RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Jesus Christ
confidently as negligible quantities, and the whole strength of criticism has been increasingly expended on the reduction of the supernatural figure of Jesus to " natural " proportions. The instrument relied upon to produce this effect has been psychological analysis; the method being to rework the narrative in the interests of what is called a " comprehensible " Jesus. The whole mental life of Jesus and the entire course of his conduct have been subjected to psychological canons derived from the critics' conception of a purely human life, and nothing has been allowed to him which does not approve itself as " natural " according to this standard. The result is, of course, that the Jesus of the evangelists has been transformed into a nineteenth-century " liberal " theologian, and no conceptions or motives or actions have been allowed to him which would not be " natural " in such a one.
The inevitable reaction which seems to be now asserting itself takes two forms, both of which, while serving themselves heirs to the negative criticism of this " liberal " school, decisively reject its positive construction of the figure of Jesus. A weaker current contents itself with drawing attention to the obvious fact that such a Jesus as the " liberal " criticism yields will not account for the Christianity which actually came into being; and on this ground proclaims the " liberal " criticism bankrupt and raises the question, what need there is for assuming any Jesus at all. If the only Jesus salvable from the debris of legend is obviously not the author of the Christianity which actually came into being, why not simply recognize that Christianity came into being without any author — was just the crystallization of conceptions in solution at the time? A stronger current, scoffing at the projection of a nineteenth-century " liberal " back into the first century and calling him " Jesus/ insists that " the historical Jesus " was just a Jew of his day, a peasant of Galilee with all the narrowness of a peasant's outlook and all the deficiency in culture which belonged to a Galilean countryman of the period. Above all, it insists that the real Jesus, possessed by those Messianic dreams which filled the minds of the Jewish peasantry of the time, was afflicted with the great delusion that he was himself the promised Messiah. Under the obsession of this portentous fancy he imagined that God would intervene with his almighty arm and set him on the throne of a conquering Israel; and when the event falsified this wild hope, he assuaged his bitter disappointment with the wilder promise that he would rise from death itself and come back to establish his kingdom. Thus the naturalistic criticism of a hundred and fifty years has run out into no Jesus at all, or worse than no Jesus, a fanatic or even a paranoiac. The " liberal " criticism which has had it so long its own way is called sharply to its defense against the fruit of its own loins. In the process of this defense it wavers before the assault and incorporates more or less of the new conception of Jesus — of the " consistently eschatological " Jesus — into its fabric. Or it stands in its tracks and weakly protests that Jesus' figure must be conceived as
greatly as possible, so only it be kept strictly within the limits of a mere human being. Or it develops an apologetical argument which, given its full validity and effect, would undo all its painfully worked-out negative results and lead back to the Jesus of the evangelists as the true " historical Jesus."
It has been remarked above that the portrait of Jesus drawn in the sources is its own credential; no man, and no body of men, can have invented this figure, consciously or unconsciously, and dramatized _ T it consistently through such a varied
Issue anc* difficult life-history. It may be added that the Jesus of the naturalistic criticism is its own refutation. One wonders whether the " liberal " critics realize the weakness, ineffectiveness, inanition of the Jesus they offer; the pitiful inertness they attribute to him, his utter passivity under the impact of circumstance. So far from being conceivable as the molder of the ages, this Jesus is wholly molded by his own surroundings, the sport of every suggestion from without. In their preoccupation with critical details, it is possible that its authors are scarcely aware of the grossness of the reduction of the figure of Jesus they have perpetrated. But let them only turn to portray their new Jesus in a life-history, and the pitiableness of the figure they have made him smites the eye. Whatever else may be said of it, this must be said — that out of the Jesus into which the naturalistic criticism has issued — in its best or in its worst estate — the Christianity which has conquered the world could never have come.
IV. The Life of Jesus: The firmness, clearness, and even fulness with which the figure of Jesus is delineated in the sources, and the variety of activities through which it is dramatized, do not insure that the data given should suffice for drawing up a properly so-called " life of Jesus." The data in the sources are practically confined to 1. In What *he brief period of Jesus' public work. Sense a Only a single incident is recorded from "Life" his earlier life, and that is taken from Impos- his boyhood. So large a portion of sible. the actual narrative, moreover, is occupied with his death that it might even be said — the more that the whole narrative also leads up to the death as the life's culmination — that little has been preserved concerning Jesus but the circumstances which accompanied his birth and the circumstances which led up to and accompanied his death. The incidents which the narrators record, again, are not recorded with a biographical intent, and are not selected for their biographical significance, or ordered so as to present a biographical result: in the case of each evangelist they serve a particular purpose which may employ biographical details, but is not itself a biographical end. In other words the Gospels are not formal biographies but biographical arguments — a circumstance which does not affect the historicity of the incidents they select for record, but does affect the selection and ordering of these incidents. Mark has in view to show that this great religious movement in which he himself had a part had its beginnings in a divine interpo-
Jesus Christ