We think it more honest and respectful to reverently inquire into the evidences of his divine character, and not to accept with blind credulity what other men say. We are endowed with reason, and it seems to us proper that we should exercise our rational faculties, and not ignore them altogether. Honest doubt must be more acceptable to him, if he is God, than unreasoning faith.
Now, we propose to look at him in the light of the New Testament, and especially of the Gospels, assuming them to be authentic. We shall here pass by his infancy and childhood (utterly ignoring the doubtful and controverted passages concerning his immaculate conception and miraculous birth), and take the first direct account we have of his life. This commences when he was about twelve years of age. We are told that he accompanied his mother and putative father to Jerusalem, whither they went to attend the feast of the Passover. Luke states that he strayed away from his parents, who were greatly concerned for his safety, but he was at length found in the temple among the doctors asking and answering wonderful questions, so as to astonish all who heard him with his wonderful knowledge. His mother gently reproved him for giving them so much anxiety, and he answered back, rather impatiently, “How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" But he went home with his parents and was subject to them, and for at least eighteen years dwelt with them and his brothers James, Joses, Judas, and Simon. The names of his several sisters are not given. During these eighteen years he is supposed to have learned the trade of a carpenter and worked with his reputed father, who was a carpenter, spending the most vigorous portion of his life in manual labor, only devoting about three years to his mission as the Messiah. Now, Jesus is held up as an “example,” and we are “to follow his steps,” and it does not appear that there was anything in his example specially worthy of imitation for about thirty years. We must find it in the last years of his earthly career if we find it at all.
The first instance in which the evangelists bring Jesus forward as a moral teacher is in the Sermon on the Mount. This discourse is supposed by Christians to be the masterpiece of wisdom and deep spiritual insight. While Matthew gives it as a complete discourse, Mark and Luke intersperse the substance of the sermon throughout their Gospels; which is strong presumptive proof that it was not delivered as a connected discourse. Like the book of Proverbs, it seems to be a collection of the moral sayings of former times, many of which can be pointed out, with slight verbal alterations, in the writings of pagan authors and of more modern Jews of the Hillel school. In fact, there is nothing in the sermon which had not been taught by many others a long time before, while there is much that is absurd and impracticable, not to say untrue and unjust. Even the deep spirituality involved in recognizing the spirit and intent of the law can be paralleled by several passages in Buddhistic scriptures. The so-called “Golden Rule” was announced by Confucius as an axiom nearly five centuries before the Christian era, both in its positive and its negative form, while the same maxim is laid down in most choice and beautiful language by Isocrates, Aristotle, Sextus, Pittacus, Thales, and many others from three to six centuries before Christ.
The same is true of the Lord’s Prayer, though it is often asserted that Jesus first taught the “Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.” This is not true. The “Lord’s Prayer” is found in the ancient Jewish rituals, and is entitled a “Prayer to the Father,” and the expression “Our Father who art in heaven” is common to many, if not all, nations and religions.
While there are several things in the Sermon on the Mount truly beautiful, there is nothing that is strictly original; there are many sayings which show a great lack of knowledge, and that are positively impracticable and immoral in their tendency. No Christian tries to keep these sayings. It would lead to vagabondism and would convert a nation into a crowd of tramps. It would be positively immoral to obey them. If Jesus did not intend that his teachings should be taken according to the common sense of the words used, why did he not say so? What is language for but to express one’s meaning? So far from teaching the non-resistance of evil, in other places he runs into the extreme of teaching revenge. (See Luke 10:10-12; Matt. 10:14, 15; Mark 6:11.) He also sanctions the most gross injustice. He commends the unjust steward (Luke 16:5-8), saying that he had “done wisely” in cheating his employer by compounding with his creditors, and advises his hearers to make “friends” of the “mammon of unrighteousness.”
Moreover, whoever is familiar with the teachings ascribed to Jesus must know that his first condition of discipleship is the total surrender of all worldly possessions and the non-accumulation of earthly treasures thereafter (Matt. 16: 24; Luke 14: 26, 27; Matt. 19, etc.). Can words be more emphatic than the utterances of Jesus reported in Matt. 6:19-34?—“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.”... “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”... “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”... “Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” This absolute unconcern about food and raiment is emphasized by repeating the injunction twice: “Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?”... “Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”
The attempts of theologians to modify these precepts are most preposterous. They tell us that Jesus meant to discourage anxious thought about worldly possessions and wants—that he intended to condemn undue anxiety and worriment of mind; and they even assert that the original word implies and justifies this rendering. To this it may be replied, We cannot be certain as to what particular words Jesus used, as we have no manuscripts of the Gospels dating back to within four hundred years of his time, and the alleged copies that we have are not authenticated; so that an argument, even if justified by learned criticism, based upon the implied meaning of particular words is useless, unless we are sure, as we cannot be, that Jesus used those very words, and that he intended that his disciples and other unlearned and uncritical hearers should accept the implied rather than the obvious meaning.
But, taking the words in the Greek manuscripts of the Gospels now most approved by scholars, we deny that there is anything in them to justify the interpolation of the word “anxious” between the words “no” and “thought.” There is the highest classical authority for the assertion that the verb employed here simply means to “care,” “to be careful,” “to heed,” and is so translated in other portions of the New Testament, as, for examples, in 1 Cor. 7: 32, 33, 34; Phil. 4:6; 1 Pet. 5:7; and in many other passages. When Paul exhorted the Philippians to be “careful for nothing,” because the Lord was about to appear in judgment, he obviously meant that it was not worth while to make any provision for future bodily wants.
It is a universally-admitted principle of critical interpretation that the meaning of words in any given text must be determined from the context, the connection in which the word occurs. It so happens that Jesus has illustrated his doctrine in this connection so as to make it impossible to doubt as to the meaning of the words employed: “Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye much better than they?”... “And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, and I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
The use of the illative word, “wherefore, if God so clothe the grass,” and the word “therefore take no thought,” show beyond doubt that Jesus intended to teach, and did teach, that his disciples were to be as indifferent to matters of food and clothing as are the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. Not only did he use words that sanction the utmost improvidence in regard to future bodily wants, but he gave the sense in which his words were to be received by referring them to the well-known unconcern of the birds and lilies.