The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions

by J. M. Robertson

The dilemma of M. Loisy here recalls that of Professor Schmiedel over the same problem. The latter, claiming that it would be “difficult to deny” healing powers to Jesus, in view of the testimonies, is fain to argue that the Healer’s personal claim ([Mt. xi, 5]; [Lk. vii, 22]; not in Mk.) to have healed the sick, the blind, the deaf, the lepers, and raised the dead, meant only a spiritual ministration, inasmuch as the claim concludes: “the poor also have the Gospel preached to them.” On this view the assumed healing power really counts for nothing; and the last clause, which Schmiedel contends would be an anti-climax if the healings were real, becomes absolutely an anti-climax of the most hopeless kind. One day men will dismiss such confusions by noting that the theory of spiritual healing, an attempt to evade the mass of miracle, is only miracle-mongering of another kind. Are we to take it that regeneration of the morally dead, deaf, blind, and leprous is to be effected wholesale by a little preaching? Did the Christian community then consist wholly or mainly of these?

M. Loisy in turn blenches at a claim in which “raising the dead” figures as a customary thing, with cures of leprosy and blindness; and he too falls back on the “spiritual” interpretation,[4] failing to note the flat fallacy of making the preaching to the poor at once a contrast and a climax to the spiritual healings, which also, on the hypothesis, are precisely matters of preaching. The Teacher is made to say: “I raise the spiritually dead, and cure the spiritually leprous, deaf, and blind, by preaching to them: to the poor I just preach.” Schmiedel does not see that the preaching of the Gospel to the poor is added as the one thing that could be said to be done for them, who would otherwise have had no benefit; and that on his own view he ought to treat this as a late addition. On the contrary, he insists that the “evangelists” could not have thought of adding it; and that it makes an excellent climax if we take the healings to be purely spiritual.

The rational argument would be, of course, that the first writer did make the Lord talk figuratively; and that a later redactor, taking the words literally, added the item of the poor, which he could not have done if he took them figuratively. But the irreducible fallacy is the assumption that as a figurative claim the speech is historic, one order of miracle being held allowable when another is not. Schmiedel has exemplified his own saying that “with very few exceptions all critics fall into the very grave error of immediately accepting a thing as true as soon as they have found themselves able to trace it to a ‘source’.”[5] It does not in the least follow that by substituting spiritual for physical miracle we acquire a right to claim historicity. And by the claim we simply cancel the “fame” of the records.

M. Loisy, committing himself to some acts of healing where Schmiedel, after accepting the general claim, commits himself to none, balances vaguely between acts of faith-healing so-called and cures of sheer insanity, and accepts the tradition of

an unfruitful point at Nazareth.[6] “A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country and among his own kin, and in his own house,” Jesus had said before the disdainful astonishment of his fellow-citizens and the incredulity of his family; and he could work no miracle in that place.

M. Loisy, it will be observed, here assumes that we are dealing with real cures, and tacitly rejects the qualifying clauses in [Mark vi, 5], and [Matthew xiii, 58], as he well may. They are indeed stamped with manipulation. “He could there do no mighty work save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk and healed them,” says the first; “he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief,” says the other. Such passages raise in an acute form the question how any statement in the Gospels can reasonably be taken as historical. What were the alleged mighty works done elsewhere save acts of healing the sick? And how many cases for such healing would naturally be presented by one small hamlet? If, again, all the healings were spiritual, what are we left with beyond the truism that sinners who did not believe were unbelieving?

As the modifications produce pure counter-sense, it is critically permissible to surmise that they were lacking in the first copies, and were inserted merely to guard against profane cavils. But as the whole episode is found only in Matthew and Mark, it cannot figure in Dr. Petrie’s Nucleus; and for similar reasons it is absent from the Primitive Gospel of the school of Bernhard Weiss. M. Loisy, recognizing that it is the kind of item that Luke would avoid for tactical reasons, is loyal enough to accept it as historical without the modifying words, and seeks no better explanation than that given in the cited words of Jesus.

For those who aim at a rational comprehension of the documents, the critical induction is that the story was inserted for a reason; and the explanation which satisfies M. Loisy is so ill-considered that it only emphasizes the need. A prophet is likely to be looked at askance by his own people: yes, if he be an unimpressive one; but upon what critical principles is M. Loisy entitled to assume, as he constantly does, that the historic Jesus made a profound and ineffaceable impression upon all who came in contact with him, from the moment of his call to his disciples, and that nevertheless he had not made the slightest impression of superiority upon his own kinsmen and fellow-villagers, up to the age of thirty? How can such propositions cohere? Jesus has only to leave Nazareth and to command men to follow him, in order to be reverently recognized as a Superman: for M. Loisy, it is his mere personality that creates the faith which, after his death, makes his adherents proclaim him as a re-arisen God. Is this the kind of personality that in an eastern village would be known merely as that of “the carpenter,” or the carpenter’s son?

M. Loisy, it is true, claims that Jesus had needed a period of solitude and meditation in the desert to make him a teacher, thus partly implying that before that experience the destined prophet might not be recognizable as such. But is it a historic proposition that the short time of solitude had worked a complete transformation? Was a quite normal or commonplace personality capable of such a transfiguration in a natural sense? That the critic had not even asked himself the question is made plain by his complete failure to raise the cognate question in regard to the marvellous healing powers with which he unhesitatingly credits the teacher, on the strength of the wholly supernaturalist testimony of the Gospels. These powers, according to M. Loisy, were also the instantaneous result of the short period of solitude in the desert. What pretensions can such a theory make to be in conformity with historical principles? Cannot M. Loisy see that he has only been miracle-mongering with a difference?

It is bad enough that we should be asked to take for granted, on the strength of a typically Eastern record of wholesale thaumaturgy, a real “natural” gift for healing a variety of nervous disorders. But a natural gift of such a kind at least presupposes some process of development. M. Loisy obliviously asks us to believe that all of a sudden a man who had throughout his life shown no abnormal powers or qualities whatever, began to exercise them upon the largest scale almost immediately after he had left his native village. Now, whatever view be taken of the cynical formula that a prophet has no honour in his own village, it is idle to ask us to believe that a great healer has none. The local healer of any sort has an easy opening; and the redacted Gospels indicate uneasy recognition of the plain truth that Jesus needed only to heal the sick at Nazareth as elsewhere to conquer unbelief. It was precisely the cures that, in the Gospel story, had won him fame in the surrounding country. M. Loisy has merely burked the problem.