The Jesus of History | Page 5

was historical? Would they not? it was replied, when
they both had died years before its traditional date.
But the distinction between Christian and secular writers is not one that

will weigh much with a serious historian. Until we have reason to
distinguish between book and book, the evidence must be treated on
exactly the same principles. To say abruptly that, because Luke was a
Christian and Suetonius a pagan, Luke is not worthy of the credence
given to Suetonius, is a line of approach that will most commend itself
to those who have read neither author. To gain a real knowledge of
historical truth, the historian's methods must be slower and more
cautious, he must know his author intimately--his habits of mind, his
turns of style, his preferences, his gifts for seeing the real issue--and
always the background, and the ways of thinking that prevail in the
background. An ancient writer is not necessarily negligible because he
records, and perhaps believes, miracles or marvels or omens which a
modern would never notice. It is bad criticism that has made a popular
legend of the unreliable character of Herodotus. As our knowledge of
antiquity grows, and we become able to correct our early impressions,
the credit of Herodotus rises steadily, and to-day those who study him
most closely have the highest opinion of him.
We may, then, without prejudice, take the evidence of Paul of Tarsus
on the historicity of Jesus, and examine it. If we are challenged as to
the genuineness of Paul's epistles, let us tell our questioner to read them.
Novels have been written in the form of correspondence; but Paul's
letters do not tell us all that a novelist or a forger would--there are
endless gaps, needless references to unknown persons (needless to us,
or to anybody apart from the people themselves), constant occupation
with questions which we can only dimly discover from Paul's answers.
The letters are genuine letters--written for the occasion to particular
people, and not meant for us. The stamp of genuineness is on them--of
life, real life. The German scholar, Norden, in his Kunstprosa, says
there is much in Paul that he does not understand, but he catches in him
again after three hundred years that note of life that marks the great
literature of Greece. That is not easily forged. Luther and Erasmus were
right when they said--each of them has said it, however it
happened--that Paul "spoke pure flame." The letters, and the theology
and its influence, establish at once Paul's claim to be a historical
character. We may then ask, how a man of his ability failed to observe
that a non-historical Jesus, a pure figment, was being palmed off on

him--on a contemporary, it should be marked--and by a combination of
Jesus' own disciples with earlier friends of Paul, who were trying to
exterminate them. Paul knew priests and Pharisees; he knew James and
John and Peter; and he never detected that they were in collusion, yes,
and to the point of martyring Stephen--to impose on him and on the
world a non-historical Jesus. To such straits are we brought, if Jesus
never existed. History becomes pure nonsense, and knowledge of
historical fact impossible; and, it may be noted, all knowledge is
abolished if history is beyond reach.
But we are not dependent on books for our evidence of the historicity
of Jesus. The whole story of the Church implies him. He is inwrought
in every feature of its being. Every great religious movement, of which
we know, has depended on a personal impulse, and has behind it some
real, living and inspiring personality. It is true that at a comparatively
late stage of Hinduism a personal devotion to Shri Krishna grew up,
just as in the hour of decline of the old Mediterranean paganism we
find Julian the Apostate using a devotional language to Athena at
Athens that would have astonished the contemporaries of Pericles. But
Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad stand on a very different footing from
Krishna and Athena, even if we concede the view of some scholars that
Krishna was once a man, and the contention of Euhemerus, a
pre-Christian Greek, that all the gods had once been human. If we posit
that Jesus did not exist, we shall be involved other difficulties as to the
story of the Church. Mr. F. C. Conybeare, an Oxford scholar avowedly
not in allegiance to the Christian Church, has characterized some of the
reconstructions made by contemporary anti-Christian writers as more
miraculous than the history they are trying to correct.
We come now to the Gospels; and in what follows, and throughout the
book, we shall confine ourselves the first three Gospels. Great as has
been, and must be, the influence of the Fourth Gospel, in the present
stage of