We may not perhaps be able to reconstruct the life of Jesus as we should wish—it will not be a biography, and it will have no dates and hardly any procession of events. We shall be able to date his birth and death, roughly in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, more exactly fixing in each case a period of five years or so within which it must have happened. Of epochs and crises in his life we can say little, for we do not know enough of John the Baptist and his work to be able to make clear his relations with Jesus, nor can we speak with much certainty of the development of the idea of Messiahship in the mind of Jesus himself. But we can with care recapture something of the experience of Jesus; we can roughly outline his outward life and environment. What is of more consequence, we can realize that, whatever the particular facts of his own career which opened the door for him, he entered into the general experience of men and knew human life deeply and intimately. And, after all, in this case as in others, it is not the facts of the life that matter, but the central fact that this man did know life as it is before he made judgment upon it. It is this alone that makes his judgment—or any other man's—of consequence to us. It is not his individual life, full of endless significance as that is, but his realization thereby of man's life and his attitude toward it that is the real gift of the great man—his thought, his character, himself in fact. And here our difficulty vanishes, for no one, who has cared to study the gospels with any degree of intelligent sympathy, has failed to realize the personality there revealed and to come in some way or other under its influence.
So far in dealing with the religious life of the ancient world, we have had to do with ideas and traditions—with a well thought-out scheme of philosophy and with an ancient and impressive series of mysteries and cults. The new force that now came into play is something quite different. The centre in the new religion is not an idea, nor a ritual act, but a personality. As its opponents were quick to point out,—and they still find a curious pleasure in rediscovering it—there was little new in Christian teaching. Men had been monotheists before, they had worshipped, they had loved their neighbours, they had displayed the virtues of Christians—what was there peculiar in Christianity? Plato, says Celsus, had taught long ago everything of the least value in the Christian scheme of things. The Talmud, according to the modern Jew, contains a parallel to everything that Jesus said—("and how much else!" adds Wellhausen). What was new in the new religion, in this "third race" of men? The Christians had their answer ready. In clear speech, and in aphasia, they indicated their founder. He was new. If we are to understand the movement, we must in some degree realize him—in himself and in his influence upon men.
In every endeavour made by any man to reconstruct another's personality, there will always be a subjective and imaginative element. Biography is always a work of the imagination. The method has its dangers, but without imagination the thing is not to be done at all. A great man impresses men in a myriad of different ways—he is as various and as bewilderingly suggestive as Nature herself—and no two men will record quite the same experience of him. Where the imagination has to penetrate an extraordinary variety of impressions, to seize, not a series of forces each severally making its own impression, but a single personality of many elements and yet a unity, men may well differ in the pictures they make. Even the same man will at different times be differently impressed and not always be uniformly able to grasp and order his impressions. Hence it is that biographies and portraits are so full of surprises and disappointments, while even the writer or the painter will not always accept his own interpretation—he outgrows it and detests it. And if it is possible to spend a life in the realization of the simplest human nature, what is to be said of an attempt to make a final picture of Jesus of Nazareth? Still the effort must be made to apprehend what he was to those with whom he lived, for from that comes the whole Christian movement.
Celsus on "coarseness" of Jesus
Celsus denounced Jesus in language that amazes us; but when he was confronted with the teaching of Jesus, the moral worth of which a mind so candid could not deny, he admitted its value, but he attributed it to the fact that Jesus plagiarized largely from Greek philosophy and above all from Plato. He did not grasp, Celsus adds, how good what he stole really was, and he spoiled it by his vulgarity of phrase. In particular, Celsus denounced the saying "Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." The idea came from the Crito, where Socrates compels Crito to own that we must do evil to no one—not even by way of requital. The passage is a fine one, and Celsus quoted it in triumph and asked if there were not something coarse and clownish in the style of Jesus.[[4]]
Celsus forgot for the moment that the same sort of criticism had been made upon Socrates. "'You had better be done,' said Critias, 'with those shoemakers of yours, and the carpenters and coppersmiths. They must be pretty well down at the heel by now—considering the way you have talked them round.' 'Yes,' said Charicles, 'and the cowherds too.'"[[5]] But six centuries had made another man of Socrates. His ideas, interpreted by Plato and others, had altered the whole thinking of the Greek world; his Silenus-face had grown beautiful by association; the physiognomy of his mind and speech was no longer so striking; he was a familiar figure, and his words and phrases were current coin, accepted without question. But to Celsus Jesus was no such figure; he had not the traditions and preconceptions which have in turn obscured for us the features of Jesus; there was nothing in Jesus either hallowed or familiar, and one glance revealed a physiognomy. That he did not like it is of less importance.
The words of Jesus
Taking the saying in question, we find, as Celsus did, absurdity upon the face of it, and, as he also did, something else at the heart of it—a contrast between surface and inner value broad as the gulf between the common sense which men gather from experience and the morality which Jesus read beneath human nature. Among the words of Jesus there are many such sayings, and it is clear that he himself saw and designed the contrasts which we feel as we read them. This sense of contrast is one of the ground-factors of humour generally, perhaps the one indispensable factor; it is always present in the highest humour. If we then take the words of Jesus, as they struck those who first heard them—or as they struck Celsus—we cannot help remarking at once a strong individual character in them, one element in which is humour,—always one of the most personal and individual of all marks of physiognomy.
Humour, in its highest form, is the sign of a mind at peace with itself, for which the contrasts and contradictions of life have ceased to jar, though they have not ceased to be,—which accepts them as necessary and not without meaning, indeed as adding charm to life, when they are viewed from above. It is the faculty which lets a man see what Plato called "the whole tragedy and comedy of life"[[6]]—the one in the other. Is it not humour that saw the Pharisee earnestly rinsing, rubbing and polishing the outside of his cup, forgetful of the fact that he drank from the inside? that saw the simple-minded taking their baskets to gather the grape-harvest from bramble-bushes? That pleaded with a nation, already gaining a name for being sordid, not to cast pearls before swine, and to forsake caring for the morrow, because such care was the mark of the Gentile world—the distinguishing sign between Gentile and Jew? That told the men he knew so well—men bred in a rough world—to "turn the other cheek,"—to yield the cloak to him who took the coat, not in irony, but with the brotherly feeling that "his necessity is greater than mine"—to go when "commandeered" not the required mile, making an enemy by sourness of face, but to go two—"two additional," the Syriac version says—and so soften the man and make him a friend?[[7]]
What stamps the language of Jesus invariably is its delicate ease, implying a sensibility to every real aspect of the matter in hand—a sense of mastery and peace. Men marvelled at the charm of his words—Luke using the Greek charis to express it.[[8]] The homely parable may be in other hands coarse enough, but the parables of Jesus have a quality about them after all these years that leaves one certain he smiled as he spoke them. There is something of the same kind to be felt in Cowper's letters, but in the stronger nature the gift is of more significance. At the cost of a little study of human character, and close reading of the Synoptists, and some careful imagination, it is possible to see him as he spoke,—the flash of the eye, the smile on the lip, the gesture of the hand, all the natural expression of himself and his thought that a man unconsciously gives in speaking, when he has forgotten himself in his matter and his hearer—his physiognomy, in fact. We realize very soon his complete mastery of the various aspects of what he says. That he realizes every implication of his words is less likely, for there is a spontaneity about them—they are "out of the abundance of his heart"; the form is not studied; they are for the man and the moment. But they imply the speaker and his whole relation to God and man—they cannot help implying this, and that is their charm. Living words, flashed out on the spur of the moment from the depths of him, they are the man. It was not idly that the early church used to say "Remember the words of the Lord Jesus." On any showing, it is of importance to learn the mind of one whose speech is so full of life, and it is happily possible to do this from even the small collections we possess of his recorded sayings.