“O Jesus! noblest of patriots, greatest of heroes, most glorious of all martyrs! Thine is the spirit of universal liberty and love—of uncompromising hostility to every form of injustice and wrong. But not with weapons of death dost thou assault thy enemies, that they may be vanquished or destroyed; for thou dost not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against ‘principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places’; therefore hast thou put on the whole armor of God, having the loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness, and thy feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, and going forth to battle with the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the Spirit! Worthy of imitation art thou, in overcoming the evil that is in the world; for by the shedding of thine own blood, but not even the blood of thy bitterest foe, shalt thou at last obtain a universal victory.”
So, across the ages, does deep answer unto deep. But all the same Garrison’s feet were unconsciously shod with the preparation of the gospel of war, even as those of Jesus were. In a realm of consecrated wrong every appeal to the moral sentiment is necessarily revolutionary; far more so than physical rebellion, against which preponderant moral forces combine with the immoral, as being a greater evil than the orderly wrong assailed. Satan cannot be cast out by Beelzebub. A god of wrath, enthroned on reeking altars, could better stand the axe of the Baptist than the sunbeam of Jesus, the arrow feathered with gentleness and culture. John the Baptist was not a religious martyr; he suffered from a ruler quite indifferent to his religion, with whose personal affairs he had interfered. But Jesus suffered because he proclaimed, with irresistible eloquence, a new religion, one involving practically the existing institutions of the priesthood, and their whole moral system. It was virtually the setting up of a new deity in place of Jahveh, reason in place of the Bible, the heart worshipping in spirit and in truth in place of the temple, and humanizing the moral sentiment—turning the conventional morality to “dead works” (Heb. vi. 1). He expected the reform to be peaceful!
Rousseau’s remark that Socrates died like a philosopher, but Jesus like a god, has in it a truth more important than those who often quote it recognise. Jesus died, legendarily, so much like a god that it is difficult to make out just what happened to the man. Strong arguments have been made to prove that he did not die at all on “the cross” (a word unknown to the New Testament),[6] and that Pilate not only “set himself” to save Jesus (John xix. 12), but succeeded. There may have been from the stake a despairing cry, afterwards shaped after a line from a psalm, but it can hardly be determined whether this may not have been part of the first post-resurrectional doctrine that the Son must be absolutely left by his divine Father, and pass unaided through the ordeal of Satan, in order to fulfil the conditions of a return from death. It is true, however, that this primitive idea had almost vanished when the earliest Gospel was written, and, although a relic of it may have been preserved by tradition, there is an equal probability that Jesus did utter at the stake a cry of despair. The whole miserable murderous affair, unforeseen and disappointing, must have appeared to him a horrible display of diabolism; and even after his friends believed in his resurrection, and saw in the tragedy a sacrifice, they regarded it a sacrifice hateful to his Father, and exacted only by the Devil.
Did he pray, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do”? Only Luke reports this; its suppression by the other Gospels suggests that its doctrinal significance was perceived. I heard a preacher in the church of the Jesuits at Rome argue that Judas himself is now in Paradise, because Jesus thus prayed for those who slew him, and the prayer of the Son of God must have been answered. There is no apparent dogmatic purpose in this incident, and it may be true.
The story of his confiding his mother to the disciple “whom he loved,” told only by John, is evidently meant to complete the assumption of a special favoritism towards that disciple, who is the type of the good Spirit on one side of Jesus in contrast with Judas, Satan’s agent, on the other. The two are equally unhistorical and allegorical. John and Judas became the good and evil Wandering Jews of mediæval folklore.
The first Solomon had perished as a teacher of wisdom when he was summoned from his tomb to utter the Jahvism of the “Wisdom of Solomon”: the second and last Solomon was forever buried on the day when Mary Magdalene saw his apparition, and cried, “My master!” From that time may be dated the loss of the man Jesus, and restoration in Christ of the Jahvism whose burden the wise teacher had endeavored to lift from the heart and mind of the people. Vicisti Jahveh!
[1] “Boast not of thy clothing and raiment, and exalt not thyself in the day of honor: for the works of the Lord (in nature) are wonderful, and his works among (wise) men are hidden.”—Ecclus. xi. 4; cf., in same, xvi. 26–27, where it is said the beautiful things in nature “neither labor, nor are weary nor cease from their works.”
[2] Ewald compares the omission of the name of Moses for so many centuries with the omission of Solomon’s name. (Geschichte des Volkes Israel, Bk. ii.). Such omissions do not, he says, cast doubt on the historic character of either. The descriptive references to Solomon during the time when his name is suppressed are more continuous, and more historical. The utterance of Solomon’s name was probably at first avoided through Jahvist horror of his supposed idolatry and worldliness, but as he was addressed in a psalm as “God,” and as superstitions about his demon-commanding power grew, it seems not improbable that there was some fear of using his name, akin to the fear of uttering the proper name of God or of any evil power.
[3] It is shocking to find this woman named as Mary Magdalene in the “Harmony of the Gospels,” appended to the Revised Bible. This deliberate falsehood is carefully elaborated by separating the story as told in Matthew and Mark as another incident, under the heading, “Mary anoints Jesus.”