The Originality of Jesus
I
THE Master of the Christian world has suffered much from two servants who are yet essential to enlightened religion — the metaphysical theologian and the historical critic. From the early days of Christianity till recent times, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the second person in the Trinity, has figured in a metaphysical scheme of redemption. The historic person of the Prophet of Nazareth, the wealth and the glory of his humanity, have been sadly obscured. He has again and again faded from the friendship of the world; he has become dim and uncertain as a human reality in the fields of time; he has been largely lost as a teacher and guide; he has been known chiefly as the member of the Godhead who had compassion upon a race gone into utter wreck and deserving only eternal damnation. The entire Calvinistic tradition tended more and more to count Jesus out. In my boyhood in Scotland he was a divine name, with a certain part to play in the drama of redemption; he was not a creative power in human life; he was not a sublime human reality. The Calvinistic tradition shows its logical issue in Carlyle. Nothing counts ultimately but the will of God. The Pilgrim theology, with all its high principles of faith, — the sovereignty of mind in the universe, the accountability of the soul to God, the great optimistic idea of redemption for sinful men, and the triumph, limited indeed, but real, of good over evil, — missed the superlative glory of the Master, his divine humanity. A metaphysic of the life of Jesus is a necessity; it should be, however, a limited necessity.
Our trouble to-day is from the other indispensable servant of enlightened religion — the historical critic. Read the Gospels, so he tells us, as one should any other book. True; but how should one read any other book worth reading? Apply the rules of historical criticism to Jesus as one would to Socrates. True again; but how should one apply the rules of historical criticism to Socrates? Shall one apply these rules to Socrates in such a way as to deny that he ever lived; in such a way as to show that, if he lived, he said nothing clearly ascertainable; that, if he spoke certain words, he spoke little of any great moment? That method of criticism would leave the mighty systems of Plato and Aristotle without historical antecedent. Criticism has here run a wild course; it has, however, settled down in the conviction that Socrates is the fountain-head of the wisdom of Greece about man and man’s world.
To apply criticism to the Gospels in such a way as to give us no sure vision of Jesus at all, in such a way as to present him to us, if he did live, not as the originator of the mightiest of all religions, not as the supreme and supremely calm spiritual mind of the race, but as a well-meaning fanatic, as a totally mistaken and tragic figure, as one forever pushed aside in his wild apocalyptic dreams by the course of the world, can hardly be deemed satisfactory either in method or result. To destroy the one and only adequate antecedent of historical Christianity is not criticism : it is an obvious and serious mistake.
It is true that the evils of criticism are to be cured by more criticism. Even in its utmost excesses criticism is like erysipelas, a self-limiting trouble. Anyone who is familiar with the criticism through which the Greek classics have passed in the last hundred years must be aware of this self-rectifying tendency in critical judgment. At one time, by certain scholars, about a dozen of the great body of writings usually attributed to Plato were allowed to be genuine; to-day critical opinion and tradition are practically agreed. More criticism, especially criticism of criticism, and the habit of discounting the idols of the historical critic’s cave, will give, it is believed, a much saner result in this discipline than has lately prevailed.
There is another, and, in my judgment, a better way of approach to the Gospels than that used by the technical critic. After all, the New Testament is not the monopoly of the historical scholar. Services there are which none but he can render; services there are to this literature which others can render better than he. Studies on the outsides of things need to be supplemented by studies on the insides of things. The rabbinical scholar should not be too proud to listen now and then to the philosophic student of human wisdom. Indeed, the method of the philosophical mind should be the ally of the historical mind. The man who comes to the study of the teaching of Jesus from wide and profound acquaintance with the wisdom and the culture of the world is able to pronounce a judgment not lightly to be disregarded. John Stuart Mill, writing to Thomas Carlyle, says, ‘ I have for years had the very same idea of Christ and the same unbounded reverence for him as now; it was because of this reverence that I sought a more perfect acquaintance with the records of his life; that indeed gave new life to the reverence, which in any case was becoming, or was closely allied with all that was becoming, a living principle in my character.’
Books are symbols; their meaning cannot be found without sympathy. Learning is essential, yet all the learning in the world by itself cannot compass the secret of Jesus. Sympathy and imagination working in the interest of the hidden reality are indispensable. Learning alone can give the size and style of the cathedral window from the outside; learning alone can never give the vision of the window from the inside — its figure, color, wonder, and splendor. History, like the external world, like the universe, is a symbol, an offering to the soul of man by the way of his senses; without insight the meaning of the symbol is unattainable. Hidden in the Gospels is the creative mind, the original character of Jesus, and he is found there by thought.
Even among men of the highest genius there is no such thing as absolute originality. Consider for a moment one of the most original minds in the English tongue, Shakespeare. He did not invent the alphabet, the words, the syntax, the reality and power of the English language; or the English nation, its ways of thinking, its achievements, its character; or the comedy and the tragedy of human life. Shakespeare found these and a thousand other things of high moment, contributed by those who had gone before him. Yet Shakespeare is rightly regarded as a great original genius, in depth of mind, in comprehensiveness, in the richness and power of his comedy and tragedy, in the intimacy of his knowledge of life, in the unsurpassed grandeur of his dramatic presentations, especially in his portrayal of character. Shakespeare’s originality is that of the mountain to the common earth; it is lifted to this unwonted elevation, to this outlook upon the world, to this vision of the naked heavens. In Shakespeare the common powers, insights, instincts, possessions of humanity are lifted to this dignity, this range of meaning, this majesty and mystery.
Jesus did not originate the Semitic dialect which was his native tongue, or the traditions of his race, their vast literature, their history, their character, their faith and hope. All these were the material furnished, ready. Yet he is in the sphere of the spirit original in the profoundest sense; he is original in himself, in his power to revive dead wisdom, to stamp with his character the unvalued truth, and put it in everlasting social circulation; he is original in depth of insight, in purity of vision, in the transcendence of his mind, the universality of his appeal.
II
In Jesus we find, in the highest degree, originality of character. This means something new, something of surpassing excellence, something of endless interest and influence. We know what originality of character means when applied to other great men. This kind of originality was evident in Lincoln: before him there was none like him; in his generation he was without a parallel; since his day no one has appeared of his type. He was something new, something excellent, something of enduring interest to all Americans. Probably no one would contest the assertion that Socrates was the human being of greatest originality in the race to which he belonged. Plato says, ‘He was like no one, either of the ancients or of the men of his own time ’; he was a wonder in newness of type, in excellence, and in interest.
In the Old Testament there is no parallel to Jesus; among the prophets of Israel, among the great, men whose name and character are recorded in that literature, there is no suggestion even of the unique personality of the Master. Among these great men, when the feeling is not merely tribal it is strictly national. The elevation of Israel’s greatest men is the elevation of separation from the peoples of the world; their humanity is still limited, exclusive; man as man does not occupy the field of vision, does not influence the centres of feeling. The prophet’s only hope is that the Gentile may become an Israelite by adoption. In the greatest of these ancient men there is nothing of the intrinsic and free humanity of Jesus; their character is an old-world character. The highest ideal of the Old Testament is that of the suffering servant of Jehovah, and this ideal touches Jesus only at one point of his character, his vicarious goodness. The Lord’s Prayer is not a tribal or national prayer; the humanity of man is the ground of appeal to the Eternal humanity: ‘Our Father who art in heaven.’
In the New Testament there is no one like Jesus. This is all the more remarkable because to his disciples Jesus became at once an object of passionate love and admiration. Stephen imitates the Lord’s prayer upon the cross: ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,’in the noble words, ‘Lord, lay not this sin to their charge’; and yet no one would think of likening the character of Stephen to the character of Jesus. Among the apostles there is no one to whom in vision, composure, dignity, disengagedness from the nonessential in religion, Jesus is not a decided contrast. When we come to the most ardent of the early disciples of Jesus, and his greatest apostle, Paul, we meet more of contrast than of resemblance. John Stuart Mill is completely right when he says that Paul’s ‘character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort.’
The original character of Jesus is the moral side of his genius; that aspect confines our attention at this point. It is something free, and inevitable; silent as the movement of the earth, and sure; its strength is without tumult, without hesitation; and in it there are no fears, no divisions of heart; unity, certainty, sovereignty are its notes. The Gospels bear witness to one without predecessor and without successor, whose originality of character is declared in the paradoxical but luminous words of one of the greatest New Testament writers, as ‘without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life’—a new type of human being, to which the coming world is to be conformed.
I cannot forget the impression made upon me in going from my first absorbing visit in Egypt to Palestine. Palestine was ancient, too; it was a part of that ancient world in which Egypt was supreme, for power and for length of years. Palestine, however, contained Jesus; and for the first time in my feeling was reflected the fact that Jesus was a modern man, the first, the original, the creative modern man. In him the spirit of man broke from the solemn melancholy of Egypt, the high exclusiveness of Israel, and the sovereign aristocracy of Greece, into the vision of the intrinsic dignity and measureless worth of man as man. The world has been sadly unfaithful to that vision, yet the vision itself has never altogether faded from our distracted life; to-day it abides in strength, and the person who was its original representative is still its authentic and incomparable type.
III
The next step in our discussion concerns the originality of the message of Jesus. Two views are current here and in conflict. One view is that Jesus was a pious and patriotic Jew, whose programme was essentially that of John the Baptist, national repentance and righteousness followed by national salvation, that is, deliverance from the Roman domination. According to this view, the mind of Jesus is to be approached through the imaginative literature of the generation preceding his own, by the habits of thought and the forms of belief of his time. It is held that the idea of the continuous development of the life of man on the earth was something foreign to the mind of Jesus; the idea of catastrophe, it is contended, was ever present to him. On the wreck of the world his Messianic kingdom was to be established. He was a good man, but completely mistaken ; he was a pure spirit, but he knew not the way that the world was taking; he was a representative Jew in his piety, in his patriotism, in his message, and in it there was nothing essentially new.
Here serious questions press for an answer. Is it fair to attribute the world-view of Jewish imaginative literature to this great Master of all Christians? Is it just to construe the few world-view sentences of Jesus, not written by himself, written a generation after his death by those to whom these views were the colored medium through which they read all serious words upon man’s destiny — is it just to put a meaning upon these sentences in clear contradiction of the sure central body of the teaching of the Master? Was Jesus entirely under the power of the spirit, of the age? Was he in no way able to rise above the poor apocalyptic nonsense discredited by the course of history? In our analysis of the records of his ministry, are we to find nothing there that did not come from him? Is scientific criticism leading us, blindfolded, back to something like an infallible reporter, and an inerrant report, which shall infallibly discredit the Divine speaker? Is not Matthew Arnold near the truth when he presumes that, when Jesus is made to speak words that the course of the world has set aside, the words are more likely to have come from the disciple than from the Master? In reading the mind of the Master, after the lapse of a generation of years, may not the disciple have read his own mind into the mind of the Lord? May not the apocalyptic addresses in the Gospels be a misinterpretation, a confused version of the mind of Jesus, which he would have refused to accept as the truth? Was it not possible for Jesus to use, to a certain extent, the mythology of his age, as other great teachers have used the mythologies of their respective ages — reality to the many, but poetry to them? Would it be fair to interpret Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as Polytheists because of the sanction they gave to the popular faith? May not the nationalization of the teaching of Jesus, so far as its exists, have been the work of his disciples? May not the genius of Jesus have been, what history has indeed found it to be, spiritual and universal?
The view that regards Jesus as the sovereign religious genius of our race enters its protest here. This view holds that, while Jesus was obliged to accommodate his mind, to some extent, to the idiom of his time, he yet in his central ideas completely transcended his time. According to this view, the mind of Jesus must be found in the records of his ministry by the most careful analysis; this analysis must be made more in the light of what his message came to mean to his greatest disciples, than in the light of the Jewish literature standing in the background; this analysis must take into account what is after all supreme in the teaching of Jesus—his conception of God, and his conception of man.
Jesus’ criticism of the Law, in the Sermon on the Mount, is surely something new in depth and in inwardness; nor is there anything in the Prophets or Psalms so absolute as the moral teaching of Jesus in that discourse. There man’s life, his world, is in the searchlight of the Infinite Perfection; the ideal of that life, of that world, is something that overawes the highest souls by its authority and splendor: ‘Ye therefore shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.’
If it should be said that there are more than mere hints of this teaching in the noblest words in the Old Testament and beyond it, in the loftiest traditions of other races, it is still true that to the best wisdom of his people Jesus has given the highest form, and to the rarest insights of the great in other nations an expression that supersedes the original utterance. The best experience of the best souls, in Israel and beyond Israel, finds its completest utterance in the authentic teaching of Jesus. In a sense profoundly true, that highest experience lives and moves in our world to-day by the power of his utterance.
Jesus was perhaps the most misunderstood teacher in history. His genius in the things of the spirit, had it taken its own high way, would have left him with no contact with his time. He was obliged to use the phrase ‘Kingdom of God,’ and he could not prevent the construction of this phrase as meaning an earthly kingdom. His disciples, let it be frankly stated, were incapable of comprehending their Teacher and his message; they read that message in the light of their education, habits of thought, beliefs, hopes, world-views. In this way it has come to pass that the Teaching of Jesus has been here and there touched by the darkened minds of the pious and good men who conserved the tradition of his career.
In the words of John the Baptist about Jesus there is a guide to the Master’s genius: ‘I indeed baptize you with water; he shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’ Another word, this time from Jesus himself, can mean only the inwardness of his Kingdom: ‘The Kingdom of heaven is within you.’ History is the authentic interpreter of creative ideas. Two generations after the death of Jesus, a great interpreter of his teaching had come to see the absolute spirituality of the Master’s central idea: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world.’ And in between the earliest and the latest of the Gospels stands the great interpretation of Jesus, in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Here Christianity has become, what it was essentially at the first and always, an Eternal reality, looking through ancient forms as through symbols, itself an Institute of the Spirit, in the life of the world and beyond time. So much history, as the great authentic interpreter of the message of Jesus, had achieved in elevating the mind of his leading disciples, in making it possible for them to apprehend the pure spirituality, the invisible and eternal reality of his Kingdom.
This process has gone ever onward. They have understood Jesus best who have had the largest share of his spirit, who have been able to bring the richness of a great religious experience to the interpretation of the life of his soul in God. The church of Christ has been from the beginning an institution of many and continuous blunders; yet in one respect it has been essentially clear in head and sound in heart: it has understood more and more deeply the Kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus to be the reign of God in the minds and hearts of men; it has seen in that phrase a heavenly ideal hovering over all human society, seeking nothing for itself, and claiming nothing but to be the perfecting light and grace of human life. The church has thus seen the spirituality, the depth, and the wonder of the message of Jesus.
IV
Jesus’ manner of teaching may be justly called original. In certain respects it resembles the manner of Socrates rather than that of any great recorded teacher in Israel. Socrates was, it is true, an educator rather than a teacher; yet the issue of his service to the mind was a great body of definite teaching. The Greek educator spoke his ideas, committing them to the minds of living men of uncommon power. He was an examiner of ideas, minds, methods of thought, and he was a searcher of the heart. His personality, his purpose, his dialectical method, his love of wisdom and his endless delight in the search for it, are behind the whole greater heritage of Greek philosophy, the original fountain of it, surely, and largely the directing genius of it.
In something of the same manner Jesus exercised his ministry. He was, first of all, a teacher of twelve men; his method was by conversation, a direct attack upon the mind, frequently by question and answer, often by the keenest dialectical encounter. ‘ By what authority doest thou these things? ’ This question is flung at Jesus in the Temple by certain leaders of the people. Jesus replies. First answer this question : ‘ The Baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven or from men?’ These acute opponents of Jesus saw at once the logic of the question: they reasoned among themselves and said, ‘If we shall say from heaven, he will say, why then did ye not. believe him; if we shall say from men, we fear the multitude, for all hold John as a prophet.’ They answered with safe agnosticism, ‘We know not.’ Jesus then rejoins, ‘Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things.’ There is Jesus’ encounter with the politicians, and their crafty question, Is it lawful to give tribute to Cæsar or not? The wisdom and dialectical force of Jesus’ answer have received universal recognition. Show me a penny. Whose is this image and superscription? Cæsar’s. You are clearly under some sort of obligation to Cæsar. Render therefore unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.
To the dialectical genius of Jesus no less than to his divine humanity are due his defense of his interest in sinful men and women in his parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Son. Here is the profoundest and widest wisdom in the possession of mankind, uttered in forms that for clear intelligibility and impressive beauty are matchless. There is no philosophy of human history like that contained in the Parable of the Lost Son. The vision of good, real and apparent, the sources of tragic mistake in confounding appearance and reality, the discipline of suffering, the awakening power of disillusionment, the illumination of experience, and the benignity of the Eternal Reality sovereign in all the courses of thought and life, are here depicted by a genius to whom man’s intellect and heart are utterly transparent. There is hardly a phrase in this profound and wonderful Parable that does not compress within itself a world of meaning for mankind.
Another peculiarity of Jesus’ manner as a teacher is his gift of characterization. It appears more or less in all his parables; it appears conspicuously in the parables just mentioned. The shepherd who seeks his lost sheep till he finds it, the woman who seeks her lost coin till she finds it, the father who seeks through all the courses of experiences his lost son, the Lost Son himself and the Elder Brother, are characters drawn with a master-hand, and they are in the imagination and feeling of the world forever. Still more striking, perhaps, is this power of characterization in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It, too, springs from debate; after it was spoken, no reply was possible: it was conclusive and final.
The portrayal of character is rightly held to be the supreme example of poetic genius. In the Iliad there are immortal characters: Agamemnon, Achilles, and a score of others that cannot die. In the Odyssey we have another group: Odysseus the incarnation of intellect, as Achilles is the incarnation of physical prowess; Nausicaa, Penelope, Circe, and many others. These are extraordinary delineations of character, but large space is necessary for the full presentation of these groups of characters. The Clytemnestra of Æschylus is a wild and terrible woman; so is the Medea of Euripides; the Antigone of Sophocles is statuesque, full of loyalty, of piety, of tenderness, of strength. But in each case, to present in full length the character depicted requires a whole drama.
Shakespeare is justly regarded the greatest character poet of modern times. To the groups of characters that he has contributed to enrich human imagination and feeling, there is no modern parallel: Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, Kent; Hamlet, Ophelia, the guilty King and Queen; Othello, Desdemona, Iago; Imogen; Portia; and again, a hundred more; but Shakespeare requires room and time for the full display of these characters.
See what we find in this story that one can read in three or four minutes. A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. The form of statement rouses at once the imagination. Who was he; in what home did he open his eyes; what was his early fortune, and how did he end his days? The impact upon the imagination is that of the supreme artist. The universal human being is introduced. A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho — the typical man representing every man everywhere.
There are the robbers: one can see their hard faces silhouetted against the rock on the way down from Jerusalem to Jericho; one can see them, low-browed, dark-faced, with cruelty in their eyes, the plagues, of society, the foes of mankind, the representatives of inhumanity all the world over, desperadoes, robbers by calling, murderers by vocation.
There are the priest and the Levite. With what complete mastery, in few words, Jesus struck off those characters! They are in the memory and imagination of mankind wherever his Gospel has gone. They were not hypocrites: they were simply men who had separated religion from human service, piety from humanity, consecration to the Infinite in contempt of the need of mankind.
There was the good Samaritan, a compound of unconscious divinity and humanity; God was in his instincts, his kind was in his instincts, quickening his perceptions of human need and brotherhood, quickening his sympathies, moving his will to help. You see him with a face like the sunrise; again, he is known wherever the teaching of Jesus is known.
There was the innkeeper, a combination of kindliness and business; he is glad to welcome this man who had been unfortunate, glad to have a paying guest, and glad to be assured by the man who brought him that everything would be settled on business principles.
There was the lawyer, keen, subtle, a dialectician by profession, who had been victorious in a hundred encounters and who had perfect confidence in his power to ‘down’ any man by asking questions which he himself could not answer. There was the great multitude hanging round in a circle, witnessing this duel of intellect between Jesus the Teacher and this acute antagonist. Lastly, there is the Master dominating all, silencing with a final silence his adversary, and towering majestic as the mountains of Judea over the whole scene.
One here recalls that marvel of painting, the ‘School of Athens,’ by Raphael, painted on a panel in the Vatican. The poetry of Greece, the science of Greece, the history of Greece, the philosophy of Greece, the whole history and the whole achievement of Greece are on that one panel; they are there in true perspective, in beautiful order, and the more one knows of the Greek and his art, his poetry, his philosophy, his genius, the more amazing is that panel. Such a panel is this parable which has painted on it all the typical forces that make up the seething, tragic world of to-day. And yet one will meet people who say, ‘That little story? We knew that when we went to Sunday school.’ Yes, and you knew the Lord’s Prayer, but do you now know what that prayer means for the universe and for mankind?
In the living wisdom of the world, it may be said, there is nothing to match the parabolic teaching of Jesus. In addition to the wealth of character created and depicted, the story is made to carry meanings of infinite moment; it sends the imagination to the depths of human need, to the heights of the Eternal Compassion, and this with ease incomparable, with a mastery to which there is no parallel in the influential wisdom of the world.
V
The most precious possession of mankind is the human experience won through the vision of great moral ideals, the eager pursuit of them, joy and sorrow in the service of them, life, love, death, and hope under their reign. For priceless value, nothing within the possession of human beings is to be compared to this. Here one finds in solution the moral nature of man, the moral world, and the moral universe in which man lives. Here is a body of thought, feeling, character, experience, fluid and vast as all the seas, and whose tide is the movement within it of the Eternal Spirit. We have here the spiritual wealth of mankind, in its ultimate source and character, as it lives in the heart of all races, as it moves in the soul of the greatest races, and as it has its being in the words spoken or written of the most gifted men.
The question of originality is finally one of insight and utterance in the superlative degree. How much of this precious experience of mankind has any single person, any school or group of persons, seen and wrought into the form of great influential speech? All our poets, all our philosophers, all our men of genius come at last to this judgment-seat. No writer will live, save in the mad sections of society, who is not a great representative of the highest human experience; no book will last that is not a vast coinage of the spiritual wealth of the world. The Greeks live, Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, by their depth and sincerity, by their adequate fidelity to the best in some part of man’s world; by the range, truth, and nobility of their utterance of the content of life as that content discovers itself in the great courses of human experience.
To this test all modern men of genius must come. Those who cannot meet the test, however they may shine for a day or a century, must pass. Dante is solitary, not because there is not a multitude of speakers, but because more and more it is recognized that his is the voice of the ten silent centuries. We are sure of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and a dozen or more others, who have felt the pulse of man, who have compassed much of his best life, and who have given it fresh, faithful, unforgettable expression. .
Here Jesus stands supreme. In his brief career as a teacher, in the small compass of his utterance, he has been more comprehensive than any other recorded man of genius, of the deepest experience of the human soul, and he has given to that experience monumental forms of beauty and power. It is here that we find the highest witness of his originality, the final assurance of his ascendancy over the mind of the world. He best of all knows our human world; he best of all has seen its tragic grandeur; he is unequaled in reading and in rendering its mighty meanings; to his influence, in kind, in range, and in promise, there is no parallel among the sons of men. He is to-day the centre of the world’s hope, as in a tragic sense he is the need and the blind desire of all nations. His religion is the sovereign version in history of the Kingdom of the Eternal Spirit as that Kingdom lives in the best life of the race. When men live sub specie œternitatis, they find in Jesus the only adequate utterance of their thoughts, feelings, purposes, and hopes. He more than all, he above all, is the prophet of the spiritual life of man in his pilgrimage through time.
VI
Jesus is indeed to be understood by his endowment and his environment. His endowment is clearly that of sovereign religious genius, and his environment is the Absolute Spirit. Jesus appeared in the world at a particuliar time; he came of a particular race; he was nurtured in the literature, traditions, beliefs, and hopes of his people. In all this he was a man of unique spiritual genius; and he is certainly no more to be understood through the limitations of inheritance and racial environment than other men of transcendant original power. The literature produced in Israel during the two hundred years preceding the birth of Jesus is, on the whole, eccentric and poor stuff; at its best, it is largely the hysteria of noble minds densely ignorant. Even the Book of Enoch, so highly prized by scholars, as giving the intellectual background of the age to which Jesus spoke, is in itself of inferior value, and when compared with the great prophets and psalmists of Israel, it is found upon a level greatly below theirs. In the Book of Enoch the soul of Abel offers and presses the prayer that the seed of his brother Cain shall be destroyed from the face of the earth, and annihilated among the seed of men. This Book of Enoch, not unfittingly here represented, is hardly a trustworthy guide to his mind whose prayer upon the cross was, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’ The truth is, the mind of Israel had become decadent; these books would merit the attention of no serious lover of reality, were it not for their antiquarian interest.
That the pure spiritual conceptions of Jesus could not shine in their own strength; that they must be presented in the idiom of the time in order to be understood even a little; that they were reported by men whom even the Master could not lift to his own level or free from the crude notions of the age; that his teaching lies embedded in this pervasive accommodation to modes of thought that meant one thing to the people, and another to him, and that his mind is to be reached, if at all, through sympathetic insight, should be clear to all.
Jesus is to be understood, not by his age, but by the Eternal God. His mind, his message, his character, his service to his people, and his hope for the world had their origin in God. At a level below him lie the best insights of his greatest predecessors in Israel; in an abyss below him lies the poor stuff by which many to-day try to understand him. If Jesus had been the product of his human environment, the world would never have heard of him, nor would that human environment ever have seen the light of day. There is little or nothing in it to detain the modern man.
If we are to have a great religion; if the universe is to be gathered into the Infinite Soul; if that Soul is to be apprehended through Fatherhood; if man is a spiritual person of permanent reality in the life of God; if the individual is not to be sacrificed to the social whole, and if the social whole is not to be sacrificed to the individual; if the fellowship of moral and accountable persons is the best word for the world of men, the religion of Jesus, originating in his own spirit, as that spirit lived and moved and had its being in the Eternal, is the religion for mankind. Historical antecedents, historical settings, may be interesting, may even shed light upon the pathway of our search; but it would seem to be unwise to seek in these the transcendent spiritual mind of Jesus. We should never think of explaining Plato, the philosophic ‘spectator of all time and all existence,’ by the mythologies and popular beliefs of the Greeks; and it seems hardly likely that scholars can long be content with the endeavor to find the origin of the deepest mind of Jesus save in the mind of God.