peace on the earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. … He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.
It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you [Chorazin and Bethsaida; because of non-acceptance of the teacher]. … It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for you.
Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.
Therefore speak I to them in parables, because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
In the end of the world the angels shall … sever the wicked from the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire.
In vain do they worship me, teaching as their doctrines the precepts of men.
Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? [retort for the employer who pays the same for a day’s work and for an hour’s].
If ye have faith and doubt not … even if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea, it shall be done.
And his lord commended the unrighteous steward because he had done wisely. … And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when it shall fail, they may receive you into the eternal tabernacles.
I say unto you that unto everyone that hath shall be given; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors. … So also shall my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not everyone his brother from your hearts.
When such a mass of unmanageable doctrines is forced on the notice of the dithyrambists, there promptly begins a process of elimination—the method of Arnold, to which Mill would doubtless have subscribed, denying as he did that Jesus ever claimed to be the Son of God. Whatever is not sweetly reasonable in the Gospels, said Arnold, cannot be the word of Jesus; let us then pick and choose as we will. And justly enough may it be argued that we have been listening to different voices. It cannot be the same man who prohibited all anger, vetoing even the use of “Thou fool,” and then proceeded to vituperate Scribes and Pharisees in the mass as sons of hell; to curse a barren tree; and to call the erring “Ye fools and blind”—any more than it was the same man who said, “I am meek and lowly in heart,” and “A greater than Solomon is here,” or annulled precepts of the law after declaring that not a jot or tittle of it should pass away. But with what semblance of critical righteousness shall it be pretended that in a compilation thus palpably composite it was the teacher who said all the right things and others who said all the wrong, when as a matter of documentary fact the better sayings can all be paralleled in older or contemporary writings? That challenge is never so much as faced by the dithyrambists; to face it honestly would be the beginning of their end.
Some seem prepared to stake all on such a teaching as the parable of the Good Samaritan, which actually teaches that a man of the religiously despised race could humanely succour one of the despising race when religious men of the same race passed him by. Is the parable then assimilated by those who stress it? Can they conceive that a Samaritan could so act? If yes, why cannot they conceive that a Samaritan, or another Jew than one, could put forth such a doctrine? Here is a story of actual human-kindness, paralleled in a hundred tales and romances of later times, a story which, appealing as it does to every reader, may reasonably be believed to have been enacted a thousand times by simple human beings who never heard of the Gospels. Yet we are asked to believe that only one Jewish or Gentile mind in the age of Virgil was capable of drawing the moral that the kindly and helpful soul is the true neighbour, and that the good man will be neighbourly to all; so rebuking the tribalism of the average Jew.
When, fifteen years ago, I wrote of “the moderate ethical height of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is partly precedented in Old Testament teaching [Deut. xxiii, 7—an interpolation; cp. the Book of Ruth],” Dr. J. E. Carpenter indignantly replied: “The field of Greek literature is open; will Mr. Robertson take the Good Samaritan and from Plato to Plotinus find his match?” And the Rev. Thomas James Thorburn, D.D., LL.D., in his later work Jesus the Christ: Historical or Mythical? (1912), wrote (p. 68):—
Dr. Estlin Carpenter has invited (we believe, in vain!) Mr. Robertson to produce an equal to this same parable out of the whole range of Greek literature, which undoubtedly contains the choicest teaching of the ancient world.
Dr. Thorburn in his bibliography cited the first and second (1912) editions of Pagan Christs; he thoughtfully omitted, in launching his “we believe, in vain!”, to ascertain whether there had been a second edition of Christianity and Mythology, in which any reply I might have to make to Dr. Carpenter might naturally be expected to appear, that critic having challenged the proposition as put in the first edition. A second edition had appeared, in 1910, and there I had duly given the simple answer which the two learned Doctors of Divinity, so conscious of knowing all Greek literature from Plato to Plotinus, were unable to think of for themselves. The field of Greek literature, as Dr. Carpenter justly observes, is open; and it would have been fitting on his part to perambulate a little therein. The demanded instance lay to the hand of unlearned people in so familiar an author as Plutarch—in the tale of Lycurgus and Alcander. As Dr. Thorburn and Dr. Carpenter, however, must be supposed to have been ignorant of that story, it may be well to tell it briefly here.
Lycurgus having greatly exasperated the rich citizens by proposing the institution of frugal common meals, they made a tumult and stoned him in the market-place, so that he had to run for sanctuary in a temple. But one of his pursuers, a violent youth named Alcander, caught up with him, and, striking him with a club as he turned round, dashed out one of his eyes. Lycurgus then stood calmly facing the citizens, letting them see his bleeding face, and his eye destroyed. All who saw him were filled with shame and remorse. They gave up Alcander to his mercy, and conducted Lycurgus in procession to his house to show their sympathy. He thanked them and dismissed them, but kept Alcander with him. He did him no harm, and used no reproachful words, but kept him as his servant, sending away all others. And Alcander, dwelling with Lycurgus, noting his serenity of temper and simplicity of life and his unwearying labours, became his warmest admirer, and ever after told his friends that Lycurgus was the best of men. In one version of the tale Lycurgus gave back his freedom to Alcander in presence of the citizens, saying, You gave me a bad citizen; I give you back a good one.
If our Doctors of Divinity are unable to see that this represents a rarer strain of goodness than the deed of the Good Samaritan, they must be told that they are lacking in that very moral judgment upon which they plume themselves. Forever sitting in the chair of judgment, defaming all who dissent from them, they are ethically less percipient than the cultured laity. Thousands of kindly human beings, I repeat, have succoured wounded strangers, even those of hostile races; and the tone held over the Gospel parable by some Christians is but the measure of their misconception of human nature. Their sectarian creed has bred in them a habit of aspersing all humanity, all character, save the Christian, thus stultifying the very lesson of their parable, the framer of which would fain have taught men to transcend these very fanaticisms. They will not be “neighbours” to the pagan to the extent of crediting him with their own appreciation of magnanimity and human-kindness; they cannot even discuss his claim without seeking arrogantly to browbeat his favourers. Forever acclaiming the beauty of the command to forgive injuries, they cannot even debate without insolence where they know their sectarian claims are called in question. And I shall be agreeably disappointed if they proceed to handle the tale of Lycurgus and Alcander without seeking to demonstrate that somehow it falls below the level of the Gospels, where, as it happens, the endurance of violence and death by the God-man is in effect presented as God-like. But for that matter, even the
