The Man of Galilee

by Atticus G. Haygood

We will consider the notion that Jesus is the product of dramatic genius from other stand-points. Have the evangelists given form and voice to national ideals?

Jesus cannot be in those writings the crystallization of national legends; there are no such legends. Had these writers constructed the character out of national legends or national hopes Jesus would have been a national deliverer, not a personal Saviour, talking to men of sin and salvation. He was not at all, as these writings and as other Hebrew writings make plain, the nation’s ideal of a hero and deliverer. Jesus was any thing but such an ideal; he utterly spoiled the national ideal of the Shiloh who was to come; he disappointed every expectation that rose to greet him.

Once, when the people and the priests thought they might use him as a national leader, they tried to force a king’s crown upon his head. He refused their crown, and they crucified him.

There is another fatal objection to the notion that Jesus is only the invention of four romance writers, suddenly springing up among a people who did not write romances. If they invented him we should have four Christs, not one.

There are differences enough in their statements that we cannot explain in any honest way, but that would, I suppose, cease to be differences if only we knew all the facts to show that these writers were not in collusion to tell a story that would hold together. We do not know all the facts; St. John, you will remember, tells us that many things are not recorded; perhaps we have only the smaller part of them.

These four men are not alike; no two men are. They differ in style and, therefore, in temperament, gifts, training, and character. They are as different as any four writers you know; for illustration, as Carlyle, Emerson, Macaulay, and Irving differ.

To make plainer the thought I wish you to consider, take Satan as a character in literature. Compare the Satans of Milton, Goethe, Bailey, Browning, and Byron. These writers show us five, not one chief of devils. They are as unlike as their authors; and they are like their authors.

Only a woman could have drawn the Satan of Mrs. Browning. Milton’s Satan is a copy of the Miltonic intellect and character—grand, scholarly, metaphysical, austere; Puritan is the hero of the Paradise Lost. Bailey’s Satan grew in the atmosphere of Temple Court, and is a London lawyer of the first order with a diabolical nature. Byron’s is like Byron—brilliant, moody, desperate, and vain. Goethe’s is German, and brought up in Weimar. He is like the high-priest and poet of materialism who gave us Faust; like Goethe, university bred, learned, scientific, literary, all-accomplished, gay and cynical by turns, a man of the world, gentlemanly even in diabolisms, one familiar with the best society, cosmopolitan in his tastes, and nineteenth century in dress and manners as well as in his opinions and habits.

But these four men who wrote of Jesus, these men so different in their training and manner of life—Matthew, who had been a tax-collector under the Roman Government; Mark, a mere child when Jesus was among men, and brought up under a careful mother; Luke, a “physician beloved;” and John, a fisherman of Galilee—these have given us one Jesus, not four. The differences are such as four photographs of one man show in different postures taken by the same artist in the same day. No matter by whose pen recorded, the words and deeds of Jesus in the four gospels are the words and deeds of one man.