The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

by T. R. Glover

CHAPTER IV

JESUS OF NAZARETH

When we hear any other speaker, even a very good one, he produces absolutely no effect upon us, or not much, whereas the mere fragments of you and your words, even at second-hand, and however imperfectly repeated, amaze and possess the souls of every man, woman and child who comes within hearing of them.—Plato, Symposium, 215 D (Jowett).

Dominus noster Christus veritatem se non consuetudinem cognominavit.—Tertullian, de virg. vel. 1.

Towards the end of the first century of our era, there began to appear a number of little books, written in the ordinary Greek of every-day life, the language which the common people used in conversation and correspondence. It was not the literary dialect, which men of letters affected—a mannered and elaborate style modelled on the literature of ancient Greece and no longer a living speech. The books were not intended for a lettered public, but for plain people who wanted a plain story, which they knew already, set down in a handy and readable form. The writers did their work very faithfully—some of them showing a surprising loyalty to the story which they had received. Like other writers they were limited by considerations of space and so forth, and this involved a certain freedom of choice in selecting, omitting, abridging and piecing together the material they gathered. Four only of the books survive intact; of others there are scanty fragments; and scholars have divined at least one independent work embodied in two that remain. So far as books can, three of them represent very fairly the ideas of an earlier generation, as it was intended they should, and tell their common story, with the variations natural to individual writers, but with a general harmony that is the pledge of its truth.

The Gospels

At an early date, these books began to be called Gospels[[1]] and by the time they had circulated for a generation they were very widely known and read among the community for which they were written. Apart from a strong instinct which would allow no conscious change to be made in the lineaments of the central figure of the story, there was nothing to safeguard the little books from the fate of all popular works of their day. Celsus, at the end of the second century, maintained that a good deal of the story was originally invention; and he added that the "believers" had made as free as drunk men with it and had written the gospel over again—three times, four times, many times—and had altered it to meet the needs of controversy.[[2]] Origen replied that Marcion's followers and two other schools had done so, but he knew of no others. It may to-day be taken as established that the four gospels, as we know them, stand substantially as near the autograph of their authors as most ancient books which were at all widely read, though here and there it is probable, or even certain, that changes on a slight scale have been made in the wording to accommodate the text to the development of Christian ideas.[[3]] This is at first sight a serious qualification, but it is not so important as it seems. By comparison of the first three gospels with one another, with the aid of the history of their transmission in the original Greek and in many versions and quotations, it is not very difficult to see where the hand of a later day has touched the page and to break through to something in all probability very near the original story.

This is the greatest problem of literary and historical criticism to-day. All sorts of objections have been raised against the credibility of the gospels from the time of Celsus—they were raised even earlier; for Celsus quotes them from previous controversialists—and they are raised still. We are sometimes told that we cannot be absolutely certain of the authenticity of any single saying of Jesus, or perhaps of any recorded episode in his life. A hypertrophied conscience might admit this to be true in the case of any word or deed of Jesus that might be quoted, and yet maintain that we have not lost much. For, it is a commonplace of historians that an anecdote, even if false in itself, may contain historical truth; it may be evidence, that is, to the character of the person of whom it is told; for a false anecdote depends, even more than a true story, upon keeping the colour of its subject. It may be added that, as a rule, false anecdotes are apt to be more highly coloured than true stories, just as a piece of colour printing is generally a good deal brighter than nature. The reader, who, by familiarity with books, and with the ways of their writers, has developed any degree of literary instinct, will not be inclined to pronounce the colours in the first three gospels at least to be anything but natural and true. However, even if one were to concede that all the recorded sayings and doings of Jesus are fabrications (a wildly absurd hypothesis), there remains a common element in them, a unity of tone and character, which points to a well-known and clearly marked personality behind them, whose actual existence is further implied by the Christian movement. In other words, whether true or false in detail, the statements of the gospels, if we know how to use them aright, establish for us the historicity of Jesus, and leave no sort of doubt as to his personality and the impression he made upon those who came into contact with him.