The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions

by J. M. Robertson

Now, after that John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye, and believe in the Gospel [not a word of which has been communicated].

And passing along by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net in the sea; for they were fishers. And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men. And straightway they left the nets, and followed him. And going on a little further, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who also were in the boat mending the nets. And straightway he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and went after him.

This “episode,” for Mr. Sinclair, “seems to belong to real life, to be told of a real human being with distinct individuality.” For critical readers it is a primitive “conventional” narrative, told by a writer who has absolutely no historic knowledge to communicate. Of the preaching of the Saviour he has no more to tell than of the preaching of the Baptist. Both are as purely “conventional,” so far, as an archaic statue of Hermes. Of “the freedom and variety of life” there is not a trace; Mr. Sinclair, who professes to find these qualities, is talking in the manner of a showman at a fair. The important process of making disciples resolves itself into a fairy tale: “Come and I will make you fishers of men; and they came.” A measure of “literary artifice” is perhaps to be assigned to the items of “casting a net,” “mending the net,” and “left their father in the boat with the hired servants”;[4] but it is the literary art of a thousand fairy tales, savage and civilized, and stands for the method of a narrator who is dealing with purely conventional figures, not with characters concerning which he has knowledge. The calling of the first disciples in the rejected Fourth Gospel has much more semblance of reality.

If the cautious reader is slow to see these plain facts on the pointing of one who is avowedly an unbeliever in the historic tradition, let him listen to a scholar of the highest eminence, who, after proving himself a master in Old Testament criticism, set himself to specialize on the New. Says Wellhausen: “The Gospel of Mark, in its entirety, lacks the character of history.”[5] And he makes good his judgment in detail:—

Names of persons are rare: even Jairus is not named in [codex] D. Among the dramatis personæ it is only Jesus who distinctively speaks and acts; the antagonists provoke him; the disciples are only figures in the background. But of what he lived by, how he dwelt, ate, and drank, bore himself with his companions, nothing is vouchsafed. It is told that he taught in the synagogue on the Sabbath, but no notion is given of the how; we get only something of what he said outside the synagogue, usually through a special incident which elicits it. The normal things are never related, only the extraordinary.... The scantiness of the tradition is remarkable.[6]

The local connection of the events, the itinerary, leaves as much to be desired as the chronological; seldom is the transit indicated in the change of scene. Single incidents are often set forth in a lively way, and this without any unreal or merely rhetorical devices, but they are only anecdotally related, rari nantes in gurgite vasto. They do not amount to material for a life of Jesus. And one never gets the impression that an attempt had been made among those who had eaten and drunk with him to give others a notion of his personality.[7]

Wellhausen, it is true, finds suggestions of a real and commanding personality; but they are very scanty, the only concrete detail being the watching the people as they drop their offerings into the collecting-chest! “Passionate moral sensibility distinguishes him. He gives way to divine feeling in anger against the oppressors of the people and in sympathy with the lowly.” But here too there is qualification:—

But in Mark this motive for miracles seldom comes out. They are meant to be mainly displays of the Messiah’s power. Mark does not write de vita et moribus Jesu: he has not the aim of making his person distinguishable, or even intelligible. It is lost for him in the divine vocation; he means to show that Jesus is the Christ.[8]

Then we have a significant balancing between the perception that Mark is not history, and that, after all, it is practically all there is:—

Already the oral tradition which he found had been condensed under the influence of the standpoint from which he set out. He is silent on this and that which he can omit as being known to his readers—for instance, the names of the parents of Jesus (!). Nevertheless, he has left little that is properly historical for his successors to glean after him; and what they know in addition is of doubtful worth....