To return to Scaurus. He dealt next with the pedigree in Luke. “You might have supposed in these circumstances,” said he, “that Luke would drop the pedigree of Joseph altogether, and give only that of Mary. Well, he has not done this. Another course would have been to state clearly that Jesus was not really, but only putatively, the son of Joseph (being really the son of God) and to add that he gave the pedigree of Joseph, as Matthew gives it, because Joseph was the putative father. Well, he has not quite done this either; but he has done half of it. He has written ‘being the son, as was supposed, of Joseph.’ But he has also given a pedigree of Joseph differing from that of Matthew in that portion which extends from Joseph to David. What do you think of this?”
I thought that the whole thing was a cobweb and wished Scaurus would pass to something more interesting. But he continued, “My rabbi suggested that Luke had invented a new genealogy. But when I dissented—for I am convinced that neither Luke nor Matthew invented, and that these early writers generally were very simple honest souls—he asked me whether I knew of any instance in the gospels where the name spelt in Greek Eli or Heli was misunderstood. I replied that there was one instance where Jesus used it to mean my God, but the bystanders took it to mean Elias. ‘Well then,’ said the rabbi, ‘I should not be surprised if your honest compiler Luke, a learned man perhaps in Greek, but innocent of Hebrew, had got hold of some tradition saying, Jesus was supposed to be the son of Joseph, being the son of God. Though in Hebrew there is a difference between the spelling of El, God, and the name Eli, there is not much difference in Greek. And Luke, having once started on the scent of a new pedigree supposed to connect Jesus with Heli, ransacked various Jewish genealogies till he found one containing the name, and adopted it as a substitute for Matthew’s.’ This was what my rabbi suggested. All I can say is that it seems to me more probable than that Luke invented the genealogy.”
Scaurus entered into further details to vindicate Luke’s honesty, concluding as follows, “My own belief is that the parents of John and of Jesus were good, pure, simple, noble-minded people, liable to dreams and to the seeing of visions and to the hearing of voices. As to ‘dreams,’ by the way, look at the earliest account of the Lord’s appearing to Solomon, ‘In Gibeon, the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream … Solomon awoke, and behold it was a dream.’ Then look at the later account in Chronicles, ‘In that night did God appear unto Solomon.’ No ‘dream’ and no ‘awaking’! Verbum sapienti! The facts above alleged—to which I could add—when combined with the influence of prophecy—seem to me to explain everything in Matthew’s and Luke’s Introductions as being at once morally truthful and historically untrue.”
Later on, Scaurus said, “Luke himself in his story of Christ’s childhood, does not seem to me to be so consistent as an educated writer would have been if he had been dishonestly inventing. For he represents Mary as saying to her son, ‘Behold, thy father and I seek thee sorrowing.’ By ‘thy father’ she means Joseph. But could she have used this language, or felt this sorrow, if she had realised indeed that her son was not one of the many children of the Father of Gods and men, but that he was unique, God incarnate? This and many other points convince me that Luke (in his account of the birth) is not composing fiction, but only compiling, harmonizing, adapting, and moulding into a historical shape, what should have been preserved as poetic legend.”
Scaurus then gave one more detail from Mark, “who,” said he, “meagre though he is, often records actual history where later accounts disguise it. Mark says that, when Jesus was preaching the gospel, his own family (literally ‘those from him,’ that is, ‘those of his household’) ‘came to lay hands on him; for they said, He is beside himself.’ Matthew and Luke omit this. But Matthew and Luke agree with Mark when the latter goes on to describe how the mother of Jesus and his brethren come to the place where he is preaching. Not being able to reach him through the crowd, they send word that they desire to speak to him. Jesus does not go out nor stop his preaching. Those who obeyed the gospel, he said, were his mother and his brethren. I have said that Matthew and Luke omit the attempt of Christ’s family to stop him from preaching as being out of his mind. Probably variations in the text enabled them honestly to omit it, believing it to be erroneous. And indeed how could they believe otherwise? How could Matthew and Luke believe that Mary would accompany the brethren of Jesus in an attempt to ‘lay hands’ on him after recording what they have previously recorded about the supernatural birth? Lay hands on her divine Son, the Son of God, engaged in proclaiming the will of his Father in heaven! The story might well seem to them incredible. But it bears the plain stamp of genuine truth.”
Scaurus then pointed out the divergence between Matthew and Luke as to the manner in which Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem. This I omit. But in the course of it he shewed me how Matthew has been influenced by prophecies applied by the Christian Jews to Christ, as being their Deliverer from Captivity, and their Comforter in time of trouble. “For example,” said he, “since ‘Egypt’ in Hebrew poetry is often synonymous with ‘bondage,’ the Christian Jews might naturally praise God in their songs and hymns for fulfilling, through Christ, the prophecy, ‘Out of Egypt have I called my son,’ i.e. Israel, meaning that God had called them, the new Israel, out of ‘bondage’ (as Paul often says) into the liberty of the children of God. But Matthew takes this as meaning that, when Christ was a little child, he was literally ‘called out of Egypt.’ Hence he is driven to infer that he must have been taken to Egypt. For such a journey he finds a reason by supposing that it was to escape from the sword of Herod. He fits in this story with another prophecy representing Rachel as weeping for her children, and as being consoled by the Lord. Hence Matthew infers a massacre of children by Herod in Bethlehem, corresponding, on a small scale, to the wholesale destruction from which the infant Moses escaped. But such a massacre is not mentioned by any evangelist, or by Josephus, or by any other historian or writer known to me.”
I was depressed by this, and eager to pass on to something more satisfactory. So was Scaurus. “I have no desire,” he said, “to dwell on these points. I am interested in the biographies of all great teachers, philosophers, and lawgivers, as well as conquerors—so far as they are true. Untruth gives me no pleasure, but disappointment—unmixed except for the slight pleasure one may find in tracking an error to its hole and killing it.
“With much greater pleasure shall I turn to Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of the words and deeds of Christ. Only I will add that, were I a Christian, I should long for a new gospel that would go back to facts, rejecting these additions of Matthew and Luke. Not that I would go back to Mark. By ‘facts,’ I do not mean such facts as John the Baptist’s diet of locusts and clothing of camel’s hair. But surely a genuine worshipper of Christ—I can conceive such a thing; for after all, what is more worthy of worship on earth, next to God Himself, than ‘the man that is as righteous as possible,’ concerning whom Socrates says that there is ‘nothing more like God’?—I say a genuine Christian, if he were also a philosopher, might surely find it possible to state in a few simple words his conviction that, whereas John the son of Zachariah was sent by the Logos, and contained only a portion of the Logos, Jesus the son of Joseph was actually the Logos incarnate. I wholly reject such a notion myself, partly because I am not sure that I believe that there is any divine Logos at all—having, in fact, given up speculating on these matters. But if I were as sure on that point as your Epictetus is, and if I were a Christian to boot, I am not sure that I should have any great difficulty in believing that some one man might exist—might be ‘sent into the world,’ I suppose, a Christian would say—as different from ordinary possessors of the Logos as steam is from water—after all, steam is water—superior to Numa the Roman, superior to Lycurgus the Spartan, to Solon the Athenian, yes, superior to Moses the Hebrew.
“You will be disposed to smile at my ‘Moses,’ as an anticlimax. But let me tell you that this Moses was a very great man. He was a genuine maker of a republic. I don’t mention your friend’s ideal, Diogenes, for I don’t regard him as a maker of anything. I do not even mention my own favourite Socrates. He is not for the man in the street. He is a maker of thinkers. I am speaking of makers of men, and contemplating the possibility of a unique Maker, a Creator of an altogether new social condition. Well, then, suppose I believed in the Logos in heaven and the Logos on earth. Your philosophers would tell me to regard it as a divine flame lighting many human torches without self-diminution. Granted. Then I should believe that every man had his share of the Logos; some, a great share; others, a very great one. Why should I not contemplate the possibility of a unique and complete man, not ‘sharing,’ but containing or being—a man that might be or contain the totality, or, as Paul says, the fulness, of the Logos? I see weak points in this torch-analogy except as an illustration of the belief; yet the belief itself does not appear to me against reason. But enough of this rambling! I have discerned of late many signs that I am growing old, and none more patent than this tendency to expatiate on my cast-off Christian explorations begun in the years when I was vigorous. I pass, and with great relief, to some things that are real possessions—I mean some portions of Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of Christ’s discourses.”
For my part, it was not with unmixed “relief” that I turned to the next portion of Scaurus’s letter. His conclusions about Christ’s birth had merely accorded with my inferences from Paul’s epistles; but he had shaken my faith in Matthew and Luke as trustworthy historians; and I looked forward with misgivings to his further criticism, which, I feared, might prove destructive. In this depression, I endeavoured to recall the words of Paul to the Corinthians about having a “treasure in earthen vessels.” Mark certainly was an “earthen vessel.” Matthew appeared likely to be no better, so far as I could judge from his story of Christ’s birth and childhood. Luke, trying to reduce these legends to historic shape, did not seem to me to have succeeded, in spite of all his pains and sincerity. While I was unrolling the Corinthian epistle to refresh my memory, the thought occurred to me, “Is it possible that any God should choose such writers to set forth the life and character of His Son! How could the All-wise be guilty of such foolishness?” I had hardly uttered the word “foolishness” when my eyes fell on the words, “The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men.” Then I became more modest. “God’s ways,” I said, “are not our ways. Perhaps He desires to force us to think and to feel for ourselves.” I felt grateful even to Mark because he alone had preserved some of Christ’s deep and difficult sayings. And in the end I recurred to the thought that had been of late growing stronger and stronger within me concerning the possible inferiority of Romans and Greeks to Jews in things of the spirit. “Thucydides,” I said, “would have surpassed Isaiah in describing exactly the campaign of Sennacherib against Hezekiah. But in describing visions and judgments of the Lord, Isaiah is, perhaps, the man, and Thucydides the babe. I will continue my exploration, with Scaurus as a guide.”