From Bondage to Liberty in Religion: A Spiritual Autobiography

by George T. Ashley

There is no evidence that his disciples during his lifetime ever had the slightest conception that he had a supernatural birth. When Philip tells Nathaniel that he has found the Messiah of whom Moses and the prophets wrote, he also tells him that this Messiah is "Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph."

Even after the death of Jesus the disciples seem to have had no knowledge of any supernatural birth. The two on their way to Emmaus, after the crucifixion, express their disappointment: "We hoped that it was he who should redeem Israel." No such expression of disappointment can possibly be reconciled with any thought that this Jesus who had so recently been crucified was the "eternal Son of God" incarnated in human flesh. On the day of Pentecost Peter speaks of him in no higher terms than "A man approved of God."

If Jesus was supernaturally born, as a matter of course his mother knew it all the time; yet during the whole life of Jesus she is nowhere mentioned as giving the slightest intimation of it; but on the contrary all the record we have of anything she did do or say would naturally lead to just the opposite conclusion. Of course no one else knew anything about it. Taking it naturally for granted, that at least at the beginning, his disciples knew nothing of it, if they ever learned it afterwards, there must have been some special time, condition or circumstance under which they came into possession of these remarkable facts. Yet, there is not a hint in the New Testament about any such time, place, circumstance or incident.

How then did the idea of a supernatural birth and the deification of Jesus come about, if it was not a real fact? Very simply and quite naturally. Any one acquainted with ancient history knows that in that age of the world, and for centuries before, it had been almost a universal custom, especially in Greece and the Roman empire, to attribute some supernatural origin to, and deify their heroes,—sometimes while they were yet alive, but most certainly after their death. Just so, after the death of this remarkable man, and his cult continued to gather adherents, time and distance lent perspective, and he naturally grew larger and greater in their estimation, until, naturally and inevitably, permeated by the universal thought of the age in which they lived, they gradually came to look more and more upon their great master as being something more than ordinarily human, until this thought gradually ripened into his deification; and of course to be consistent with this he must have been, like all other deified heroes, supernaturally born. And out of this the legend of Bethlehem, in both its forms, in Matthew and Luke, somehow grew,—nobody knows exactly how. It is just like many other myths of past ages. The first we know of them they are full grown and complete; yet, like all other things, they must have had a natural and gradual growth.

As to where he was born we do not know, nor is it material. It is by far the most probable that he was born at Nazareth where his parents lived. The legend that he was born at Bethlehem was doubtless a pure conjecture, made necessary by those who accepted him as the Messiah of Hebrew prophecy, to make it correspond with the prophetic declaration that the Messiah should be born at Bethlehem of Judah. This fully accounts for the Bethlehem story as the place of his birth. The fact is they are all purely conjectural, made to fit into some preconceived notion of his personality or character. We have no reliable account whatever of his birth or early life.

We now come to consider the man,—yes, the man Christ Jesus. We have already said he was a Jew and lived and died one, with apparently no thought or purpose other than to reform and correct the abuses into which his people had lapsed, and revive and intensify the deep spiritual and ethical meaning of religion. Born of the most intensely religious race of all antiquity, he was the most intensely religious of his race. He perceived a new conception of God, not as the arbitrary ruler and vindictive judge of his people, but as the universal Father of all men, not anthropomorphic, but Infinite Spirit, whose greatest attributes were love, justice, mercy and truth, expressed in the great term Fatherhood; and that all men are children of the great Father, and therefore brothers. This expresses his fundamental philosophy and working basis of life. Upon it he undertook to build up and establish, not a new system of religion, but a new order of life. The central idea in this was man's direct relationship to God. In his own life he embodied a perfect example of his ideal. He thus became not God incarnate bodily in human flesh, nor the Son of God in any different sense than all are sons of God—except perhaps in degree and not in kind—but the most complete reflection and interpretation of God in terms of human life that the world had ever known before his time, has ever known since, or perhaps ever will know. But this last statement is saying more than any man can know for certain. We know not what God may yet have to reveal to mankind, nor how He will reveal it.

His course of life and teaching naturally brought him into direct conflict with the prevailing order of his time. We need not discuss that in detail. It soon led to a violent and tragic death, before he had fairly begun his work. We cannot form any guess what might have been the result if he had been permitted to live out a normal life and continue his teaching. He only met the same fate that many prophets before him had met, and many more since. If he should appear today here in America and pursue the same course toward public institutions and popular beliefs and practices, he would meet with a reception little different from what he met in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago. He might not indeed be crucified on a cross; but he would stand a good chance to be cast into jail and sent to a penitentiary for a term of years for sedition and attempting to interfere with the established order. And no persons would be more active in his prosecution than some of the modern Pharisees who occupy high places in that great institution that bears his name. If he had appeared in Europe some four or five hundred years ago, he would have been almost dead certain to meet the same fate of John Huss, Savonarola and Giordano Bruno. But now, as then, the poor, down-trodden and oppressed would doubtless hear him gladly.

There is no reliable evidence that he ever claimed to be the Messiah of Hebrew prophecy. He is quoted on several occasions as having accepted the appellation when applied to him by others. On one occasion only is he quoted as having affirmatively declared himself the Messiah; and that was to the woman of Samaria, and the whole circumstance of it renders it incredible. It would certainly be a very unusual course to take, for the Jewish Messiah to come and announce himself as such, not to the Jews themselves, but to a very obscure, not to say disreputable woman, of the most despised race known to the Jews.

It was however quite natural that, after his followers had universally accepted him as the Jewish Messiah, they should recall some occasional remarks that he may have made, upon which to base this belief; and that these remarks would finally take more concrete form, until when written, fifty to a hundred years after they were uttered, they were perhaps entirely different from anything Jesus ever said. As a matter of fact there is nothing in the life or teachings of Jesus, as recorded in the New Testament, that at all corresponds to the personality or character of the Messiah of Hebrew prophecy. And may I add here, that the Messiah of Hebrew prophecy, for whose coming the Jews were looking at that time, and for which most of the Jews have been looking ever since, is but a fiction and a myth, born entirely out of the patriotic devotion and fervid poetic fancy of the Old Hebrew prophets? In the days of Israel's adversity, when all the really unquestioned Messianic prophecies were uttered, the mind of prophet and people turned back to the golden days of David's glorious reign; and in their intense patriotism and unfaltering faith in Jehovah, they hoped and believed that he would some day raise up a King of the line and house of David that would restore the ancient glory of Israel; and so they prophesied—"the wish being father to the thought." And this is all there is to Old Testament Messianic prophecy. And a great many of the most intelligent Jews of the Reformed School of today are beginning to think the same.

But if there was ever a true prophet of God, a man in whom the God-life in human form was truly manifest, a man supremely divine,—not by miraculous generation, but by spiritual union with God, whereby God indeed became manifest in human flesh,—that man was Jesus of Nazareth. And as such he becomes the eternal example for all mankind after him. As a man he justly commands the highest homage that the world can give to man. But make him God, and the chain that connects him with man is at once broken. If Jesus was God, and therefore incapable of temptation or sin, the temptation and triumph in the wilderness becomes a farce, without any meaning to mankind whatever. But as a mortal man struggling with and overcoming the strongest temptations of life, it has infinite significance to all mankind. If he overcame as a man, so may I. As a god, the sweat of Gethsemane and the agony of the Cross are but mockery—not equal to a single pin-prick in a whole mortal life. But as a man, struggling with the last enemy, with eternity before him, a means of escape at hand, but deliberately devoting his life and his all in the most excruciatingly torturous manner known to human ingenuity in cruelty, it becomes a spectacle to command the awe and admiration of angels.