The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity

by Octavius Brooks Frothingham

Scarcely less is the difficulty of constructing a harmonious character from the first gospel alone. Renan brought to this experiment rare powers of mind, and a singular skill in letters. An orientalist, well versed in the productions of eastern genius; an accomplished literary investigator, practised in discerning between the genuine and the spurious; without dogmatic prejudice or predilection, neither christian nor anti-christian; enthusiastic, yet critical; approaching the subject from the historical direction; preparing himself laboriously for his task, and devoting to it all the capacity there was in him, Renan yet signally failed to construct a morally harmonious figure. Though conceiving Jesus as simply a man, he was obliged to resort to most obnoxious extravagances to make the narratives cohere. The "Vie de Jesus" is a standing refutation of the theory that the elements of a harmonious biography are to be found in the first gospel. It is the Christ of the first gospel who curses unbelieving and inhospitable cities; who threatens to deny in heaven those that deny him on earth; who speaks of the unpardonable sin, that "shall not be forgiven, either in this world, or in the world to come;" who will have none called "Master" but himself; who condemns to "everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels" those who have not assisted "these my brethren;" who bids his friends regard as no better than "a heathen man and a publican," the offender who will not listen to the Church; who launches indiscriminate invective against scribes and pharisees; who anticipates sitting on a throne, a judge of all nations, with his chosen followers sitting on twelve thrones of authority in the same kingdom. These statements must be qualified, allegorized, "spiritualized" a good deal, before they can be made congenial with the attributes of meekness, humility, gentleness, patience, loving-kindness, human sympathy, benevolence, justice, that adorn the image of a human Jesus. One set of qualities or the other, must be disavowed, unless we would incur the reproach that has fallen on Renan, of transforming Jesus into a terribly magnificent, and superbly unlovely person. Of this there is no necessity, for there is no necessity for constructing a harmonious character, on any hypothesis. We are not called on to construct a character at all. We may frankly own that the materials for constructing a character are not furnished. The first gospels exhibit stages in the development of the Christ idea; they do not give a portraiture of the man Jesus.

The hypothesis of mental and sentimental development in the experience of Jesus comes to the aid of the believers. Signs of such an interior progress do certainly appear, or can be made to appear by force of enthusiastic exegesis. The teacher who admonishes his disciples not to cast their pearls before swine, relates, with approval, the parable of the sower who flung his seed right and left, heedless that some fell on thorns that grew up and choked them, and some on stony ground, where having no root, they withered away. The man who twice frigidly repulsed the Canaanite woman who begged on her knees the boon of his compassion, telling her that he was not sent, save to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, adding, "it is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs," not only extends his effectual sympathy to her in her immediate need, but is found afterward, seeking and saving these very lost, going into the wilderness to find them that had gone astray, visiting the country of the pagan Gergesenes, and opening the blind eyes of Samaritans. The twelve disciples called and sent to the twelve tribes of Israel, one to each tribe, none to spare for the people beyond the borders of Palestine, became later seventy apostles commissioned to carry the message of the kingdom to all the tribes of the earth. The exorciser of evil spirits begins by casting devils into the herd of swine, thus "spoiling the pig-market" of a village, herein showing himself a true Jew, and ends by sitting at meat with publicans and sinners. By ingenious piecing, light skipping over dates and discrepancies careless of sequence and consequence, with resolute purpose to extract from the documents, by all or any means, a consistent human character, the development theory may be pushed a little way. But it soon comes against an insurmountable difficulty; the stream narrows just where it ought to widen, namely, as it approaches the ocean. It is towards the end of his career that the fanaticism discloses itself. The terrible outbreaks of anger, the invectives, the diatribes, the superb claims of authority, the horrid descriptions of the day of judgment, the discouragement and despair, come at the last. The serenity disappears; the sunlight pales; the day closes in mist. The man shrinks, instead of expanding, as he grows.

This is Renan's account of it; an account more deeply colored with gloom than need be; for that the baffled, tortured Jesus, lost his moral poise, and became a deliberate impostor, is not fairly deducible from any text; but the account is still essentially close and natural. Starting, as Renan does, from the position that the four gospels contain materials for an intelligible portraiture of Jesus; that those materials may be discovered, sifted, and arranged so as to produce a well proportioned figure; and that the principle of this human construction, must, on the supposition, be the principle according to which the characters of men are and must be constructed, namely, by tracing the actions and reactions between them and the circumstances of their time and place; starting, we say, from this position, it is difficult to avoid the inferences that he draws in regard to the disastrous effect that skepticism and opposition had on the mental and moral character of the hero. That "he made no concession to necessity;" that "he boldly declared war against nature, a complete rupture with kindred;" that "he exacted from his associates an utter abandonment of terrestrial satisfactions, an absolute consecration to his work," is no more than the plain texts imply. Renan does not strain language when he says: "In his excess of rigor, he went so far as to suppress natural desire. His requirements knew no bounds. Scorning the wholesome limitations of human nature, he would have people live for him only, love him alone." "Something preternatural and strange mingled with his discourse; as if a fire was consuming the roots of his life, and reducing the whole to a frightful desert. The sentiment of disgust towards the world, gloomy and bitter, of excessive abnegation which characterizes christian perfection, had for its author, not the sensitive joyous moralist of the earlier time, but the sombre titan, whom a vast and appalling presentiment carried further and further away from humanity. It looks as though, in these moments of conflict with the most legitimate desires of the heart, he forgot the pleasure of living and loving, of seeing and feeling." "It is easy to believe that from the view of Jesus, at this epoch of his life, every thought save for the kingdom of God, had wholly disappeared. He was, so to speak, entirely out of nature; family, friends, country had no meaning to him." "A strange passion for suffering and persecution possessed him. His blood seemed the water of a second baptism he must be bathed in, and he had the air of one driven by a singular impulse to anticipate this baptism which alone could quench his thirst." "At times his reason seemed disturbed. He experienced inward agitations and agonies. The tremendous vision of the kingdom of God, ceaselessly flaming before his eyes, made him giddy. His friends thought him, at moments, beside himself. His enemies declared him possessed by a devil. His passionate temperament, carried him, in an instant, over the borders of human nature. * * * Urgent, imperious, he brooked no opposition. His native gentleness left him; he was at times rude and fantastical. * * * At times his ill humor against all opposition pushed him to actions unaccountable and preposterous. It was not that his virtue sank; his struggle against reality in the name of the ideal became insupportable. He hurled himself in angry revolt against the world. * * * The tone he had assumed could not be sustained more than a few months. It was time for death to put an end to a situation strained to excess, to snatch him from the embarrassments of a path that had no issue, and, delivered from a trial too protracted, to introduce him, stainless, into the serenity of his heaven."

This is strong language, even shocking to minds accustomed to worship a character of ideal perfection. But it is scarcely bolder than the case warrants. The privilege to pick and choose material has its limits. We have no right to take what pleases us and leave the rest. Statements that rest on equal evidence deserve equal acceptance. If the result be not agreeable, the responsibility is not with the critic.

The only wonder is that such a person as the literal record justifies, should be accepted as the founder of a religion. How can Renan stand before his portrait of Jesus, and say, "the man here delineated merits a place at the summit of human grandeur;" "this is the supreme man; a sublime personage;" "every day he presides over the destiny of the world; to call him divine is no exaggeration; amid the columns that, in vulgar uniformity crowd the plain, there are some that point to the skies and attest a nobler destiny for man; Jesus is the loftiest of these; in him is concentred all that is highest and best in human nature." Such a conclusion is not justified by the premises. The homage is not warranted by the facts. It will not do to make out a catalogue of human weaknesses, and then urge those very weaknesses as a chief title to glory.

In the opinion of some it is wiser and kinder to confess at once that the image of Jesus has been irrecoverably lost. In the judgment of these, it is unphilosophical to set up an ideal where none is required. No doubt every effect must have a cause, but to assume the cause, or to insist on the validity of any single or special cause, is unscientific. Each event has many causes, a complexity of causes. Renan himself says: "It is undeniable that circumstances told for much, in the success of this wonderful revolution. Each stage in the development of humanity has its privileged epoch, in which it reaches perfection without effort, by a sort of spontaneous instinct. The Jewish state offered the most remarkable intellectual and moral conditions that the human race ever presented. It was one of those divine moments when a thousand hidden forces conspire to produce grand results, when fine spirits are supported by floods of admiration and sympathy."

In truth, was such a person as Jesus is presumed to have been, necessary to account for the existence of the religion afterwards called Christian? As an impelling force he was not required, for his age was throbbing and bursting with suppressed energy. The pressure of the Roman empire was required to keep it down. The Messianic hope had such vitality that it condensed into moments the moral results of ages. The common people were watching to see the heavens open, interpreted peals of thunder as angel voices, and saw divine portents in the flight of birds. Mothers dreamed that their boys would be Messiah. The wildest preacher drew a crowd. The heart of the nation swelled big with the conviction that the hour of destiny was about to strike, that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. The crown was ready for any kingly head that might dare to assume it. That in such a state of things anticipation should fulfil itself, the dream become real, the vision become solid, is not surprising. It was not the first time faith has become fact. The first generation of our era exhibited no phenomena that preceding generations had not prepared for and could not produce. No surprising original force need have been manifested. The spirit was the native spirit of the old vine growing in the old vineyard.

Jesus is not necessary to account for the ethics of the New Testament. They were as has been said, the native ethics of Judaism, unqualified. The breadth and the limitation, the ideal beauty and the practical point were alike Jewish. The gorgeous abstractions, gathered up in one discourse, look like fresh revelations of God; as autumn leaves plucked and set in a vase seem more luminous than do myriads of the same leaves covering the mountains and the meadows, their crimson and gold blending with the brown of the soil and the infinite blue of the sky. The ethics of the New Testament, like the ethics of the Old, have their root in the faith that Israel was a chosen people; in the expectation of a king in whom the faith should be crowned; in the anticipation of a judgment day, a national restoration, a celestial sun-burst, a final felicity for the faithful of Israel. The enthusiasm, the extravagance, the fanaticism, the passive trust, the active intolerance, the asceticism, the arbitrariness, bespeak in the one case as in the other, the presence of an intense but narrow spirit. They are not the ethics of this world. They are not temporal. The power of an original, creative soul should be attested by some modification of the popular code, rather than by an exaggeration of it. We should look for something new, not for a more emphatic repetition of the old. But nothing new appears. The exaggerations are exaggerated; the precepts suggested by the distant prospect of the kingdom are simply reiterated in view of its speedy establishment. Trust in Providence and faith in the Messiah are all in all; the virtues of common existence are less and less. The inhumanities that Renan ascribes to an access of fanaticism in Jesus are the humanities of an unreal Utopia.

The prodigious manifestation of mental and spiritual force that broke out in Paul requires no explanation apart from his own genius. He never saw Jesus and apparently was incurious about him. His originality was intellectual, and his system bears no trace of a foreign personality. As Renan says: "The Christ who communicates private revelations to him is a phantom of his own making;" "It is himself he listens to, while fancying that he hears Jesus." If ever man was self-motived, self-impelled, self-actuated, it was he. He needed no prompter. Hot of brain and heart, he was only too swift to move. Whether, as some think, driven by over-mastering ambition to lead a new movement, or, as others contend, constrained by inward urgency to attempt a moral reform on a speculative basis, or, according to yet a third supposition, eager to bear the glad tidings of the gospel to the gentile world, his own genius was from first to last, his guide and inspiration. There is no evidence to prove that his "conversion" added anything new to the mass of his moral nature, or changed the quality of ruling attributes, or determined the bent of his will to unpremeditated issues. He was converted to the Christ, not to Jesus; and his conversion to the Christ, was nothing absolutely unprepared for. His zeal for Israel blazed furiously against the disciples who claimed that the Christ had come, and to the end of his stormy days it still continued to burn against disciples of the narrow school who would not believe he had come to any but Jews. His zeal for Israel, sent him away by himself to meditate a grander Christ. The Christ, not Jesus, was his watch-cry. A man of ideas, intensely interested in speculative questions, keenly alive to the joy of controversy and the ecstasy of propagandism, he filled his boiler with water as he rushed along, leaving Peter and the rest to fill theirs at the nazarene spring. So little is Jesus to be credited with Paul's achievement, that it is the fashion to call his a distinct movement. Enthusiastic admirers of his genius, call him the real founder of Christianity. Severe critics of his claim accuse him of corrupting the religion of Jesus in its spirit, and diverting it from its purpose. On either supposition, he was not a disciple.

The worship of Jesus, it has been said, is the redeeming feature of Christianity. This evidently is the opinion of John Stuart Mill, who writes, confounding, as is usual, Jesus with the Christ: "The most valuable part of the effect on the character which Christianity has produced by holding up in a divine person a standard of excellence and a model for imitation, is available even to the absolute unbeliever, and can nevermore be lost to humanity. For it is Christ rather than God whom Christianity has held up to believers as the pattern of perfection for humanity. It is the God incarnate, more than the God of the Jews or of nature, who being idealized has taken so great and salutary a hold on the modern mind;" and more to the same effect, in the essay on Theism. Before Mr. Mill's intellectual eccentricities were as well understood as they are now, this testimony to the humanizing influence of christian, as distinct from philosophical theism, would have possessed great weight. As it is, it only excites our wonder that so keen and inexorable a thinker should so completely lose sight of facts. That Christendom has worshipped the Christ is true. Is it true that it has worshipped Jesus? Again we might say: Yes;—the Jesus who demanded faith in himself as the condition of salvation; the Jesus who depicted the Son of Man, sitting on a throne of judgment, summoning before him all nations, and placing the sheep on his right hand, the goats on his left; the Jesus who threatened everlasting fire, and spoke of the devil and his angels; the Jesus who made the church umpire in matters of faith and works; the Jesus who bade his friends forsake father and mother, brother and sister for his sake. But did Christendom ever deify the man of the Beatitudes, the relator of the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, the friend of publicans and sinners? Is Jesus the central figure in the Nicene, or the Athanasian creed? Is he the God of Calvin, or of Luther, of Augustine, even of Borromeo, or Fénélon? Long before the dogmatical or ecclesiastical system of Christendom was formed, the image of Jesus had faded away from the minds of christians, if it ever was stamped there. That it was ever stamped there is not quite apparent. In the east there exists no trace of it after the apostolic age, or beyond the circle of his personal friends. In the west the personal influence is not distinctly visible at any distance. From the reported heroism of the early christian centuries no solid conclusion can be drawn, for the reason that the reports come from panegyrists like Tertullian, and from a period when the apostolic age had become a tradition. Writers like Neander make the most of a few recorded instances of devotion which distinguished the christians from the pagans about them; and James Martineau uses them as evidence of an original spiritual genius in the young religion. They are indeed beautiful, but they do not refer back so far as the historical Jesus for their source of inspiration. That in a community composed, with scarcely an exception, of poor people, the ordinary social distinctions should be unobserved; that slaves, among whom in early times many converts were made, should have been acknowledged as brethren in Christ; should have appeared in public religious meetings as equal with the rest before the Lord; should have partaken of the communion on the same terms, taking their place among the believers, and receiving the passionless kiss of brotherhood and of sisterhood, is not surprising, especially when it is considered that these slaves belonged to hardy, white races, that they discharged, some of them at least, the most honorable offices of labor, and were, except for the mere accident of their condition, physically as well as morally, peers of the best.