The Man of Galilee

by Atticus G. Haygood

How little the evangelists were capable of inventing such a character as the Jesus of the four gospels is made very plain by comparing Jesus and his doctrines with them and their notions.

It must be assumed here that you have, to some extent at least, considered what the character of Jesus is and what his teachings mean. As to your conception of him and his teachings, this I am sure of: if you continue to study him and his words your best ideas now will, by and by, seem to you to be very unworthy.

Measure the evangelists and their thoughts by Jesus and his thoughts. How small, narrow, meager, and lean of soul they are! When they speak, when they act in these histories, they give us the gauge and the level of very common men. They misapprehend him till he is rent with grief at their dullness and hardness of heart. They misinterpret his simplest words. They show in many ways what even to us seems to be amazing spiritual stupidity and spiritual incapacity.

This is a fair specimen of them and their thinking powers: Jesus said to them one day, “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.” “And they reasoned among themselves, saying, It is because we have taken no bread,” supposing that he meant they must not eat bread with these people.

This also gives us the drift and gauge of their thoughts: Jesus was constantly and in many ways speaking to them of the “kingdom of heaven,” and they kept dreaming and talking of a “kingdom of Israel,” the restoration of David’s throne. This was the common thought and talk of their circle. One of the best of the women who followed Jesus and loved him, braving danger and contempt for his sake, Salome, preferred ambitious requests for her two sons, James and John, who were in their mother’s secret and sympathy, seeking high places for them in what they so longed for—the coming dispensation of national deliverance and dominion.

So far below his thoughts are their thoughts, so unlike him are they, that no Christian child, who has but partially learned of Jesus what he means by the “kingdom of God,” can read what Salome and her sons say to Jesus without recoiling from them.

Were the evangelists good enough—did they have the moral elevation necessary to the conception of such truths as Jesus taught? Of such a life as Jesus lived? Of Jesus himself?

If you know what is in these gospels it is too plain to you to need argument that these men were very far below the sphere of Jesus as to morals, rights and wrongs, and whatever relates to spiritual life. While he was proclaiming self-renunciation as the condition precedent to entering into life at all in common with his life, these men, while claiming to be his disciples and best friends, were wont to “dispute” with one another about seats of honor at dinings, as well as places of honor in the earthly kingdom they were looking for.

Some of them showed that they could fight upon occasion—their Galilean blood was equal to that; but they greatly lacked moral courage. They were afraid not only of men’s anger, but of their criticism. But it is impossible to think of Jesus as hesitating, for one instant, from any sort of fear of men, fear of death or criticism, in uttering one truth or doing one right thing. We cannot think of Jesus as feeling the pulse of public sentiment in order to determine what he should say. We cannot think of Jesus as, for one instant, looking about him to read in the faces of his hearers, whether they were Galilean peasants or the chief estates of Jerusalem, the probable reception of his words. We cannot think of him as veering the thickness of a line from the perfect truth as he saw it in order to win favor or avoid resentment. It is certain to us that such thoughts were never in his mind—that such feelings were never in his heart. His “eye was single,” his “whole body full of light.”