In the next number of the same journal (June 2, 1911) is recorded another example of how little our bishops are inclined to face a plain issue. It is contained in a paragraph headed thus:—
SYMBOLISM OF THE ASCENSION.
The Bishop of Birmingham on the Second Coming.
Preaching to a large congregation in Birmingham Cathedral … the Bishop of Birmingham said that people had found difficulty in modern times about the Ascension, because, they said, “God’s heaven is no more above our heads than under our feet.” That was perfectly true. But there were certain ways of expressing moral ideas rooted in human thought, and we did not the less speak continually of the above and the below as expressing what was morally high and morally low, and we should go on doing so to the end. The ascension of Jesus Christ and his concealment in the clouds was a symbolical act, like all the acts after his Resurrection; it was to impress their minds with the truth of his mounting to the glory of God. Symbols were the best means of expressing the truth about things which lay outside their experience; and the Ascension symbolized Christ’s mounting to the supreme state of power and glory, to the perfect vision of God, to the throne of all the world …. The Kingdom was coming—had to come at last—“on earth as it is in heaven”; and one day, just as his disciples saw him passing away out of their experience and sight, would they see him coming back into their experience and their sight, and into his perfected Kingdom of Humanity.
Now, I am sure that what people in modern times chiefly want to know about the Ascension is whether it really happened. Did Jesus in his physical body go up like a balloon before the eyes of the faithful, and disappear behind a cloud, or did he not? That is the plain issue, and Dr. Gore seems to avoid it. If he believes in such a miracle, why expatiate on the symbolism of all the acts of Jesus subsequent to his resurrection? Such a miracle was surely sufficient unto itself, and never needed our attention to be drawn to its symbolical aspects and import. Does he mean that the legend is no more than “a certain way of expressing moral ideas rooted in human thought”? May we welcome his insistence on its moral symbolism as a prelude to his abandonment of the literal truth of the tale? I hope so, for in not a few apologetic books published by divines during the last twenty-five years I have encountered a tendency to expatiate on the moral significance of extinct Biblical legends. It is, as the Rev. Mr. Figgis expresses it, a way of “letting down the laity into the new positions of the Higher Criticism.” Would it not be simpler, in the end, to tell people frankly that a legend is only a legend? They are not children in arms. Why is it accounted so terrible for a clergyman or minister of religion to express openly in the pulpit opinions he can hear in many academical lecture-rooms, and often entertains in the privacy of his study? When the Archbishop of Canterbury tells his brother-doctors that “modern investigation enables them now to set the earlier stages of Old Testament literature in somewhat different surroundings from those in which they were set by their fathers and grandfathers,” he means that modern scholarship has emptied the Old Testament of its miraculous and supernatural legends. But the Anglican clergyman at ordination declares that he believes unfeignedly the whole of the Old and New Testaments. How can an Archbishop not dispense his clergy from belief in the New, when he is so ready to leave it to their individual consciences whether they will or will not believe in the Old? The entire position is hollow and illogical, and most of the bishops know it; but, instead of frankly recognizing facts, they descant upon the symbolical meaning of tales which they know they must openly abandon to-morrow. One is inclined to ask Dr. Gore why Christ could not have imparted in words to his followers the secret of his mounting to the supreme state of power and glory? Did they at the time, or afterwards, set any such interpretation on the story of his rising up from the ground like an airship or an exhalation? Of course they did not. They thought the earth was a fixed, flat surface, and that, if you ascended through the several lower heavens, you would find yourself before a great white throne, on which sat, in Oriental state, among his winged cherubim, the Most High. They thought that Jesus consummated the hackneyed miracle of his ascension by sitting down on the right hand of this Heavenly Potentate. If Dr. Gore doubts this, let him consult the voluminous works of the early Fathers on the subject. The entire legend coheres with ancient, and not with modern, cosmogony. How can it possibly be defended to-day on grounds of symbolism, or on any other? The same criticism applies to the legend of the Virgin Birth. The Bishop of London is reduced to defending this thrum of ancient paganism by an appeal to the biological fact of parthenogenesis among insects. Imagine the mentality of a modern bishop who dreams that he is advancing the cause of true religion and sound learning by assimilating the birth of his Saviour to that of a rotifer or a flea!
The books of Dr. Drews and Mr. Robertson and others of their school are, no doubt, blundering extravaganzas, all the more inopportune because they provoke the gibes of Dr. Moulton; but they are at least works of Freethought. Their authors do not write with one eye on the truth and the other on the Pope in the Vatican, or on the obsolete dogmas of Byzantine speculation. It is possible, therefore, to discuss with them, as it is not with apologists, who take good care never to lay all their cards on the table, and of whom you cannot but feel, as the great historian Mommsen remarked, that they are chattering in chains (ex vinculis sermocinantes). In the investigation of truth there can be no mental reserves, and argument is useless where the final appeal lies to a Pope or a creed. You cannot set your hand to the plough and then look back.
It was not, then, within the scope of this essay to try to determine how much and what particular incidents traditionally narrated of Jesus are credible. Such a task would require at least a thousand pages for its discharge; I have merely desired to show how difficult it is to prove a negative, and how much simpler it is to admit that Jesus really lived than to argue that he was a solar or other myth. The latter hypothesis, as expounded in these works, offends every principle of philology, of comparative mythology, and of textual criticism; it bristles with difficulties; and, if no better demonstration of it can be offered, it deserves to be summarily dismissed.
On the other hand, no absolute rules can be laid down a priori for the discerning in early Christian or in any other ancient documents of historical fact. But students embarking on a study of Christian origins will do well to lay to heart the aphorism of Renan (Les Apôtres, Introd. xxix), that “one can only ascertain the origin of any particular religion from the narratives or reports of those who believed therein; for it is only the sceptic who writes history ad narrandum.” It is in the very nature of things human that we could not hope to obtain documents more evidential than the Gospels and Acts. It is a lucky chance that time has spared to us the Epistles of Paul as well, and the sparse notices of first-century congregations and personalities preserved in Josephus and in pagan writers. For during the first two or three generations of its existence the Church interested few except itself. In the view of a Josephus, the Jewish converts could only figure as Jews gone astray after a false Messiah, just as the Gentile recruits were mere Judaizers, objects—as he remarks, B. J., II, 18, 2—of equal suspicion to Syrian pagans and Jews alike, an ambiguous, neutral class, spared by the knife of the pagans, yet dreaded by the Jews as at heart aliens to their cause.[3] There were no folklorists or comparative religionists in those days watching for new cults to appear; and there could be little or no inclination to sit down and write history among enthusiasts who dreamed that the end of the world was close at hand, and believed themselves to be already living in the last days. For this is the conviction that colours the whole of the New Testament; and that it does so is a signal proof of the antiquity of much that the book contains. If a Christian of the first century ever took up his pen and wrote, it was not to hand down an objective narrative of events to a posterity whose existence he barely contemplated, but, as against unbelieving Jews, to establish from ancient prophecy his belief in Jesus as the promised Messiah, or perhaps as the Word of God made flesh. All Christians were aware that Jews, both in Judæa and of the Dispersion, roundly denied their Christ to have been anything better than an impostor and violator of the Law. They heard the pagans round them echoing the scoffs of their Messiah’s own countrymen. Accordingly, the earliest literature of the Church, so far as it is not merely homiletic and hortative, is controversial, and aims at proving that the Jewish people were mistaken in rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. The Jews neither then nor now have fought with mere shadows; and just in proportion as they bore witness against his Messiahship, they bore witness in favour of his historical reality. It is a pity that the extreme negative school ignore this aspect of his rejection by the Jews.
Let me cite one more wise rule laid down by Renan in the same Introduction: “An ancient writing can help us to throw light, firstly, on the age in which it was composed, and, secondly, on the age which preceded its composition.”
This indicates in a general fashion the use which historians should make of the New Testament. We have at every turn to ask ourselves what the circumstances its contents reveal presuppose in the immediate past in the way both of ideas or aspirations and of fact or incidents.
In conclusion, I cannot do better than quote the words in which Renan defines in general terms the sort of historical results we may hope to attain in the field of Christian origins. It is from the Introduction already cited, pp. vi and vii:—
In histories like this, where the general outline (ensemble) alone is certain, and where nearly all the details lend themselves more or less to doubt by reason of the legendary character of the documents, hypothesis is indispensable. About ages of which we know nothing we cannot frame any hypothesis at all. To try to reconstitute a particular group of ancient statuary, which certainly once existed, but of which we have not even the debris, and about which we possess no written information, is to attempt an entirely arbitrary task. But to endeavour to recompose the friezes of the Parthenon from what remains to us, using as subsidiary to our work ancient texts, drawings made in the seventeenth century, and availing ourselves of all sources of information; in a word, inspiring ourselves by the style of these inimitable fragments, and endeavouring to seize their soul and life—what more legitimate task than this? We cannot, indeed, after all, say that we have rediscovered the work of the ancient sculptor; nevertheless, we shall have done all that was possible in order to approximate thereto. Such a method is all the more legitimate in history, because language permits the use of dubitative moods of which marble admits not. There is nothing to prevent our setting before the reader a choice of different suppositions, and the author’s conscience may be at rest as soon as he has set forth as certain what is certain, as probable what is probable, as possible what is possible. In those parts of the field where our footstep slides and slips between history and legend it is only the general effect that we must seek after …. Accomplished facts speak more plainly than any amount of biographic detail. We know very little of the peerless artists who created the chefs d’œuvre of Greek art. Yet these chefs d’œuvre tell us more of the personality of their authors and of the public which appreciated them than ever could do the most circumstantial narratives and the most authentic of texts.