No one persecuted the Jews for believing in one God and refusing to accept Pagan gods. But then, they did not say that their religion had universal authority: the Catholic Church and its Founder did say that of theirs—and do so still. It is simply silly to think that anyone would have persecuted anyone else for telling people to be gracious and to look to happiness from a good life: yet in order to fit facts in with his theory, the Modernist has to descend to that silliness.
The Catholic Church was persecuted because it proposed and practised a ritual, doctrinal, particular, mystery religion claiming universal and Divine authority, and therefore antagonistic to the official religion of the Empire; and the heart of that mystery religion, the pivot on which it all turned, was, from the very beginning, a belief, right or wrong, in the Incarnation: that Christ was God. Ignorance of that historical fact is, I say, a piece of first-class historical ignorance on Mr. Wells’s part.
Next in importance, though still very important, is what I have already alluded to, his quite unhistorical way of looking at the Gospels. Here I must warn the reader that I take up an attitude which would have been that of but a small minority fifty years ago (when the ideas Mr. Wells still retails were in their hey-day), and which is still that of a minority, but a rapidly growing minority to-day. I think the old-fashioned criticism of the Gospel text has failed. Anyhow, Mr. Wells takes the Gospels—or what Modernists chose to retain of them—as contemporary records. In that he is right. He says that they have miraculous and incredible “additions,” and he only accepts the documents subject to his right to reject anything in them to which he is unaccustomed. I know that in this attitude he is only copying what he finds in a hundred textbooks of our time. But unhistorical such a method is and unhistorical it remains no matter how widely it is used.
Mr. Wells is careful to say, as all the swarm of his sort continually repeat, that he is treating the Gospels only as he would treat any other book. But the historian, when he comes across a book crammed with statements which he is certain are false, ceases to depend upon that book. You may indeed say that the man who wrote such and such a document credulously accepted a lot of nonsense, or got himself to believe what he was saying or was simply telling lies; but then, by every standard of historical criticism, documents packed full of falsehood are worthless.
You may say that the Gospels may have behind them some tiny, ultimate nucleus of fact, but that is all you can say: And you have no right whatever to single out what you choose to regard as true from what you choose to regard as false, simply upon the plea of probability. You can say, “In these stories there does appear a certain human figure: he may have existed: he probably did. But as he perpetually claims and exercises miraculous powers, and, as these are incredible, there is no certitude to be based on such documents.” But you have no sort of right to say, “He certainly said this. He certainly did not say that,” on the strength of such documents. Least of all can you exclude matter which is in no way marvellous or unusual but simply out of gear with some imagined theory, e.g. the Petrine texts, the intensely vivid touches concerning Our Lady, Her rhapsody, Her Visitation, Her warning of tragedy (such things are said to mothers every day), Our Lord’s recommendation of her to St. John from the Cross, etc. None of these things are miraculous: they are called “unauthentic” simply because they support Our Lady and St. Peter—whom the critics don’t like. If the Gospels had not about them the traditional appeal to the heart and to the ancestral memories which the Modernist is too weak to strip off, our author would throw over the whole of them. If they came to him as documents from another tradition he would certainly do so. Belonging as they do to his past, he cannot bear to part with them altogether, and so picks out a few words to retain for his consolation.
Similarly, it is grossly unhistorical to imagine impossible motives at work in the composition of the Gospels. Suppose the Gospels to be contemporary, but the work either of people too daft to judge reality or of people who were telling lies. Then the historical way of attacking them is to say: “They are contemporary; but they, being written under such and such a motive consonant to the time, tell such and such falsehoods, or are subject to such and such illusions for which the character of the time will account.”
That is how critics with good historical knowledge, but of sceptical temper, deal with, say, the marvels in The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, or in The Life of St. Martin. But if you do not know the motives consonant to the time, you will make a muddle of it—and Mr. Wells, not knowing the time, has made a muddle of it.
A very good example of his attempt at understanding something which he has insufficiently studied is his comment on the double lineage given for Our Lord through His Foster-Father, St. Joseph, and through His Blessed Mother, “both leading to David.” Mr. Wells remarks: “As if it were any honour to descend from such a man.”
It is a remark which presupposes that a first-century Jew would present Our Lord’s descent from David merely as a social distinction. What an extraordinarily ignorant idea! Yet even Mr. Wells must have heard that the Jews expected their Messiah to be descended from David, and further, that lineage was counted among the Jews, not only through a natural father, but also through an adopted or legal father.
As another example (out of dozens) of the unhistorical character of the whole thing, you have those descriptions made up entirely out of his head, in which Mr. Wells excels as a writer of fiction, but which are hopeless in History. It is admirable to attach imagination to History for the purpose of giving life to known facts, but it is ridiculous to try to make History live by inventing facts. How, for instance, does Mr. Wells know that Our Lord was “lean,” was “strenuous,” or that He was unkempt? Or that He was “very human”—I mean, with the modern connotation of weakness in those unfortunate words?