The Jesus of History | Page 4

the significance of Jesus

Christ--a more wonderful thing as we study it more. We may fail to
explain it, but we must recognize it. One of the weaknesses of the
Church to-day is--put bluntly--that Christians are not making enough of
Jesus Christ.
We find again that, where Jesus Christ is most real, and means most,
there we are apt to see the human mind reach a fuller freedom and
achieve more. There is a higher civilization, a greater emphasis on the
value of human life and character, and a stronger endeavour for the
utmost development of all human material, if we may so call the souls
and faculties of men. Why should there be this correspondence between
Jesus of Nazareth and human life? It is best brought out, when we
realize what he has made of Christian society, and contrast it with what
the various religions have left or produced in other regions--the atrophy
of human nature.
In fine, there is no figure in human history that signifies more. Men
may love him or hate him, but they do it intensely. If he was only what
some say, he ought to be a mere figure of antiquity by now. But he is
more than that; Jesus is not a dead issue; he has to be reckoned with
still; and men who are to treat mankind seriously, must make the
intellectual effort to understand the man on whom has been centred
more of the interest and the passion of the most serious and the best of
mankind than on any other. The real secret is that human nature is
deeply and intensely spiritual, and that Jesus satisfies it at its most
spiritual point.
The object before us in these pages is the attempt to know Jesus, if we
can, in a more intimate and intelligent way than we have done--at least,
to put before our minds the great problem, Who is this Jesus Christ?
and to try to answer it.
One answer to this question is that Jesus was nothing, never was
anything, but a myth developed for religious purposes; that he never
lived at all. This view reappears from time to time, but so far it has not
appealed to any who take a serious interest in history. No historian of
the least repute has committed himself to the theory. Desperate
attempts have been made to discredit the Christian writers of the first

two centuries; it has been emphasized that Jesus is not mentioned in
secular writers of the period, and the passage in Tacitus ("Annals",
XV:44) has been explained away as a Christian interpolation, or, more
gaily, by reviving the wild notion that Poggio Bracciolini forged the
whole of the "Annals". But such trifling with history and literature does
not serve. No scholar accepts the theory about Poggio--and yet if the
passage about Christ is to be got rid of, this is the better way of the two;
for there is nothing to countenance the view that the chapter is
interpolated, or to explain when or by whom it was done--the wish is
father to the thought. Christians are twice mentioned by Suetonius in
dealing with Emperors of the first century, though in one passage the
reading "Chrestus" for "Christus" has suggested to some scholars that
another man is meant; the confusion was a natural one and is instanced
elsewhere, but we need not press the matter. The argument from silence
is generally recognized as an uncertain one. Sir James Melville, living
at the Court of Mary, Queen of Scots, does not, I learn, mention John
Knox--"whom he could not have failed to mention if Knox had really
existed and played the part assigned to him by his partisans," and so
forth. It might be as possible and as reasonable to prove that the
Brahmo Samaj never existed, by demonstrating four hundred years
hence--or two thousand--that it is not mentioned in In Memoriam, nor
in The Ring and the Book, nor in George Meredith's, novels, nor (more
strangely) in any of Mr. Kipling's surviving works, which definitely
deal with India. None of these writers, it may be replied, had any
concern to mention the Brahmo Samaj. And when one surveys the
Greek and Roman writers of the first century A.D. which of them had
any concern to refer to Jesus and his disciples, beyond the historians
who do? Indeed, the difficulty is to understand why some of these men
should have written at all; harder still, why others should have wanted
to read their poems and orations and commonplace books. One
argument, advanced in India a few years ago, against the historical
value of the Gospels may be revived by way of illustration. Would not
Virgil and Horace, it was asked, have taken notice of the massacre at
Bethlehem, if it