The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions

by J. M. Robertson

Exactly. Jesus, in effect, preached just what the Baptist is said to have preached; only without baptism. The monition to repent was simply the monition of all the prophets and all the eschatologists; and it had not the attraction of baptism which the evangel of the Baptist was said to have. So that the Twelve, on the showing of M. Loisy, went through Jewry uttering only one familiar phrase—and casting out devils—and dooming those who refused to hear them. And, by their own report, it was in casting out devils that they had their success. The simple name of Jesus, according to the Gospels, availed for that where he had never appeared in person. Yet, again, the name is used by non-adherents for the same purpose ([Mk. ix, 38]). And still M. Loisy confidently claims that there is no trace of a pre-Christian Jesus cult in Palestine![3]

Concerning the nullity of the original evangel he is quite unwittingly explicit when he is resisting the myth theory; albeit in the act of contradicting himself:—

Paul, indeed, proclaims [se réclame du] an immortal Christ, or more exactly a Christ dead and re-arisen, not the Jesus preaching the evangel in Galilee and at Jerusalem. But his attitude is easy to explain.... He was aware of the circumstances of the death of Christ, and of what was preached by his followers.... If he boasted of having learned nothing from the old [sic] apostles, it was that, in reality, he had never been at their school.... But he was able [il lui arrive] also to affirm the conformity of his teaching with theirs: that is what he did in the passage ... touching the death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul converted had nothing to demand of the first apostles of Jesus, because he knew already what they had preached.[4]

So that the doctrine of an immortal or resurrected Christ was the sole doctrine of the Apostles. There was no other evangel. And this doctrine, which had just been declared to be born of the personal impression made by Jesus on his followers, is also the doctrine of Paul, who had never seen Jesus.

The primary evangel having thus simply disappeared, we revert to the Jesuine Teaching (addressed in large part only to the disciples) which had formed among disciples and adherents such a “religious life” as served to develop the conviction that the Master could not really die, and so prepared the foundation upon which Paul built historic Christianity.[5] We have seen how M. Loisy vacillates over the Founder’s conception of the Kingdom of God in relation to his moral teaching. When it is a question of a myth theory, M. Loisy insists upon exactitude. “In order that the thesis should be sustainable, it would be necessary that a well-defined myth should have existed in some Jewish sect.”[6] But there is no call for well-defined proofs or notions when it is a question of defending the tradition. For our critic, Jesus is first and foremost an intense believer in a miraculous advent of that Kingdom which had come simply to mean “the sovereignty of God.”[7] Even this conception is of necessity vague to the last degree:—

The primitive nationalism subsisted at least in the framework [cadre] and the exterior economy of the kingdom of God; it maintained itself also in [jusque dans] the evangel of Jesus. At the same time the kingdom of God is not a simple moral reform, to safeguard the law of the celestial Sovereign and guarantee the happiness of the faithful. The action of Yahweh ... governs the entire universe.... [The cosmological tradition] developed the idea of a definite triumph of light over darkness, of order over chaos, a triumph which was to be the final victory of good over evil.... The terrestrial kingdoms ... were to disappear, to give place to the reign of Israel, which was the reign of the just, the reign of God. In this great instauration of the divine order, in this regeneration of the universe, the divine justice was to manifest itself by the resurrection of all the true faithful.[8]

This transformation, then—the long current dream of Jewry—was to be a vast miracle, and in that miracle Jesus believed he was to play the part of the Messiah, the divine representative. That expectation sustained him till the moment of his death.[9] Nevertheless “his idea of the reign of God was not a patriotic hallucination or the dream of an excited [exalté] mystic. The reign of God is the reign of justice.”[10] (As if the second sentence proved the first.) And yet, all the while: “On the whole, the Gospel ethic is no more consistent than the hope of the kingdom.... Considered in themselves, as the Gospel makes them known to us, they are not mythic but mystic.”[11]

Thus helped to a definite conception, we turn to the ethic, which we have seen to be in the main a compilation from Jewish literature. This fact M. Loisy admits, only to deny that it has any significance:—

He opposes the voice of his conscience to the tradition of the doctors. There lies precisely the originality of his teaching, which, if one recomposed the materials piece by piece, could be found scattered in the Biblical writings or in the sayings of the rabbis. Like every man who speaks to men, Jesus takes his ideas in the common treasure of his environment and his time; but as to what he makes of it [pour le parti qu’il en tire] one does not say that it proceeds from any one. This independence results, probably, at once from his character and from the circumstances of his education.[12]

Thus, as regards the Sermon on the Mount, the act of collecting a number of ethical precepts and maxims from the current literature and lore of one’s people and curtly enouncing them, without development, is a proof of supreme moral originality, and is to be regarded as opposing the voice of one’s conscience to tradition. Had the rabbis, then, no conscience? Was their ethic a mere tradition, even when they gave out or originated the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount? Was Hillel but a mouth-piece of the law? M. Loisy must in justice pardon us for avowing that so far he has but duplicated a worn-out paralogism, and that he has evaded the plain documentary fact that the Sermon is a literary compilation,[13] and not a discourse at all.