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To all such reminders the present-day expert will reply, belike, that he does not need them. He, profiting by the past, can commit no such errors. And yet, however right the present members of the apostolic succession of truth-monopolists may be, there is an astonishing likeness in their tone and temper over the last heresy to that of their predecessors, down to the twentieth generation. Anger and bluster, boasting and scolding, snarl and sneer, come no less spontaneously to the tongues of the professional defender of the present minimum of creed than they did to those of the full-blooded breed of the ages of the maximum, or of Calvin and Bonner. From the defence of the “real presence” of the God to that of the bare personal existence of the Man is a long descent; but there is a singular sameness in the manner of the controversy. As their expert ancestors proved successively the absolute truth of the corporal presence in the wafer, or the humanity of the Son against those who dubbed him merely divine, or his divinity against those who pronounced him merely human, or the inerrancy of the Gospels against the blasphemers who pointed out the contradictions, or the historic certainty of the miracles and the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection and the Ascension against the “materialists” who put such Christian myths on a level with Pagan, so do the expert demonstrators of the bare historicity of the now undeified God establish by vituperation and derision, declamation and contempt, the supreme certainty of the minimum after all the supernatural certainties are gone. Even as Swiss patriots undertook to demonstrate “somebody” and “something” behind the legend of William Tell when it had ceased to be possible to burn men at the stake for exposing the apple-myth, so do the descendants of the demonstrators of the real presence now go about to make clear the real existence.
I speak, of course, of the ruck of the vindicators, not of the believers; and Professor Schmiedel and M. Loisy, I trust, will not suspect me of classing them with men many of whom are as hostile to them as to the thesis which those scholars seek by rational methods to confute. Professor Schmiedel has even avowed that a proof of the non-historicity of the Gospel Jesus would not affect his inner religious opinions; and such high detachment has been attained to by others. That civilized scholars credit, and might at a pinch maintain in debate, the historicity of the Gospel Jesus as calmly as they might the historicity of Lycurgus against its impugners, I am well aware. And to such readers, if I have the honour to obtain any, I address not a warning but an appeal. There is an attitude towards the problem which incurs no reproach on the score of tone and temper, and which will naturally recommend itself all the more to men of real culture, but which yet, I think, only illustrates in another way the immense difficulty of all-round intellectual vigilance. Let me give an example in an extract from a rather noteworthy pronouncement upon the question in hand:—
Of Paul’s divine Master no biography can ever be written. We have a vivid impression of an unique, effulgent personality. We have a considerable body of sayings which must be genuine because they are far too great to have been invented by His disciples, and, for the rest, whatever royal robes and tributes of devotion the Church of A.D. 70–100 thought most fitting for its king. The Gospels are the creation of faith and love: faith and love hold the key to their interpretation. (Canon Inge, art. “St. Paul” in Quarterly Review, Jan., 1914, p. 45.)
I am not here concerned to ask whether the closing words are the expression of an orthodox belief; or what orthodoxy makes of the further proposition that “With St. Paul it is quite different. He is a saint without a luminous halo.” The idea seems to be that concerning the saint without a nimbus we can get at the historical truth, while in the other case we cannot—a proposition worth orthodox attention. But what concerns the open-minded investigator is the logic of the words I have italicized. It is obvious that they proceed (1) on the assumption that what non-miraculous biography the Gospels give is in the main absolutely trustworthy—that is to say, that the accounts of the disciples and the teaching are historical; and (2) on the assumption that we are historically held to the traditional view that the Gospel sayings originated with the alleged Founder as they purport. It is necessary to point out that this is not a licit historical induction. Even Canon Inge by implication admits that not all the Gospel sayings have the quality which he regards as certifying authenticity; and on no reasonable ground can he claim that the others must have been “invented by the disciples.” The alternative is spurious. No one is in a position to deny that any given saying may have been invented by non-disciples. In point of fact, many professional theologians are agreed in tracing to outside sources some tolerably fine passages, such as the address to Jerusalem (Mt. xxiii, 37; Lk. xiii, 34). The critics in question do not ascribe that deliverance to inventive disciples; they infer it to have been a non-Christian document. Many other critics, again, now pronounce the whole Sermon on the Mount—regarded by Baur as signally genuine—a compilation from earlier Hebrew literature, Biblical and other. Which then are the “great” sayings that could not be thus accounted for? Without specification there can be no rational discussion of the problem; and even the proposition about the exegetic function of “faith and love” affects to be in itself rational.
The plain truth would seem to be that Canon Inge has formed for himself no tenable critical position. He has merely reiterated the fallacy of Mill, who in his Three Essays on Religion (pp. 253–54) wrote:—
Whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left; a unique figure, not more unlike all his precursors than all his followers, even those who had the direct benefit of his personal teaching. It is of no use to say that Christ as exhibited in the Gospels is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is admirable has been superadded by the tradition of his followers. The tradition of followers suffices to insert any number of marvels, and may have inserted all the miracles which he is reputed to have wrought. But who among his disciples or among their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St. Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort; still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than that the good which was in them was all derived, as they always professed that it was derived, from the higher source. What could be added and interpolated by a disciple we may see in the mystical parts of St. John, matter imported from Philo and the Alexandrian Platonists and put into the mouth of the Saviour in long speeches about himself such as the other Gospels contain not the slightest vestige of, though pretended to have been delivered on occasions of the deepest interest and when his principal followers were all present; most prominently at the last supper. The East was full of men who could have stolen (!) any quantity of this poor stuff, as the multitudinous Oriental sects of Gnostics afterwards did. But about the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality combined with profundity of insight which, if we abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific precision where something very different was aimed at, must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in his inspiration, in the very first rank of men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer, and martyr to that mission, who ever existed on earth, religion [sic] cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity. … Add that, to the conception of the rational sceptic, it remains a possibility that Christ actually was what he supposed himself to be—not God, for he never made the smallest pretension to that character, and would probably have thought such a pretension as blasphemous as it seemed to the men who condemned him—but a man charged with a special, express, and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue. …
Ein historischer Kopf hatte er nicht, is a German economist’s criticism of Mill which I fear will have to stand in other fields than that of economics. The man who wrote this unmeasured dithyramb can never have read the Gospels and the Hebrew books with critical attention; and can never have reflected critically upon his own words in this connection. The assumption that “the fishermen of Galilee” could not have attained to thoughts which are expressly alleged to have been put forth by an untaught carpenter of Galilee is on the
