baptist 
 we are not confined to the New Testament. Jo- 
 sephus, who is almost, if not absolutely, silent 
 concerning Jesus, is sufficiently communicative 
 concerning John. For three years Josephus was 
 the disciple of his ascetic pupil, Banus, so that 
 his opportunity for learning about the Baptist was 
 excellent. 
 
 " Never, believe me, 
 Appear the Immortals, 
 Never, alone." 
 
 The conjunction of the lives of Jesus and the Bap- 
 tist is a case in point. The world's debt to the 
 Baptist it would be hard to overrate. Unkempt 
 ascetic though he was, it was his voice, " crying in 
 the wilderness of Jndea," that penetrated to the 
 Galilean hills and to the carpenter's shop of Jesus, 
 and lured him to the Jordan's side, there to arrive 
 at length at a distinct self-consciousness, and enter 
 on that brief career which has been the acknowl- 
 edged inspiration — too little actual — of more 
 than eighteen hundred years. 
 
 The account of John the Baptist's birth and par- 
 entage, as given in the Third Gospel, is a figment 
 of devout imagination, completely self-destructive 
 from the number and extent of its internal incon- 
 
104 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 gruities. We have no reason to doubt that he was 
 a Judean, and that he had served a long appren- 
 ticeship of ascetic solitude before he assumed the 
 double role of prophet and forerunner of the king- 
 dom of heaven. The scene of his appearance, the 
 wilderness of Judea in the immediate vicinity of 
 the Dead Sea, was favorable to the ascetic life, for 
 it was exceedingly barren and unlovely. Here the 
 Essenes had established themselves. John's local 
 nearness to them, and the common fact of an 
 ascetic life, have suggested to many semi-critical 
 persons the idea that John himself was an Essene. 
 But, in truth, his asceticism was very different 
 from theirs, and his attitude was much more indi- 
 vidual and spontaneous. His baptism was as dif- 
 ferent as possible from their ablutions. These 
 were continually renewed in a vain struggle after 
 a perfect ceremonial cleanness. The baptism was 
 once for all, and was purely symbolic. Apparently 
 it was his own invention, for the baptism of Jewish 
 proselytes was more of the nature of a ceremonial 
 ablution, and does not appear to have come into 
 use until a later time. John had no Pharisaic or 
 Essenic horror of ceremonial uncleanness. He min- 
 gled freely with the vilest outcasts of the land. 
 He was an anachronism in no small degree. His 
 character was that of a prophet of the style of 
 Amos and Hosea. There was something imitative 
 in the coarseness of his dress. It was a common 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 105 
 
 notion that Elijah the prophet would reappear as 
 herald of the Messianic time. The aim of John 
 the Baptist seems to have been to make himself a 
 kind of Elijah Many accepted him as the ancient 
 prophet, risen from the dead. Others hailed him 
 as the Messiah. But for this idea he was not in 
 the least responsible, and only moderately for the 
 other. His one idea was that the Messianic king- 
 dom was at hand, and, seeing that no Elijah was 
 forthcoming to proclaim the fact, he stepped into 
 the vacant place. And he was worthy of such 
 great election. Since the captivity, no voice so 
 thrilling as his own had pierced the conscience of 
 the nation to the quick. " Bepent, for the king- 
 dom of heaven is at hand ! " The message fell on 
 ears attuned to it by years of sufferiug and humil- 
 iation. The priests and rabbis sneered at him, but 
 the flood of popular enthusiasm swept even these, 
 in many instances, along with it into his presence, 
 where they quailed before the majesty of his de- 
 nunciation. Thousands, from every part of Pal- 
 estine, came to his baptism, and one day, with 
 others from the North, a man of Nazareth, Jesus 
 by name, pressed in among the Jordan's bending 
 reeds to hear the voice whose echoes had pene- 
 trated to his Galilean home and drowned the noise 
 of saw and hammer with their importunate appeal 
 to his religious consciousness. 
 
 The effect upon Jesus of the Baptist's personal- 
 
106 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 ity must have been impressive, for he received his 
 baptism and enrolled himself as one of his disci- 
 ples. No fact in all the gospel history is more 
 substantial than this, and it a fact that is full of 
 deep significance. At the same time it is a fact 
 that has given the apologists and theologians no 
 end of trouble and anxiety. For the baptism of 
 John was a baptism of repentance, and necessitated 
 a confession of sin. But repentance and confession 
 of sin are ideas which have long been entirely for- 
 eign to the ecclesiastical idea of Jesus. Of course 
 they are entirely foreign to the idea that Jesus was 
 the infinite God ; and even the humanitarian, when 
 he has given up every other trait that is not agree- 
 able to the pure humanity of Jesus, often clings to 
 the dogma of his sinlessness with passionate devo- 
 tion. Even within the limits of the New Testament 
 we see the dawn of this far-reaching tendency. * I 
 have need to be baptized of thee," says John, " and 
 comest thou to me ? " And Jesus, answering, said 
 unto him, " Suffer it to be so now, for thus it be- 
 cometh us to fulfil all ceremonies." 1 Thus to make 
 it appear that Jesus had no need of baptism, he is 
 charged with miserable time-serving. Surely the 
 loss is greater than the gain. And in the Gospel 
 according to the Hebrews Jesus is made to say, 
 * What sin have I committed that I should go and 
 
 1 Our present version says "righteousness," but "ceremonial 
 righteousness" is intended. 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 107 
 
 be baptized of him ? " Nevertheless he goes, to 
 please his mother and his brethren ! In Matthew 
 the device is dishonesty; here it is weak good- 
 nature ; and there is little room for choice. Even 
 so great a critic as Keim pleads that the baptism 
 of Jesus was peculiar to himself, that there was a 
 private understanding between him and the Bap- 
 tist that no repentance was implied in the transac- 
 tion, there being nothing of which Jesus could 
 repent ! How much more honorable and manly 
 is the proceeding of Strauss, who says, " Even the 
 best and purest of mankind has ever many sins to 
 accuse himself of, much remissness, much precipita- 
 tion; moreover, as the individual becomes morally 
 purified, the moral feeling itself is more sensitive 
 of the slightest impurity of moral motives, of the 
 slightest deviation from the moral ideal.' , It is 
 this honesty and manliness of Strauss, and not the 
 quibbling of Keim, or the assumptions of theology, 
 that Jesus himself endorses when he says to the 
 young man who calls him " Good Master," " Why 
 callest thou me good ? There is one only who is 
 good, and that is God." There is not a particle of 
 reason for supposing that the baptism of Jesus by 
 John was in any respect different from that of any 
 other person. It was a baptism of repentance. It 
 was a confession of unsatisfied ideals. An impreg- 
 nable fact, it marks the purely human conscious- 
 ness of Jesus up to this date ; that as yet he had 
 
108 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 no other thought of himself than as a man among 
 men. But in the narratives of the event we find 
 the germ of an immense dogmatic development, of 
 which the miraculous birth of Mary, the mother of 
 Jesus, is so far the highest term. The story of the 
 baptism in Matthew represents a much earlier 
 stage of the legend of Jesus than the story of his 
 miraculous birth in the preceding chapter. The 
 Spirit descends on Jesus, making him the Messiah 
 after his baptism. Surely a superfluous business if 
 Jesus had been bom of the Spirit, if he was the 
 miraculous Son of God, if he was — forgive such 
 blasphemy — himself the Almighty ! 
 
 The relations of Jesus to the Baptist, as related 
 in the New Testament, reflect at every turn the 
 dogmatic conceptions of the growing creed of 
 Christianity. The cousinship between John and 
 Jesus is a single instance of a mania which was 
 not satisfied until it had affirmed a blood relation- 
 ship between all the principal characters of the 
 gospel history. What is likeliest is that the two 
 had never seen each other till they met as master 
 and disciple on the banks of the Jordan. So far 
 was John from recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, 
 that it may be doubted whether the Messianic 
 kingdom of John's expectation involved the idea 
 of a personal Messiah, and it is certain that Jesus 
 himself did not at this time recognize himself as 
 a lie that should come." What is likeliest is that 
 
BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 109 
 
 Jesus sought the baptism of John out of dissatis- 
 faction with the dominant religion of the time, and 
 out of sympathy with one who openly proclaimed 
 what his own heart already prophesied, — "The 
 kingdom of heaven is at hand ! " If such an act 
 implied repentance and confession of wrong-doing, 
 Jesus, however clean and honorable had been his 
 life, was not so miserably self-righteous as to hesi- 
 tate a moment upon this account. 
 
 That the religious consciousness of Jesus was rap- 
 idly matured under the influence of John's impas- 
 sioned utterance we have every reason to believe. 
 But this increasing maturity brought an increas- 
 ing sense of difference. Even if the ministry of 
 John had continued indefinitely it may be doubted 
 whether Jesus would long have reckoned him- 
 self among his disciples. But the arrest of John 
 by Herod Antipas saved him the pain of setting 
 up a standard of his own while John's was still 
 upon the field. With the arrest of John began the 
 special ministry of Jesus. He was already nearly 
 forty years of age. One glorious year of hope and 
 high resolve, and then the shadow of doom, and 
 then — the doom. How wonderful it is that from 
 a period of activity so brief, and so secluded from 
 the self-conscious world, such vast results should 
 have proceeded ! 
 
 I have read or heard somewhere of a remarkable 
 Indian plant or tree which grows, isolated from 
 
110 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 others, to a great height, throwing out few, if any, 
 lateral branches, but suddenly, at the very top, 
 bursting into a single flower of marvellous bril- 
 liancy and beauty, and with a fragrance that en- 
 chants the sense with an unspeakable delight. 
 And then — it dies ! It is a parable of the life of 
 Jesus. Year after year it grew in silence and ob- 
 scurity, sending no lateral branches, that we know 
 of, out into the sunny Galilean air ; but suddenly 
 its top, as if dew-sprinkled with the baptism of 
 John, as if expanded by the fierce heats of a na- 
 tion's patriotic and religious zeal, burst into a flower 
 whose beauty and whose fragrance have enriched 
 whole centuries of time. But as we may be sure 
 that all that patient waiting, silent growing, of the 
 Indian tree were necessary to its one consummate 
 flower, we may be equally sure that all the patient 
 waiting, silent growth, of Jesus were but the need- 
 ful preparation for his single year of active service 
 among men, a flower whose fragrance, even to this 
 day, enriches every wind that blows. 
 
IV. 
 
 JESUS AS PEOPHET. 
 
" At first they knew him only as a village enthusiast, a 
 Galilean teacher, at best a rabbi, like other interpreters of 
 the Law, one of the school, perhaps, of Rabbi Hillel or 
 Rabbi Simeon, like them setting the weightier matters of 
 justice and mercy above the mint, anise, and cumin of cur- 
 rent exposition. For a background to the understanding of 
 his discourses, one should know something of the wonderful, 
 well-meaning pedantry of the rabbinical interpreters, and 
 something, too, of the genuine and wholesome ethics which 
 the better sort, Hillel at their head, had tried to engraft 
 upon it." 
 
 Joseph Henry Allen. 
 
IV. 
 
 JESUS AS PROPHET. 
 
 r MHE relations of Jesus to John the Baptist are 
 JL full of uncertainty, hopelessly so if we at- 
 tach any importance to the representations of 
 the Fourth Gospel. In Matthew the story of the 
 temptation follows immediately upon the story of 
 the baptism. It is just possible that this story 
 contains so much of truth : that Jesus, as was cus- 
 tomary among the prophets of his nation, retired 
 into the wilderness to nurse the flame of his resolve 
 and deepen his religious consecration. But such 
 an act supposes a more special task than he had 
 yet assumed, and a different spirit from that in 
 which shortly afterward he entered on his proper 
 work. The general framework of the story is 
 purely symbolic, and appears at this stage of the 
 narration only in accordance with the erroneous 
 supposition that the baptism of Jesus was the be- 
 ginning of his Messianic career. This was still 
 far in the future, and the period of inward strug- 
 gle, which must have preceded rather than fol- 
 
 8 
 
114 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 lowed his distinct avowal of his Messiahship, is 
 but rudely symbolized in this superstitious story, 
 which, nevertheless, is not without a certain dig- 
 nity and charm. 
 
 The baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist was 
 the baptism of a disciple by the prophet of the 
 kingdom of heaven. Those baptized by John, 
 for the most part, returned after their baptism to 
 their usual vocations; some of them to await 
 with breathless interest the great day of Jehovah, 
 and others to relapse into the stupor from which 
 the trumpet-tones of the ascetic prophet had roused 
 them for a moment. Still others, it is every way 
 probable, tarried in the vicinity of the Jordan. 
 They could not hear too often the Baptist's " sure 
 word of prophecy." It sustained their wavering 
 hearts; it deepened their religious consciousness. 
 Among those who lingered thus with John, we 
 may assign a place to Jesus with some confidence. 
 The account of the relations of the two is every- 
 where shadow and not substance, but it is a 
 shadow of such dimensions and such density that 
 it implies a relation between the two more inti- 
 mate and more protracted than the average rela- 
 tion between the Baptist and his disciples. And 
 it may even be that Jesus was still in company with 
 John when the arrest of the latter by Antipas 
 brought his public career to a sudden termination. 
 The arrest of John is attributed in the New Testa- 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 115 
 
 ment to his rebuke of Antipas for his adulterous 
 marriage with his niece Herodias. Herodias's first 
 husband was her uncle Herod, a son of Mariamne, 
 whom his father, Herod the Great, had disinher- 
 ited. Desiring a royal husband, she forsook her 
 uncle Herod for her uncle Antipas, who had simul- 
 taneously wearied of his Arabian wife. It is not 
 likely, however, that this dramatic situation, sure 
 to attract the Evangelist, had anything to do with 
 John's imprisonment. But Antipas felt the waves 
 of popular enthusiasm beating against the bases of 
 his throne ; his recollection was still vivid of the 
 insurrection of Judas the Gaulonite, and he could 
 not be expected to distinguish between the spirit 
 of Judas and that of John. Nor is it unlikely 
 that the movement of John was rapidly assuming 
 a political character. Such was the tendency of 
 every Messianic movement. 
 
 Whatever the motive, it is certain that John 
 was thrown into prison. His movement was not 
 wholly extinguished by this circumstance. The 
 movement of Jesus gathered up a considerable por- 
 tion of its energy into itself, but a certain remain- 
 der long maintained a parallel existence ; even into 
 the second century, and later, when it had still 
 energy enough to interpolate Josephus in behalf of 
 John, as, further on, the Christians were impelled 
 to do in behalf of Jesus. 
 
 With the imprisonment of John the Baptist be- 
 
116 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 gins the independent ministry of Jesus. Possibly 
 the method of John had already impressed Jesus 
 as too harsh, and thoughts of establishing a min- 
 istry parallel to John's may have occurred to him. 
 But he was saved the painfulness of doing this by 
 the event of John's imprisonment. Henceforth 
 there was an end of doubt and hesitation. If Je- 
 sus was by the Jordan at this time, he returned at 
 once to Galilee, and there took up the herald-cry 
 of John, — the same, but with an accent of divin- 
 er pity and more perfect trust : " The kingdom 
 of heaven is at hand." 
 
 This was in A. D. 34, 1 and in the early spring. 
 The entire activity of Jesus was concentrated 
 within the limits of a single year. This is not the 
 traditional idea which is derived from the Fourth 
 Gospel. According to this idea, the ministry of 
 Jesus extended over three years. The various 
 feasts which Jesus is said to have attended at Je- 
 rusalem carry this implication. And it has been 
 argued that certain expressions and omissions in 
 the Synoptists suggest the longer term. But upon 
 close inspection the one year of the Synoptists 
 proves to be fully adequate to all the conditions 
 of the problem, while the three years of John land 
 us amid a host of incongruities. The Jesus of 
 John is always appearing and vanishing, and flit- 
 ting back and forth between Jerusalem and Galilee 
 
 1 I follow the chronology of Keim as the most satisfactory. 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 117 
 
 in a vague and purposeless manner, entirely suit- 
 able to the Logos-phantom of this Gospel, but 
 entirely at variance with the human personality of 
 Jesus. 
 
 Considering the briefness of his activity, we 
 have no reason to complain of the amount of our 
 traditional information. The amount is remark- 
 ably generous, and is a decisive proof that Jesus 
 must have made a profound impression. On no 
 other supposition is it possible to account for so 
 many sentences and parables that have the impress 
 of his individuality. There is much here that Je- 
 sus never said. Invention and distortion have 
 contributed their respective quotas of pseudo-say- 
 ings ; but, when due allowance has been made for 
 all of this, a nucleus remains of which the individ- 
 uality and force and beauty cannot be impeached 
 by any reasonable person. An unfavorable verdict 
 here would only be the critic's condemnation. 
 
 In the career of Jesus a few important points 
 emerge with absolute clearness, but the utmost 
 ingenuity and conscientiousness combined are un- 
 equal to the task of determining the order of the 
 various events and sayings of the New Testament 
 narrations. The order observed in the New Testa- 
 ment is oftener misleading than instructive. Mat- 
 thew is more trustworthy than Luke in general, 
 but even Matthew's arrangement of the discourses 
 and events is arbitrary in nine cases out of ten. 
 
118 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 Matthew is largely made up of a series of me- 
 chanical groups. The sententious teachings are 
 massed ; the miracles are massed ; the parables are 
 massed; the conflicts are massed. This principle 
 is everywhere apparent. " Birds of a feather flock 
 together." Sayings that must have originated at 
 different and even widely separated times are 
 forced into an arbitrary juxtaposition. From the 
 standpoint of the average Christian dogmatist, 
 which assumes that there was no development in 
 the ideas of Jesus, we have here an inextricable 
 snarl ; but once allow the hypothesis of a devel- 
 opment on the part of Jesus, and that what would 
 be a progressive series in any other life might 
 have been the same in this, and immediately we 
 have a general order, into which each particu- 
 lar event and saying cannot be set exactly, but 
 into which certain groups and stages of idea and 
 action fall with such positive alacrity as is of 
 itself quite reassuring. Nor is it a mere fancy 
 that the order thus conceived derives some further 
 validity from the fact that it tallies with the 
 procession of the seasons and the flowers and 
 fruits throughout the year of Jesus' ministry. In 
 such vital relations was the mind of Jesus with 
 the spectacle of nature, and the homely tasks of 
 husbandmen and vintners, that his words contin- 
 ually took color from this spectacle, reflected its 
 various changes and the corresponding changes in 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 119 
 
 the labors of his countrymen in town and field. 
 This is a pleasant thought, and it has a basis of 
 reality. 
 
 Nothing could be simpler than the outlines of 
 Jesus' ministry as revealed in the Synoptic Gos- 
 pels. It was a Galilean idyl of some months' du- 
 ration, overclouded more and more by conflicts 
 with the ecclesiastical powers, developing in Jesus 
 an ever-growing sense of the importance of his 
 mission and his Messianic office. To the idyl a 
 tragedy succeeded, for whose enactment only a 
 few weeks were necessary. This tragedy will be 
 the subject of my next discourse. My concern 
 this morning is wholly with the Galilean idyl, 
 with the period of eager hope and joyful expecta- 
 tion, involved in an inevitable conflict more and 
 more, but tending to an ever higher exaltation, 
 a self-assertion ever more courageous and pro- 
 found. 
 
 It is the idea of Eenan that the ministiy of Je- 
 sus began in private circles and gradually widened. 
 This was the method of Mohammed, without any 
 doubt; but not without forcing the note can it 
 be made to appear that the initiative of Jesus was 
 of this sort. From the moment of John's death 
 Jesus must have been something more than a 
 dealer in maxims, however lofty, unrelated to a 
 great leading idea. He speaks of himself and he 
 is often spoken of as a scribe or rabbi, and there 
 
120 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 was this aspect to his life throughout the Galilean 
 period. The teacher in him was a much more im- 
 portant factor than in John the Baptist, to whom 
 nothing of the manner of the scribe or rabbi per- 
 tained. Nevertheless this factor was in such com- 
 plete subordination to another and a higher, that 
 in his total manifestation, equally with John the 
 Baptist, he was a prophet, different from and yet of 
 the same order with the ancient prophets of Israel. 
 More of a scribe and rabbi than John, he was not 
 less a prophet; and it was as a prophet that he 
 entered on his independent ministry. It was not 
 as the Messiah whom John had heralded (if he had 
 heralded any personal Messiah) ; it was as another 
 herald-prophet of the kingdom of God. The idea 
 that he was himself the central figure of this king- 
 dom was not a part of his original outfit. He as- 
 sumed the role of John. His watchword was the 
 same, — " The kingdom of heaven is at hand,'' — 
 and when he sent out his disciples this was the 
 message which he charged them to deliver. Noth- 
 ing was more central to the Messianic thought than 
 the idea that with the appearance of the Messiah 
 the kingdom of heaven was established not only 
 de jure but de facto, — not only in prospect but in 
 fact. So that for Jesus, regarding himself as the 
 Messiah, to keep on insisting, and bidding others 
 insist, "The kingdom of heaven is approaching," 
 would have been the disavowal of his claim. 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 121 
 
 " The kingdom of heaven is at hand ! " This 
 term, " the kingdom of heaven/' was identical 
 with "the kingdom of God," — the word " heaven" 
 being often used, instead of " God," as a synonym 
 for " the ineffable name." The word " heaven " here 
 had nothing to do with any place or state of exist- 
 ence after death. The kingdom of heaven was sim- 
 ply and purely the " good time coming," of which 
 prophets long ago had prophesied, but which, in the 
 time of Jesus, was the one great, persistent, omni- 
 present, all-engrossing object of thought throughout 
 the length and breadth of Palestine. - This is no 
 exaggeration, for Samaria, no less than Galilee and 
 Judea, was agitated by this thought. But this 
 thought, it must never be forgotten, was never 
 fixed and definite. It varied with every variation 
 of the national life and with the character of every 
 individual prophet. The more spiritual the prophet, 
 the more spiritual his conception of the kingdom, 
 and vice versa. In general, peace, prosperity, and 
 righteousness were regarded as the component 
 parts of the "good time coming." The grosser 
 minds insisted most upon the prosperity, the ab- 
 sence of foreign oppression, the heel of Israel upon 
 the necks of the oppressors. The more spiritual 
 insisted most upon the righteousness. But even 
 where righteousness was uppermost it was gener- 
 ally associated with the idea of prosperity. It was 
 so in the thought of John. It was so in the thought 
 
122 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 of Jesus. Their idea was precisely that of the an- 
 cient prophets, that national righteousness would 
 be the signal for the heavenly kingdom to appear ; 
 but when it did appear, they did not doubt that it 
 would usher in an era of unexampled peace and 
 prosperity. " Seek first the kingdom of God and 
 his righteousness/ ' said Jesus, " and all these things 
 shall be added unto you." In the minds of many 
 in the time of Jesus, the Messianic time meant 
 little more than the deliverance of Palestine from 
 the hated power of Eome. The Maccabean dy- 
 nasty furnished the elements of their ideal. Some 
 even stooped so low as to see the Messiah in Herod 
 the Great. John and Jesus were as far as possi- 
 ble from these materialistic fancies. With them 
 the outward deliverance and prosperity were inci- 
 dents of the reign of righteousness. If this was a 
 means to an end, the means was greater than the 
 end it had in view. 
 
 " The kingdom of heaven is at hand ! " The 
 watchword of Jesus was the same as that of John. 
 His object was the same : to, as it were, force the 
 hand of fate by turning everywhere the hearts of 
 men to righteousness ; but with this fundamental 
 likeness between John and Jesus, there was an im- 
 portant difference, a difference necessitated by the 
 difference in their characters. With John the 
 Baptist, conscience, with Jesus of Nazareth, affec- 
 tion, was supreme. In John we see only the hatred 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 123 
 
 of iniquity; in Jesus we see, I will not say only 
 the love of men, but this preeminently and always. 
 Hence a different method, especially in the earlier 
 part of Jesus' ministry. His tone is not so fierce 
 as John's, not so denunciatory. He seeks to draw 
 men into the kingdom, where John would drive 
 them with the lash of his intolerable invective. 
 You will, at once, recall sentences ascribed to Jesus 
 that are as drastic as any ascribed to John. And 
 they are undoubtedly authentic. But they belong 
 to a later stage of his ministry. They were wrung 
 from him by the opposition of his enemies. His 
 boundless faith in human nature had suffered from 
 his practical experience. The initiative of Jesus 
 was full of hope and cheer. So enamored was he 
 of his own idea, that he imagined it would have 
 a universal fascination. 
 
 But the difference between John and Jesus has 
 not half been told. You have heard the saying, 
 "If God made man in his own image, man has 
 well paid him back." Here was a case in point. 
 John was a man of almost savage sternness. The 
 God of his imagination was a reflection of himself, 
 as harsh and stern as the god of any ancient 
 prophet, Amos or Hosea. Upon the other hand, 
 the boundless love of Jesus was reproduced in his 
 idea of God as the universal Father of mankind. 
 His God-idea was almost as different as possible 
 from that of John ; and I do not think we shall 
 
124 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 account for it by seeking here and there in Hebrew 
 or in Greek and Eoman writers for a similar idea. 
 It will certainly be found there; but of Greek 
 and Eoman writers Jesus knew absolutely nothing, 
 and the idea of God as a Father was too little em- 
 phasized in the Hebrew Scriptures to make much 
 impression on his mind. I am obliged to think 
 that in the fatherly tenderness of the God of Jesus 
 we have simply a reflection of the tenderness of his 
 own heart. He was not a student. He was not 
 a reasoner. With him, feeling was all in all. He 
 was no such egotist as to suppose that his own love 
 could outstrip the love of Heaven. Less from ob- 
 servation of the fact than because the sunshine of 
 his own affection fell equally upon the evil and the 
 good, the rain of his own pitying tears equally upon 
 the just and unjust, he made bold to predicate 
 these attributes of the Eternal. Because the pub- 
 licans and harlots were dearer in his eyes than the 
 most righteous in the community, he ascribed this 
 preference to God. To the woman taken in adul- 
 tery he could say, " Thy sins are forgiven thee," 
 because of his swift inference, an inference the 
 validity of which he never doubted, that God could 
 not be less forgiving than himself. So everywhere 
 the God of Jesus reflects his own immeasurable 
 tenderness. In this sense, indeed, he might have 
 said in the phrase of the Fourth Gospel, "He that 
 hath seen me hath seen the Father." But he never 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 125 
 
 could or would have said this, for he was not him- 
 self aware that his idea of the Father was the reflex 
 image of his own " enthusiasm for humanity." 
 
 This enthusiasm manifested itself in the desig- 
 nation of himself, which was apparently anterior to 
 his assumption of Messiahship, — "the Son of Man." 
 Never once in the Synoptic Gospels does he call 
 himself "the Son of God;" but the expression 
 " Son of Man " is ever on his lips, as one that sums 
 up, in a perfect manner, the elements of his self- 
 consciousness. "Why was this so ? The answer 
 generally is, Because in Daniel the Messiah is 
 spoken of as one " whose form is as the Son of 
 Man," so that when Jesus called himself the Son 
 of Man he simply meant to call himself the Mes- 
 siah. The criticism of Kuenen is convincing to 
 my mind that there is no personal Messiah in 
 Daniel, that the " one whose form is as the Son of 
 Man " is the Jewish nation. But it may be granted 
 that the expression was applied to the Messiah in 
 the time of Jesus. Did Jesus use it in this way ? 
 Not originally, if he asked the question, " Whom 
 do men say that I, the Son of Man, am ? " for 
 then it could only mean, "Do men say that I, the 
 Messiah, am the Messiah ? " Later it may be that 
 Jesus accepted the Messianic force of these words 
 and applied them to his second coming " in the 
 clouds of heaven;" but the expression "Son of 
 Man " is used in the Old Testament, outside of Dan- 
 
126 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 iel, without any Messianic meaning, and oftenest to 
 'express the idea of man, limited and imperfect, 
 bearing the burdens that are incidental to his 
 mortal lot. On this account, I doubt not, Jesus 
 made it synonymous with his own name. It iden- 
 tified him with humanity; it expressed the desire of 
 his heart to be thoroughly human. Christendom 
 has wasted an incalculable amount of energy in the 
 endeavor to exhibit Jesus as " the Son of God/' and 
 even as God himself. For commentary on this we 
 have the record that the only anxiety of Jesus was 
 to be, and to be considered, absolutely human; 
 and to this end he called himself "the Son of 
 Man." 
 
 His love of man spoke in this phrase, as in his 
 designation of God as Abba, Father ; and his 
 love of man is the one sentiment which breathes 
 from every page of the New Testament tradition ; 
 nor this in any vague, far-off, and abstract way, 
 but in the most concrete way imaginable. It was 
 not the ideal man, — the possible man, — that he 
 loved, but the men and women of Palestine, the 
 most abased of them as much — more than the 
 most respectable. The oratorio of "The Messiah" 
 has long been written ; its music glorious ; its text 
 an irrational conglomeration of all the absurdities 
 of Biblical interpretation that have attached them- 
 selves to the theological Christ. The symphony 
 of the Messiah has yet to be written. It awaits 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 127 
 
 the master-hand which shall combine the tender- 
 ness of Beethoven, at his tenderest, with the tu- 
 multuous energy of Wagner in his stormiest mood. 
 And when it is written, the unifying theme which 
 will underlie every movement, from the joyous 
 opening to the dark and stormy close, will be a 
 theme which will express, as well as music can, a 
 love of man, whose tenderness and passion were 
 incalculably pure and high. For such a love it was 
 that underlay the life of Jesus from its beginning 
 to its end, and gathered up into itself all of its joy 
 and sorrow, all of its seeming discords, fusing them 
 into harmonious unity. 
 
 The localities of Jesus' teaching are but vaguely 
 hinted at in the New Testament tradition. He 
 began his work, it would appear, in Capernaum, a 
 thriving town upon the Sea of Galilee, well to the 
 north. Luke's representation that he began at 
 Nazareth is without any internal or general con- 
 sistency. From Capernaum he sallied out into the 
 various towns and villages which in his day dotted 
 the smiling, verdurous, and fruitful plain of Gen- 
 nesareth. Dreams of the kingdom of God came 
 naturally in such a place as that, a marvel in its 
 loveliness. The ministry of Jesus was never so 
 widely extended as we should gather from the 
 general expressions that follow up the various par- 
 ticular accounts of his preaching. These are the 
 school-boy's " and so forth " with which he seeks 
 
128 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 to round out his imperfect lesson. The immediate 
 vicinity of Lake Gennesareth would seem to have 
 engrossed the bulk of his activity, and Capernaum 
 to have been his favorite sallying point and resting 
 place. That occasionally his journeys were ex- 
 tended beyond the fishing villages of Gennesareth 
 and the towns of the adjacent plain, to Nazareth and 
 its vicinity, across the lake, and northward to the 
 extreme boundary of Galilee, even, perhaps, across 
 it into heathen Thenicia, there can be no serious 
 doubt ; nor can there be any that the synagogues 
 were his favorite places of public utterance, nor that 
 in them, at first, his word was frequently welcomed 
 and approved. Further on, as his opposition to 
 the ecclesiastical powers became more pronounced, 
 the synagogues were superseded by other places, 
 such as convenience might offer. And quite from 
 the beginning the synagogue was not his only place 
 of teaching. Hillside and plain he made his van- 
 tage-grounds ; they lent him birds and flowers to 
 illustrate his words ; the fisherman's boat became 
 his pulpit ; and as he walked from one village to 
 another he talked with his disciples, or as he re- 
 clined with them at table after the fatigues of the 
 day. Then the stream of his discourse was never 
 dry. It was an easy, careless, joyous life he led, 
 — that of the initial weeks and months of his min- 
 istry. His heart was overflowing with the sense of 
 the eternal goodness and the nearness of the Day 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 129 
 
 of the Lord. Men and women gave him freely 
 of their hearts' best love, and his little world of 
 pure affection and of kindly service seemed to him 
 a pledge and illustration of the universal rejuve- 
 nation, whose prophecy was in his heart. If we 
 can trust the record at this point, — and it is as 
 trustworthy here as anywhere, — the faith of Jesus 
 in the Fatherly Providence was so complete that 
 he dissuaded men from all anxiety in regard to what 
 they should eat or drink or wear. The nature of 
 his perspective, however, must be taken into . the 
 account. The kingdom of heaven was at hand, 
 and a prominent feature of this kingdom was the 
 uncoaxed abundance of the earth. Jesus was not a 
 political economist. He was not a captain of labor. 
 The dignity of labor, the morality of industrial 
 enterprise, — these things had no place in his con- 
 ception of the world. The poor attracted him much 
 more than the rich ; their vices seemed to him less 
 dangerous. Injustice, cruelty, and oppression were 
 more hateful to him than vices of passion and im- 
 providence. A lover of little children and the 
 home, with an immense capacity for loving and for 
 being loved, he nevertheless advised a celibate life 
 for those whose passions could endure so much re- 
 straint, — this, too, I am obliged to think, in view 
 of the impending catastrophe which tvas to entirely 
 revolutionize the existing order of society. 
 
 The fallacy of his industrial ideas was obscured 
 9 
 
130 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 for Jesus, it would seem, by the ability and gener- 
 osity of his earliest disciples. Two pairs of fish- 
 ermen-brothers, Peter and Andrew, James and 
 John, appear to have been well-to-do persons, and 
 to have devoted themselves entirely to him. Of 
 these four disciples, Peter and James and John 
 seem to have been the most confidential friends of 
 Jesus, and in this order, the representation of 
 John as " the beloved disciple " being entirely 
 absent from the Synoptics. Of "The Twelve" 
 whom he selected as his habitual companions, these 
 are in the foreground always. Of the others, except 
 Judas of Kerioth, little is said or known. The 
 apostle Matthew is identified with Matthew, the 
 publican-disciple in the First Gospel, who is called 
 Levi in Mark and Luke, where there is not a hint 
 that he was the same as Matthew. If he was not, 
 then many a shrewd discovery of the publican 
 character in the First Gospel must go the way of 
 others of its kind, equally shrewd and wholly 
 fanciful. 
 
 Criticism has sometimes gone so far as to deny 
 that the twelve were ever called apostles in the 
 lifetime of Jesus, or that he ever sent them forth ; 
 but for the second of these statements there is suffi- 
 cient proof. Luke represents him as sending out 
 seventy after the twelve. The dogmatic animus 
 is here apparent. As the twelve stand for the 
 twelve tribes of Israel, so the seventy stand for the 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 131 
 
 seventy nations of the world, as counted or imag- 
 ined at that time. Luke, as the less Jewish Gos- 
 pel, is not satisfied with a Jewish apostolate. The 
 seventy are a dogmatic invention. Even the send- 
 ing out of the twelve would seem to have been an 
 experiment which a few weeks', or even a few 
 days' trial proved to be hopeless. With the excep- 
 tion of this brief period of absence, the twelve 
 were the companions of Jesus upon his journeys. 
 There is abundant evidence that they entered very 
 imperfectly into his thought. Their conception of 
 the kingdom of heaven was material and gross. 
 They disputed among themselves who should have 
 precedence in its princely arrangements. Nothing 
 would satisfy the mother of James and John but 
 that her sons should sit one on the right hand and 
 the other on the left of the Messiah in his king- 
 dom. This mention of Salome reminds us that 
 several women, of whom she was one, accompanied 
 Jesus and the twelve wherever they went. Mary of 
 Magdala, and another Mary, occupied the foremost 
 place in his regard. The devotion of these women 
 to the fortunes of Jesus was without any senti- 
 mental implication. Eenan has broached a different 
 opinion ; but always in Judea the religious teacher 
 that demanded the most renunciation attracted 
 women to his side. So the Pharisees had many 
 devotees among the women. It was natural that 
 Jesus should enjoy the same distinction. 
 
132 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 The insatiable curiosity of the Galileans, and 
 their easy hospitality, came to the aid of Jesus and 
 his little company of travelling companions. Lodg- 
 ing and sustenance were gladly furnished them in 
 almost every town and village of their missionary 
 field. In course of time this included Nazareth, 
 the birthplace of Jesus, where he had lived for 
 many years ; but men and women who had known 
 him, from his childhood up, were slow to recognize 
 the prophet of the kingdom, much less the Mes- 
 siah, in one who had mended their cradles for them, 
 and built their cribs and stalls. His mother and 
 his brothers were as slow as any of the rest to take 
 him at his own valuation, if indeed they did not 
 lead the opposition to his claims. They even fol- 
 lowed him to Capernaum, and endeavored to dis- 
 suade him from the task he had assumed. I need 
 not say how ill these facts accord with any fancy 
 of his miraculous birth. We do not entertain the 
 possibility of any such occurrence. 
 
 The sum of Jesus' teaching during the Galilean 
 period was exhausted by his endeavors to set forth 
 the manner of life which men should lead who 
 expected to be citizens of the kingdom of heaven. 
 In form, his teaching was not strikingly original. 
 Aphorism and paradox were favorite methods with 
 the rabbinism of the time, and the parable was not 
 so entirely strange to it as Eenan has affirmed. To 
 the paradox, Jesus was extremely partial. Some of 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 133 
 
 his weightiest utterances are cast in this mould, — 
 the assertion as a fact, of that which seems a con- 
 tradiction, as : " To him that hath shall be given, 
 and from him that hath not shall be taken away 
 even that which he hath ; " " B[e that saveth his 
 life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life shall 
 save it." He was fond, too, of convicting men out 
 of their own mouths ; of asking them questions of 
 which the inevitable answer was the confirmation 
 of his principles. Thomas Fuller says of the good 
 woman, "She makes plain cloth to be velvet by 
 her handsome wearing of it ; " so Jesus made the 
 parable, which up to his time had been only mod- 
 erately efficient, an instrument, a weapon with 
 which he accomplished wonders. His parables 
 must ever seem to us the most characteristic part 
 of his teaching. Their charm is largely in their 
 homeliness. They are the utterances of a man who 
 could not be indifferent to any aspect of the busy 
 life that was going on about him, even though he 
 believed that a new order was impending. We 
 must be on our guard against the illusive notion 
 that the aphorisms and parables of Jesus were 
 poured forth in any such numbers at a time as the 
 Gospels, especially the first, would indicate. The 
 method of the First Gospel, as I have said, is to 
 mass things of like character, — parables, sentences, 
 miracles, and so on. What is most likely is that 
 the parables were delivered one at a time, and the 
 
134 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 sentences in no such torrent as the " Sermon on the 
 Mount," which is evidently made up of all the 
 richest sentences of Jesus during the Galilean pe- 
 riod. As. to the substance of these teachings, as 
 well as to their ^>rm, we must take warning. The 
 Gospels assumed their present form throughout a 
 period when various controversies were agitating 
 the bosom of the infant church. These controver- 
 sies have left their mark upon the Gospels. Es- 
 pecially the Judaizing tendency of the infant 
 church has done so. To take a single example: 
 the man thrust out because he had not worn a 
 wedding garment. The wedding garment here is 
 evidently the ceremonial righteousness without 
 which, in opposition to Paul, the Jewish Chris- 
 tians insisted that no heathen could come in. This 
 is but one instance, out of a score that might be 
 easily named, where certainly the words attributed 
 to Jesus never came from him. 
 
 Seeking to penetrate to what was most essential 
 in the teachings of Jesus and in his general atti- 
 tude, we shall do best to consider separately his 
 relations to the different parties and divisions that 
 made up his political and social and religious 
 world. Beginning at the periphery, the heathen 
 world first offers itself for our consideration. It is 
 not to be doubted that Jesus felt the sense of out- 
 rage common to all his people, in view of the op- 
 pressive tyranny of Borne; but he was with the 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 135 
 
 Pharisees against the Zealots in his conviction that 
 this tyranny must wait for God to give the sign of 
 its abolishment. The Zealots, the patriots of the 
 patriots, wished to hasten somewhat the steps of 
 the Almighty by an energetic resistance of their 
 own. The Pharisees urged that with the advent 
 of the Messiah, or the Messianic kingdom, the 
 Eoman power would shrivel into naught. This 
 was the idea of Jesus. The insurrection of Judas 
 the Gaulonite was fresh in his memory. He had 
 no inclination to follow in his steps. Between him 
 and the Zealots, then, there could have been little 
 sympathy. Simon the Zealot was one of the 
 twelve, but his conquests in this direction must 
 have been few. 
 
 But while in this particular Jesus was in agree- 
 ment with the Pharisees, his general attitude to 
 the heathen world was entirely foreign to their 
 principles. The structure of the Galilean world 
 assisted him to wider sympathies than were cur- 
 rent in Jerusalem. Galilee, or the northern part 
 of it, was called contemptuously by the Judeans 
 " Galilee of the Gentiles." In Capernaum and 
 elsewhere Jesus must frequently have come in 
 contact with a heathen population, and, as a man 
 looking through his own eyes, he must have found 
 the heathen frequently in more perfect accord with 
 his moral ideal than the self-righteous Pharisees. 
 Nevertheless, the attitude of Jesus, with reference 
 
136 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 to both heathens and Samaritans, is one of the 
 most perplexing problems of New Testament crit- 
 icism. The sayings, on this head, attributed to him 
 abound in contradictions. The net result, when 
 we have made allowance for the distortion of the 
 Petro-Pauline controversy, and for a natural de- 
 velopment of thought, is that, as time went on, 
 Jesus grew more and more sympathetic towards 
 the heathen and Samaritans, and finally imagined 
 that the former would enjoy the benefits of the 
 approaching kingdom to a fuller extent than his 
 own countrymen. 
 
 The relation of Jesus to "the unchurched," as 
 we might call them, of his day, the common peo- 
 ple, the outcasts of the temple and the synagogue, 
 is central to his character and his career. It is the 
 key of his position. These were " the lost sheep of 
 the house of Israel." The Pharisees did not con- 
 sider them worth seeking or saving. They dreaded 
 contact with them as a stain upon their ceremonial 
 cleanness. Now it was to this class that Jesus ad- 
 dressed himself with special earnestness ; and his 
 opposition to the Pharisees culminated in the most 
 damaging assertion that his lips could frame or his 
 imagination could conceive, when he hurled this 
 saying in their teeth : " The publicans and harlots 
 shall go into the kingdom of heaven before you." 
 This joining together of the terms " publicans" and 
 " harlots " indicates that the two classes were gen- 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 137 
 
 erally regarded as the lowest in the community, 
 and, by consequence, that they had an attraction 
 for each other. The relations of Jesus with these 
 classes indicate the extent of his rebellion against 
 the orthodoxy of his time. The publicans were 
 equally despised and hated by both Zealots and 
 Pharisees. Even their money was not good for 
 charity, — a point to which our modern orthodoxy 
 has not yet attained. But Jesus mingled freely 
 with this class, found disciples if not an apostle 
 among them, and upbraided the Pharisees for not 
 following their example in seeking the baptism of 
 John. 
 
 The relation of Jesus to the Pharisaic party has 
 been incidentally set forth already in declaring his 
 relation to the Zealots, to the heathen, and Sama- 
 ritans, and finally to the pariahs of the community; 
 but this relation must be more carefully developed. 
 There can be no doubt that an idea of the Phari- 
 sees derived from the New Testament alone would 
 be exceedingly unjust. There were Pharisees and 
 Pharisees. The self-righteousness of some was re- 
 buked by others of their class. The maxims of 
 Jesus, which score their faults most deeply, can be 
 paralleled by maxims of their own. So, too, can 
 many of his higher maxims of sincerity and the 
 religion of the heart. And Jesus was not unaware 
 of this. The end of his work has obscured for us 
 the beginning, but, taking the record as it stands, 
 
138 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 it is evident that his distrust of the Pharisees was 
 a thing of gradual development. At first he min- 
 gled with them freely, and expected them to give 
 him sympathy and aid. His disciples must have 
 been recruited to a considerable extent from their 
 ranks. He distinguished them as " the righteous " 
 from " the sinners " for whom he had compassion. 
 Even his words, " Unless your righteousness exceed 
 that of the scribes and Pharisees ye shall in no 
 wise enter the kingdom," imply that their right- 
 eousness was indisputable and the best then current. 
 In what respect did he regard their righteousness 
 as defective ? In this : that it was too exclusively 
 a matter of outward forms and ceremonies, too little 
 a matter of the heart. This was what Matthew 
 Arnold calls " the secret of Jesus," — his perception 
 that it is character which gives to conduct its abid- 
 ing grace and glory. Individual Pharisees had 
 seen so much. Their maxims, those of Hillel and 
 others, had perhaps reached the ear of Jesus ; but his 
 concern was with the average Pharisaism of his time, 
 and this was wholly engrossed with ceremonial 
 considerations ; not only with conduct rather than 
 with character, but with ceremonial rather than 
 with social conduct. Men excused themselves 
 from supporting their aged parents on the plea 
 that their money was pledged to the treasury of 
 the temple. The central idea of Jesus was that, 
 while social was more important than ceremonial 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 139 
 
 conduct, the most important thing of all was the 
 inward disposition. To be free of murderous and 
 licentious acts was not enough. One must be free 
 from cruel thoughts and from impure desires. 
 Here bursts the thought of Jesus into its perfect 
 flower. 
 
 With such an estimate of the relative values of 
 ceremonial and inward purity, it was inevitable 
 that Jesus should grow more and more indifferent 
 to those things which in the view of the Pharisees 
 were of the first importance. At first, we may con- 
 ceive, he was disposed to let the ceremonial right- 
 eousness remain intact, and try to infuse into it a 
 principle of inward life. His sayings, on this head, 
 have certainly been garbled by the Judaizing Chris- 
 tians of a later time, but so much is still apparent. 
 It was, however, impossible for him to maintain 
 this attitude for any length of time. Ceremonial 
 piety endures "no brother near the throne," and 
 much less a subordinate position ; but, with Phari- 
 saic insistence on the importance of Levitical purity 
 and Sabbatical observance, Jesus grew more con- 
 temptuous of these things, and more antagonistic 
 in his sentiments. If he did not make occasions 
 for offence, he neglected none that offered. He 
 neglected the Levitical washings, and did not exact 
 them of his disciples. He caressed with loving 
 hands the outcasts of the temple and the synagogue. 
 He sat at meat with publicans. He allowed " a 
 
140 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 woman that was a sinner" to bathe his feet and 
 wipe them with her hair. He went through the 
 cornfields on the Sabbath with his disciples, and 
 bade them pluck the corn and eat it. " Eat that 
 which is set before you," he said to his disciples, 
 with shocking disregard of any consideration of 
 Levitical cleanness ; and again he said, in funda- 
 mental hostility to the Pharisaic casuistry, "Not 
 that which goeth into a man defileth him ; " a 
 splendidly audacious saying in its day, which was 
 not literally true, and is not so in ours. 
 
 The genius of Jesus was not intellectual but 
 moral. He did not speculate. He was no theolo- 
 gian. The Church has its " Apostles' Creed." It 
 has never pretended to have a creed of Jesus. Not 
 one of the arid propositions of its various creeds 
 can claim his sanction. He never uttered anything 
 that can be called a theological proposition. Never- 
 theless, a certain theology is implied in his teach- 
 ings ; and this was the theology of his time, above 
 the limitations of which his intellectual concep- 
 tions never rose. Indeed, upon the side of science 
 there was something possible, even at that time in 
 the world, to which he did not attain. He made 
 the superstitions of his time the vehicles of his 
 moral earnestness. He believed in angels and dev- 
 ils, in a prince of devils, in demoniacal possession, 
 in the resurrection of the body, in a material Ge- 
 henna, in special providence, and so on. Some of 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 141 
 
 these beliefs were sources of strength to him, while 
 others were sources of weakness. Especially was 
 his belief in a hierarchy of devils greatly to his 
 advantage. It enabled him to cope with the phe- 
 nomena of nervous disease, called demoniacal pos- 
 session, as he could not otherwise have done. For 
 the success of his exorcism, it was necessary for 
 him to believe in the reality of the possession, and 
 in himself as the herald or Messiah of a kingdom 
 diametrically opposed to that of Satan. In all his 
 dealings with the so-called demoniacs we see him 
 consciously measuring his power with Satan, as 
 Ormuzd against Ahriman in the Persian theology. 
 Such dealings, therefore, had for him a religious 
 significance; but he did well to recognize that 
 the faith of the sufferer was the efficient cause of 
 his recovery, — faith in his power over the world 
 of devils ; for " it was the superstition itself which 
 formed the generative cause of the disease," so that 
 with the conviction that the power of Jesus was 
 superior to that of Satan, the disease was immedi- 
 ately abated, if not cured. But what convinced 
 the demoniacs of the superiority of Jesus was the 
 strength of his own personal conviction. His voice 
 and manner were their surety for this. 
 
 The instances of successful dealing with the de- 
 moniacs were certainly not numerous, but they 
 were multiplied and magnified by the popular 
 imagination and report ; they changed, upon their 
 
142 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 travels, into cures of lepers and the dumb and 
 blind, and, thus exaggerated, served, in no small 
 degree, to increase the popular interest in Jesus, 
 and to swell the crowd of his disciples. In the 
 autumn months of A. D. 34, we may conceive of 
 Jesus as being widely famed, though not so widely 
 known, in Galilee ; as attracting wherever he went 
 an eager concourse of people; as being almost 
 worshipped by an inner circle of believers ; as at- 
 tracting to himself many of the more spiritual 
 scribes and Pharisees, and especially as endearing 
 himself, in an unprecedented manner, to the most 
 despised and miserable in the community. Never 
 had the kingdom of heaven seemed so near to any 
 of its prophets as then it seemed to him. His 
 spiritual eye " saw Satan, like lightning, fall from 
 heaven," — the power of evil suddenly and irrecov- 
 erably beaten down and utterly destroyed. The 
 idyl of Galilee culminated in this ecstasy of eager 
 hope and joyful expectation. Of course he was 
 mistaken in his calculations, and was doomed to 
 disappointment ; but the mistake of believing too 
 much in man, and too much in the power of one's 
 own consecration, is a sublime mistake. If only 
 enough could be induced to make it (to be as para- 
 doxical as Jesus), it would be a mistake no longer, 
 but God's kingdom would come and his will would 
 be done upon the earth as in the heaven of the 
 ideal. 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 143 
 
 It was not long before the necessities of Jesus' sit- 
 uation brought him to the beginning of the end. His 
 heedlessness of ceremonial purity, his subordina- 
 tion of Sabbatical observance to the claims of com- 
 mon-sense morality and kindliness, his association 
 with the outcasts of the synagogue and temple, — 
 these things, and such as these, brought him into 
 ever sharper contrast with the Pharisaic party, 
 whose hot protagonists began to dog his steps and 
 seek to involve him in controversies which they 
 knew would damage him with the ecclesiastical 
 authorities. Their pertinacity sharpened the edge 
 of his invective. The more they menaced him, the 
 more defiantly he answered them. But there were 
 times when he was weary of the controversy, now 
 each day renewed, and again and again he took 
 himself off into some quiet place, where he could 
 be alone with his disciples, and meditate upon his 
 future course. News came to him that John the 
 Baptist had been put to death in prison, and the 
 fate of his great teacher seemed almost a premoni- 
 tion of his own. Was ever such an azure heaven 
 overspread so soon with dark and threatening 
 -clouds ? News came to him that Herod Antipas 
 was intending to follow up the destruction of John 
 the Baptist with his own. The lips that uttered the 
 beatitudes had learned to enunciate a different lan- 
 guage. "Go tell that fox," he said, "that I have 
 yet some time to stay in Galilee before I go up to 
 
144 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 Jerusalem." Already, then, the consciousness that 
 he must go up there and face the hierarchy in the 
 stronghold of its bigotry and zeal had dawned upon 
 his mind. His fame had already gone so far. The 
 more the pity ! For back over the course which it 
 had travelled came certain Pharisees from Jerusa- 
 lem, apparently sent out to spy into his teachings 
 and entrap him into dangerous admissions. They 
 succeeded perfectly. From henceforth it was war 
 to the knife. As if to gather up his energies for 
 the encounter, Jesus betook himself beyond the 
 borders of Galilee, into the vicinity of Tyre and 
 Sidon. Eeturning to the lake-shore, he found his 
 enemies awaiting him with a new stratagem. They 
 wanted a sign from heaven. Was not their want- 
 ing it itself a sign that his cures of the possessed 
 were too near akin to the cures of their own exor- 
 cists to pass with them for genuine miracles ? But 
 these were all he had to offer; and he did not 
 offer these. If miracle had played the part in the 
 economy of Jesus which modern orthodoxy claims, 
 there would have been no excuse for his not per- 
 forming such a miracle as would have silenced 
 every demur at his prophetic office. What he did 
 was to blast the Pharisees, and, with them, the ped- 
 lers in Christian evidences from that day to this, 
 with the assertion, " A wicked and adulterous gen- 
 eration seeketh after a sign, but there shall no sign 
 be mven them." 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 145 
 
 Once more he drew apart into a region remote 
 from the scenes of his ordinary activity. His jour- 
 ney brought him into the neighborhood of Caesarea- 
 Philippi, the handsome city which Philip Antipas 
 had built as a compliment to the Eoman emperor. 
 It was a purely pagan city in its architecture and 
 the manner of its life; but though Jesus had 
 wandered among its theatres and palaces he would 
 have had no eyes to see the glittering spectacle. 
 His eyes were turned inward upon his heart ; and 
 what he read there was that he was the Messiah, and 
 that as the Messiah he must go up to Jerusalem. 
 
 The struggle and the disappointment had not 
 had the effect which would have followed on them 
 in a less exalted mind. Instead of convincing Je- 
 sus that he was something less than the herald of 
 the kingdom, they had convinced him that he was 
 something more, and that he must assume the role 
 which had been assigned to him by his self-con- 
 sciousness. He could not help admitting that his 
 Galilean ministry had ended in something which 
 was more like failure than success. Its joyous in- 
 itiative had not been followed up by a succession of 
 victories. Had he then dared too much ? Nay, 
 not enough. Now he would dare all. He had too 
 long denied the pleading of his heart. Why had 
 he not believed that still small voice which had so 
 often told him that he was the Christ ? For it is 
 not conceivable that his Messianic seif-conscious- 
 
 10 
 
146 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 ness was any sudden apparition. Very gradually 
 it must have dawned upon his mind. He called 
 his disciples about him and asked them, " Whom 
 do men say that I am ? " They told him, Some said 
 this, and some said that. " But whom do you say 
 that I am?" he questioned eagerly. " Thou art 
 the Messiah," said Peter. " Blessed art thou, Si- 
 mon," he exclaimed, " for flesh and blood have not 
 revealed it unto thee, but my Father who is in 
 heaven;" but even then he charged his disciples 
 that for the present they should tell no man that 
 he was the Messiah. 
 
 It was inevitable that Jesus should soon or late 
 arrive at this conviction. Accepting the idea of 
 a personal Messiah as the inaugurator of the king- 
 dom of heaven, his sense of the nearness of that 
 kingdom, and the complete coincidence of his own 
 spiritual ideal with his ideal conception of the 
 Messiah, compelled him to identify himself with 
 him. A book has recently been written on the 
 Manliness of Jesus. This was its supreme ex- 
 ample : to measure his qualification for the Mes- 
 sianic office not by the standards of Zealots or 
 Herodians, Pharisees or Sadducees, but by his own 
 personal ideal. 
 
 For it was not as if the assumption of the Mes- 
 sianic office portended to his fancy any pleasurable 
 experience, any victorious career, any magnificent 
 sway. It was a Messiah who should " suffer many 
 
JESUS AS PROPHET. 147 
 
 things " that he conceived himself to be. Simul- 
 taneously with the conviction that he was the 
 Messiah, was borne in upon him the conviction 
 that he must go up to Jerusalem, not to triumph, 
 but — to die. It was with this understanding that 
 he accepted at once his office and his doom ; but 
 to measure the heroism implied in such an act, we 
 must clear our minds of every least survival of the 
 superstition that Jesus was anything more or less 
 than a purely human person. We have recently 
 been told that to appreciate the sufferings of Jesus 
 we must apprehend him as a suffering God, What 
 an absurdity is this ! Who could not suffer any- 
 thing with the resources of an infinite nature to 
 fall back upon ? The glory of Jesus is that as a 
 man, and so considering himself — for being the 
 Messiah did not unman him — he went to meet 
 a miserable doom with an unquestioning submis- 
 sion to the logic of events. 
 
 When a gulf opened in the heart of Eome, so 
 runs the tale, the oracle declared that the most 
 precious thing in Eome must be thrown into it ere 
 it would close ; and men brought their gold, and 
 women their jewels, and threw them into the gulf, 
 and still it did not close. Then came a young man 
 and leaped into the chasm, and it closed and opened 
 not again. His perfect manhood was the most 
 precious thing in Eome. 
 
 Into the gulf which yawned in the heart of his 
 
148 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 nation, between the actual and the ideal, Jesus of 
 Nazareth threw himself with noble scorn of death. 
 His manhood was the most precious thing in Pal- 
 estine. And if the chasm did not close above him, 
 if the ideal still shamed the actual, and does unto 
 this day, his courage was not less than if the edges 
 of the gulf had kissed above his grave, nor any less 
 should be our gratefulness. 
 
 
V. 
 
 JESUS AS MESSIAH. 
 
" The first tiling we have to do, then, is to take the record 
 of the facts, if we can, absolutely without the warp of any 
 preconceived opinion, or any theological dogmatism. Look- 
 ing at them so, it appears plain that what we call the Mes- 
 sianic consciousness of Jesus, which is so intense and even 
 predominant towards the close of his ministry, was a com- 
 paratively late development in him. To put it in theologi- 
 cal phrase, his generation as son of God was anterior to 
 his appointment as Messiah of the Jews. In the language 
 we usually apply to human experience, his vocation as a 
 moral and spiritual teacher was recognized first ; and only 
 as an after-result came his strong conviction that he was the 
 chosen deliverer of his people, though by a way they could 
 not understand or follow." 
 
 Joseph Henry Allen. 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 
 
 I HAVE said that simultaneously with his ar- 
 rival at the conviction that he was himself the 
 Messiah, Jesus arrived at the conviction that he 
 must " suffer many things," and die a miserable 
 death in furtherance of his Messianic mission. 
 We may be very sure, however, that as his antici- 
 pations and predictions of his impending fate 
 stand written in the New Testament, they enter 
 into particulars much more than he did ; they 
 foreshadow the actual course of events to an ex- 
 tent which must have been for him impossible. 
 It was inevitable that the events and the ideas of 
 a period subsequent to the life of Jesu's, during 
 which the New Testament writings were gradually 
 assuming their present form, should leave their 
 impress upon the traditions of his speech and ac- 
 tion. One result of this reflex influence is that 
 even in the Synoptic Gospels, as they stand, the 
 anticipations of a tragical conclusion of his min- 
 istry are put into the mouth of Jesus much too 
 
152 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 soon. In John we meet them on the very thresh- 
 old of the narration. Another result of this reflex 
 influence is that the resurrection of Jesus is made 
 a part of his anticipation of coming events. Those 
 who accept his resurrection as a fact will find no 
 difficulty in believing that he frequently spoke of 
 it as a coming event. A coming event of such 
 stupendous magnitude might well have cast its 
 shadow before ; but, for those of us who do not 
 accept the resurrection of Jesus as a fact, the nu- 
 merous allusions to it attributed to him by the 
 Synoptists are still easily explicable on the ground 
 that the belief in Jesus' resurrection was an un- 
 doubted fact during the tradition-forming and gos- 
 pel-making period, and that this belief must have 
 been ascribed to Jesus ; his knowledge of it must 
 have been assumed, and the most innocent sayings 
 on his part must have been unwittingly distorted 
 into the service of his assumed prevision. Thus, 
 for example, "the sign of the prophet Jonah," 
 which Jesus insists is the only sign that he will 
 give, is made by the Synoptist to mean that Jo- 
 nah's concealment for three days in the whale's 
 belly was a sign of Jesus' three days' concealment 
 in the grave. In fact, as the connection plainly 
 shows, " the sign of the prophet Jonah," as Jesus 
 understood it, was merely his preaching to the Gen- 
 tiles, which Jesus regarded as a sign or omen of 
 his own resort to such a line of action. As here, 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 153 
 
 so elsewhere, and in many instances, the belief of 
 after-times distorted the meaning of Jesus, and 
 even made him the mouth-piece of words which 
 he could not have uttered. It is still possible, 
 however, that Jesus anticipated some of the par : 
 ticulars of his death, such as his condemnation by 
 the Sanhedrin, and his crucifixion by the Soman 
 government, seeing that this was the natural order 
 of events. Tailing foul of the ecclesiastical pow 7 ers 
 of Jerusalem, he knew the doctors of the Sanhe- 
 drin would be his judges. He knew they would 
 condemn him, and that if they could carry out 
 their own sentence he would be stoned to death ; 
 but the Sanhedrin could not execute its own sen- 
 tence under the Eoman rule. This had its own 
 favorite form of punishment. It was crucifixion. 
 That Jesus should have known so much is not im- 
 possible, scarcely improbable, and so he may have 
 spoken of his condemnation by the Sanhedrin, and 
 of his death upon the cross. 
 
 That Jesus should come at length, to think of 
 himself as the Messiah was not so strange as the 
 simultaneous conclusion that he must be a suf- 
 fering Messiah, for the Messianic idea was so 
 omnipresent to the Jewish mind that for a man 
 conscious of a great mission not to connect his 
 mission in some way with that idea, was quite im- 
 possible. It was the grandeur of his spiritual ideal 
 that compelled Jesus to identify his mission with 
 
154 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 the Messianic office. He remained the herald 
 of the kingdom so long as he could consistently 
 do so. The Messiah must be the incarnation 
 of the highest possible ideal. To himself Jesus 
 was this. This wonderful self-confidence on the 
 part of Jesus did not necessitate self-righteousness, 
 only an absolute devotion to the moral welfare of 
 mankind, — only an absolute conviction that right- 
 eousness and love were fundamental facts in the 
 new order. It was as representative of these that 
 he demanded personal allegiance ; but the conclu- 
 sion that, as the Messiah, he must " suffer many 
 things," — this was so foreign to all ordinary con- 
 ceptions of the Messiah current in his time, that 
 its adoption by the self-consciousness of Jesus is, 
 at first glance, a great enigma. The ordinary con- 
 ception of the Messiah in the time of Jesus was 
 as a powerful and triumphant king, who should 
 subdue the oppressors of the Jewish people, and 
 conquer for himself a universal dominion. If such 
 a vision of his personal future ever beguiled the 
 heart of Jesus, we may be sure that it was -not for 
 long. But associated with the kingly idea of the 
 Messiah was the prophetic. Here was the point 
 at which the personal ideal of Jesus married with 
 the popular conception, and begot his personal 
 consciousness of himself as the Messiah. Now, in 
 the second part of Isaiah (chapters xl. to lxvi.), 
 which we know to have been written by some 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 155 
 
 prophet of the captivity, about 536 b. c., but which 
 Jesus, like all his contemporaries, ascribed to the 
 true Isaiah of the eighth' century, — in this won- 
 derful fragment, the cap-sheaf of Old Testament 
 prophecy, there figures prominently "the servant 
 of God," who is represented as a teacher or prophet ; 
 thus : a Behold my servant, whom I uphold ; mine 
 elect, in whom my soul delighteth. I have put my 
 Spirit upon him : he shall, declare judgment to the 
 Gentiles. He shall not strive nor cry. He shall 
 declare judgment with truth. He shall not fail 
 nor be discouraged till he set judgment in the 
 earth : far lands wait for his law." We may be 
 sure, I think, that so far as the Messianic self-con- 
 sciousness of Jesus nourished itself upon Scriptural 
 food, it found it in these and other similar passages 
 of the Deutero-Isaiah. Jesus was here less critical 
 than the rabbis of his time, for they understood 
 the " servant of God " in these passages to mean 
 the Jewish people, or the body of faithful Jews, and 
 modern criticism has almost unanimously corrobo- 
 rated their opinion. Now, in the fifty-third chap- 
 ter of this same fragment, the Servant of Jehovah 
 i& represented as debased and suffering, while at 
 the same time his ultimate triumph is portended. 
 " He was despised and rejected of men, a man of 
 sorrows, and acquainted with grief." In the ora- 
 torio of "The Messiah," the tenderest passage in the 
 music is that which corresponds to these words. 
 
156 THE 'MAN JESUS. 
 
 This is as it should be, for we may well believe 
 that no other passage in the Old Testament was so 
 central to the thought of Jesus. I do not mean 
 that his anticipation of a catastrophic ending to 
 his ministry was entirely derived from this text 
 and its context. His observation of the spirit of 
 the Pharisees, as he saw them in Galilee, led him 
 to expect the worst when he should meet them in 
 Jerusalem, as he meant to meet them, with a ges- 
 ture of defiance ; but what was predicated in the 
 fifty-third chapter of Isaiah of the Servant of Je- 
 hovah, tallied almost exactly with his natural 
 anticipation. " Surely," the prophet says, "he hath 
 borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows ; yet we 
 did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and af- 
 flicted. He was wounded for our transgressions, 
 he was bruised for our iniquities. He was taken 
 from prison and from judgment: and who of his 
 generation regarded it, why he was cut off out of 
 the land of the living ? and he made his grave 
 with the wicked, and with sinners in his death ; 
 although he had done no violence, neither was any 
 deceit in his mouth, yet it pleased the Lord to 
 bruise him; he hath put him to grief." The con- 
 temporaries of Jesus did not apply these words 
 to the Messiah, but Jesus did, and therefore to 
 himself. Even before the announcement of his 
 Messiahship at Csesarea-Philippi, he must often 
 have brooded over them. The future which they 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 157 
 
 pictured for him was very different from that which 
 his own hopeful and loving heart had pictured at 
 the beginning of his ministry only ten months ago ; 
 but there had been no break in the development 
 of his ideas. Now the conviction of impending- 
 shame and death would haunt him more and more. 
 Meantime the idea of a suffering Messiah would 
 shock the Zealots and the Pharisees, and excite 
 their animosity. Nor was it strange that it should 
 do so. For one man to set up his idea of the Mes- 
 siah in opposition to the entire community, an idea 
 diametrically opposed to the popular idea, was cer- 
 tainly audacious, and could hardly meet with any- 
 thing but fierce resentment. 
 
 The Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus was 
 not exhausted by the elements which we have now 
 considered. It was quite as impossible for him to 
 conceive of suffering and death as the final out- 
 come of his Messiahship as for the people generally 
 to accept this consummation. Suffering and death 
 there might be, there must be ; but, if he was truly 
 the Messiah, beyond the suffering and death there 
 must be victorious compensation ; and hence arose 
 in the mind of Jesus, and grew at length into im- 
 mense and overshadowing — nay, all-illuminating — 
 bulk, the idea that after his death he would return 
 to earth again to establish the Messianic kingdom 
 of peace and righteousness. This idea did not cor- 
 respond to his immediate resurrection as afterward 
 
158 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 conceived by the primitive Christians. It corre- 
 sponded with the second coming, which after his 
 (imagined) resurrection filled with a vague unrest 
 the bosom of the Christian community. He had 
 said that this second coming would take place 
 within the lifetime of his disciples, but their suc- 
 cessors went on hoping against hope for many gen- 
 erations. Does the fact that Jesus cherished such 
 a hope seem to you an impeachment of the sound- 
 ness of his mind ? Does it seem to remand him at 
 once and forever to the order of fanatics ? These 
 derogatory conclusions are forbidden by the cir- 
 cumstances of the case. The expectation which 
 he cherished of his second coming was not some- 
 thing entirely peculiar to himself. A constituent 
 part of the popular Messianic conception was that 
 the faithful dead would reappear at the inaugura- 
 tion of the Messianic kingdom. Believing this, 
 Jesus could not believe that he, the Messiah, 
 would not share in this general reappearance. It 
 was not his difference from others but his con- 
 scious likeness to them that made such a belief 
 inevitable. He did not anticipate a future special 
 to himself, but a fortune common to many. The 
 clew to his mental process here is given in that 
 saying of Paul, " If we rise not, then is Christ not 
 risen." His resurrection .was implied in the gen- 
 eral resurrection of the faithful dead. No special 
 exaltation, therefore, was implied in his idea of his 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 159 
 
 second coming, but only his conformity in this 
 particular, as in many others, with the received 
 opinions of his time. 
 
 Not only did the average opinion that the Mes- 
 siah must finally triumph, impose itself on the 
 mind of Jesus, and the average opinion that the 
 faithful dead would reappear, assist him to believe 
 in his own reappearance, but his favorite passages 
 of ancient prophecy came to his aid and enabled 
 him to reconcile his conception of a suffering Mes- 
 siah with the idea of his final triumph; for in 
 these passages the suffering Servant of Jehovah 
 was represented as being finally victorious ; thus : 
 " Behold my servant shall prosper ; he shall be ex- 
 alted and extolled and be very high. As many 
 were astonished at him, so many nations shall 
 exalt him. Kings shall shut their mouths before 
 him. When he hath made his soul an offering for 
 sin, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of 
 the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see 
 of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied. I 
 will divide him a portion with the great, and he 
 shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he 
 has poured out his soul unto death; and he was 
 numbered with transgressors." It is in vain to sug- 
 gest that, critically considered, there are many points 
 in this delineation which do not correspond to the 
 character of Jesus or his fate. Jesus was not a 
 critic. Undoubtedly this delineation was intended 
 
160 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 for " the true Israel," or, if for some individual, one 
 whose experience had already made it good. Nev- 
 ertheless, to Jesus it was prophetic of his own 
 character, of his own career, ending apparently in 
 shame and ignominious death, but after death re- 
 sumed and going on to victory, and to a universal 
 empire over the conscience of mankind. 
 
 Does it take anything from the heroism of Jesus 
 to admit that, beyond the suffering and ignominy, 
 he saw the triumph of his cause ? I think not. 
 He knew that he must bear the suffering and ig- 
 nominy with only 'the resources of his mortal 
 nature to fall back upon. Doubtless it fortified 
 his will to think of the subsequent triumph, but 
 not more than it always fortifies the will of the 
 martyr to anticipate the triumph of his cause 
 after his death, and in part because of it. John 
 Brown was firm in his assurance that his death 
 would " pay " its cost. No doubt this high assur- 
 ance fortified his will, but that it took anything 
 from his heroism I have never for a moment 
 dreamed. 
 
 With what details Jesus imagined the sublime 
 catastrophe which would accompany his reappear- 
 ance after death, it is difficult to determine ; with 
 many less, quite certainly, than we should gather 
 from the predictions which are ascribed to him in 
 the New Testament. In Luke, especially, these 
 predictions are evidently colored by the facts of 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 161 
 
 which the writer was aware concerning the de- 
 struction of Jerusalem. In Matthew, we approach 
 more nearly to the original tradition ; but the 
 views of Jesus, on this head, must have been ex- 
 ceedingly indefinite. From Daniel, it is likely that 
 he borrowed the idea of a " coming in the clouds of 
 heaven." His favorite designation of himself as 
 "the Son of Man" made this almost inevitable, 
 once he had resolved to assume the role of the 
 Messiah, for the Son of Man in Daniel is spoken 
 of as coming in the clouds of heaven. Only this, 
 however, is certain: that the Messianic self-con- 
 sciousness of Jesus included the anticipation of 
 his return to the earth after his death, to establish 
 the kingdom of heaven. The criticism which en- 
 deavors to make it appear that the conceptions 
 ascribed to Jesus here are entirely the reflection 
 of the apostolic community is not thoroughly ra- 
 tional. It is necessary to ascribe these concep- 
 tions to Jesus, in order to account for the hold 
 they had upon the primitive Christian commu- 
 nity. 
 
 When Jesus resolved upon his Messianic charac- 
 ter at Caesarea-Philippi, the Galileans were already 
 making their preparations to go up to Jerusalem 
 to the great spring feast, — that of the Passover. 
 Jesus had little inclination to resume his Galilean 
 ministry. Better, he thought, to take an entirely 
 fresh field for the assertion of his Messianic dig- 
 
 11 
 
162 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 nity. Besides, the idea that the Messiah would 
 make his appearance in Jerusalem was too deeply 
 ingrained in the popular -mind not to affect the 
 mind of Jesus ; nor was a moral reason wanting 
 for his journey thither. Jerusalem was the strong- 
 hold of the pedantry and formalism which he had 
 come to regard as the principal obstacles in the 
 path of the Messiah. As the Messiah, he must 
 confront the ecclesiastical formalism of Jerusalem 
 on its own ground, assert his claim full in its face, 
 summon it to unconditional surrender, and then, if 
 need be, die, the more effectually to overwhelm it 
 with the condemnation that would be sure to follow 
 on his death. Once having resolved upon this 
 course, " how was he straitened " till he had started 
 on the way of its accomplishment. He allowed 
 himself brief parting-time in Galilee. If he in- 
 dulged his heart in any leave-taking with the family 
 at Nazareth, no record of it has been preserved. 
 It is only in the Fourth Gospel that his mother 
 appears in Jerusalem, and at the foot of his cross. 
 It is altogether improbable that she either went with 
 him or followed him, considering the silence of the 
 Synoptists. The " Stabat Mater " is still an ex- 
 cellent theme for the musician, but it is without 
 any historical foundation. Quis est homo, qui non 
 fieret ? In the absence of Mary there is more abun- 
 dant cause for tears. 
 
 It was late in February when Jesus announced 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 163 
 
 his Messiahship to his disciples in the north ; and 
 it was a month later, or a little more, when he 
 bade farewell forever to the towns and villages 
 where he had loved and been loved so much, and 
 to the beautiful sea whose waters had imaged for 
 him both the serenity and the agitation of his 
 spirit. He sailed them now for the last time, on 
 the first stage of his journey, landing on the south- 
 east coast and taking his way through the country 
 east of the Jordan. The more common route was 
 through Samaria. Jesus avoided this in order, we 
 may surmise, to be more alone with his disciples. 
 He found it very difficult to fascinate them with 
 his conception of the suffering Messiah. "Be it 
 far from thee," said Peter. In spite of his contin- 
 ual warnings they persisted in believing that, hav- 
 ing once declared himself in Jerusalem, victory 
 would come and perch upon his banner ; nor is it 
 by any means unlikely that the natural buoyancy 
 and hopefulness of his disposition asserted them- 
 selves at times, so as to overbear the rationalized 
 conviction of his mind. At such times his expec- 
 tations would assume a less sombre hue. Still, to 
 prepare the minds and hearts of his disciples for 
 the worst, must have been the most engrossing ob- 
 ject of his care during the journey through the 
 Persea. Crossing the Jordan in that vicinity 
 where only a year before he had received the bap- 
 tism of John, the recent fate of the Baptist must 
 
164 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 have been to him terribly suggestive of his own. 
 Nevertheless, he held upon his way. To this jour- 
 ney, and to the weeks immediately preceding and 
 following it, belongs all that is darkest, sternest, 
 fiercest, in the teachings of Jesus, — the lurid 
 visions of judgment, the hot denunciations of the 
 self-righteousness and hypocrisy of the scribes and 
 Pharisees; but to this journey also, and to him 
 in the fullest consciousness of his Messianic mis- 
 sion, as if to rebuke in advance any attempt to 
 deduce from this consciousness the negation of his 
 pure humanity, belongs the saying to " the rich 
 young man," who called him "Good Master;" 
 " Why callest thou me good ? There is one only 
 who is good, and that is God." 
 
 Many were the lessons of prudence and forbear- 
 ance that Jesus impressed upon his eager and pas- 
 sionate disciples as they journeyed on from one 
 station to another of their pilgrim track. Short as 
 the journey was from the valley of the Jordan up to 
 Jerusalem, it involved an ascent of three thousand 
 feet, through a populous district much of the way, 
 but exceedingly barren, once Jericho and its groves 
 of stately palm-trees had been left behind. With 
 this section of the journey, synchronize the last at- 
 tempts of Jesus to enamour his disciples with his 
 conception of the Messianic kingdom triumphing 
 through his sufferings and death. They had ears for 
 the final triumph, none for the intermediate catas- 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 165 
 
 trophe. We see the mother of James and John 
 beseeching for her sons the two best places in 
 the approaching kingdom of heaven. We hear the 
 reply of Jesus, " Can ye drink of the cup that I 
 must drink of, and be baptized with the baptism 
 that I am baptized with ? " They think it possible ; 
 but he can make no promises. We see the indig- 
 nation of the Ten at the underhanded attempt of 
 James and John to influence Jesus in their favor 
 through their mother. We hear the rebuke of Je- 
 sus : "He that would be greatest among you let him 
 be your servant." Arrived at Jericho, he made 
 his home with the chief tax-gatherer of the city, 
 the publican of publicans, as such the most de- 
 spised of all its citizens. This act was his first 
 challenge to the hierarchy of Judea on its own 
 soil. The news of it, we may be sure, preceded 
 Jesus to Jerusalem. The little band of his disci- 
 ples was now receiving frequent accessions, mainly 
 of Galilean folk upon their way to the great 
 feast. From Jericho to Jerusalem the distance 
 was eighteen miles, which were easily accom- 
 plished between the morning and the evening of a 
 single day. A league beyond Jericho the scenery 
 becomes suddenly barren. The roadway leads 
 through steep, rocky defiles, — between mountains 
 clothed with scanty verdure ; but the dreariness of 
 their surroundings could not damp the ardor of 
 the growing crowd which now surrounded the 
 
166 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 Galilean prophet and his immediate friends. As 
 the day advanced the enthusiasm increased, and 
 Jesus made no attempt to chill it with his dark 
 forebodings. It may be that he questioned with 
 himself whether, after all, he had not reckoned 
 with himself too sternly, whether the bitter cup 
 might not even now be changed to honey on his 
 lips. Again the scenery changes. The Mount of 
 Olives rises into view. Behind that, the pilgrims 
 know, is all the splendor of Jerusalem. They 
 climb its eastern slope and come to pleasant Beth- 
 any embosomed among verdurous hills ; and then, 
 a little way beyond, the top is reached, and look- 
 ing westward they behold the Holy City lying 
 at their feet, — a city of grim towers and lordly 
 palaces and magnificent royal gardens, the temple 
 overtopping all. How its long rows of marble 
 columns and its roof of plated gold must have 
 flashed and gleamed in the slant rays of the declin- 
 ing sun ! A vision so inspiring might well pro- 
 duce a higher exaltation in the minds of Jesus and 
 his followers. The journey now became a triumph. 
 An ass was borrowed from some friendly person, 
 and Jesus, who had always gone on foot, as if to 
 mark the greater dignity of this occasion, allowed 
 his disciples to saddle the creature with their gar- 
 ments, and so rode on to Bethphage, down by the 
 Garden of Gethsemane, over the brook Kedron, 
 then up again to the Sheep-gate, and so, at length, 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 167 
 
 into the city, — that magnet which had drawn him 
 from the base of Hermon with irresistible attrac- 
 tion. Nothing would satisfy the disciples and the 
 friends of Jesus, and even the strangers who could 
 not resist the contagion of their earnestness, but to 
 spread their garments for the ass to tread upon 
 with leaves and branches from the adjacent fields, 
 while, waving branches of the palm-tfee to and fro, 
 they cried, " Hosanna ! Blessed is he that cometh 
 in the name of the Lord ! " 
 
 The narrative of these events, as it is written 
 in the New Testament, abounds in features that 
 are evidently the dogmatic reflections of a later 
 time. Apparently this triumphal entry was a spon- 
 taneous outburst of enthusiasm confined within 
 narrow limits. It may be that Jesus hoped these 
 limits would extend until they should comprise an 
 effective majority of the population of the city, 
 and that so, perhaps without a struggle, the hier- 
 archy would be overthrown and his own kingdom 
 set up in its place. It may be, he had spoken of 
 these things with them so frequently, that he al- 
 lowed himself to think that his disciples were 
 completely disabused of their materialistic notions 
 of his Messiahship ; but from all that we can glean 
 concerning them, we may be sure that they were 
 not. Already they imagined themselves sitting on 
 twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 
 Jesus is made to promise them this honor in one 
 
168 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 of the worst distortions of the New Testament tra- 
 dition. It was their triumph quite as much as 
 his own that they were celebrating as they spread 
 their garments in his way. 
 
 Once in the city, it was only a short distance to 
 the temple-area, and thither, less it would seem in 
 obedience to any preconcerted plan, than because 
 swept along by a great common impulse, went the 
 enthusiastic crowd. It is in vain that we endeavor 
 to imagine with what emotions Jesus entered the 
 sacred precinct. The sight that greeted him he 
 had seen before, but then it was with reverence 
 almost unmixed with any other feeling. Now all 
 was changed. If he knew his own heart, it was 
 entirely alienated from this magnificent and costly 
 ritual. But it was so imposing that his temerity 
 in expecting that he could grapple with it and 
 overthrow it must have seemed to him, then and 
 there, almost a madman's fancy. His mood was, 
 however, too exalted to permit him to take counsel 
 for a moment with any doubt or fear. Immedi- 
 ately the acclamations of his retinue were drowned 
 amid the various din and uproar of the temple- 
 court, — the mutter of prayers, the chanting of 
 hymns, the clink of coin, the lowing of oxen, the 
 bleating of sheep, the chaffering and shouting of 
 the buyers and sellers of the sacrificial animals 
 and the wine and oil and other things necessary to 
 the routine of sacrifice. Instantly at sight and 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 169 
 
 hearing of these things the enthusiasm of Jesus 
 culminated in an act of almost inconceivable dar- 
 ing. With whip in hand he overturned the tables 
 of the money-changers, and drove their occupants 
 and the dove-sellers and cattle-dealers from their 
 booths and stalls, crying as he did so, " It is written, 
 my house shall be called a house of prayer, but y£ 
 have made it a den of thieves." In the full tide 
 of the Passover such an act would have been im- 
 possible, and at any time it justifies a sceptical ap- 
 proach ; but we must remember that in the bones 
 of every Jew lurked a certain reverence for the 
 prophetic office, and a fear of spurning as an im- 
 postor a veritable messenger of God. We must re- 
 member, too, that one man, armed with the strength 
 of personal conviction, has ever been a terror to a 
 crowd of mercenary formalists. In this act of Je- 
 sus there is nothing improbable, if we make due 
 allowance for the intensity of his enthusiasm, and 
 the character of the people on whose backs he laid 
 the nearest whip at hand. 
 
 The hierarchy could not, if it would/see in this 
 act of Jesus merely a rebuke of the dishonesty of 
 the temple-traffickers. Their traffic was essential to 
 the temple-ritual. The act of Jesus was a condem- 
 nation of this ritual. So, at any rate, it must have 
 been regarded, and from this moment we may re- 
 gard the fate of Jesus as sealed. Did he himself 
 regret his action, as, in the deepening twilight, he 
 
170 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 drew apart with his disciples out of the city, to 
 spend the night with friends in Bethany ? It is 
 not unlikely. If he could have deliberately chosen 
 his initiative it would have been different from 
 this. He would have besought the hierarchy and 
 the people to forsake their toilsome ceremonial for 
 his ritual of righteousness. He would have begun 
 in love and not in wrath ; but circumstances had 
 determined otherwise for him. The die was cast. 
 No backward step was possible. 
 
 Jesus had anticipated the crowd of pilgrims, and 
 had two or three weeks at his disposal before the 
 feast of the Passover. Every evening we must im- 
 agine him leaving the city, and retiring beyond the 
 brow of Olivet to spend the night with some new- 
 made friend in Bethany. A majority of the pil- 
 grims to the feasts were always housed in the 
 outlying villages ; but this resting-place may have 
 been further determined by the desire of Jesus to 
 prolong his life at least until the Passover, and it 
 was not long before he knew that emissaries of the 
 Pharisaic party were upon his track. Early every 
 morning we must imagine him again returning to 
 the city, and to the fore-court of the temple or 
 the temple-synagogue. Here there was no lack of 
 opportunity for the exposition of his doctrine of 
 religion. At first his attitude seems to have been 
 rather defensive than aggressive. A certain shrewd- 
 ness is a notable characteristic of the mind of Je- 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 171 
 
 sus. Educated as a rabbi, he would have been a 
 match for any rabbi in the land in textual fence. 
 With such training as he had he was always equal 
 to the occasion. Frequently the arguments with 
 which he met his opponents are without any ab- 
 solute validity, but as arguments ad hominem they 
 could hardly be improved. One of the devices of 
 his enemies was to identify him with the move- 
 ment of the Zealots, which within a few years had 
 attained to great importance under the lead of Judas 
 the Gaulonite. The leading principle of Judas 
 was that it was not admissible for a faithful Jew 
 to pay a tax to Eome. The question put to Jesus? 
 " Is it lawful to pay tribute unto Caesar ? " was in- 
 tended to commit him to the principles of the Zeal- 
 ots. The reply of Jesus, " Eender unto Caesar the 
 things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things 
 that are God's," was certainly a subterfuge, but it 
 turned the edge of the attack. A criticism, per- 
 haps too genial, has found in this reply a sugges- 
 tion that rendering to God his own, the Eoman 
 tax would be forever done away. Such may have 
 been the thought of Jesus, but we must not refine 
 too much upon his words. 
 
 The days went by, and each in turn brought 
 with it fresh and more dangerous complications. 
 To these days belongs the parable of the Two Sons, 
 one who said, "I go," and went not, while the 
 other said, " I go not," and yet went, followed up" 
 
172 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 by that terrible saying, " The publicans and harlots 
 shall go into the kingdom of heaven before you." 
 To these days belongs the story of the woman 
 taken in adultery, an interpolation in the Fourth 
 Gospel, but a valid piece of primitive tradition. 
 Jesus was a strict constructionist of the law of 
 marriage; divorce on any ground he could not 
 justify; the exception of the Gospels is not his; 
 but the spontaneous crime of the woman who was 
 brought to him seemed venial in comparison with 
 the Pharisaical casuistry of divorce. Here was 
 another terrible offence. But there came a day 
 when all the indignation which had for months 
 been gathering in his heart against the ceremonial- 
 ism of the time, but which had only shown itself 
 fitfully, burst every barrier and sent a flood of lava- 
 like denunciation flaming and scorching into the 
 midst of his antagonists, the purists of the syna- 
 gogue and temple. "Woe unto you, scribes and 
 Pharisees, hypocrites ! for ye pay tithe of mint, 
 anise, and cumin, and have omitted the weightier 
 matters of the law, — justice, mercy, and fidelity. 
 Blind guides that you are, straining out gnats and 
 swallowing camels. Woe unto you, scribes and 
 Pharisees ! for ye make clean the outside of the cup 
 and platter, but the inside is full of extortion and 
 impurity. Blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which 
 is within the cup and the platter, and then the out- 
 side will be clean also. Woe unto you, scribes 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 173 
 
 and Pharisees, hypocrites ! for you are like white- 
 washed sepulchres, that seem all pure without, but 
 within are full of dead men's bones and all un- 
 cleanness. Even so you outwardly appear right- 
 eous, but within you are full of hypocrisy and 
 iniquity. You serpents, you generation of vipers, 
 how can you escape the damnation of hell ? " This 
 is no feeble rage. Such words as these came from 
 the lips of no such lackadaisical Jesus as Christian 
 art has everywhere inflicted on mankind. The 
 picture has yet to be painted which shall be as 
 manly as he was ; and let this be noted carefully, 
 that the dizzying height, the dazzling brilliancy, of 
 his Messianic self-consciousness had not obscured 
 for him one line of his original " good tidings." At 
 the heart of these withering denunciations is the 
 same gospel of character — to he and not to seem — 
 which was at the heart of the first kindly utter- 
 ances of the Galilean spring-time. Let us do Je- 
 sus so much of simple justice. Let us confess that 
 the most passionate vagaries of his Messianic dream 
 were correlated with moral principles, as simple as 
 they were sublime. The particular moral precepts 
 of Jesus will not, in every instance, bear the strain 
 of social science, and of wide experience. His 
 principles, subordinating ceremonial to social con- 
 duct, and social conduct to private character, are 
 the same immutable and glorious principles, yes- 
 terday, to-day, and forever. 
 
174 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 The New Testament is entirely silent in regard 
 to the relations of Jesus to " the common people " 
 while he was at Jerusalem, unless we have a hint of 
 failure to enlist them on his side in the charge he 
 brings against the scribes and Pharisees : " Hypo- 
 crites that you are ! for you shut men out of the 
 kingdom of heaven. You will not enter your- 
 selves, and you forbid and prevent those who 
 would ! " This would seem to indicate that the 
 scribes and Pharisees had frustrated his attempt to 
 marshal the common people under his flag. The 
 parable of the vintner who sent his own son to 
 gather the fruit of his vineyard, after he had sent 
 various servants, marks, very possibly, the hottest 
 point of controversy before the final catastrophe. 
 The husbandmen of the parable take the son and 
 drag him outside of the vineyard and kill him. 
 Here, in one breath, Jesus distinctly avows his 
 Messianic claim, which he had kept more or 
 less in the background, and the nature of his ex- 
 pectations. The more pious in the community 
 hastened to make these expectations good. In 
 this particular they would on no account have 
 had him disappointed. On Tuesday evening, the 
 twelfth Msan (the month Msan of that time cor- 
 responded very nearly with our April), there was 
 a meeting at the house of the ex-high-priest Caia- 
 phas, to see what might be ventured in order to 
 compass the destruction of Jesus. It was resolved 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 175 
 
 to delay action until after the Passover ; but on the 
 thirteenth there came to certain of the Sanhedrin 
 one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, Judas of Keri- 
 oth, and for thirty shekels of silver (about twenty 
 dollars) agreed to deliver Jesus into their hands, 
 and to do this before the Passover. A bait so 
 tempting was of course swallowed at once, and at 
 a bound Judas obtained immortal infamy. He has 
 had his defenders. What traitor has not, sooner 
 or later ? It has been argued that he was impatient 
 to consummate the destruction of Jesus, so that 
 his subsequent triumph might be the more quickly 
 assured. This is not likely. Nor is it likely that 
 his aim was mercenary. Of all surmises, the most 
 rational is that he was disappointed by the Messi- 
 anic ideal of Jesus. His own was the popular 
 ideal. The ideal of Jesus was so different that he 
 felt himself deceived and wronged. A suffering 
 Messiah, indeed ! What fulfilment was there here 
 of the great national hope, or of his own ambition 
 to sit upon a throne ruling one of the twelve tribes 
 of Israel ? Whatever the motive, the act remains. 
 On Wednesday evening Jesus was betrayed al- 
 ready, and Judas only waited for a favorable op- 
 portunity to carry out his iniquitous design. 
 
 Thursday, the fourteenth Msan, must have been 
 a busy day for the priests and temple-servants of 
 Jerusalem. At the Passover of A. D. 66, Josephus 
 would have us believe that two hundred and fifty- 
 
176 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 six thousand lambs were slaughtered. This may 
 be a fivefold exaggeration. Let us say fifty thou- 
 sand. No doubt as many as this were sacrificed in 
 the year of Jesus' death ; and all of these must 
 be carried to the temple, to be examined by the 
 priests before they could be killed. Pronounced 
 without blemish, they were handed over to their 
 o.wners to be killed upon the spot, " the priests in 
 two long rows receiving the blood in gold and sil- 
 ver vessels," and passing it along till it was poured 
 out at the foot of the altar. Then the animals 
 were skinned, and certain parts were left before 
 the altar while the rest was carried home to be 
 roasted for the evening. The disciples of Jesus, 
 unnoticed among thousands of Galileans, brought 
 their lamb to the temple, and in the evening Jesus 
 found that every preparation had been made for 
 eating the feast of the Passover at the house of 
 some friendly person. This feast was ordinarily 
 an exceedingly joyous occasion. It was a hearty 
 meal, and wine was drunk freely, two glasses being 
 allowed after " the cup of blessing," which was the 
 third. Its character has been obscured in popular 
 estimation by the " Lord's Supper," with its nomi- 
 nal eating and drinking. But " the last supper " of 
 Jesus with his disciples was not a joyful occasion. 
 The Master's mind was too intensely fixed on his 
 immediate future. For many days he had felt the 
 coils tightening around him. He knew that they 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 177 
 
 would crush him soon. " How have I longed/' he 
 said, " to eat this Passover with you, for I shall not 
 eat it again till it be the true feast of redemption in 
 the kingdom of God." But he had special reasons 
 for disquietude. A vague suspicion haunted him 
 that one of the twelve had gftne over to the enemy. 
 It may be that something in the manner of Judas 
 singled him out as the traitor. Matthew represents 
 him as saying " Is it I ? " and Jesus as answering, 
 "Yes." Only those who believe everything will 
 believe this. 
 
 What would we not give for any faithful account 
 of the words of Jesus upon this occasion, — the 
 last evening of his life ! Let us hope that among 
 them there were tender reminiscences of his life in 
 Galilee, and gracious messages for the family in 
 Nazareth who had been so little able to sympathize 
 with him or to comprehend his spirit. But nat- 
 urally it was the future which engrossed his 
 thoughts most deeply. Words of warning and en- 
 couragement that had been many times spoken 
 must be again enforced. Then, in the spirit of the 
 ancient prophets, he performed a symbolic action. 
 Breaking the bread and giving it to his disciples, 
 he said, " Eat, it is my body." Passing the cup to 
 them he said, " This is my blood of the covenant 
 that shall flow for the salvation of many. Of a 
 truth I tell you that I shall never again drink of 
 this Paschal wine till I drink it new in the estab- 
 
 12 
 
178 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 lished kingdom of God." In Luke and Paul we 
 have the statement that Jesus asked his disciples 
 when they ate and drank together to hold him in 
 remembrance. Never was anything more simple ! 
 Never was anything more natural ! But to what 
 manifold distortion have the Christian ages sub- 
 jected that simple action and those simple words ! 
 From the words, " This is my body," in the course 
 of eight hundred years the Eoman Church devel- 
 oped the doctrine of transubstantiation, — that the 
 bread of the eucharist is bread no longer, but liter- 
 ally and only the human body of God ; and Protes- 
 tantism still speaks as confidently as ever of " the 
 institution of the Lord's Supper." There was no 
 institution. There was an act of natural human 
 tenderness. The occasion determined the form of 
 his expression. He would have been infinitely 
 sadder than he was if he had dreamed what san- 
 guinary systems of theology would be built upon 
 his figures of speech. He did but ask of his disci- 
 ples that, till his second coming, as often as they 
 ate the Paschal bread and drank its ruddy wine, 
 they would remember how his body had been 
 broken and his blood had flowed for the establish- 
 ment of new and higher relations between man 
 and man, and between man and God. Oh, the 
 pity of it ; — that from an action and from words 
 so simple and humane, should have come doctrines 
 and practices more foreign to the mind of Jesus 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 179 
 
 than any he endeavored to abolish by his life and 
 
 death ! 
 
 " And when they had sung a hymn they went 
 
 out." The hymn was the usual hymn sung upon 
 this occasion. It was near midnight, and Bethany 
 was some three miles away, — between two and 
 three. The oppression of Jesus grew deeper as 
 they walked along. It may be that he noticed 
 that Judas was no longer with the rest. Upon 
 the way they came to an olive garden where there 
 was an olive press that gave to the place its name 
 — Gethsemane. That garden is almost too sacred 
 for our thought to enter. The nature of that in- 
 ward struggle of which it was the melancholy 
 scene, we cannot fully know. Touching and sweet 
 as are the words ascribed to Jesus, we cannot be 
 certain that he uttered them, for his disciples were 
 asleep, and he could not have repeated them ; and 
 yet we may not doubt that the narrator has fully 
 entered into the spirit of that hour. " Father, if it 
 be possible, let this cup pass from me." What 
 was the cup that was so bitter to his taste ? The 
 cup of shame and death, death in its most horrible 
 form. The agony in Gethsemane was the last and 
 sharpest struggle between his natural, human sen- 
 sibility and the imperious exigencies of his ideal. 
 Because this man was human he was in love with 
 life. Because he must think of himself as the 
 Messiah he had doomed himself to death. He did 
 
180 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 himself injustice by his antithesis, " The spirit in- 
 deed is willing, but the flesh is weak." It was his 
 spirit, not his flesh merely, that drew back from 
 such a doom. What was the outcome of this ter- 
 rible inward struggle ? Again we cannot help 
 feeling that the narrator has divined it well : 
 " Father, if this cup cannot pass away till I have 
 drunk it, thy will be done ! " 
 
 Jesus would go no further on his way to Bethany 
 that night. He had just returned to his disciples 
 when Judas made his appearance at the head of a 
 mixed company of temple soldiers and high priest's 
 retainers, and indicated to them their victim with a 
 treacherous kiss, the prototype of all kissing treach- 
 ery from that day to this. You would not have me 
 enter fully into the details of the remaining hours 
 of Jesus' life. You know how he was taken to 
 the house of Caiaphas, and in the last hours of the 
 night put upon his trial before the Sanhedrin. 
 Jewish scholars have assured us that the Sanhe- 
 drin was not regularly convened, and that the con- 
 demnation of Jesus was by a faction which had no 
 regular authority. Certainly the proceedings were 
 hasty. The members of the Sanhedrin must have 
 been in ill humor at their early summons ; but 
 under the most favorable circumstances only one 
 result was possible. There was abundant evidence 
 that Jesus had been guilty of blasphemy, or, as we 
 should say, of heresy. Asked if he were the Mes- 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 181 
 
 siah, he made no denial. Here was no ground for 
 his conviction, but it was clear that his ideas were 
 subversive of the existing order of religion. Doubt- 
 less the members of the Sanhedrin did what they 
 thought was right. Their sacred books, which all 
 Christians but the merest handful consider the in- 
 fallible word of God, commanded them expressly 
 to put to death any prophet who should not con- 
 form to the received traditions. Jesus did not 
 conform to these. Therefore his sentence was in- 
 evitable and, if the Old Testament is an infallible 
 revelation, absolutely just and right. 
 
 Through the chill morning hours Jesus was made 
 the laughing-stock of brutal clowns, and buffeted 
 by their rude hands. At day-break the Sanhedrin 
 was again convened, and a deputation of its mem- 
 bers, taking Jesus with them, went to the Procura- 
 tor, Pontius Pilate, to get his confirmation of their 
 sentence of death, and his directions as to the man- 
 ner of its execution. Their own law prescribed 
 stoning,- but, merciful as such a death would have 
 been compared with the crucifixion, they had no 
 executive power. Pilate was sufficiently cruel and 
 bloodthirsty, but his hatred of the Jews made him 
 suspicious of their justice in this matter. It was 
 in Jesus' favor that they wished for his destruction ; 
 and something in the presence and bearing of Je- 
 sus may have impressed him. It was his custom 
 to release a prisoner to the people at every Pass- 
 
182 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 over. He now gave them their choice between 
 Jesus of Nazareth and another Jesus (for Jesus 
 was by no means an uncommon name), whose sur- 
 name was Barabbas, a seditious person who had 
 killed a Eoman soldier in a brawl. To his aston- 
 ishment the crowd preferred Jesus the Zealot to 
 Jesus the Messiah, and the latter was condemned 
 to die upon the cross. 
 
 It was a fearful death for any man to die. Fre- 
 quently the torture lasted two or three days, the 
 victim finally perishing from hunger or nervous 
 exhaustion. In the case of Jesus, death was not 
 so long delayed. His sufferings lasted only some 
 six or eight hours. The women of Jerusalem were 
 allowed the privilege of giving to the crucified a 
 benumbing or intoxicating potion. This was of- 
 fered to Jesus but refused. Not one of the twelve 
 was there to witness either his sufferings or this 
 heroic act of self-denial; but Mary of Magdala, 
 Mary Cleophas, and Salome (whose sons had van- 
 ished with the rest of the apostles), were there 
 with thoughts that were "too deep for tears." 
 These are our only witnesses of the last hours of 
 Jesus, and it is not likely that we owe to these any 
 of the utterances ascribed to Jesus in the New Tes- 
 tament. Beautiful and suggestive as are some of 
 these, they are probably the inventions of a loving 
 imagination and not the records of what was actu- 
 ally said. Before sunset, soon after three o'clock it 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 183 
 
 is most likely, his head sank on his breast and his 
 heart ceased its beating. Never was one, who loved 
 his fellow-men so much, more cruelly destroyed. 
 
 Left to themselves the Eomans would have al- 
 lowed his body to remain for birds of prey to feed 
 upon, but it was a Jewish custom to give decent 
 burial even to the most abandoned criminal. The 
 legend runs that, in the case of Jesus, one Joseph 
 of Arimathea, of whom we have this mention only, 
 begged for his body and, having obtained it, per- 
 formed for it the last sad offices with all duty and 
 affection. " And there was Mary Magdalene and 
 the other Mary sitting over against the sepulchre." 
 
 The concern of the biographer ends with Jesus, 
 as with every other person, at his death. His im- 
 agined resurrection and his speculative deification 
 belong to the history of ideas not to the biography 
 of the man. We are persuaded that an immediate 
 resurrection formed no part of his conception of 
 his future, so that in this particular he was not dis- 
 appointed; but that he did expect to return to 
 earth at some time in no distant future we are as 
 certain as need be, and absolutely certain that he 
 did not so return. Nevertheless, his firm convic- 
 tion that his cause would triumph through his death 
 was justified by the event. The religion of Jesus, 
 not without various corruption and distortion, but 
 with conscious allegiance to his sacred name, is the 
 religion of three hundred millions of the civilized 
 
184 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 world. Could anything seem more unlikely as he 
 hung upon the cross that April day, with only 
 three women in the world as his confessed disciples ? 
 And yet it was his dying so that made Christianity 
 a universal religion. " Never was that which bore 
 the outward* appearance of ruin and annihilation 
 turned into such signal and decisive victory as in 
 the death of Jesus." 1 As Theodore Parker .said : 
 " A live man may hurt his own cause ; a dead one 
 cannot soil his clean, immortal doctrines with un- 
 worthy hands." So long as Jesus lived there was 
 danger that his and the popular conception of the 
 Messiah would approximate to each other, that 
 some sort of a compromise would be effected. The 
 result of such a compromise would certainly have 
 been that Christianity would have been only an- 
 other Jewish sect, or that Judaism would have 
 absorbed it altogether. In either case it would not 
 have been a universal religion. From that day to 
 this Judaism has had a record which is not inglo- 
 rious, however little glory it reflects upon ' the 
 Christian world ; but Judaism was too intensely 
 jaational in its instincts ever to become a universal 
 faith. The death of Jesus on the cross made it 
 forever impossible for the Jews to allow his Messi- 
 anic claim. Paul,~seeing in that death the aboli- 
 tion of the Jewish law, anticipated the last result 
 of our historical science. The actual triumph of 
 
 1 Baur's Christian History. Vol. I., p. 41. 
 
JESUS AS MESSIAH. 185 
 
 Jesus dwarfs his apocalyptic vision; and such a 
 triumph would have been impossible but for his 
 ignominious death. 
 
 I am aware how dreadfully inadequate must be 
 any representation of the life and character of Jesus 
 within the limits I have allowed myself in these 
 discourses ; but, if I have sketched even the out- 
 lines of his life and character with tolerable exact- 
 ness, any frequenter of the churches of the popular 
 religion might well question with himself whether 
 I have not made some great mistake, whether it is 
 really possible that I have been talking about the 
 same person who is called Jesus Christ in orthodox 
 circles, and worshipped as the second person in the 
 Trinity, as a being coeternal and coequal with God. 
 The same and not the same. Jesus of Nazareth 
 could not have been the person I have depicted, 
 and at the same time or at any time have been the 
 second person in the Trinity, a being coeternal 
 and coequal with God ; but it is as the person I 
 have depicted, and not as the second person of the 
 Trinity, that he appears in the New Testament, 
 when due allowance has been made for the origin 
 and character of the different books that make up 
 our sources of information. Jesus of Nazareth, as 
 I have drawn him, was a man ; a man with an in- 
 comparable genius for religion ; a man of invincible 
 conscience and immeasurable love ; a man limited 
 in many ways by the conceptions of his time but 
 
186 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 making, even of the most irrational of these concep- 
 tions, channels through which he poured the natural 
 goodness of his heart in a great tide of vivifying 
 and exalting power. Almost as different as possi- 
 ble from the theological God-Man of the churches, 
 in the fulness of his human personality he was one 
 whom we can hardly reverence too much ; one the 
 disparity of whose ideal and actual experience we 
 cannot pity so much as it deserves ; and one, in 
 view of all he was and all he did and all he hoped 
 to do, " whom not having seen we love." 
 
VI. 
 
 THE EESUEEEOTIOK 
 
" Where, then, is the force of that argument of despair, 
 as we called it, that if St. Paul vouches for the bodily resur- 
 rection of Jesus and for his appearance after it, and is mis- 
 taken in so vouching, then he must be an imbecile and 
 credulous enthusiast, untruthful, unprofitable ? We see 
 that for a man to believe in preternatural incidents, of a 
 kind admitted by the common belief of his time, proves 
 nothing at all against his general truthfulness and sagacity. 
 Nay, we see that even while affirming such preternatural 
 incidents, he may with profound insight seize the true and 
 natural aspect of them, the aspect which will survive and 
 profit when the miraculous aspect has faded. He may give 
 us, in the very same work, current error, and also fruitful 
 and profound new truth, the error's future corrective." 
 
 Matthew Arnold. 
 

 VI, 
 
 THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 ROMAN" CATHOLICISM revolves preemi- 
 nently around the doctrine of the incarnation. 
 So do the broad and high parties in the Episcopa- 
 lian church of England and America. Protestant- 
 ism generally is preeminently devoted to the 
 doctrine of the atonement. The doctrine of the 
 resurrection is less exclusively the property of any 
 great communion. It is almost, if not quite, equal- 
 ly dear to Romanists and Protestants. In the first 
 stages of Christian development, it occupied the 
 foremost place in the mind of every Christian be- 
 liever ; and from that time to this it has played a 
 stupendous part upon the stage of Christian his- 
 tory. To the average Christian believer, the resur- 
 rection of Jesus from the dead has been and is the 
 miracle of miracles ; the sole and all sufficing proof 
 of immortality. Even within the limits of the 
 Unitarian denomination there are clergymen who 
 insist that without the resurrection of Jesus there 
 is no ground for hope in immortality, but that this 
 
 
190 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 being given all is safe and sure. Thirty or fortj 
 years ago this was the general attitude among Uni- 
 tarians. The preacher spent his force in demon- 
 strating the worthlessness of every natural argument. 
 To believe in immortality on any ground save that 
 of Jesus' resurrection was Deism in one of its most 
 baleful forms. 
 
 Some of you, I doubt not, think the matter 
 hardly worth an hours consideration. The life of 
 Jesus, such will say, perhaps, is one thing but his 
 resurrection is another. The former has some 
 human interest : the latter none. That Jesus lived 
 and died is possible. That he rose from the dead 
 is impossible. 
 
 To which I answer, Yes and No. That Jesus 
 rose from the dead I have no belief whatever ; but 
 because other men (hundreds of millions of them) 
 have a belief in his resurrection, and because thou- 
 sands of millions have had this belief in the past, 
 its human interest is inconceivably great. We 
 cannot be indifferent to it. We cannot dismiss it 
 with a sneer. It challenges our closest scrutiny. 
 It is not as if it were a doctrine of the past. It is the 
 accepted doctrine of the present time. Those who 
 do not accept it form a small minority, a minority 
 so small that, in comparison with the majority, it 
 is inappreciable. Like Posthumus in " Cymbeline," 
 it melts "from the smallness of a gnat to air." 
 Article IV., of the Established Church of England, 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 191 
 
 reads : " Christ did truly rise again from death, and 
 took again his body with flesh, bones and all things 
 appertaining to the perfection of man's nature, 
 wherewith he ascended into heaven and there sit- 
 teth, until he return to judge all men at the last 
 day." This is one of the articles to which Dean 
 Stanley subscribes, and hundreds of men as honest 
 and intelligent as he. This is the doctrine of three 
 hundred millions of Christian people. This is 
 the doctrine of the New Testament as it stands. 
 The article does not exceed the statements and the 
 implications of the record, not " in the estimation 
 of a hair." Does it seem presumptuous in us, even 
 when we have added to ourselves all who agree 
 with us, to oppose ourselves to a doctrine which 
 has the suffrages of millions, of the Bible, and of 
 history, and of thousands of very learned persons 
 occupying high ecclesiastical positions ? It may 
 seem so, but we cannot help it. But we can help 
 some things. We can help any hap-hazard or con- 
 temptuous rejection of a doctrine which is so 
 widely accepted, so venerable, so dear. We can 
 examine it carefully, conscientiously, in every aspect 
 it presents, before we break with it forever. Not 
 to do this would be presumptuous and this we must 
 not be. 
 
 At the same time we must give no heed to the 
 voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely, 
 who would fain persuade us that the interest at 
 
192 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 stake should either warn us off from the considera- 
 tion of this matter altogether, or should make us 
 throw our prepossession into the scale with every 
 argument for the resurrection of Jesus. The inter- 
 est at stake is supposed to be our personal immor- 
 tality. Substantially we are advised not to probe 
 this matter too deeply lest we should find that it 
 does not confirm our hope of a hereafter ; but if it 
 does not we want to know it. Every man, who is 
 a man, will say this. Only a coward will say any- 
 thing else. The hope of immortality is too grand 
 a hope to fortify itself with evidence which is con- 
 sciously illusive. We do not want to pretend to 
 believe; we want to believe; but knowing as we 
 do that the hope of millions is based upon this be- 
 lief would we do anything to weaken it? The 
 rational religionist is frequently confronted with 
 this appeal to his better nature. His answer ought 
 to be : We do not flatter ourselves that we are go- 
 ing to convert the world to our opinion in a day. 
 The great majority will go on believing pretty much 
 as they do now for many generations. Nothing that 
 we think or say will make any great impression on 
 this majority; but such as are able to receive it — 
 the conclusion to which we have arrived — let 
 them receive it. They will prefer it, as we do, 
 to an illusory foundation for any hope, even the 
 greatest. 
 
 And if the magnitude of the issues at stake will 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 193 
 
 not deter us altogether from the consideration of 
 this matter, no more will it constitute, in and of it- 
 self, an added force to every argument for the res- 
 urrection of Jesus. Let us play no tricks with 
 ourselves. The force of arguments on either side 
 is not affected by the magnitude of the issues at 
 stake, whatever be the matter under consideration. 
 If the testimony in a recent trial, for example, was 
 sufficient to convict the man of murder, it was not 
 less so because his own life was involved ; it would 
 not have been more so had there been no penalty. 
 If the testimony for the resurrection of Jesus from 
 the dead is sufficient to establish this as an historic 
 fact, it is still sufficient, whatever is bound up in 
 this conclusion. If the testimony is insufficient 
 it is not made any less so by the fact, if fact it 
 be, that our personal immortality is involved. 
 We caniiot use the final implication to piece out 
 the original foundation. We cannot say the founda- 
 tion must be satisfactory because it is necessary 
 to support such a magnificent superstructure. On 
 the contrary the more magnificent the proposed 
 superstructure, the more careful shall we be con- 
 cerning the foundation. Could we be sure that 
 the resurrection of Jesus would involve our per- 
 sonal immortality we should scrutinize it no less 
 sharply ; nay all the more sharply ; for we do not 
 wish to cherish great beliefs and hopes on any 
 doubtful evidence. 
 
 13 
 
194 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 But does the resurrection of Jesus from the dead 
 involve our personal immortality ? If his resur- 
 rection could be proved would our immortality 
 follow ? Christian theology answers, Yes. Eational 
 religion answers emphatically, No ; and the won- 
 der is that any man of ordinary intelligence can- 
 not see that rational religion is right. Let us 
 assume for the present that the resurrection of 
 Jesus was a fact ; that dead as could be on Friday 
 afternoon, on Sunday morning he was alive again, 
 and was no mere phantom but a man of flesh and 
 blood, with the marks of his crucifixion on his per 
 son ; and that within a short time, with his cor- 
 poreal substance, — in the language of the Article, 
 " witlf his flesh and bones and all things appertaining 
 to the perfection of man's nature " — he ascended 
 into heaven. Assuming all this, where is the argu- 
 ment for our personal immortality ? The resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus is a resurrection of the body ; his 
 ascension is an ascension of the body ; his immortal- 
 ity is an immortality of the body. Now it is quite 
 impossible for us to have any such resurrection, 
 any such ascension, any such corporeal immortality. 
 Our bodies moulder away. They mingle with the 
 elements. They are taken up into vegetable and 
 animal structures. What analogy can there be 
 between our resurrection at some infinitely distant 
 day and that of Jesus from twenty-four to thirty- 
 six hours after his death ? There can be no anal- 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 195 
 
 ogy whatever, and therefore there can be no argu- 
 ment from the one thing to the other. 
 
 Again in popular estimation, from the stand- 
 point of Christian orthodoxy, the resurrection of 
 Jesus from the dead was the crowning act of his 
 miraculous career. It was in virtue of his super- 
 human character that he triumphed over death ; 
 but what argument is here for the resurrection of 
 people who are not superhuman ? What man has 
 done, man may do ; but it does not equally follow 
 that he can do anything that has been done by a 
 being whose nature and genius were entirely ex- 
 ceptional. To prove anything universal the nature 
 of Jesus should have been simply and entirely 
 human. It was so in reality, but it is not so in 
 the theory of his resurrection. It is necessary to 
 this theory that he should have been sui generis, 
 a being unlike any other. This or no resurrection ; 
 but this being granted his resurrection if estab- 
 lished would have no universal significance. It 
 would not argue anything for you and me. Our 
 hope of immortality would receive no accession, 
 suffer no abatement, from his triumph. It would 
 be entirely unaffected. 
 
 Such being the relation of Jesus' resurrection 
 to our personal immortality we can apprqach it 
 without bias. The situation makes no such de- 
 mand upon our honesty and courage as it would 
 if the relation were that which is generally as- 
 
196 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 sumed. We can look at it in the dry light. We 
 can ask, Is it, or is it not, a fact ? without regard 
 to the ulterior consequence. We can do this at 
 least so far as it concerns the matter of our per- 
 sonal immortality; but the effort has been fre- 
 quently made to establish a secondary bias in 
 favor of the resurrection by insisting on the im- 
 portance of the doctrine in the development of 
 early Christianity. Perhaps no other argument for 
 the resurrection has been insisted on so much as 
 this. The development of early Christianity we are 
 assured was one of the most remarkable and bene- 
 ficent social transformations that the world has 
 ever known, and we agree to this ; and then the ad- 
 vocate of the resurrection goes on, " But if the res- 
 urrection of Jesus was not a fact, then was the most 
 remarkable and beneficent social transformation 
 the world has ever known the result of an illusion." 
 Here is a conclusion so unpalatable that it is as- 
 sumed that rather than accept it we shall accept 
 the resurrection ; but the implications of a result, 
 however unpalatable, do not affect the arguments 
 by which a result is established. If the testimony 
 for the resurrection is insufficient it remains so, 
 whatever this result implies. If the testimony 
 against it is destructive it remains so, whatever 
 be the implication. That an illusion contributed 
 to the development of an important social change 
 is doubtless an unpalatable result; but it is not 
 

 THE RESURRECTION. 197 
 
 so unpalatable as the fact of an actual resurrection 
 from the dead would be to one whose intelligence 
 had been educated to admire, whose heart had 
 been inspired to trust, the habitual order of the 
 world. Moreover nothing is surer than that illu- 
 sion plays an important part in all the changes 
 of history, for better and for worse. Finally, the 
 resurrection doctrine was not the only force that 
 was grandly operative in the development of early 
 Christianity. The resurrection doctrine was one 
 of many forces, an exceedingly important one, but 
 in comparison with the aggregate of all the other 
 forces at work, not so considerable that we are 
 obliged to feel that the development of early 
 Christianity was wholly, or to any great extent, 
 the result of an illusion. 
 
 From our secondary, as from our primary, bias 
 in favor of the resurrection, we are thus set free. 
 We can approach it without any side-long glances 
 at the chances of our personal immortality upon 
 the one hand, or at the development of early 
 Christianity upon the other. 
 
 The return of a man to life who has been ac- 
 tually dead for a period of twenty-four hours or 
 longer is an occurrence of such exceeding rarity, 
 to say the least, that the evidence by which it is 
 established ought to be of the most impressive and 
 conclusive character. I am aware that solely in 
 the interest of the New Testament miracles, and 
 
198 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 especially in the interest of Jesus' resurrection, it 
 has been discovered that " evidence is evidence," 
 and that it requires no more evidence to establish 
 a resurrection from the dead than it does to estab- 
 lish anything else, even the most ordinary fact ; 
 but let any one of those who reason thus hear of 
 any unusual event, and instinctively he requires 
 more evidence for it than for an ordinary event. 
 Thus, if one of them should hear that an omnibus 
 had. been seen going up or down Broadway, drawn, 
 driven, and freighted in the usual manner, one day 
 last week, he w^ould believe this without a mo- 
 ment's hesitation ; but if he should hear that a 
 locomotive, with a train of cars attached, was seen 
 going up or down Broadway, he would require a 
 hundred times as much evidence for this statement 
 as for the first ; and if he should hear that a train 
 of cars had been seen going up or down Broadway 
 without any locomotive or any means of propul- 
 sion or traction, the amount of evidence he would 
 require, before he would accept such a statement 
 as the truth, would be infinitely greater than for 
 either of the previous statements. Nothing is 
 surer than that we do all of us spontaneously, and 
 especially those of us who have a judgment at all 
 educated, demand more and clearer evidence for 
 unusual than for usual events, and in proportion 
 to their unusualness; and nothing is surer than 
 that we ought to do exactly this, and that men's so 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 199 
 
 doing is in all ages one of the prime conditions of 
 human progress. The more evidence men have 
 demanded for extraordinary events, the more terri- 
 tory has science conquered from the realm of su- 
 perstition and annexed to its own. 
 
 Now let us consider whether the evidence for 
 the resurrection of Jesus is as much stronger than 
 that which we demand for any ordinary event, as 
 this event is more than ordinary ; — whether it is 
 as strong as evidence should be for any event 
 which is remarkably contradictory of our average 
 experience. 
 
 The four gospels are our principal authorities. 
 The resurrection of Jesus is related in each one of 
 these with more or less detail. Matthew repre- 
 sents Mary Magdalene and the other Mary as 
 going on Saturday evening * to the sepulchre ; 
 Mark represents these and Salome as going early 
 Sunday morning, "after 2 the rising of the sun;" 
 Luke increases the number of women, and fixes 
 the time before sunrise ; John represents Mary 
 Magdalene as coming alone, " early, while it was 
 yet dark." Here, to begin with, is a certain 
 amount of inconsistency ; and, other things being 
 equal, that one or more women at some time or 
 other went to the sepulchre would be all we could 
 infer. According to Matthew, in the presence of 
 
 1 The original Greek has this meaning. 
 
 2 The Greek has this force. 
 
200 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, there was a 
 great earthquake, caused by an angel who came 
 and rolled away the stone of the sepulchre, and 
 sat on it; "and for fear of him the keepers did 
 shake and became as dead men ; and the angel 
 said unto the women, Fear ye not, for I know that 
 ye seek Jesus who hath been crucified. He is not 
 here, for he was raised, as he said. Come, see the 
 place where he lay ; and go quickly and tell his 
 disciples that he was raised from the dead ; and be- 
 hold he goeth before you into Galilee : there shall 
 ye see him." Here you will notice there is no 
 claim that any one witnessed the resurrection. 
 The guard do not see it, nor the women. The an- 
 gel informs them that it has already taken place. 
 Again, this account, if true, would preclude the 
 appearance of the risen Jesus to any one in Jeru- 
 salem. That God should send an angel to hasten 
 the disciples to Galilee to meet Jesus there, and 
 that afterward they should see him in Jerusa- 
 lem, gives God the appearance of a person who 
 does not know his own mind, or the angel the ap- 
 pearance of not being well-informed. This story 
 must have been first current in circles where an 
 appearance in Jerusalem was no part of the tradi- 
 tion ; but from beginning to end the story is a 
 tissue of improbabilities. We have an angel with 
 his appearance like lightning and his raiment white 
 as snow. Now an angel in a story is as sure a 
 
THE RESUKRECTION. 201 
 
 proof that the story is a legend, as a trout in the 
 ■milk that the milk has suffered from adulteration. 
 The angel causes an earthquake. A very little 
 knowledge of the nature of an earthquake is suf- 
 ficient to discredit this one, mentioned only by 
 Matthew, among whose "properties" earthquakes 
 particularly abound. He introduces one at the 
 moment of Jesus' death, in the course of which 
 " the graves were opened, and many bodies of the 
 saints which slept arose and went into Jerusalem 
 and were seen by many ; " but the other gospels do 
 not mention any such occurrence, though it is suf- 
 ficiently impressive for a passing word. The guard 
 at the tomb is another trait peculiar to the First 
 Gospel. It was evidently placed there ideally, to 
 rebut any charge that the body of Jesus was secretly 
 removed by his disciples, not actually to prevent 
 such removal. That Pilate would detail a Eoman 
 guard for such a purpose is incredible ; that the 
 guard, to please the Sanhedrin, would risk their 
 lives by confessing that they fell asleep, is unspeak- 
 ably absurd. The account in Matthew also suggests 
 the question, "What was the need of an earthquake 
 to roll away the stone of the sepulchre when Jesus 
 was already risen ? for it is so represented. 
 
 Let us now consider the account of the resur- 
 rection in the Second Gospel. It is that after sun- 
 rise 1 Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene and Mary 
 1 Literally, "The sun having just risen." Folsom's translation. 
 
202 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 the mother of James, and Salome went with spices 
 to embalm the body of Jesus and found the stone 
 of the sepulchre rolled away, and entering, saw a 
 young man sitting on the right side, in a long, 
 white garment, who spoke in terms very similar to 
 those of the angel in Matthew. Here are several 
 divergencies from the account in Matthew. There, 
 an, earth quake, — here, none ; there, the stone rolled 
 away after the arrival of the women, — here, before ; 
 there, the angel sitting on the stone, — here, in the 
 sepulchre ; there, they go and tell the disciples, — 
 here, in flagrant disobedience to the angelic com- 
 mand, they tell no one ; and with the assertion 
 that they told no one the Second Gospel properly 
 ends, for the concluding verses (9-20) are not 
 found in the early manuscripts. These verses evi- 
 dently embody an independent legend, more nearly 
 allied to that of the Fourth Gospel than to the 
 others. 
 
 The account in Luke is different in several par- 
 ticulars from that of Matthew and Mark. It agrees 
 with Mark in finding the stone removed. It adds 
 Joanna to the two women of Matthew, where 
 Mark adds Salome. It adds other women who are 
 not specified. In place of the angel on the stone in 
 Matthew, and the " young man " in the sepulchre 
 in Mark, we have here two men in shining gar- 
 ments, who remind the women that Jesus had 
 promised to rise again on the third day. "And 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 203 
 
 they remembered his words." As if they could 
 have forgotten them if he had ever spoken such ! 
 The women go and tell the eleven all these things. 
 " And these words appeared to them an idle tale, 
 and they believed them not." Strange, if Jesus 
 had indeed, as the Synoptists^tell, again and again 
 foretold to them his resurrection ! It is not claimed 
 here any more than in Matthew and Mark that 
 any one saw the resurrection. Perhaps the most 
 important difference is that Galilee is no longer 
 specified, as in Matthew and Mark, as the place 
 where Jesus will show himself to his disciples. 
 The bearing of this difference will be hereafter ap- 
 parent. 
 
 So far, in these lectures, I have made no use of 
 the Fourth Gospel, for reasons given in my first 
 lecture. It is a production of the second century, 
 and not like the Synoptics the result of traditional 
 agglomeration, but a dogmatic treatise in which 
 everything is made to serve the preconceived idea 
 that Jesus was the incarnate Logos ; but in its 
 treatment of the resurrection, it has the appearance 
 of representing a more developed form of the le- 
 gend. Mary Magdalene goes to the sepulchre 
 alone and finds the stone rolled away. She runs 
 and finds Peter and John, and these two run to 
 the sepulchre and find it empty. Not knowing 
 the Scriptures — that Jesus must rise from the 
 dead — they go to their own homes. Strange again 
 
204 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 if Jesus had foretold his resurrection so frequently ! 
 Here, again, there is no claim that any one saw the 
 resurrection. The disciples went to their own 
 homes without any idea that such a thing had 
 taken place. 
 
 But when they had gone home Mary Magdalene, 
 whom they had left weeping at the mouth of the 
 tomb, looks in and sees two angels sitting " one at 
 the head, the other at the feet, where the body of 
 Jesus lay/' though a minute before the disciples 
 had seen nothing but the grave-clothes. Suddenly 
 turning, she sees Jesus, but taking him for the 
 gardener, she asks him if he has taken away her 
 master's body, and if so, where it is laid. Jesus 
 calls her by name, and then she recognizes him and 
 goes and tells the disciples that she has seen him. 
 Here again there is no mention of Galilee, nor any 
 promise of meeting the disciples anywhere ; rather 
 an implication that he will not do so. That vari- 
 ous meetings are narrated further on, points to the 
 fact that the account in the Fourth Gospel is an 
 incongruous jumble of various legends. 
 
 And now let us consider the different statements 
 in regard to the appearance of Jesus to different 
 persons after his resurrection. One of the most 
 interesting of these statements is that relating to 
 the walk to Emmaus. This statement is in Luke. 
 Two disciples, not of the twelve, were walking to- 
 wards Emmaus, a village seven or eight miles from 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 205 
 
 Jerusalem. They are joined by a person whom 
 they do not recognize, who expounds to them 
 the Scriptures concerning the death and res- 
 urrection of Jesus. Afterward, while eating with 
 them, he takes bread, breaks it, and gives thanks. 
 Then they recognize Jesus and he vanishes from 
 their sight. Beautiful as it is, the legendary char- 
 acter of this story should be apparent to the dullest 
 sense. No such village as Emmaus can be identi- 
 fied within seven or eight miles from Jerusalem. 
 A village of similar name in Galilee suggests that 
 this account originally belonged to the circle of 
 tradition which represented Jesus as first appear- 
 ing to his disciples in Galilee. We have here a 
 Jesus who is not recognized, although he is corpo- 
 real enough to eat food, while he is at the same 
 time a phantom who appears and vanishes like an 
 Homeric deity. It is said that the disciples, return- 
 ing to Jerusalem, found the eleven and were told 
 that Jesus " was raised and was seen by Simon." 
 Of this appearance there is no other mention, and 
 the statement by itself can have no evidential 
 value. 
 
 The two from Emmaus are still talking with the 
 eleven when Jesus stands in their midst. They 
 are affrighted and think they see a spirit, but he 
 bids them handle him, telling them " a spirit hath 
 not flesh and bones as ye see me having." Then 
 he appeases his hunger with broiled fish and 
 
206 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 honeycomb. Enjoining on them to remain in Je- 
 rusalem, he leads them out towards Bethany, and 
 while in the act of blessing them he is taken up 
 into heaven. Here again we have a person who 
 is by turns a phantom and a substantial person- 
 ality. This statement you will see precludes any 
 appearance in Galilee, and fixes the ascension on 
 the day of the resurrection. 
 
 The account in John is evidently a developed 
 form of this in Luke. On the day of the resurrec- 
 tion, the disciples are sitting with fastened 1 doors, 
 when suddenly Jesus appears among them and pro- 
 ceeds to offer evidence of his corporeality. Eight 
 days later he appears again to confirm the faith of 
 Thomas, who must feel the nail-prints and put his 
 hand into his wounded side before he can believe. 
 The divergence of this account from that of Luke 
 is palpable enough. In Luke the ascension is on 
 the day of the resurrection. Here Jesus is corpo- 
 really present eight days later, — corporeal and yet 
 capable of " appearing " in a room whose doors are 
 fastened. 2 Subsequent appearances of Jesus are 
 represented in the last chapter of John, but- this 
 chapter formed no part of the original Gospel. 
 Still it is interesting as showing how the legend 
 grew more grossly extravagant as time went on. 
 
 Eeturning to the First Gospel, we find there an 
 
 1 This is certainly the force of " shut for fear of the Jews." 
 
 2 See above. 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 207 
 
 account of an appearance of Jesus to his disciples 
 in Galilee. The undoubted force of this tradition is 
 that Jesus had not appeared in Jerusalem, and did 
 not afterward. Of the ascension there is no ac- 
 count whatever. And now a word in regard to the 
 ascension. Matthew does not mention it. Mark is 
 equally silent ; but in the appendix to this Gospel 
 it is said that "he was taken up into heaven, and 
 sat on the right hand of God." John also is silent. 
 So, then, we have three Gospels, out of four, making 
 no final disposition of the risen Jesus. Had he 
 come to life only to die again, and that immediately, 
 the death of ordinary men ? Why no mention of 
 this ? Did he remain living for some time longer ? 
 Had he then become so insignificant that he de- 
 served no further mention ? Matthew, Mark, and 
 John leave us entirely in the dark concerning all 
 these things ; but Luke's is the Gospel of the As- 
 cension ; and, as we have seen, he fixes this on the 
 day of the resurrection. The author of Luke 
 is also the author of Acts. In Acts also, there is 
 an account of the ascension ; but there it is said 
 that it was not till forty days after the resurrec- 
 tion. When a writer contradicts himself in this 
 astonishing fashion what reliance can we place on 
 anything he says ? And yet Luke wrote his Gos- 
 pel, as he tells us, after many had " taken in hand " 
 a similar task, and he tells us that it is a record of 
 the things that were "most certainly believed" 
 
208 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 or " fully established " among the early Christians. 
 How " certainly " or " fully " we may judge from 
 the fact that ten years later, writing the book 
 of Acts, he changes the ascension from the first 
 day to the fortieth after the resurrection. Could 
 we have any better evidence of the variableness 
 of the tradition, or of the absolutely uncritical 
 nature of the evangelist's method of research? 
 When a writer contradicts himself in this man- 
 ner, without a word of apology or explanation, 
 what contradictions may we not expect from dif- 
 ferent writers, and what a quicksand must be 
 the entire New Testament account of both the 
 resurrection and ascension ! 
 
 And now having reviewed the testimony of the 
 Gospels to the resurrection in almost every partic- 
 ular, what is the net result ? Do we find that this 
 testimony is as much more complete and satisfac- 
 tory than the testimony which we require for any 
 ordinary event, as the resurrection is more remark- 
 able and unusual than any ordinary event ; for ex- 
 ample, the death of Jesus ? This was in the course 
 of nature; and all the accounts agree concerning 
 the manner of it; but here no single account is 
 self-consistent or agrees with any other. The dif- 
 ferent accounts are self-destructive and mutually 
 destructive all. They agree in hardly a single par- 
 ticular. They differ in particulars of the first im- 
 portance. Here the appearance of the risen Jesus 
 
I 
 
 THE RESURRECTION. 209 
 
 is placed in Galilee ; there, in direct contravention 
 of his own assertions, in Jerusalem. Here his as- 
 cension is definitely placed on the first day ; else- 
 where, by different writers, later, but without 
 general agreement. Of testimony to the act of 
 rising there is absolutely none. Here the risen 
 Jesus is a man of flesh and blood ; elsewhere a 
 bodiless ghost ; and so on through all the weary 
 catalogue of difference and contradiction. 
 
 Let me revert a moment to my original illustra- 
 tion. I said that if we heard that a train of cars 
 had been seen upon Broadway, moving without 
 any motor power, we should require an incalcula- 
 ble amount of evidence before we believed the 
 statement. If all the witnesses confirmed each 
 other* in every particular we should still be in 
 doubt. How then if all the witnesses were diver- 
 gent and contradictory in their statements ; if some 
 said the train was going up Broadway and others 
 said it was going down ; some that there were 
 many cars, others that there were few; some 
 that they were white and some that they were 
 black ; some that it was in the evening, others 
 that it was in the morning ; — and so on ? This 
 is a very homely illustration but it is to the 
 point. It does not exaggerate in the least degree 
 the conflicting character of the testimony to the 
 resurrection of Jesus contained in the four Gos- 
 pels. 
 
 14 
 
210 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 But it is admitted and even insisted by many- 
 critics of a conservative stamp, that the Gospels 
 are not our strongest evidence for the resurrection. 
 The evidence of Paul, we are assured, is much 
 stronger. His authentic epistles were written 
 from twenty to thirty years after the death of Je- 
 sus ; from fifty to one hundred years before the 
 Gospels assumed their present shapes, say the less 
 conservative critics ; from twenty-five to fifty years 
 say the more conservative ; and not only does 
 Paul continually assert and imply the resurrection, 
 but he builds upon it a great scheme of doctrine. 
 What then is the amount and nature of Paul's 
 evidence to the resurrection of Jesus ? " On one 
 occasion," says Dr. Sanday, " he gives a very cir- 
 cumstantial account of the testimony on which the 
 belief in the resurrection rested." Let us proceed 
 at once to examine this account. It is the central 
 citadel of the argument for the resurrection. If it 
 is impregnable to the assault of critical science, 
 the failure of the Gospels to establish this in any 
 least degree may yet be made good. In First Cor- 
 inthians, xv. 3, we read, " For I delivered unto you 
 that which I also received, that Christ died for our 
 sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was 
 raised again on the third day ; and that he was 
 seen by Peter, then by the twelve. After that he 
 was seen by above five hundred brethren at once, 
 of whom the greater part remain unto this present 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 211 
 
 day, but some are fallen asleep. After that he was 
 seen by James, then by all the apostles ; and last 
 of all he was seen by me also as by one born out 
 of due time." This is what is called " a very cir- 
 cumstantial account " of the testimony for the res- 
 urrection. Could anything be less circumstantial ? 
 Is it not the barest summary possible of what Paul 
 considered the evidence for the resurrection ? Not 
 a single circumstance is given of any one of the 
 alleged appearances of Jesus. Nevertheless the 
 attempt has frequently been made to connect these 
 different appearances of the risen Jesus with the 
 appearances related in the Gospels. There is good 
 reason to believe that Paul meant his list to be 
 exhaustive of the facts ; but of the appearance of 
 Jesus to Mary Magdalene and the other women 
 he has not a word. " Why ? Because he had 
 not heard of these appearances, or because he did 
 not believe in them ? On either supposition the 
 omission deducts something from the testimony of 
 the Gospels, already a minus quantity. The first 
 appearance specified is to Peter. This is supposed 
 to correspond to the w^ords in Luke, " and was seen 
 of Simon." It is quite possible that it refers to 
 the same tradition; but in Luke not a circum- 
 stance is given, and the other Gospels mention no 
 such appearance. To attach any weight to such a 
 statement therefore would be the height of folly. 
 The next appearance in Paul's list is to the twelve. 
 
 
212 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 This has been identified with the appearances in 
 Luke 1 and John 2 which we have already consid- 
 ered. If justly so, it can have no evidential value 
 over and above that of those accounts, which we 
 have seen to be mutually and self-destructive. The 
 next appearance mentioned by Paul — to above 
 five hundred brethren at once — is identified with 
 the Galilean appearance in Matthew. If rightly, 
 the account in Matthew is a damaging commen- 
 tary. If the identification is doubtful, then the 
 omission of all mention of such a striking and 
 glorious manifestation of the risen Jesus from the 
 Gospels, points to the weakness of the tradition on 
 this head. There is nothing in Paul's words to 
 imply that he had ever spoken on the subject with 
 one of the five hundred spectators. That any such 
 number of disciples could have been gathered any- 
 where, within a short time after the death of Jesus, 
 it is impossible to believe. The appearance to 
 James is not mentioned in any of the four Gospels, 
 but in the " Gospel according to the Hebrews " such 
 an appearance is recorded in an exceedingly apoc- 
 ryphal form. The appearance " to all the apostles " 
 cannot be identified with any appearance in the 
 Gospels, and only proves the shifty character of 
 the tradition twenty years after the death of 
 Jesus. 
 
 It is argued that Paul's acquaintance with the 
 
 1 Luke xxiv. 36. 2 John xx. 19. 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 213 
 
 apostles must have been the basis of his assurance ; 
 but his acquaintance with them was inconsidera- 
 ble. After his conversion he did not go to them 
 but retired into Arabia. After three years he went 
 to Jerusalem and stayed fifteen days with Peter, 
 — seeing nothing of the other apostles, — and four- 
 teen years elapsed before he went to Jerusalem 
 again. He boasted that the apostles had added 
 nothing to his knowledge of Jesus. Still there can 
 be no doubt that the passage we have been consid- 
 ering reflects with sufficient accuracy the tradition 
 of the Church A. d. 57, nor that the apostles held 
 substantially to this tradition ; but as to the nature 
 of the different appearances of Jesus, Paul's state- 
 ment tells us nothing, and but for its concluding 
 clause we should be left wholly in doubt as to his 
 own opinion. 
 
 But this concluding clause is exceedingly signif- 
 icant : " and last of all he was seen of me also." 
 Here again not a single circumstance is vouchsafed 
 to us. This is a great misfortune ; for, as Paul 
 makes no distinction between his sight of the risen 
 Jesus and that of the others, if he had told us the 
 circumstances of his experience, we should know, 
 at least, what he thought of the others'. That Paul 
 thought he had seen the risen Jesus, and that he con- 
 sidered his sight of him as good as any other, — 
 so much is certain. Now it is common to suppose 
 that Paul refers to what is generally spoken of as his 
 
214 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 conversion on his way from Jerusalem to Damas- 
 cus. Three different accounts of this, more or less 
 contradictory, are given in Acts ; but Paul nowhere 
 refers in his own writings to this event, — an as- 
 tonishing fact if there was any such in his experi- 
 ence. He dates his conversion from no such event, 
 but from a subjective experience of the truth and 
 power of Christ's religion ; but even supposing that 
 it was this event which he had in mind when he 
 wrote, " and last of all he was seen of me also," 
 and again, " Have I not seen Jesus Christ oar 
 Lord?" — this sight of Jesus must have been years 
 after his death. That it was a sight of the body 
 of Jesus which hung upon the cross there is not an 
 intimation, nor indeed that he saw Jesus at all. He 
 saw an intolerable light and heard, or imagined 
 that he heard, the voice of Jesus. If Paul really 
 considered this a valid manifestation of the risen 
 Jesus, nothing could be more weakening than such 
 an opinion on his part to his testimony to the res- 
 urrection. It remands all the previous appearances 
 to the same province of visionary exaltation. The 
 intellectual force of Paul is cited as an evidence that 
 he was not a visionary person. What, not when 
 he himself tells us that on one occasion he was 
 " caught up into the third heaven, — whether in the 
 body or out of the body he knew not, — and heard 
 unspeakable things ? " But, as I have said, Paul's 
 sight of the risen Jesus cannot be identified with 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 215 
 
 the event on the Damascus road. Of its nature he 
 has not vouchsafed to us one word. Whatever it 
 was, it was something which occurred years after 
 the death of Jesus, and it must have been some- 
 thing entirely different from the appearance of Je- 
 sus in the same body with which he died, the 
 resurrection of which is represented with much 
 inconsistency in the four Gospels. 
 
 So much for the testimony of Paul. If, as Dr. 
 Sanday says, it is stronger than the testimony of 
 the Gospels, the testimony of the Gospels must be 
 the weakest of all testimony. It is indeed ; and 
 the combined testimony of the Gospels and Paul's 
 Epistles is inadequate to establish the historical 
 character of any extraordinary event, much more 
 one so remarkably extraordinary as the return of a 
 man, actually dead, to life, and his ascension into 
 heaven " with his flesh and bones." That men 
 could believe this centuries ago, when the learning 
 of the few was as superstitious as the ignorance of 
 the many, I can easily understand. That the igno- 
 rant and superstitious of the present time, who 
 know nothing of the laws of evidence, who have 
 no appreciation of the inviolable sanctity of the 
 natural order of the world, and no perception that 
 it is men's growing faith in this which marks the 
 hours of progress on the great dial of history, — 
 that such can still, in this last quarter of the nine- 
 teenth century, regard the evidence of the New 
 
216 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 Testament as sufficient to support the physical 
 resurrection of Jesus is not strange ; but it is pass- 
 ing strange that men of intelligence, of culture, of 
 learning, and of apparent honesty, can be of this 
 opinion. I cannot understand it. The evidence 
 for the physical resurrection of Jesus in the New 
 Testament is less conclusive than that which a 
 criminal judge in one of our city courts might 
 properly require to convict a common thief of 
 petty larceny. I have said this before, and I re- 
 peat it with renewed conviction that it does no 
 state the case too strongly. The utter insufficiency 
 of the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus can- 
 not be overstated. 
 
 But we are told that where there is so much 
 smoke there must be some fire ; that where there is 
 so much belief that something happened, something 
 must have happened, — if not the physical resurrec- 
 tion, then something else. Agreed, and still the 
 something that occurred may have been a very 
 modest something which gradually, through va- 
 rious processes of accretion, attained to a consid- 
 erable bulk. It is not necessary to suppose that 
 the tradition of the New Testament was the result 
 of any one event. Different parts of it we can 
 trace to different sources. One part is the reflec- 
 tion of Old Testament texts; another of actual 
 sayings of Jesus, sadly misunderstood ; another of 
 unconscious exaggeration ; another of the more or 
 
 ! 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 217 
 
 less conscious endeavor to harmonize incongruous 
 elements. Besides all these sources of the tra- 
 dition, was there something more ? I am in- 
 clined to answer, Yes. What was it ? Many- 
 have said it was the resuscitation of Jesus from ap- 
 parent death, and they have argued their case with 
 a great deal of ingenuity. Even our dear friend, 
 Dr. Furness, is inclined to this idea in its most po- 
 etic form. Of course such a resuscitation would 
 have no theological significance. It would be no 
 crowning miracle. It would not be a miracle 
 at all. It would neither vindicate the Messi- 
 anic idea of Jesus nor our personal immortality. 
 Still, if it were a fact it would be worth while 
 to know it, painful and barren as it would be. 
 But the evidence for such a fact, though it 
 would be the immediate inference from any cer- 
 tainty that Jesus was seen alive after his burial, is 
 wholly insufficient. What is infinitely more likely 
 is that there was some visionary experience arising 
 from the intensely excited condition of the disci- 
 ples' minds after the death of their great teacher. 
 Coleridge said he had no doubt that Dr. Johnson 
 saw the Cock-Lane ghost; he only doubted whether 
 the ghost was there for him to see. I have myself 
 little doubt that the disciples saw Jesus on one or 
 more occasions after his death. I am very sure 
 however, that he was not there for them to see. 
 What seemed objective was the projection of an 
 
218 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 ideational state. Here was no miracle. The rec- 
 ords of morbid psychology abound in such phe- 
 nomena ; and not only in connection with a single 
 person, but in connection with many persons, alto- 
 gether and at once, seeing the same projected image 
 of an ideational state. Nothing is so contagious as 
 this condition of the mind. Given the initial expe- 
 rience, and no one is willing to be left behind. At 
 the burning of the Crystal Palace hundreds of per- 
 sons watched for an hour or more the agonies of an 
 escaped animal upon the roof; but all the time the 
 animal which they were pitying was safe and sound, 
 and what they saw was a piece of tin-roofing, shriv- 
 elled in the flames. Where there is less basis for a 
 common vision than there was here, the projection 
 of the ideational state is even more contagious. 
 
 Given such an experience on one or more occa- 
 sions, and the legend of the resurrection was sure 
 to be developed, soon or late, into its present bulk. 
 We have reason to believe that the scene of this 
 experience was Galilee. Matthew and Mark, you 
 will remember, suggest an appearance in Galilee 
 exclusive of any at Jerusalem. The indications are 
 that the original tradition embodied this Galilean 
 appearance ; that all the rest is subsequent accre- 
 tion and embellishment. The indications also are 
 that the original tradition did not include any stay 
 upon the earth, if any physical resurrection. It 
 was the glorified Jesus who was seen ; and there- 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 219 
 
 fore in the original tradition, there was no as- 
 cension. The resurrection and ascension were one 
 and the same thing. This is Paul's thought as 
 well. Though he has so much to say about the 
 resurrection, he has not a word concerning any as- 
 cension or any period of physical life upon the 
 earth after the resurrection. Such is the most 
 reasonable account that can be given of the causes 
 that were operative in producing the New Testa- 
 ment tradition. They are not simple, but exceed- 
 ingly complex : an ideational state projecting itself 
 from minds morbidly excited ; inferences from cer- 
 tain Old Testament texts, and certain words of 
 Jesus; unconscious exaggeration; more or less con- 
 scious adaptation of part to part, and all to certain 
 ends ; — these were the elements which combined 
 to make up the tradition of the resurrection which 
 has come down to us. 
 
 "Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail." 
 Different as is this result from the average belief 
 of Christendom, there is nothing in it directly, or 
 by implication, that need cause any rational being a 
 moment's trouble or alarm ; for we have seen that 
 even if the resurrection could be proved to have 
 been a fact, it could not affect the question of our 
 personal immortality ; but who shall say how much 
 the natural supports of this have been weakened by 
 centuries of reliance on a single miraculous occur- 
 rence ? I dare believe that when the last vestige 
 
220 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 of belief in this occurrence has been stripped away, 
 the hope of immortality, committed to the natural 
 reason of mankind, will enter on a new career of 
 unexampled power and glory. Nor need the su- 
 pernaturalist be sad because his miracle of miracles 
 has lost all standing-ground. Once certain that 
 the resurrection was a fact, and law would straight- 
 way adopt it into its ever widening sphere. The 
 fact would only prove that under certain condi- 
 tions, seldom realized, the phenomenon of death is 
 not absolutely final. The supernatural would be 
 as far as ever from being demonstrated. The 
 would-be supernaturalist may demur at this, but 
 the wise man will rejoice ; for the wise man wel- 
 comes every fresh evidence of the sublime cohe- 
 rency, the invariable order of phenomena. The 
 more coherency, the more invariableness, the more 
 absolute our confidence in the Infinite and Eternal 
 One. 
 
 There was another burial of Jesus than that in 
 the fresh rock-hewn sepulchre of the New Testa- 
 ment tradition. It was in a tomb where thousands 
 were already buried, buried alive under the forms 
 and ceremonies of an effete religion. Into this 
 tomb the friends of Jesus, the apostles and the 
 brothers who, in his lifetime, had given him no 
 countenance, made haste to carry him; not his 
 emaciated form, not his nail-wounded flesh, but 
 the real man, — his thought, his spirit. But from 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 221 
 
 this burial of Jesus there was indeed a resurrec- 
 tion ; and the angel who rolled away the stone of 
 the sepulchre was no supernatural being, with his 
 countenance like lightning, and his raiment white 
 as snow ; no, but a man who, according to his own 
 description, was " in bodily presence weak, and in 
 speech contemptible." Nevertheless there was 
 that in him which was sufficient for the burden 
 that was laid upon him. With mighty, ringing 
 strokes he hewed his way through manifold ob- 
 structions, straight to the spirit of Jesus, — his in- 
 most thought and life, — and bade it rise up and 
 come forth ; and even so it did, and Christianity, 
 that might else have been only a Jewish sect, los- 
 ing itself in arid wastes of pedantry and ritual 
 after a few generations, entered upon a career of 
 universal influence. This was the real resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus, the triumph of his essential spirit 
 over the Judaizing narrowness of the Church of 
 the Apostles, and it was a resurrection of infinitely 
 greater significance than any impossible resuscita- 
 tion of his mortal body ; and Paul of Tarsus, the 
 man through whom it was accomplished, was of 
 such mind and heart and will, that, in comparison 
 with him, all bent with toil and scarred with battle 
 though he was, the dazzling brightness of any le- 
 gendary angel is "no light, but rather darkness 
 visible" 
 
VIL 
 
 THE DEIFICATION. 
 
"More than anything else, it was just then important 
 that the power to organize society and create the institu- 
 tions of the future should be a moral power ; and that was 
 the same as saying that it should rest on a religious con- 
 viction, held with unreasoning fervor, denned in a symbol 
 positive enough to enlist, like a flag, the passionate loyalty 
 of multitudes of men. A decaying civilization, a perishing 
 social fabric, a political framework battered and just yield- 
 ing before a frightful tempest of invasion, a decrepit pagan- 
 ism, guilty of vices that might not be named and cruelties 
 not to be recalled without horror, — these were on one side ; 
 and on the other, the sublime faith, held with whatever of 
 unreason, turbulence, or feud, that Almighty God had once 
 lived bodily among men, and that He did really, in person, 
 lead them now in the fight against His enemies." 
 
 Joseph Henry Allen. 
 
VII. 
 
 THE DEIFICATION. 
 
 THE phrase, " an epoch-making book/' is a cap- 
 ital one where it is well deserved, but it is 
 frequently applied to books, damp from the press, 
 which are a nine-days' wonder, and then go down 
 into well merited oblivion ; but the Cur Dens Homo 
 of Anselm, the great scholar-bishop of the eleventh 
 century, was indeed an epoch-making book. It 
 revolutionized the doctrine of the atonement. For 
 centuries before Anselm, the death of Jesus had 
 been regarded as a price paid to the devil for the 
 liberation of souls legally his, and doomed to ever- 
 lasting suffering on account of Adam's sin; but 
 since the time of Anselm the death of Jesus has 
 been regarded as a price paid to the Almighty, en- 
 abling him to remit the natural penalty of Ad- 
 am's sin without any subordination of the claims 
 of justice to the pleadings of mercy, the sufferings 
 of Jesus being regarded as an equivalent for the 
 remitted sufferings of all who might be saved. 
 Cut Deus Homo means " why God was made man." 
 
 15 
 
226 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 It is not exactly the opposite of this problem that 
 we are to consider this morning : Why the man 
 Jesus was made God ? It is, Sow he was made 
 God ; the process through which the conception of 
 him in men's minds passed, so that, from being at 
 first regarded simply and entirely as a man, his 
 deity was at length asserted in terms as clear as 
 the nature of language would permit. 1 
 
 You will discover, as I proceed, that it is not 
 my object in this discourse to claim the testimony 
 of the New Testament throughout in favor of a 
 purely humanitarian conception of Jesus. There 
 is no reason why I should be anxious to do this, 
 for if the teaching of the New Testament were as 
 expressive of the deity of Jesus as the Nicene 
 creed, or the still more dogmatic Athanasian, it 
 would not be conclusive of the fact. Our present 
 knowledge of the New Testament is such that it 
 precludes all use of it as an authority over and 
 above the measure of its intrinsic rationality. To 
 proceed on any other principle than this is a spe- 
 cies of intellectual immorality for any person who 
 is decently informed concerning the New Testa- 
 ment. Whatever then the teachings of the New 
 Testament prove to be concerning the nature of 
 Jesus, the facts remain the same. The teachings 
 
 1 The Paulus of F. C. Baur, his First Three Christian Cen- 
 turies, and Pfleiderer's Paulinism are the most valuable studies 
 that I know of this development. 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 227 
 
 of the New Testament are not conclusive of any 
 speculative truth. The rational religionist can ap- 
 proach them without any bias. If the deity of 
 Jesus were taught with unmistakable clearness 
 upon every page, he would be in no wise bound to 
 accept it. It would still remain for him to con- 
 sider the intrinsic rationality of this doctrine, with 
 no more prejudgment than if he had found it in the 
 Mohammedan Koran or the Buddhist Dhamma- 
 pada. 
 
 What we do actually find in the New Testament 
 is not a perfectly homogeneous exposition of the 
 doctrine of the nature of Jesus, but an exposition 01 
 incidental statement that exhibits much variety ; 
 which variety betrays the character of a develop- 
 ment of which the starting-point is found in the 
 Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and 
 the culmination in the Fourth Gospel. This deveb 
 opment does not then exactly synchronize with tlu 
 order of time in which the New Testament writing* 
 appeared. The earliest writings of the New Test- 
 ament are the genuine Epistles of Paul, extending 
 from about A. D. 53 to A. D. 63. These Epistle? 
 represent a more developed form of the doctrine o 
 Christ's nature than do the Synoptic Gospels ; but 
 this is only what we should expect from what w« 
 know of Paul and his relation to the early church 
 and from the character of his letters in comparison 
 with that of the Synoptic Gospels. These Gospek 
 
228 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 reached their present form much later than the 
 Pauline Epistles, but they represent much more 
 perfectly the primitive ideas of the early Christians; 
 for it is not as if they were made at one cast, like 
 the Pauline Epistles. They are, as they now stand, 
 the last result of a long process of traditional ag- 
 gregation. The comparative unconsciousness of 
 their Christology, the absence from them of all 
 daring speculation, indeed of anything that can be 
 called speculation, is convincing that we are here 
 much nearer the fountain-head of Christological 
 development than in the letters of St. Paul ; but 
 not even in the Synoptic Gospels have we a per- 
 fectly consistent representation of the nature of 
 Jesus. In general, the conception of Mark and 
 Luke is more exalted than that of Matthew, al- 
 though it is in Matthew that the conception for a 
 moment reaches its highest level, in the words as- 
 cribed to Jesus, " All power is given unto me in 
 heaven and on earth." Even this, which is un- 
 doubtedly the reflection of the afterglow of pious 
 adulation on the historic character of Jesus, is still 
 within the bounds of a purely humanitarian con- 
 ception. The idea is of a dignity and office to be 
 bestowed on Jesus by God as a reward of his faith- 
 fulness unto death, and through the medium of his 
 resurrection. The dignity and office do not inhere 
 in his essential nature. Nevertheless, this is the 
 highest point reached by the Synoptists. Nowhere 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 229 
 
 in their representation is there anything which is 
 not fundamentally consistent with the pure hu- 
 manity of Jesus. When we consider that the Sy- 
 noptic Gospels did not reach their present form until 
 from sixty to eighty years after the death of Jesus, 
 and that in the mean time the Epistles of Paul had 
 all been written, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 it is astonishing how little they are colored by the 
 tendencies of these important writings. It only 
 proves with what tenacity the human idea of Jesus 
 held its ground, and how slowly the bolder thought 
 of Paul fought its way to general recognition. The 
 Synoptic Gospels are the Gospels of the early 
 church, of the church of the apostles, of the Jew- 
 ish Christians. They embody their beliefs. And it 
 does not admit of any doubt that the early church, 
 the church of the first century, the Jewish Christian 
 church, was strictly humanitarian in its conception 
 of Jesus ; for its central dogma was that Jesus was 
 the Jewish Messiah. Now the Jewish Messiah 
 was never conceived as being anything but a man. 
 The suggestion that he was God, or a being in any 
 such proximity to God as Arianism represented 
 him, would have seemed to any pious Jew utterly 
 blasphemous. With every successive step in the 
 exaltation of Jesus, Judaism became alienated from 
 Christianity more and more ; and w T ith his arrival 
 at divine honors ceased the last hope of an extended 
 Jewish Christianity, and the long centuries of con- 
 
230 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 flict and of Christian persecution of the Jews began. 
 The Jew-Christians never succumbed to the deified 
 Jesus. They resisted every movement of thought 
 that tended thither. 
 
 The Jesus of the Synoptists is a human being. 
 He works miracles, but the power of working mir- 
 acles was not supposed to be inconsistent with the 
 nature of a human being. It is ascribed to the 
 disciples of Jesus ; to various Old Testament per- 
 sonages ; even to the enemies of Jesus by Jesus him- 
 self : " If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom 
 do your children cast them out ? " " The Son of 
 Man," is the favorite Synoptic designation. " The 
 Son of God," is used infrequently ; 1 and as used is 
 everywhere the title of an office with which Jesus is 
 invested, not the designation of a peculiar nature. 
 It has no reference whatever to the idea*of miracu- 
 lous birth. Possibly, however, it suggested this 
 idea. Evidently the doctrine of miraculous birth 
 formed no part of the earliest conception of Jesus' 
 nature or origin ; for side by side with the stories 
 of his miraculous birth in Matthew and Luke, we 
 have genealogies tracing the line of his descent 
 from David through Joseph, and these genealogies 
 must have been written before the stories of mirac- 
 ulous birth became current. After this the line 
 of Davidic descent was traced through Mary. 
 These stories form no part of " the triple tradition " 
 
 1 Never by Jesus himself. 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 231 
 
 which underlies the Synoptic Gqspels. This begins 
 with the baptism of Jesus by John. So does our 
 Second Gospel. The Gospel according to the He- 
 brews, the Jewish-Christian Gospel of the Ebionites 
 and Nazarenes until these Jewish-Christian sects 
 became extinct, has no miraculous birth, no legends 
 of the infancy, and begins with the simple state- 
 ment : " There was a certain man named Jesus, 
 about thirty years old, who chose us out;" and 
 yet some of the greatest scholars of the early 
 church regarded this Gospel as of equal authority 
 with our Synoptics. Doubtless it represents the 
 starting-point of Christian legend and doctrine 
 concerning Jesus : " There was a certain man 
 named Jesus, about thirty years old, who chose 
 us out." Here, from the descent of the spirit at 
 the baptism of Jesus, as in the Synoptics, dates 
 the Messianic dignity of Jesus. Not only was he 
 purely human, but he was not invested with the 
 attributes of his official station till he had come 
 well nigh to middle age. The stories of his mir- 
 aculous birth are an attempt to carry back his 
 dignity a step further. These make his Messiah- 
 ship congenital; but they do nothing more. In 
 the Synoptics there is not a hint of those doctrines 
 of pre-existence which play so conspicuous a part 
 in Paul, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and in the 
 Fourth Gospel. The miraculous birth of Jesus did 
 not detract from his humanity in the eyes of the 
 
232 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 mythologists who fashioned the legend of such a 
 birth. Miraculous birth was attributed to Isaac 
 and to Samuel, but their entire humanity was 
 never for a moment doubted. The germ of the 
 doctrine of Christ's sinless nature appears in the 
 language ascribed to John the Baptist : " I have 
 need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to 
 me ? " for the baptism of John implied the con- 
 sciousness of sinfulness. In the Gospel according 
 to the Hebrews, Jesus is made to say, " What 
 sin have I committed that I should go and be bap- 
 tized of him ? " and then adds, " Unless my saying 
 this very thing is sinful." An exquisite moral 
 perception went to the framing of this story. Its 
 maker saw that for Jesus to consider himself sinless, 
 would be a sign of moral imperfection. No wonder 
 that the tendency to exalt the person of Jesus 
 more and more allowed the Gospel which contained 
 this penetrating remark to lapse into obscurity, 
 although it had, as had no other, the look of an 
 authentic apostolic document. To sum up: the 
 Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels is a man. No attri- 
 butes ascribed to him, no circumstances of his ca- 
 reer, make this statement in any degree doubtful. 
 How then ? Do not the Synoptists furnish a sin- 
 gle item of the process we are met here to consider : 
 How Jesus was made God ? They furnish certain 
 preluding notes. The glorious attributes with 
 which Jesus was invested after death, according to 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 233 
 
 Matthew, are prophetic of the subsequent disposi- 
 tion to find these attributes inhering in his nature. 
 The attempt, by means of the miraculous birth, to 
 make his Messianic dignity congenital, is prophetic 
 of the later disposition to carry it back into the 
 aeons of a pre-existent state. 
 
 In the Epistles of Paul the glorification of Jesus 
 is much further advanced, and, though it stops far 
 short of actual deification, it abounds in phrases 
 that might easily bear such an interpretation, and 
 paved the way for it whenever one should come 
 daring enough to trust himself to such a way, as 
 unsubstantial as the floating bridge which turned 
 to flame under the flying feet of Galahad, when to 
 his blamelessness was granted the first, last, only 
 vision of the Holy Grail. If with Ferdinand 
 Christian Baur we accept as authentic only four of 
 Paul's Epistles out of the fourteen ascribed to him 
 in the New Testament, namely, Romans, the two 
 Corinthians, and Galatians, Paul's theory of Christ's 
 nature is quite homogeneous. If we also accept, as I 
 am inclined to do, with the support of many able 
 critics, First Thessalonians, Colossians, and Philip- 
 pians, then we have in Paul also a development of 
 which the starting point is found in First Thessalo- 
 nians, his earliest epistle, the middle point in Eo- 
 mans, Galatians, and Corinthians, and the culmina- 
 tion in Colossians and Philippians. In Thessaloni- 
 ans the conception is hardly different from that of 
 
234 THE MA.N JESUS. 
 
 the Synoptic Gospels. In Komans, Corinthians, and 
 Galatians it has already made a great advance. To 
 the actual historical Jesus, Paul was quite indiffer- 
 ent. He does not quote his words. He does not re- 
 count his deeds. He does not dwell on his example. 
 His self-denial is not that of a man among men. It 
 is the laying aside of heavenly glory, and the as- 
 sumption of a human form. Paul's thought centred 
 not in the historic Jesus but in an ideal Christ of 
 his own conception. This ideal Christ was a man. 
 Paul never calls him God, and would, no doubt,- 
 have resented the imputation of any tendency to 
 deify him. But though the Christ of Paul is a man, 
 he is a very different man from the man of the Sy- 
 noptics. Notice some of his expressions : "There is 
 one God," he says, "and one mediator between God 
 and man, the man Christ Jesus." " Since by man 
 came death, by man came also the resurrection 
 from the dead." "The first man is of the earth 
 earthy; the second man is from heaven." Our 
 common version reads, "the Lord from heaven," 
 but "the Lord" is an interpolation of the later 
 manuscripts. This last expression is the key to 
 Paul's Christology. Christ is a man, but he is " the 
 man from heaven." He is a heavenly man, a pre- 
 existent being. If here and there Paul speaks of 
 the glorified nature of Jesus as the result of his 
 death and resurrection, this is only because his 
 thought has not become entirely homogeneous. 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 235 
 
 Paul was not a consistent thinker, and if we try to 
 make all that he said hold fast together we shall 
 only weary ourselves without result. This was his 
 first thought, — that Jesus was glorified by his 
 death and resurrection ; but this could not satisfy 
 his speculative genius. A glory with which Christ 
 was invested did not satisfy him. He wanted a 
 glory for him that was essential to his personality ; 
 and so his death and resurrection became only the 
 means of his resuming a glory which he had ages 
 before his earthly manifestation — the glory of a 
 heavenly, archetypal man. Henceforth to Paul the 
 human life of Jesus was the merest episode in the 
 career of the heavenly man, the ideal Christ of his 
 speculative imagination; and yet, lofty as was 
 Paul's conception of the Christ, he cherished the 
 idea that all men who would might be even such 
 as he. Although an image of the divine glory, he 
 was not less an image of the possible glory of the 
 saints. It was not the character of the historical 
 Jesus that marked Paul's limit of possible human 
 attainment. It was the nature of the heavenly 
 pre-existent Christ. Here is a sufficient proof that 
 however Paul might exalt the attributes of Christ 
 he- never thought of him as God. 
 
 That he did exalt his attributes in the most dar- 
 ing fashion, his Epistles amply prove, even if we 
 stop short of Philippians and Colossians. Already 
 in Corinthians he is the instrument of the univer- 
 
236 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 sal energy of God ; but in Colossians he is not so 
 much the instrument of God as a creative, cosmic 
 principle. All things are made not only by him, but 
 for him. He is the end of all creation. This is a 
 decided change from Paul's idea that, at the last, 
 Christ will give back into God's hands the domin- 
 ion which has been delegated to him, "that God 
 may be all in all ; " but I do not think that it is a 
 greater change than a mind so freely speculative 
 as Paul's might easily make. Even the Christ 
 of this conception is not God. He is " the image 
 of the invisible God," "the first-born of every 
 creature." "In him dwelleth all the fullness of 
 the Godhead bodily." "Who, being in the form 
 of God, did not covet equality with God." As 
 yet no deification, but deification is not far off. 
 Whether Colossians and Philippians are Paul's or 
 not, they represent the natural development of his 
 ideas as they appear in Romans and Corinthians. 
 
 In Hebrews, which is certainly not Paul's, and 
 Ephesians, which is somewhat less certainly not his, 
 the doctrine of Christ's nature does not differ much 
 from that in Colossians and Philippians. Ephe- 
 sians is an echo of Colossians. The Epistle to the 
 Hebrews has much more original force ; but while 
 the Christ of this epistle is exalted to the highest 
 cosmical rank, that of the creative principle in 
 virtue of which all things have their being, the 
 writer endeavors to reconcile this awful majesty 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 237 
 
 with the earthly career of Jesus in a manner to 
 which Paul never condescended. Paul's sinless 
 Christ is the pre-existent heavenly and the risen 
 glorified Christ. It is necessary to his psychology 
 to suppose that the historical Jesus was not free 
 from sin ; but the Christ of Hebrews " was tempted 
 in all points even as we are, yet without sin." This 
 by the way. Neither Hebrews nor Ephesians con- 
 ducts us much, if any, further than Colossians in 
 our inquiry, How Jesus was made God. The sub- 
 ordination of Christ to God is even more emphatic 
 'than in Colossians. 
 
 The Apocalypse, which was written (a. d. 69), a 
 little later than Hebrews, is somewhat aside from 
 the main line of development. The most exalted 
 epithets are applied to Jesus ; the most exalted at- 
 tributes are assigned to him ; but what would be 
 metaphysical in Paul is here rhetorical. The attri- 
 butes do not inhere in the personality of the Mes- 
 siah. They are badges of distinction. If, however, 
 anything could be proved by quoting isolated 
 texts, the Apocalypse would be an armory from 
 which believers in the deity of Christ could draw 
 out many a battle-axe and spear. 
 
 " A little deeper," said the wounded soldier to the 
 surgeon probing his wound, close to his heart, — 
 "a little deeper, and you will find the emperor." A 
 little deeper, and we shall come to the imperial 
 doctrine of the New Testament concerning the per- 
 
238 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 sonality of Christ, — its loftiest expression, consid- 
 erably advanced beyond that of Paul, even though 
 Colossians be his work. It is of the Fourth Gospel 
 that I now speak ; yet even here the advance is 
 more in point of definiteness than in point of exal- 
 tation. Various lines of evidence lead up to the 
 conclusion that the Fourth Gospel made its appear- 
 ance in the second quarter of the second century. 
 Before this time the conceptions of Christ's nature 
 had sought no alliance with the Alexandrian doc- 
 trine of the Logos ; but now the signs of this alli- 
 ance began to multiply on every side, and such is • 
 their character that we are forbidden to imagine 
 that the Fourth Gospel took the lead and set the 
 fashion in this line of thought. On the contrary, 
 it is absolutely certain that if, at any time during 
 the second and third quarters of the second century, 
 the Fourth Gospel had been generally recognized 
 as a genuine apostolic writing, it must have had 
 more influence than we know it had in shaping the 
 Logos doctrine of the time. Thus Justin Martyr, 
 writing in the middle of the second century, and 
 wholly devoted to the doctrine of the Logos-Christ, 
 develops the doctrine in a manner widely different 
 from that of John, to which his apparent references 
 are so slight and so exceedingly doubtful that 
 many of the wisest critics are inclined to think 
 them only apparent, implying a common stock of 
 phrases of which both Justin and the pseudo-John 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 239 
 
 availed themselves. Even after the middle of the 
 century the doctrine of the Logos-Christ is devel- 
 oped in a manner quite independent of the Fourth 
 Gospel. The inevitable conclusion is that the 
 Fourth Gospel was one of many and various at- 
 tempts to state the doctrine of Christ's nature in 
 terms of the Alexandrian philosophy, which, as the 
 most consistent, the most brilliant, the most imag- 
 inative, gradually threw every other attempt into 
 the shade. The Gospel having thus achieved a 
 splendid victory on its own merits, its thinly dis- 
 guised claim to be the apostle John's was easily 
 allowed. The more prestige for the doctrine it 
 contained, the better. 
 
 Paul had developed his doctrine of Christ's na- 
 ture without consciously allying it with the Logos 
 doctrine of the Alexandrians, which indeed was 
 not so generally diffused in his time as it was a 
 century later ; but he had developed his doctrine 
 to such a height that the wonder is it did not 
 sooner coalesce with the Logos doctrine. 
 
 The idea of the Logos or Word came into Jewish 
 thought from two sides, from Persia and from 
 Greece ; from Persia by way of Babylon, from 
 Greece by way of Alexandria. The Persian-Zoro- 
 astrian religion taught that God created all things 
 by his word. The cosmology in Genesis is of Per- 
 sian origin. " God said let there be light, and there 
 was light." His word is the creative power. Be- 
 
240 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 fore the time of Jesus this Word of God had be- 
 come personified in Jewish thought, most fre- 
 quently under the name of Wisdom. "Wisdom 
 hath been created before all things," we read in 
 the Book of Proverbs ; " Wisdom has been created 
 before all things," in Ecclesiasticus ; and in the 
 Wisdom of Solomon, " She is a reflection of the 
 everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the 
 power of God, and the image of his goodness." 
 The Greek influence coutributed to the same ten- 
 dency of thought. The later followers of Plato, 
 the Neo-Platonists, had personified his doctrine of 
 the divine idea or reason. They called it the first 
 born Son of God, born before the creation of the 
 world, itself the agent of creation. It was the im- 
 age of God's perfection, the mediator between God 
 and man. Philo Judseus, who was born about 
 twenty years before Jesus, was possessed with these 
 ideas and endeavdred to connect them with the Old 
 Testament teachings. He quoted, " Let us make 
 man in our own image," to prove that God had an 
 assistant in the work of creation, an assistant 
 who did all the work, thus saving God from any 
 contact with matter, a necessity of the Persian 
 system, imported into Jewish thought. He calls 
 the Logos the " first born Son of God," " Second 
 God," and even " God," but this always in a quali- 
 tative, never in a quantitative sense. 
 
 On the one hand, then, the writer of the Fourth 
 
 
THE DEIFICATION". 241 
 
 Gospel found this doctrine of the Logos ; and on 
 the other hand he found a conception of Jesus ex- 
 pressed in terms the most exalted, and bearing a 
 very strong resemblance to the terms of the Logos 
 doctrine of Philo. True, Philo had never dreamed of 
 a human incarnation of the Logos, and Paul had 
 never identified his exalted Christ with the Alex- 
 andrian Word. The first to do this was pretty cer- 
 tainly not the writer of the Fourth Gospel. It 
 occurred to many writers at about the same time. 
 To affect an alliance between Christianity and 
 Alexandrian Platonism was the one passionate en- 
 thusiasm midway of the second century. Of this 
 enthusiasm the Fourth Gospel is the grandest mon- 
 ument. The opening verses of this Gospel might 
 have been written by Philo Judaeus : " In the be- 
 ginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
 God, and the Word was God. The same was in the 
 beginning with God. All things were made by 
 Him ; and without Him was not anything made 
 that was made. In Him was life, and the life was 
 the light of men." So far it is Philo speaking in 
 the voice of the evangelist. But Philo never could 
 have written, "And the Word was made flesh and 
 dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory 
 of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace 
 and truth." To Philo this incarnation of the Logos 
 in a human personality would have seemed a blas- 
 phemous proceeding ; and even in John the union 
 16 
 
242 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 of the Logos with the human personality of Jesus 
 is purely verbal. The Logos is " a consuming fire," 
 and shrivels up the human personality. In the 
 Fourth Gospel representation there is little that is 
 really human, and what is so is the survival of 
 traditions which the writer was obliged to respect, 
 not his own thought. In his own thought the life 
 of Jesus was merely a manifestation of the glory of 
 the Word of God. It is this Word that speaks, 
 and not the human Jesus. " He that hath seen 
 me hath seen the Father." " I and my Father are 
 one." With such texts as these confronting it, it 
 is marvellous that a humanitarian Christ doctrine- 
 has ever dared appeal to the New Testament in 
 justification of its creed. Humanitarian this is not, 
 but it is still unitarian ; unitarian in the most ex- 
 alted sense, but still unitarian. Without deifying 
 Jesus it could not exalt him further, but it does 
 not deify him. The resemblance is so close to the 
 Alexandrian Philonism that we must allow this 
 the right of an interpreter ; and we know that this 
 was extremely careful to insist that the Logos is 
 not God. How could it be, when the prime object 
 of the idea was to introduce something, some one, 
 not God, between God and the material universe ? 
 To assert the coextensiveness of the Logos with God 
 would have been simply the suicide of the idea. 
 In the Fourth Gospel the doctrine is the same. 
 " The Word was God," it says ; but the meaning 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 243 
 
 here is qualitative, not quantitative. For all the 
 likeness there is difference, and there is subordi- 
 nation: "As the Father hath life in himself, so 
 hath he given the Son to have life in himself/' 
 These words express the idea of the independent 
 personality and subordination of the Logos. Thus 
 the New Testament Christ, on the topmost height 
 of his development, though infinitely more than 
 man, is still not God. The Humanitarians certainly 
 cannot claim him ; but no more can the Trinita- 
 rians. I say this in no spirit of triumph, for I am 
 myself triumphed over as much as the Trinitarians. 
 Do I then abandon my humanitarian conception of 
 Jesus ? By no means. The New Testament dic- 
 tum settles nothing. Any thoughtful person, un- 
 derstanding the method of its development, ought 
 to see that it settles nothing. Tf the dictum of the 
 Fourth Gospel were final, nothing would remain 
 for us but to consider Jesus, or rather the Christ, 
 as a super-angelic being, coexistent with God, and 
 the Creator of the world, and still not God. This 
 is old-fashioned Unitarianism of the most exalted 
 type, the creed of Arius ; but why should we accept 
 the dictum of the Fourth Gospel as final, when we 
 know 1 that is a pseudonymous Gospel, written by 
 some man of daring speculative genius in the sec- 
 
 1 There are competent critics who would not allow this ; but 
 no competent critic will pretend that we are certain of the Jo- 
 hannean authorship. 
 
244 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 ond quarter of the second century ? The dictum of 
 such a Gospel can have no authority for us over 
 and above the amount of its intrinsic rationality. 
 
 It would be a wearisome matter to attempt to 
 follow the development of thought, concerning the 
 nature of Christ, for the century and a half between 
 the appearance of the Fourth Gospel, and the great 
 Arian 'controversy at the beginning of the fourth 
 century. It is a popular fancy that a standard of 
 orthodoxy was furnished in the New Testament 
 writings in the first century, and that all subsequent 
 divergence from this standard was of the nature of 
 heresy. Alas, the history of the first Christian 
 centuries leads us to no such conclusion ! What 
 we find is that the four Gospels attained to general 
 recognition as the Gospels only at the close of the 
 second century; that this recognition was only 
 general, not universal ; that the canon of the New 
 Testament fluctuated through a wide range for 
 some two or three centuries longer. In the mean- 
 time the doctrine of Christ's nature was continually 
 in dispute; not strangely either, for within the 
 limits of the most honored books of the New Test- 
 ament the conception of Christ's nature fluctuated 
 between two widely separated points, at one of 
 which the conception was purely human, and at 
 the other on the verge of deity. 
 
 The nature of Christ was a matter of free specu- 
 lation for a period of at least two hundred and fifty 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 245 
 
 years. In the course of this time every possible 
 shade of opinion was entertained. The Jewish 
 Christians, who were becoming relatively less sig- 
 nificant all the time, held to the more humanitarian 
 view. In the Greek and Eoman world the ten- 
 dency was to ever greater exaltation. This ten- 
 dency was facilitated by the worship of the Eoman 
 emperor. This worship had accustomed the ma- 
 jority to think of a man as God. This worship, 
 satisfying so long as the Flavians and Antonines 
 held up the honor of the state, naturally sought 
 another and worthier object wh'en the emperors be- 
 came too manifestly ungodlike in their life and rule. 
 The deification of the emperor has generally been 
 regarded as the lowest depth of paganism. On the 
 contrary, it corresponded with the most beneficent 
 sway of the empire and the highest personal charac- 
 ter of the emperors, men who endeavored to deserve 
 the appalling honors that were heaped upon them ; 
 and it would be difficult to overestimate the con- 
 tribution of the imperial worship, — the worship of 
 the emperor as God, — to the deification of Jesus. 
 
 A few quotations, taken almost at random, will 
 show how various the opinions were concerning the 
 nature of Christ for some centuries. Justin Martyr, 
 midway of the second century, while himself iden- 
 tifying Christ with the Logos and with the God 
 who appeared to Abraham, freely allowed that 
 there were Christians, whose right to their opinion 
 
246 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 he did not dispute, who believed that Jesus was 
 " a man of men." What weighty thinking went to 
 the solving of these difficult problems can be in- 
 ferred from the statement of Theophilus of Antioch, 
 one of the most distinguished writers of the second 
 century, who, guarding against the notion that the 
 Logos was another God, declared that God made 
 man and woman both together, lest it should be 
 supposed that one God made man ; another, woman ! 
 Much of the thinking done was of about this qual- 
 ity. In the Clementine Homilies (second-century 
 writings) Paul is accused of sheer polytheism in 
 making Christ another God. These Homilies as- 
 sert the pure humanity of Jesus. Irenaeus, on the 
 other hand, insists that those who call Christ mere 
 man are in a state of death. Gnostic Christianity 
 taught that Christ was the Son of the Supreme 
 God; Jesus, the Son of the Creator, who was not the 
 Supreme God. These two beings of different ori- 
 gin were united in Jesus Christ. Be patient with 
 this nonsense. It is necessary to consider it if you 
 would know what sort of thinking it was that de- 
 veloped the doctrine of Christ's nature. Then there 
 were the Docetse, who contended that Jesus had 
 no real flesh and blood but was a phantasm. This 
 notion is combated in the New Testament: "Every 
 spirit that confesseth not that Christ has come in 
 the flesh, is not of God." This notion was exceed- 
 ingly common and held its own for a long time. 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 247 
 
 It pleased not Tertullian. To him the danger of 
 denying the humanity of Christ seemed greater 
 than that of denying his divinity. " Common peo- 
 ple/' he said, " think of Christ as a man. Count 
 him a man if you please ; " and yet Tertullian was 
 the first to introduce the idea and the name Trin- 
 ity into Christian theology. This about A. D. 200, 
 when it made no impression, and was not followed 
 up by Tertullian himself or any other writer. Mid- 
 way of the third century Sabellius advocated the 
 doctrine that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all 
 emanations of the Logos, which he identified w T ith 
 the Supreme God. Christ, he said, was only a tran- 
 sient manifestation of the Logos. For a time this 
 quaternity, this four-fold mystery of the divine na- 
 ture, threatened to be the orthodox doctrine of the 
 church ; but, at a later stage of the controversy, his 
 doctrines were pronounced heretical, as also were 
 those of Paul of Samosata, who argued that " Christ 
 was not God by nature but became so by progressive 
 development." Origen, who died A. D. 254, insisted 
 on the distinctness of Christ from God, and his 
 subordination to him, but announced the doctrine 
 of his eternal generation. This was the doctrine 
 that was to be stamped as orthodox in the great 
 council of ISTicsea, nearly three quarters of a century 
 after the death of Origen. 
 
 Consider the immediate course of events which 
 led up to this decision. No country so much as 
 
248 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 Egypt, no city so much as Alexandria, influenced 
 the development of Christianity for four hundred 
 years. In the year 318 an Alexandrian bishop, 
 Alexander by name, publicly charged Arius, one of 
 his presbyters, with holding erroneous doctrines of 
 Christ's nature. Arius retorted the charge. The 
 controversy widened until it included Egypt, Libya, 
 and Palestine under its baleful shadow. Arius was 
 excommunicated by a synod of Egyptian and 
 Libyan bishops ; but with his excommunication 
 the number of his adherents increased rather than 
 diminished. He was a man of great intellectual 
 force. He believed what he believed. He was an 
 ardent propagandist. He set his doctrines to the 
 music of the theatres and chanted them in a loud, 
 passionate voice. Before long, hundreds were chant- 
 ing them, — priests, boatmen, bakers, people of all 
 sorts. Said Gregory of Nyssa : " Every corner and 
 nook of the city is full of men who discuss in- 
 comprehensible subjects ; the streets, the markets, 
 the people who sell old clothes, the money-chan- 
 gers, the dealers in provisions. Ask a man how 
 many oboli it comes to, — he gives you a dogmatic 
 discourse on generated and ungenerated being. 
 Inquire the price of bread, — you are answered, 
 ( The Father is greater than the Son, and the Son 
 is subordinate to the Father/ Ask if your bath is 
 ready, — you are answered, ' The Son of God was 
 created out of nothing.' " 
 
THE DEIFICATION. ■ 249 
 
 The animating motive of Arius was apparently 
 to steer the ship of dogma clear of the rock of 
 Ditheism, the notion of two Gods. Two beings, one 
 unbegotten, the other eternally begotten, seemed to 
 him no better than two Gods. As for himself, he 
 would not say that " there was a time when Christ 
 was not," but "there was when Christ was not." 
 He was before time; but God was before him. 
 How clear this is ; how palpable ; how wholesome ; 
 how nutritious ! Then, too, Arius stuck at the 
 word " begotten." If Christ was begotten, then, as 
 begotten from the unbegotten, he must inherit the 
 unbegottenness of his begetter ! He was not be- 
 gotten, then, said Arius ; he was not of one sub- 
 stance with the Father; he was created out of 
 nothing. There is not wanting evidence that the 
 opposite party was animated by the same motive as 
 Arius. Its aim was not so much to exalt the per- 
 son of Jesus as to avoid Ditheism, and the best way 
 to avoid this seemed to insist on the oneness of 
 Christ with God. He was too great to be another. 
 A being created before time, and himself the crea- 
 tor of all things but himself, was sure to be another 
 God sooner or later. In vain did Arius insist that 
 his " createdness " and his " moment when he was 
 not," nullified the danger. The Athanasians could 
 not see it so. Thus dreading one and the same evil, 
 the two parties took different methods of avoiding 
 it, and in their hot insistence, each on its own way, 
 
250 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 made every corner of the Eoman Empire ring with 
 angry altercation. 
 
 The Emperor Constantine, who had become sole 
 emperor A. D. 323, was honestly disgusted to find 
 the new religion which he had adopted, and over 
 which he had thrown the protecting aegis of his 
 imperial power, already rent with violent contro- 
 versy. He wrote a letter to the principal disputants 
 assuring them that the matter in dispute was " of 
 small or scarcely least importance," that " there was 
 no unvarying standard of judgment," that the Scrip- 
 ture passages on which the controversy turned were 
 " inexplicable." It was a wise letter, but a drop of 
 oil upon the raging Atlantic would not have less 
 effect. The controversy waxed hotter and hotter 
 until, in the spring of 325, the bishops of the church 
 were summoned to meet in Mcsea and settle the 
 dispute. This was the first (Ecumenical (meaning 
 imperial) council; the first attempt to bring to- 
 gether all the bishops of the church. The hand of 
 Constantine was felt in every part of the arrange- 
 ments. No modern senator ever subordinated a 
 political convention to his will more perfectly than 
 Constantine this convention of bishops, and, no 
 modern delegates were ever more subservient to 
 " the machine " than were these bishops to the im- 
 perial will. They were many of them simple men, 
 who had never seen an emperor before, and he did 
 his best to dazzle them. It is probable that he 
 
THE DEIFICATION". 251 
 
 could have got a majority for any creed that he 
 might urge on the assembly ; but he was a shrewd 
 man, and, instead of forcing the majority to come 
 over to his side, he went over to the side of the 
 majority. 
 
 On his arrival at Nicsea he was immediately 
 flooded with rolls of parchment, the letters of those 
 days, each one detailing some personal grievance of 
 this or that bishop. Indeed, to lay their personal 
 grievances before the emperor seemed the only rea- 
 son why the majority had come to the council. 
 No sooner had the council been opened by the em- 
 peror than the bishops filled the air with mutual 
 accusations of all sorts of baseness, demanding of 
 the emperor to right their various wrongs ; but he, 
 ordering a brazier to be brought, made a burnt-offer- 
 ing of all their parchments, and then read them a 
 wholesome lesson on the duties of their office and 
 the need of mutual forbearance. The theological 
 controversy then began. The only argument re- 
 corded is that of Nicholas of Myra, which was lit- 
 erally " a knock-down argument," for he gave Arius 
 such a blow in the jaw that this offending member 
 must have been incapacitated for its legitimate 
 functions for a time. His creed, however, was pro- 
 duced and read to the assembly. A storm of dis- 
 approbation greeted it and it wa's torn in fragments 
 by the opposing party. Another creed, that of 
 Eusebius of Caesarea, was read and disapproved 
 
252 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 and torn in pieces. To read this creed, though 
 Eusebius was himself an Arian, any one would 
 suppose that it might give satisfaction to the most 
 orthodox. It had given satisfaction to the empe- 
 ror, who, before the meeting of the council, had 
 leaned undisguisedly to the Arian side; but the 
 very fact that this creed was satisfactory to the 
 Arians insured its condemnation by the opposite 
 party. What this party wanted was a creed that 
 Arius could not accept; and it was furnished them, 
 or, at least, its crucial word, by one of the Arian 
 party, Eusebius of Mcomedia, who declared that 
 " to assert the Son to be uncreated would be to say 
 that he was homoousian, that is, of one substance 
 with the Father." Great was the excitement caused 
 by this letter. It was torn in pieces, as the obnox- 
 ious creeds had been before it, and then a creed 
 was fashioned by the Athanasian party in which 
 the word homoousian was embodied. So hateful to 
 the Arians, it was just the word the Athanasians 
 wanted. The creed, so far as it concerned the na- 
 ture of Christ, affirmed belief in " one Lord, Jesus 
 Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father ; 
 only begotten, that is to say, of the substance of 
 the Father; God of God, Light of Light, very God 
 of very God, begotten not made, being of one sub- 
 stance with the Father, by Whom all things were 
 made, both things in heaven and things on earth." 
 " But those that say, ' there was when he was not/ 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 253 
 
 and c before he was begotten he was not/ and that 
 'he came into existence froni what was not/ or 
 who profess that the Son of God is of a different 
 ' person' or 'substance/ or that he is created, or 
 changeable, or variable, are anathematized by the 
 Catholic church." At once the emperor threw 
 himself with his whole weight on the side of this 
 statement. What he wanted was unanimity, and 
 he cared little how it was gained. To Eusebius he 
 privately confessed that he understood homoousian 
 to mean homoiousian, — "of the same substance/' 
 to mean " of like substance," and advised Eusebius 
 to sign with this private understanding ! All of the 
 Arian bishops, except some five or six, proved their 
 subserviency and duplicity by following his example. 
 Constantine, determined to do nothing by halves, 
 issued a decree of banishment against all who re- 
 fused to sign the creed ; denounced Arius and his 
 disciples as impious, and ordered that he and his 
 disciples should be called Porphyrians, and his 
 books burned, under penalty of death to any one 
 who perused them. 
 
 Thus it was that Jesus was made God. It was 
 the work of some three centuries, — this deification 
 of the Man of Nazareth. Even now much remained 
 in dispute concerning the nature of Christ. New 
 controversies necessitated new councils. One was 
 the Monophosite controversy : Had Christ two na- 
 tures ? The answer was affirmative. Then came 
 
254 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 the Monothelite controversy: Had Christ two 
 wills ? Again the answer was affirmative. The 
 Nestorian controversy was mixed up with these: 
 Was Mary to be called theotokos, the Mother of God ? 
 Yes, answered the council of Ephesus ; at which 
 the passions developed were so intense that one 
 bishop felled another to the earth, and trampled 
 him to death amid the sympathetic shoutings of 
 the assailant's party. Arianism died hard ; it was 
 the creed of the great Northern races that over- 
 whelmed the Eoman empire ; but the decision of 
 Nicaea was the beginning of the end, and it was 
 the culmination of the process of Christ's deifica- 
 tion. Further than that it was impossible for 
 words to go in asserting the deity of Christ. I 
 have no sympathy to waste on either party in this 
 momentous struggle. The creeds of Arius and 
 Athanasius are alike irrational to me, alike blasphe- 
 mous in their garrulity concerning things of which 
 no man has a right to speak. I have wearied you 
 with their pretentious foolishness, only because it 
 was necessary for me to do so in order to show you 
 How Jesus was made God ; and this you have now 
 seen. 
 
 And having seen it, is not the course which we 
 have travelled, let me ask you, a sufficient con- 
 demnation of the goal to which we have arrived ? 
 Is not the history of the development of the doc- 
 trine of the deity of Christ all the refutation of this 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 255 
 
 doctrine that any reasonable man should ask for or 
 desire ? And what a commentary is this history 
 upon the part which the doctrine of Christ's deity 
 has played in Christendom for fifteen hundred 
 years ! Everywhere this doctrine has been spoken 
 of as if it were a direct revelation from the Al- 
 mighty, and as such it has been claimed to be a 
 mystery which it is impious for us to dare to criti- 
 cise, or to try to fathom with our natural intelli- 
 gence ; and what have we found to be the facts ? 
 That within the limits of the New Testament this 
 doctrine is nowhere distinctly taught ; that in those 
 parts of the New Testament which embody the tra- 
 ditional conception of Jesus, as it developed in the 
 course of sixty to eighty years after his death, how- 
 ever exaggerated in some particulars, is still the 
 conception of Jesus as a purely human being. It 
 is only in those parts of the New Testament where 
 tradition gives place to free and daring speculation, 
 that the human personality of Jesus is resolved 
 into the fiery mist of metaphysical ideas; and 
 still the leading Pauline conception of Jesus is as 
 a heavenly archetypal man, and whether it is Paul 
 or another 1 who resolves him into a cosmic princi- 
 ple, the lines of difference and subordination are 
 never blurred. In the Fourth Gospel, a magnificent 
 tour de force, dating from the second quarter of the 
 second century, the highest point of the New Tes- 
 1 In Colossians and Philippians. 
 
256 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 tament development is reached, and it is still below 
 the point of deity. Moreover we see this Gospel 
 to have been only one of many second-century 
 attempts to express an exalted conception of Je- 
 sus in the terms of a fanciful and imaginative 
 system of philosophy, the Neo-Platonism of Alex- 
 andria. For two centuries after this attempt we find 
 the doctrine of Christ's nature still a matter of 
 free speculation; the speculation frequently of men 
 as credulous, as fanciful, as irrational, as any that 
 have contributed to the sum of human thought. 
 We see the eagle of victory hovering uncertainly 
 about the rival standards, not knowing upon which 
 to perch. We see the orthodoxy of one period, the 
 heterodoxy of another; and we see a word, " homo- 
 ousian," branded in a synod of the third century as 
 heretical, in the following century become the sym- 
 bol par excellence of the orthodox faith. We see 
 this symbol triumph in the council of Nicaea, in 
 virtue of imperial manipulation, and in pursuance 
 of the example of imperial duplicity, after it has 
 come to the. surface of that wild waste* of theologi- 
 cal and personal acrimony of which the council of 
 Nicaea was the concrete expression. There are de- 
 grees of human imperfection in this history of a 
 doctrine's rise and growth, but where along its 
 ever-widening course shall we look for any tribu- 
 tary stream of supernatural influence or illumina- 
 tion ? The Synoptic Gospels are an agglomeration 
 
THE DEIFICATION. 257 
 
 of traditional elements, receiving their final editorial 
 impress from we know not what hands. Nothing 
 that Paul claims for himself, and nothing that his 
 letters contain, demands for them any authoritative 
 force over and above the intrinsic reasonableness of 
 their ideas. His was a great mind entangled in 
 the meshes of rabbinical interpretation and philos- 
 ophy. We find him basing a stupendous argument 
 upon the idiomatic use of a singular for a plural 
 noun (seed for seeds) ; we find him constantly re- 
 flecting the ideas of his time, and, in his individual 
 speculations, rash, fanciful, imaginative to the last 
 degree. The case of the Fourth Gospel is not dif- 
 ferent. The doctrine of the Logos is here funda- 
 mental ; and this, wildly fanciful in the Alexandrian 
 schools, does not become any less so through being 
 incorporated in a Christian Gospel. At this point 
 we pass from the New Testament into the general 
 thought of early Christendom for which the Protes- 
 tant Christian claims no supernatural inspiration ; 
 and the Eomanist claims it only because it is ex- 
 tremely convenient, and indeed absolutely neces- 
 sary for him to do so, not because anything in the 
 order of events suggests such inspiration. The im- 
 partial observer, looking back upon the early Chris- 
 tian centuries, the centuries which completed the 
 doctrine of the deity of Christ, sees that they had 
 no immunity from the errors or the passions which 
 beset the general course of history. He sees that 
 
 17 
 
258 THE MAN JESUS. 
 
 men of quite exceptional intellectual force were fet- 
 tered by the imperfect philosophical systems of their 
 time, and led astray by the then universal passion 
 for fathoming the unfathomable mysteries of infi- 
 nite being. He sees that many baser motives con- 
 tributed to the final result, and that the men who 
 constituted the council of Nicaea, including its im- 
 perial head, were not such that infallibility is to be 
 predicated of their thought or action ; and so I ask 
 again, Is not the history of Christ's deification all 
 the refutation of the doctrine that an intelligent 
 and candid person should desire ? Yes, and what 
 then ? Why, then the dignity and beauty of the 
 human Jesus remain to us a heritage of incom- 
 parable worth; and for the rest — "our sufficiency is 
 of God," the One Infinite and Eternal, whose power 
 and wisdom and beneficence need nothing supple- 
 mentary ; whose nature is so unapproachable that 
 the exaltation of any other being into special rela- 
 tionship with him, to say nothing of equality or 
 unity, is reverent of such a being only at the cost 
 of a much deeper reverence for "his Father and 
 our Father, his God and our God." 
 
 University Press : John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 
 
MESSES. EOBEETS BEOTHEES' PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 A Book of Poems. 
 
 By JOHN W. CHADWICK, 
 
 Author of "The Man Jesus," "The Faith of Reason," "The Bible 
 of To-Day." 
 
 " It is the very life we live and all of it, the very place we live in, the very 
 sorrows and joys of our present day that the poet finds full of cheer and peace and 
 suggestion." — Liberal Christian. 
 
 "Their chief worth is in their abounding human tenderness."— Portland 
 Press. 
 
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 his verse is sincere and truthful, and its melody is perfect." — New York Times, 
 
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 into these little pieces sweetness and light, tenderness and subtle beauty." — 
 New York Evening Post. 
 
 " Mr. Chadwick's fine poetic sensibility and mastery of form find even more 
 natural expression here than in his vigorous and thoughtful preaching." — 
 Christian Register. 
 
 " He has many new things and many new old things to sing, and God made 
 him a singer. With high praise in short space we bid him welcome." — New 
 York Evening Mail. 
 
 " Mr. Chadwick is an independent and intrepid thinker, but the sentiment 
 that pervades and chastens these pieces is singularly pure and sweet, trustful and 
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 Price, $1.00. 
 
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MESSES. ROBERTS BROTHERS' PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 The Faith of Reason. 
 
 A SERIES OF DISCOURSES ON THE LEADING 
 TOPICS OF RELIGION. 
 
 By JOHN W. CHADWICK, 
 
 Author of "The Man Jesus," "The Bible of To-Day," "A t 
 Book of Poems," &c. 
 
 11 Free, original, brave, manly speech is here ; never prosy, always earnest, 
 often curiously apt, and sometimes swelling with its theme into fervid eloquence. 
 . . . When we consider their quality, we marvel, for what sermons of the day can 
 compare with these in richness, force, and beauty?" — Rev, Dr. F. H. Hedge, 
 in the Unitarian Review, 
 
 " In this externally negative theology there is an earnestness, a trustfulness in 
 truth and honesty, a fearlessness as to the results of patient and reverent thinking, 
 which has more of the freshness and fragrance of genuine faith than half the 
 orthodox apologies and sermons of the day." — Brooklyn Eagle. 
 
 " The gravest fault of this book will be the difficulty of answering it. It is the 
 result of long and patient thinking on the greatest themes that can occupy the 
 human mind." — Dr. Bellows^ in Christian Register. 
 
 " Everywhere pervaded by a spirit of profound reflection." — New York 
 Tribune, 
 
 " There is extraordinary vigor and scope of thought in the treatment of these 
 themes." — Boston Transcript, 
 
 11 They are packed full of bold, strong, original thought. Perhaps their most 
 striking feature is their utter fearlessness. . . . We venture to say that no book of 
 equal volume issued from the press for years contains more vigorous and searching 
 thought on more momentous themes." — Chicago Saturday Evening Herald, 
 
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