The Man of Galilee

by Atticus G. Haygood

Begin with the story of Abraham, in Genesis, and follow through the centuries the thread of Hebrew history to the times of Cæsar Augustus and of Jesus, if you will, till our own time. We find in that history patriarchs, law-givers, priests, judges, soldiers, kings, statesmen, poets, reformers, and prophets. We have Abraham and the other patriarchs; Moses, Aaron, and his successors; Joshua and his compatriots; Samuel, last and best of a long line of judges; Saul, David—poet, as well as soldier and king; Solomon, genius and philosopher, sage and profligate; Isaiah and the other prophets; Nehemiah and other reformers; Daniel, the statesman, in the service of an alien prince, the conqueror of his people. In later times we have Judas Maccabæus, the heroic defender of his country, and the other mighty men who gave their lives in a hopeless struggle for the freedom of their nation. Still later we read of men like Annas and Caiaphas, the wicked high-priests of an evil time. We have Gamaliel, learned in the law, and his pupil, Saul of Tarsus. (But for Jesus there would have been no Paul.) We have the men brought to view as “disciples” of Jesus. Later on appear such a man as Josephus and the brave men who fought the Romans and died for Jerusalem. Consider them all, the strong and the weak, the good and the bad, as they grew upon this Hebrew tree. These men show the best as well as the worst it could do. We must judge this tree by its fruits.

Can we place Jesus among them and count him as one of them—the best of them? Could a tree which produces these others produce him? To ask the question is to answer it.

I know what some writers have to say when they speak of finding types of Jesus among those who lived before him; what they say of Moses, Joshua, and others. Some of them were truly great and good men—among the best the human race can show for itself. But we cannot place Jesus among them; they do not approach him, and they are not like him. He stands alone and apart. He is not only above them, he is unlike them. The question is not simply whether the Hebrew tree, judging it by all its other fruits, was capable of producing this one perfect character in all the world, but also whether it could have produced this kind of character? Certainly it never did before him or after him. Search history for one shadow of proof that this race—wonderful and unique in all times and countries—from Abraham to Disraeli had in it any powers that could, as a normal development, produce Jesus of Nazareth.

If you will you may give your inquiries wider range. Forget that Jesus was a Jew by blood and birth and training. Try all history; search the records of other nations. Tell me of the sages and reformers—the great and good men of other peoples and countries; of Zoroaster, Confucius, Socrates, Buddha, and the rest; of Moses or any other Jew you could name along with them. Is Jesus only one of them? The best of them perhaps—but only one of them? Read all you may of them as their best friends tell their stories, and you would recoil if some maker of cyclopedias should talk of only adding the name of Jesus.

It is not simply that you have heard your mother pray to Jesus; it is not simply the prompting of your “cradle faith.” The reason lies deeper; if to-day for the first time you were to read of the great and holy men of other nations and of Jesus you must think of him, without waiting to reason why, in a place by himself, as a great star shines alone. No light is so splendid but the eye knows the sunlight for what it is.

But it is not, as you know, a question as to what the human race in some age could do; it is, what could the Hebrew race do in the age of Cæsar Augustus? For Jesus was of the Hebrew race and of that age.

But for the moment forget this limitation of our inquiry and ask, What could that age do? It is like asking, What could the Roman race and civilization do? For the glory of Egypt and Babylon had long departed, and the great Greeks were before the time of Jesus. Roman life then dominated the world, and Roman life did its utmost in producing Julius Cæsar. But there was not in Roman life, tradition, thought, sentiment, one quality or influence of any sort whatsoever that could have any relation to the production of a character like this that the evangelists have given us.

But at last we must ask simply this question: What could the Hebrew race in that age do?

Only Jewish influences entered into the life of Jesus. There is not in any single thought or word of his so much as an echo of any thing characteristic of other peoples. There is not an undertone in his thoughts from the Greek or Roman masters. He had nothing from other teachers or thinkers. He was only a Jew, never out of Palestine, of a peasant family in Galilee. The Galilean was a narrow, suspicious, and revengeful man; provincial to the last degree; holding fast old ideas and rejecting new ones with little regard to argument or evidence—the “Bourbon” of his time. He was a man of bitterer prejudices than characterized even the men of Judea. But even Galilee had its best and its worse, and Jesus was brought up in a disreputable mountain town. “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” was a common proverb, carrying its own answer and indicating the estimate placed upon the little town by the better people of the country.

Jesus was untaught in the greater schools of his own people. “How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?” implies more than that his hearers knew his history well enough to know he was not school-trained as their scribes were; it means that they knew he did not speak as their scholars spoke. Jesus did not talk like a book; he was not learned in books; his language indicates, so far as books count, knowledge of the Scriptures only; he could read, but he was no scholar.