When we try to form a correct view of Jesus’s utterances regarding this Kingdom of God, we find they have much vagueness and ambiguity. Their differences also in the Synoptic Gospels and the fourth are so apparent that the latter must be left out of account in any attempt to get a proper sketch of Jesus’s hopes. His apostles and other early reporters misunderstood some of His sayings, making them crasser. Oral tradition marred their original form. This is specially the case with respect to the enthusiastic hopes about the kingdom He looked for. But as the ideal did not become actual we must rest in the great fact that the Christianity He introduced was the nucleus of a perfect system adapted to universal humanity.[5]
“We must” do no such thing. We “must” draw a licit inference. The alleged great fact is morally a chimera, and historically a hallucination. To admit that all the evidence collapses, and then to posit the visionary gospel with a “must,” is to abandon critical principle. The “must” is simply the eternal presupposition. And the choice of the sincere student “must” be between that negation of science and a fresh scientific search, from which the presupposition, as such, is excluded. If it can reappear as a licit conclusion, so be it. But it has never yet so arisen.
[1] With the customary bad faith of the orthodox apologist, Dr. Thorburn represents as a sudden change of thesis the proposition that “the Christian narrative is merely an ethical adaptation of the Greek story,” because that proposition follows on the remark that the Christian myth “might fairly be regarded” [as it actually has been] “as a later sophistication” of the Buddhist myth. On this “might” there had actually followed, in the text quoted, the statement: “There are fairly decisive reasons, however, for concluding that the Christian story was evolved on another line.” This sentence Dr. Thorburn conceals from his readers. There had been no change of thesis whatever. [↑]
[2] Rev. Dr. T. J. Thorburn, Jesus the Christ: Historical or Mythical?, p. 231. [↑]
[3] Dr. Thorburn appears to be wholly unaware of this fact of Jewish theology. See Dr. Schechter’s Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, 1909, ch. xv; Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, ii, 304. [↑]
[4] The Nemesis of this uncritical method appears in its development at the hands of Dr. Conybeare: “That Jesus was a successful exorcist we need not doubt, nor that he worked innumerable faith cures” (Myth, Magic, and Morals, 2nd. ed., p. 142). Such a writer “need not doubt” anything he wants to believe. In particular he “need not doubt” that the disciples were “successful exorcists” also. [↑]
[5] Introd. to the N. T., 3rd. ed., i, 4. [↑]