read the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, he must have been aware that the main precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, which are presumably among the unspecified objects of his panegyric, were all there beforehand. Had he taken the trouble to investigate before writing, he could have found in Hennell’s Inquiry (1838), which popularized the old research of Schoettgen; in Nork’s Rabbinische Quellen und Parallelen (1839); and in Les Origines du Sermon de la Montagne by Hippolyte Rodrigues (1868), a copious demonstration of the Jewish currency of every moral idea in the Christian document, often in saner forms. And he ought to have known from his own reading that the doctrine of forgiveness for injuries, which appears to be the main ground for the customary panegyric of the Sermon, was common to Greeks and Romans before the Gospels were compiled. From the duty of giving alms freely—which is repeatedly laid down in the Old Testament—to that of the sin of concupiscence and the wrongness of divorce for trivial causes, every moral idea in the Sermon had been formulated alike by Jews and Gentiles beforehand.1 And if it be argued that the compilation of such a set of precepts with a number of religious dicta (equally current in non-Christian Jewry) is evidence of a special ethical or religious gift in the compiler, the answer is that precisely the fact of such a compilation is the disproof of the assertion in the Gospels that the whole was delivered as a sermon on a mountain. A sermon it never was and never could be; and if the compiler was a man of unique character and qualification he was not the Gospel Jesus but the very type of which Mill denied the possibility!
That the Gospel ethic is non-original becomes more and more clear with every extension of relevant research. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written between 109 and 106 B.C. by a Quietist Pharisee, is found to yield not only origins or anticipations for pseudo-historic data in the Gospels but patterns for its moral doctrine. Thus the notion that the Twelve Apostles are to rule over the tribes in the Messianic kingdom is merely an adaptation of the teaching in the Testaments that the twelve sons of Jacob are so to rule.2 There too appears for the first time in Jewish literature the formula “on His right hand”;3 and a multitude of close textual parallels clearly testify to perusal of the book by the Gospel-framers and the epistle-makers. But above all is the Jewish book the original for the doctrines of forgiveness and brotherly love. Whereas the Old Testament leaves standing the ethic of revenge alongside of the prescription to forgive one’s enemy, the Testaments give out what a highly competent Christian editor pronounces to be “the most remarkable statement on the subject of forgiveness in all ancient literature. They show a wonderful insight into the true psychology of the question. So perfect are the parallels in thought and diction between these verses [Test. Gad, vi, 3–7] and Luke xvii, 3; Matt. xviii, 15, 35, that we must assume our Lord’s acquaintance with them. The meaning of forgiveness in both cases is the highest and noblest known to us—namely, the restoring the offender to communion with us, which he had forfeited through his offence. … We now see the importance of our text. It shows that pre-Christian Judaism possessed a noble system of ethics on the subject of forgiveness.”4
Here the tribute goes to a Pharisee; in another connection it redounds to the other butt of Christian disparagement, the Scribes. As our editor points out, the collocation of the commands to love God and one’s neighbour is even in Luke (x, 25–27) assigned not to Jesus but to a Scribe. But this too is found in the Testaments. “That the two great commandments were already conjoined in the teaching of the Scribes at the time of our Lord we may reasonably infer from our text,5 which was written 140 years earlier, and from the account in Luke.”6 And here too, a century before the Christian era, we have a Jewish predication of the salvation of the Gentiles,7 in the patronizing Jewish sense.
It is only for men partly hypnotized by sectarian creed that there can be anything surprising in these anticipations. The notion that Sacred Books contain the highest and rarest thought of their respective periods is a delusion that any critical examination of probabilities will destroy. Relatively high and rare thought does not find its way into Sacred Books; what these present is but the thought that is perceptible and acceptable to the majority, or a strong minority, of the better people; and it is never purified of grave imperfection, precisely because these never are. Perfect ethic is the possession of the perfect people, an extremely rare species. The ethic of the Testaments, which is an obvious improvement on that of average Jewry, is in turn imperfect enough; even as that of the Gospels remains stamped with Jewish particularism, and is irretrievably blemished by the grotesquely iniquitous doctrine of damnation for non-belief.
Such asseverations as Mill’s, constantly repeated as they are by educated men, are simply expressions of failure to comprehend the nature and the possibilities of life, of civilization, of history. The thesis is that in a world containing no one else capable of elevated thought, moral or religious, there suddenly appeared a marvellously inspired teacher, who chose a dozen disciples incapable of comprehending his doctrine, and during the space of one or many years—no one can settle whether one or two or three or four or ten or twenty—went about alternately working miracles and delivering moral and religious sayings (including a doctrine of eternal hell-fire for the unrepentant wicked, among whom were included all who refused to accept the new teaching); and that after the execution of the teacher on a charge of blasphemy or sedition the world found itself in possession of a supernormal moral and religious code, which constituted the greatest “moral reform” in the world’s history. The very conception is a chimera. In a world in which no one could independently think the teacher’s moral thoughts there could be no acceptance of them. If the code was pronounced good, it was so pronounced in terms of the moral nature and moral convictions of those who made the pronouncement. The very propagandists of the creed after a few generations were found meeting gainsayers with the formula anima naturaliter Christiana.
Christianity made its way precisely because (1) it was a construction from current moral and religious material; and because (2) it adopted a system of economic organization already tested by Jews and Gentiles; and (3) because its doctrines were ascribed to a God, not to a man. Anything like a moral renovation of the world it never effected; that conception is a chimera of chimeras. While Mill, the amateur in matters of religious research, who “scarcely ever read a theological book,”8 ascribed to Christian morality a unique and original quality, Newman, the essentially religious man, deliberately affirmed with the Rationalists that “There is little in the ethics of Christianity which the human mind may not reach by its natural powers, and which here or there … has not in fact been anticipated.”9 And Baur, who gave his life and his whole powers to the problem which Mill assumed to dispose of by a dithyramb, put in a sentence the historic truth which Mill so completely failed to grasp:—
How soon would everything true and important that was taught by Christianity have been relegated to the order of the long-faded sayings of the noble humanitarians and thinking sages of antiquity, had not its teachings become words of eternal life in the mouth of its Founder!10
And a distinguished Scottish theologian and scholar has laid it down that
there is probably not a single moral precept in the Christian Scriptures which is not substantially also in the Chinese classics. There is certainly not an important principle in Bishop Butler’s ethical teachings which had not been explicitly set forth by Mencius in the fourth century B.C. The Chinese thinker of that date had anticipated the entire moral theory of man’s constitution expounded so long afterwards by the most famous of English moral philosophers.11
