He [Jesus] without doubt never frequented the schools of the rabbins.
His family was certainly pious.
One fact is certain, that a seizure was concerted of which he [Judas] was the principal agent.
It was without doubt arranged [at the house of the high priest at earliest daylight] that they should content themselves with denouncing the Galilean prophet to the Roman authority.
Without doubt he [Jesus] expected to his last moment the succour which only death could bring him.
It was Peter, it would seem, who first obtained the proof and the definitive certainty [of the resurrection] that faith called for. One day, at dawn, fishing on the lake of Tiberias, he saw Jesus. Already, without doubt, he had assembled around him the other disciples.[1]
It is enviable to be so sans doute on so many points in a narrative of which so much has had to be abandoned as myth. The odd thing is that with all these certitudes M. Loisy introduces his book with the declaration, “We must [il faut] now renounce writing the life of Jesus. All the critics agree in recognizing that the materials are insufficient for such an enterprise.”[2] And then, after an introduction in which he contests the view that nothing can be written with certainty, he gives us a Life of Jesus which is simply Renan revised!
It is certainly brief; but that is because he is content to say only what he thinks there is to say, whereas his predecessors were at more or less pains to embed the thin thread of biography in a large mat of non-biographical material. M. Loisy seems to have become a little confused in the process of prefixing a critical introduction to three chapters of the former introduction to his commentary on the synoptics. “The present little book,” he writes, “does not pretend to be that history which it is impossible to recover.” Naturally not. But it proffers a Life of Jesus all the same.
M. Loisy is quite satisfied that there was a Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, a “worker in wood, carpenter, furniture maker, wheelwright.”[3] “And Jesus followed originally the same profession.” When he began his preaching of the speedy coming of the heavenly kingdom, “his mother Mary was a widow, with numerous children. It is not certain that Jesus was the eldest....” “It was probably John the Baptist who, unknowingly, awoke the vocation of the young carpenter of Nazareth. The crisis which traversed Judæa had evoked a prophet.... This preaching of terror made a great impression.... John was usually on the Jordan, baptizing in the river those touched by his burning words. Jesus was drawn like many others.... He was baptized, and remained some time in the desert.”
And so it goes on. “What appears most probable” is that Jesus had already “passed some time in solitude. A time of reflection and of preparation was indispensable between the life of the carpenter and the manifestation of the preacher of the evangel. Pushed to the desert by the sentiment of his vocation, Jesus was bound (devait) to be pursued by a more and more clear consciousness of that vocation.” Thus M. Loisy can after all expand his sources. It was after the imprisonment of the Baptist that Jesus felt he “was to replace him, and by the better title because he felt himself predestined to become the human chief of the Kingdom, there to fill the function of Messiah.” But “almost in spite of himself” he worked miracles. From his first stay at Capernaum the sick were brought to him to heal; and, fearing that the thaumaturg might hurt the preacher of the Kingdom, he left the place, only to be followed up and forced to make cures. “He operated with a peculiar efficacy on the category of patients supposed to be specially possessed by the demon.... He spoke to them with authority, and calm returned, at least for a time, to those troubled and unquiet souls.” As to the greater cures, M. Loisy observes that “perhaps” there was ascribed to the healer the revivification of a dead maiden. On the instantaneous cures of lepers and the blind he naturally says nothing whatever.