 Forward and preface of the Jesus of History. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org The Jesus of History by T. R. Glover. Forward. I regard it as a high privilege to be associated with this volume. Many who know and value Mr. Glover's work, on the conflict of religions in the early Roman Empire, must have wistfully desired to secure from his graphic pen just such a book as is here given to the world. He possesses the rare power of reverently handling familiar truths or facts in such manner as to make them seem to be almost new. There are few gifts more precious than this, at a time when our familiarity with the greatest and most sacred of all narratives is a chief hindrance to our ready appreciation of its living power. I believe that no one will read Mr. Glover's chapters and especially his description of the parable teaching given by our Lord without a sense of having been introduced to a whole series of fresh and fruitful thoughts. He has expanded for us with the force, the clearness and the power of vivid illustration which we have learned to expect from him. The meaning of a sentence in the earlier volume I have alluded to where he insists that Jesus of Nazareth does stand in the centre of human history, that he has brought God and man into a new relation, that he is the present concern of every one of us and that there is more in him than we have yet accounted for. In accordance with its title, the single theme of the book is the Jesus of History, but the student or exponent of dogmatic theology will find abundant material in its pages. I commend it confidently, both to single students and to those who nowadays, in happily increasing numbers, meet together for common study. And I congratulate those who belong to the student-christian movement upon this notable addition to the books published in connection with their far-reaching work. Randall Cantor, Lamberth, Advent Sunday, 1916 Preface This book has grown out of lectures upon the historical Jesus, given in a good many cities of India during the winter, 1915, 1916. Recast and developed, the lectures were taken down in shorthand in Calcutta. They were revised in Madras. And most of them were wholly re-written, where and when in six following months leisure was available, in places so far apart as Colombo, Mamio, Rangoon, Coday Canal, Shimla, and Pune. The reader will not expect a heavy apparatus of references to books which were generally out of reach. Here and there are incorporated passages, re-handled, from articles that have appeared in the constructive quarterly, the Nation, the Expositor, and elsewhere. Those who themselves have tried to draw the likeness attempted in this book will best understand, and perhaps most readily forgive, failures and mistakes, or even worse, in my drawing. The aim of the book, as of the lectures, is, after all, not to achieve a final presentation of the historical Jesus, but to suggest lines of study that will deepen our interest in him, and our love of him. TRG, Pune, August 1916 End of Four Word and Preface Chapter One of the Jesus of History This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Jesus of History by T. R. Glover Chapter One The Study of the Gospels If one thing more than another marks modern thought, it is a new insistence on fact. In every sphere of study there is a growing emphasis on verification. Where a generation ago a case seemed to be closed, today in the light of new facts it is reopened. Matters that to our grandfathers were trivialities, to be summarily dismissed, are seriously studied. Again and again we find the most fruitful avenues opened to us by questions that another age might have laughed out of a hearing. Today they suggest investigation of facts insufficiently known, and of the difficult connections between them. In psychology and in medicine the results of this new tendency are evident in all sorts of ways. New methods in the treatment of the sick, new inquiries as to the origin of diseases and the possibilities of their prevention, attempts to get at the relations between the soul and the body, and a very new open-mindedness as to the spiritual nature and its working and experiences. In other fields of learning it is the same. To the modern student of man and his history, the old easy way of excluding religion as an absurdity, the like prediction of its speedy or at least its eventual disappearance from the field of human life, and other dogmatisms of the like kind, are almost unintelligible. We realise that religion in some form is a natural working of the human spirit, and whatever place we give to religion in the conduct of our own hives, as students of history we reckon with the religious instinct as a factor of the highest import, and we give to religious systems and organisations, above all to religious teachers and leaders, a more sympathetic and a profounder study. Carl Isle's lecture on Muhammad in his course on heroes and hero worship may be taken as a landmark for English people in this new treatment history. The Christian Church, whether we like it or not, has been a force of unparalleled power in human affairs, and prophecies that it will no longer be so, and allegations that by now it has ceased to be so, are not much made by cautious thinkers. There is evidence that the influence of the Christian Church, so far from ebbing, is rising. Evidence more obvious when we reflect that the influence of such a movement is not to be quickly guessed from the number of its actual adherents. A century and a quarter of Christian missions in India have resulted in so many converts. A million and a quarter is no slight outcome, but that is a small part of the story. All over India the old religious systems are being subjected to a new study by their own adherents. Their weak points are being felt. There are reform movements, new apologetics, compromises, defences, all sorts of indications of ferment and transition. There can be little question that while many things go to the making of an age, the prime impulse to all this intellectual, religious and moral upheaval was the faith of Christian missionaries that Jesus Christ would bring about what we actually see. They believed, and they were laughed at for their belief, that Jesus Christ was still a real power, permanent and destined to hold a larger place in the affairs of men. And we see that they were right. Jesus remains the very heart and soul of the Christian movement, still controlling men, still capturing men against their wills very often, changing men's lives, and using them for ends they never dreamt of. So much is plain to the candid observer, whatever the explanation. We find further another fact of even more significance to the historian who will treat human experience with seriousness and sympathy. The cynical view that delusion and error in a real world have peculiar power in human affairs may be dismissed. No serious student of history could hold it. For those who believe, as we all do at heart, that the world is rational, that real effects follow real causes, and conversely that behind great movements lie great forces. The fact must weigh enormously that wherever the Christian church, or a section of it, or a single Christian, has put upon Jesus Christ a higher emphasis. Above all where everything has been centred in Jesus Christ, there has been an increase of power for the church, or community, or man. Where new value has been found in Jesus Christ, the church has risen in power, in energy, in appeal, in victory. Paul of Tars has progressively found more in Christ, expected more of him, trusted him more, and his faith was justified. If Paul was wrong, how did he capture the Christian church for his ideas? If he was wrong, how is it that when Luther caught his meaning, reinterpreted him, and laid the same emphasis on Jesus Christ, with his nose near sumus, Christus solus estomnia. Once more the hearts of men were won by the higher doctrine of Christ's person and power, and a new hero followed the new emphasis. How is it that when John Wesley made the same discovery, and once more staked all on faith in Christ, again, the church felt the pulse of new life? On the other hand, where through a nebulous philosophy men have minimized Jesus, or where through some weakness of the human mind they have sought the aid of others, and relegated Jesus Christ to a more distant, even if a higher sphere, where in short Christ is not the living centre of everything, the value of the church has declined, its life has waned. That, to my own mind, is the most striking and outstanding fact in history. There must be a real explanation of a thing so signal in a rational universe. The explanation in most human affairs comes after the recognition of the fact. There our great fact stands of 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 today 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, where we are apt to see the human mind reach a fuller freedom and achieve more. There is a higher civilisation, 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 of 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 emphasised that Jesus is not mentioned in secular writers of the period, and the passage in Tacitus 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 has interpolated, or to explain when or by whom it was done. The wish is farther to the thought. Christians are twice mentioned by Suetonius in dealing with the emperors of the first century, though in one passage the reading Crestus, 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 recognised 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-Sarmarge never existed by demonstrating four hundred years hence, or two thousand, that it is not mentioned in the in-memorium, nor in the ring and the book, nor in George Morettith'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-Sarmarge, and when one surveys the Greek and Roman writers of the 1st century AD, 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 common place-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 any notice of the massacre at Bethlehem if it 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 are 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 today 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 fordra 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 that there is much in Paul that he does not understand, but he catches in him again after 300 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 established 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's 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 as 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 in-raught 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 Julie and the Apostate using a devotional language to Athena at Athens, that would have astonished the contemporaries of Pericles. But Jesus, Buddha and Mahabhid stand on a very different footing from Krishna and Athena, even if we can see the view of some scholars that Krishna was once a man and the contention of Hugh Hemerus, a pre-Christian Greek, that all the gods had once been human. If we posit that Jesus did not exist, we shall be involved with other difficulties as to the story of the Church. Mr. F. C. Coneybear, an Oxford scholar, avowedly not in allegiance to the Christian Church, has characterised 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 to the first three Gospels. Great as has been, and must be, the influence of the Fourth Gospel, in the present stage of historical criticism it will serve our purpose best to postpone the use of a source which we do not fully understand. The exact relations of history and interpretation in the Fourth Gospel, the methods and historical outlook of the writer cannot yet be said to be determined. Only those who have merely trifled with the problems it suggests are likely to speak dogmatically upon the subject. This is not to abandon the Fourth Gospel, for it is a document which we could not do without in the early Church history, and which has vindicated its place in the devotional life in every Christian generation. But, for the present, the first three Gospels will be our chief sources. The Gospels have, of course, been attacked again and again, sober criticism has raised the question as to whether here and there traces may be found of the touch of a later hand. For example, were there two asses or one when Jesus rode into Jerusalem? Has the baptismal formula at the end of Matthew been adjusted to the creed of Nicaea? In the following pages the attempt will be made to base what is said, not on isolated texts, which may, and of course may not, have been touched, but on the general tenor of the books. A single episode or phrase may suffer change from a copyist's hand, from inadvertence or from theological predilection. The character of the personality set forth in the Gospels is less susceptible of alteration. This point is at once of importance, for the suggestion has been made that we cannot be sure of any particular statement, episode, incident, or saying in the Gospels, taken by itself. And imagine a more sweeping theory still, that no single episode, incident or saying of Jesus in the Gospels is authentic at all. What follows? The great historian E. A. Freeman of Oxford once said that a false anecdote may be good history. It may be sound evidence for character. For, to obtain currency a false anecdote has also to be true. It must be, in our proverbial phrase, if not true well invented. Even if exaggeration and humor contribute to give it a twist the essence of parody is that it parodies. It must conform to the original even where it leaves it. A good storyteller will hardly tell the same story of Mr. Roosevelt and the Archbishop of Canterbury unless it happens to be true, and then he will be cautious. Truth, to quote another proverb, is stranger than fiction because fiction has to go wearily to be probable, and must be true. The story a man invents about another has to be true in some recognizable way to character, as a little experiment in this direction will show. The inventor of a story must have the gift of the characterist and the bestower of nicknames. He must have a shrewd eye for the real features of his victim. Jesus, then, was a historical person and about him we have a mass of stories in the Gospels which our theory for the moment but they have a certain unity of tone and they agree in pointing to a character of a certain type and the general aspects and broad outlines of that character they make abundantly clear. Even on such a hypothesis we can know something of the character of Jesus but the hypothesis is gratuitous and absurd as the paragraphs that follow may help to show the Gospels are essentially true and reliable records of a historical person. A survey of some of the outstanding features of the Gospels should do something to assure their reader of their historical value but there is a necessary caution to be given at this moment. When Aristotle discusses happiness he adds a curious limitation as the man of sense would define he postulates a certain intelligence of the matter in hand. Similarly, Longanus the greatest of ancient critics says that in literature short judgment is the outcome of long experience. In matters of historical and literary criticism a certain instinct is needed conscious or unconscious perhaps more often the latter which without a serious interest and long experience no man is likely to have. The Gospels are not properly biographies they consist of collections of reminiscences memories and fragments of others and sometimes the fragment is little more than a phrase such and such were the circumstances and Jesus spoke a story that may occupy four or five verses or less something happened Jesus did something or said something that impressed his friends and they could never forget it the story as such impressions do keeps its sharp edges date and perhaps even place may be forgotten but the look and the tone of the speaker are indelible memories in the experience of every man there are such moments and the reminiscences can be trusted the Gospels are almost avowedly not first hand Peter is said to be behind Mark Mark and at least one other are behind Matthew and Luke Luke in his preface explains his methods they are collectors and transmitters and the indications are that they work very faithfully there is a simplicity and a plainness about the stories in the Gospels which further guarantees them it is remarkable how little of the adjective there is no compliment no eulogy no heroic touches no sympathetic turn of phrase no great passages of anconium or commendation it is often said about the Greek historian the usidities that among his many intellectual judgments he never offers a criticism of any act that implies moral approbation or disapprobation that he says nothing to show that he had feelings or that he cared about questions of right or wrong page after page of the usidities will make the reader tingle with pity or indignation there is hardly in literature so tragic a story as the Syracusean expedition and the writer did not feel is it not the sternest and deepest feeling after all when a man will not unpack his heart with words something of this kind we find in the Gospels there is not a word of condemnation for Herod or Pilate for priest or Pharisee not a touch of sympathy as the nails are driven through those hands a blunt phrase about the soldiers and sitting down they watched him there that is all from a literary point of view it was an awful quiet objectivity and they had no such aim Luke indeed has one slight touch that might be called irony and he released unto them that for sedition and murder was cast into prison whom they had desired but he delivered Jesus to their will and yet the irony is in the story itself why callest thou me good so it is recorded that Jesus once answered a compliment and it looks as if the mood had passed over to his intimates from them to their friend who wrote the Gospels he meant too much for them to seek the facile relief of praise the words of praise die away yes and the words of affection too and their silence and self restraint are in themselves evident of their truth and more winning than words could have been here and there the Gospels keep a phrase actually used by Jesus and in his native Aramaic speech the Greek was not apt to use or quote foreign phrases unlike the Englishman who has been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps why then do the evangelists writing for Greek readers keep the Aramaic sentences it looks like a human instinct that made Peter if as we are told he had some part in the origination of Mark's Gospel and the rest wish to keep the very words and tones of their master as most of us would wish to keep the accents and phrases of those we love was there no satisfaction to the people who had lived with Jesus when they read in Mark the very syllables they had heard in use and caught his great accents again is there not for Christians in every age a joy and an inspiration in knowing the very sounds his lips framed the first word that his mother taught him survives in Abba Father in his speech to let us begin at the beginning something again that takes us to the very heart of him at the end in his cry Is it not true that we come nearer to him in that cry in the language strange to us but his own would not the story again be poorer without the little tender phrase that he used to the daughter of Charis from time to time we find in the Gospels matters for which writers and those behind them have felt that some apology or at least some explanation was needed his friendship for sinners was a taunt against him in his lifetime so was his inattention to the Sabbath and the details of ceremonial washing the faithful record of those is a sound indication both of the date and of the truth of the Gospels but these were not all Celsus in one seven eight AD in his true word mocked at Jesus because of the cry upon the cross he reminded Christians that many and many a worthless nave had endured in brave silence and their great man cried out it was from the Gospels that his knowledge came even during his lifetime the Gospels reveal much about Jesus that in contemporary opinion would degrade him sighs and tears and fatigue the ability to devotion and to pain friendship with women with these revelations of character we may group passages where the Gospels tell of Jesus surprising or shocking his disciples startling them by some act or some opinion for which they were not prepared or which was contrary to common belief or practice passages to where he blames or criticizes them for conventionality or an intelligence it has been remarked that the frequency and fidelity of Jesus' own illusions to country life is illustrations from bird and beast and flower and the work of the farm are evidence for the genuineness of the tradition early Christianity as we see already in the Acts of the Apostles was prevailing the urban Paul aimed at the great centers of population where men gathered and from which ideas spread the language of Paul in his epistles the sermons inserted by Luke in the Acts writings that survive of early Christians are all in marked contrast to the speech of Jesus in this matter of country life when we recall the practice of ancient historians of composing speeches for insertion into their narratives and weigh the suggestion that the sermons in the Acts may conceivably owe much to the free re-handling of Luke or may even be his own compositions there is a fresh significance in his marked abstention to such treatment of the words of Jesus it means that we may be secure in using them as genuinen and untouchably productions of what he said and thought this leads us to another point the central figure of the Gospels must impress every attentive reader as at least a man of marked personality he has his own attitude to life his own views of God and man and all else and his own language as we shall see in the pages that follow so much his own are all these things that it is hard to imagine the possibility of his being a mere literary creation even if we could concede a joint literary creation by several authors writing independent works indeed when we reflect on the character of the Gospels their origin and composition and then consider the sharp strong outlines of the personality depicted we shall feel apt to feel his claim to hystericity to be stronger than we supposed finally two points may be mentioned the church from the very start accepted the Gospels two of them were written by men in Paul's own personal circle all found early acceptance and wide use and after a century we find Arrhenius maintaining that four Gospels are necessary and unnecessarily all there are four points of the compass seasons and so forth it is appropriate that there are four Gospels the argument is not very convincing but that such an argument was possible is evident to the position of the Gospels as we have them we must remember the solidarity of that early church the constituency for which the Gospels were written was steeped in the tradition of Jesus' life and the Christians accepted the Gospels has embodying what they knew and there were still survivors from the first days of the Gospels when Boswell's Life of Johnson was published the great painter Sir Joshua Reynolds a lifelong friend of Johnson said it might be depended upon as if delivered upon oath Burke too had a high opinion of the book in the same way the Gospels come recommended to us by those who knew Jesus though it is true we do not know their names the Gospels do not tell us all that Christians thought about Jesus but they imply more than they say the writers limited themselves that Luke for years a friend of Paul's so generally kept his great friend's theology above all his Christology out of his Gospel is significant it does not mean divergence of view more reasonably we may conclude something else he held to his literary and other authorities and he was content for he knew to what the historical Jesus brings men to new life and larger views to a series of new estimates of Jesus himself he left it there in what follows we must not forget in our study that behind the Gospels simple and objective as they are is the larger experience of the ever working Christ there are three canons which may be laid down for the study of any human character whether of the past or of today they are so simple that it may hardly seem worthwhile to have stated them yet they are not always very easy to apply to them the acutest critic will fail to give any sound account of a human character first of all give the man's words his own meaning make sure that every term he uses has the full value he intends it to convey connotes all he wishes it to cover and has the full emotional power and suggestion that it has for himself two quite simple illustrations may serve the English born clergyman in Canada the meeting of his congregation as a homely gathering did not produce quite the effect he intended homelike is one thing in Canada homely quite another and the people laughed at the slip they knew what he did not that homely meant hard featured and ugly my other illustration will take us towards the second canon I remember years ago a working man of my own city taking a swift impulsive socialism to me he was young and something of a poet he got in return the obvious common sense that would be expected of a mid-Victorian middle-aged and middle-class and then he began to talk of hunger the hunger that haunted whole streets in our city where they had indeed something to eat every day but never quite enough and the children grew up so the hunger that he had experienced himself for I knew his story with his eyes fixed on me he brought home to me by the quiet intensity of his speech whether he knew what he affected or not that he and I gave hunger different senses he gave the word for me a new meaning with the glimpse he gave me of his experience since then I have always felt when men fling theories out like his schemes too like his wild and impracticable ah yes what is at the heart of it all what but this awful experience which they have known and you have not the sight of your own folk hungering life and faculty wasted for want of mere food and children growing up atrophied from the cradle it is not easy to dissociate the language and the terms of others from the meaning one gives to them oneself it means intellectual effort and intellectual discipline a training of a strenuous kind in sympathy and tenderness but if we are to be fair it must be done what applies to Jesus also have we given his meaning to his term force, value, emotion and suggestion in later chapter we shall have to concentrate on one term of his God and try to discover what he intends for that term to convey the second canon is make sure of the experience behind the thought how does a man come to think and feel as he does that is the question antecedent to any real criticism what is it that has led him to such a view it is more important for us to determine that than to decide at once whether we think him right or wrong again and again the quiet and sympathetic study of what a man has been through will modify our judgment upon his conclusions it will often change our own conclusions or even our way of thinking we have then to ask ourselves what is the experience that leads Jesus to speak as he does to think as he does in his case as in every other the central and crucial question is what is his experience of God in other words what has he found in God what relations has he with God what does he expect of God what is God to him such questions if we are candid and not too quick in answering will take us a long way it was once said of a man busy with some labour problem that he was working it out in theory unclouded by a single fact is it not fair to say that many of our current judgments upon Jesus Christ are no better founded can we say that we have any real, sure and intimate knowledge of his experience of God the old commentator, Bengal wrote at the beginning of his book that a man who is setting out to interpret Scripture has to ask by what right he does it what is our right to an opinion on Jesus Christ the third canon will be ask what type and of what dimensions the nature must be that is capable of that experience and of that language one of the commonest sources of bad criticism is the emphasis on weak points the really important thing in criticism is to understand the triumphs of the poet or painter let us say, whom you are studying how came he to achieve poem or picture so profound and so true in what does he differ from other men that he should do work so fundamental and so eternal Lam's punning jest at Wordsworth at Wordsworth was saying he could have written Hamlet if he had had the mind puts the matter directly what is the mind that can do such things the historian will have to ask himself a similar question about Jesus here we reach a point where caution is necessary will the Jesus we draw be in antiquaries Jesus an archaic figure simple and lovable perhaps but quaint and old world in blunt language outgrown a Galilean peasant dressed in the garb of his day in place his mind fitted out with the current ideas of his contemporaries but not essentially changed a dreamer with the clouds of the visionaries and apocalyptists over his head when we look at the ancient world the great men are not archaic figures Matthew Arnold found in Homer something of the clearness and shrewdness of Voltaire there is nothing archaic about Plato or Virgil or Paul to keep abreast of their thinking is no easy task for the strongest of our brains so modern, eternal and original are they they have shaped the thinking of the world and are still shaping it how much more Jesus of Nazareth when we make our picture of him does it suggest the man who has stirred mankind to its deaths set the world on fire and played an infinitely larger part in all the affairs of men than any other man we know of in history is it a great figure does our emphasis fall on the great features of that nature are they within our vision and in our drawing does our explanation of him really explain him or leave him more riddle what do we make of his originality is it in our picture what was it in him that changed Peter and James and John and the rest from companions into worshipers that in every age has captured and controlled the best, the deepest and the tenderest of men are we afraid that our picture would be too modern too little Jewish these are not the real dangers again and again our danger is that we underestimate the great men of our race and we always lose by so doing that we should overestimate Jesus is not a real risk the story of the church shows that the danger has always been the other way but not to underestimate such a figure as hard to see him as he is calls for all we have of intellect of tenderness, of love and of greatness it is worthwhile to try to understand him even if we fail God, said St. Bernard is never sought in vain even when we do not find him Jesus Christ transcends our categories and classification we never exhaust him and one element of Christian happiness is that there is always more in him than we supposed End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of The Jesus of History by T. R. Glover this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Chapter 2 Childhood and Youth it has been remarked as an odd thing by some readers that the Gospels tell us so little of the childhood of Jesus it must be remembered however, that they are not really biographies it is the ancient order still less that of modern kind in which the main concern is a tracing of the psychological development of the man Plutarch the prince of ancient biographers put fact and eulogy together cited characteristic sayings or doings of his hero quoted contemporary judgments and wove the whole into a charming narrative good to read, pleasant to remember perhaps not without use less than conventional morality but with real historical criticism in it and as little or less attempt at any effective reconstruction of a character his biography of Pericles illustrates his method and his defects the writers of the Gospels did not altogether propose biography as their object either in the ancient or the modern style they left out perhaps because it did not survive much about the life of Jesus that we should like to know the treatment of Mark by Matthew shows a certain matter of fact habit which explains the obvious want of interest in aspects of the life and mind of Jesus that would to a modern be fascinating they are dealing with the earthly life of the Son of God and they deal with it with the faithfulness to tradition and reminiscence to really consider it quite surprising but it is the heavenward side of the master that mattered to them most and it is perhaps not a mere random guess that they were not in any case so aware of the interest of childhood and of children as Jesus was Matthew and Luke record the miraculous birth and each had a story that has never failed to fascinate men of the Magi who came to the manger cradle Luke gives one episode of Jesus's childhood that is all the writers of the apocryphal gospels did their best to fill the gap by inventing or developing stories pretty, silly or repellent which only show how little they understood the original gospels or the character of Jesus but when we turn to the parables of Jesus and ask ourselves how they came to be what they are by what process of mind he framed them and where he found the experience from which one and another of them spring it isn't once clear that a number of them are stories of domestic life and the question suggests itself why should he have got a fuel for what he found at home if we know that he grew up in the ordinary circle of a home and then find him drawing familiar illustrations from the common scenes of home the inference is easy that he is going back to the remembered daily round of his own boyhood in stray hints the gospels give us a little of the framework of that boyhood in Nazareth the elder Joseph early disappears from the story and we find a reference to four brothers and several sisters is this not the carpenter people of Nazareth asked the son of Mary the brother of James and Joseph and of Judah and Simon and are not his sisters here with us Matthew adds a word that may or may not be significant his sisters are they not all with us in ancient times a particular view of the incarnation linked with other contemporary views of celibacy and the baseness of matter they are meant to discover or invent the possibility that these brothers and sisters were either the children of Joseph by a former wife or the cousins of Jesus on his mother's side that cousins in some parts of the world actively are confused in common speech with brothers may be admitted but to the ordinary Greek reader brothers meant brothers and cousins something different no one not starting with the theories of Saint Jerome let us say on marriage and matter and the decencies of the incarnation would ever dream from the Greek narrative of the episode of the critical neighbors at Nazareth who will not accept Jesus as a prophet because they know his family a delightfully natural and absurd reason with history written plain on the face of it that Jesus had no brothers only cousins or half brothers at best when history gives us brothers and dogma says they must be cousins in any other case the decision of the historian would be clear and so it is here we have then a household a widow with five sons and at least two or very likely more daughters Jesus is admittedly her eldest son and is bred to be a carpenter and a carpenter he undoubtedly was up to we are told about 30 years of age the dates of his birth and death are not quite precisely determined and people have fancied that he may have been rather older at the beginning of his ministry for our purposes it is not of much importance the more relevant question for us is this how came he to wait till he was at least about 30 years old before he began to teach in public one suggested answer finds the impulse or starting point of his ministry in the appearance of John the Baptist it is a simpler inference from such dates as we have that the claims of a widowed mother with six or seven younger children a poor woman with a carpenter's little brew to bring up may have had something to do with his denay in any case the parables give us pictures of the undeniable activities of the household a group of parables and other allusions as Jesus saw it in his mother's house he pictures two women grinding together at the mill and then the heating of the oven the mud oven not unlike the field ovens used for a while by the English army in France in 1915 and heated by the burning of wood inside it kindled with the grass of the field meanwhile the leaven is at work in the mill where the women hid it and her son sits by panting mass the bubbles rising and bursting the fall of the level and the rising of other bubbles to burst in their turn all bubbles later on the picture came back to him it was like the kingdom of God all bubbles said the disappointed but he saw more clearly the bubbles are broken by the force of the active life at work beneath life not death is the story the kingdom of God is life the leaven is of more account than any number of bubbles and we may link all these parables from bread making with what he says of the little boy asking for bread the mother fired the oven and set the leaven in the mill long before the child was hungry she looked ahead and the bread was ready is not this written also in the teaching of Jesus your heavenly father knoweth that he have need of all these things God, he holds is as little taken aback by his children's needs as Mary was by hers and the little boys did not confine their demand to bread they wanted eggs and fish as well there was no end to their healthy appetites it is significant that he mentioned the price of the cheapest flesh food used by peasants they also wanted clothes and wore them hard as boys do the time would come when new clothes were needed but why could not the old one to be patched and passed down yet another stage and his mother would smile and perhaps she asked him to try for himself to see why and he learnt by experiment that old clothes cannot be patched beyond a certain point and later on he remembered the fact and quoted it with telling effect he pictures little houses and how they are swept especially when a coin has rolled away into a dusty corner or under something and candles and bushels and beds and moth and rust and all sorts of things that make the common round of life his talk as naturally as they did into his life the carpenter's shop we may suppose was close to the house a shop where men may count on good work and honest work and what memories must have gathered round it is it fanciful to suggest that what the churches have always been saying about coming to Jesus began to be said in a natural and spontaneous way in that shop those little brothers and sisters did not always agree and tempers would now and then grow very warm among them and then the big brother came and fetched them away from the little house to the shop and set one of them to pick up nails and the other to sweep up shavings to help the carpenter they helped him like small boys when they help they got in his road at every turn but somehow they slipped back to a jolly frame of mind the big brother told them stories and they came back different people I can picture a day when there was a woman in the little house weary and heavy laden and the door opened and a cheery pleasant face looked in and said won't you come in and talk to me and she came and talked with him and life became a different thing for her are these pictures fanciful? mere imagination are we to think that all the tenderness of Jesus came to him by a miracle when he was 30 years of age must we not think it was all growing up in that house and in that shop or did he never tell a story he who tells them so charmingly till he wanted parables we have to note at the same time some elements of criticism of the elder brother in the family attitude some defect of sympathy a failure to understand him even if kindness prompted their action in later days Nazareth lies in a basin among hills from the rim of which can be seen to the southward the historic plain of Estralon and eastward the Jordan valley and the hills of Gilead and westward the Mediterranean on great roads north and south of the town's girdle of hills passed to and fro the many coloured traffic between Egypt and Mesopotamia and the Orient traders, pilgrims herods, the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them all within reach and travelling no faster as a rule than the camel cared to go they formed a panorama of life for a thoughtful and imaginative boy more than what allusion to king's clothes comes up in his recorded teaching and it was here that he saw them and noticed them and remembered one is struck with the amount of that unconscious assimilation of experience which we find in his words and which is, in itself an index to his nature we are not expressly told that he sought the sights that the road afforded but it would be hard to believe that a bright quick boy with genius in him with poetry in him with feeling for the real and for life never went down on to that road never walked along sides of the caravans and took note of the strange people from the east and from the west from the north and from the south Nubians Egyptians Romans Gauls, Britons and Orientals in the one anecdote that survives of his boyhood we find men astonished at his understanding his gift for putting questions and his comments on the answers and all life through he had a genius for friendship when we consider how Jesus handles nature and her wilder children in his parables another point of trapped attention men vary a great deal in this to take two of the Old Testament prophets we find a marked difference here between Ezekiel and Jeremiah Ezekiel puts forth a riddle and speaks a parable about an eagle a frankly heraldic eagle that plants a treetop in a city of merchants Jeremiah is obviously country bread he might have been surprised if he had been told how often he illustrates his thought from bird and beast and country life and always with a certain life like precision and a perfectly clear sympathy in the Gospels we find again the same faithfulness to living nature another country bread boy with the same love for bird and beast and the wild open countryside the earth and common face of nature spake to me rememberable things nature is enough for Jesus as for Jeremiah she needs no remodeling no heraldic paints long pinions of diverse colours she will do as she is she is just splendid and lovable and true as God made her and she slides into his mind whenever he is deeply moved think of all the parables he draws from nature the similes metaphors and illustrations every one of them will bear examination and means more the nearer we look into it and the better we know the living thing behind the eagle in Jesus's sentence plants no trees but it has the living bird's instinct for carrion the ancient Greek historian and Lord Roberts at Delhi in 1858 remarked that where so ever the body is thither will the eagles be gathered together in India that year it was said they gathered from all over to Delhi what brought them instinct we say and we find Jesus in that rather dark sentence suggesting somehow that there is an instinct which knows where and sheep and cows and asses and hens and sparrows and red sunsets fill men's reminiscences of his talk and we may safely conclude that when allusions are so many in fragments of conversation preserved as these are the man's speech and mind were attuned to the love of bird and beast is there another teacher of those times who is at all so sure that God loves bird and flower the Greek poet Maliega of Gadara not so very far removed from Jesus in space of time has a good deal to say about flowers but not at all in the same sense as Jesus nor with any feeling such as his for the immortal hand and eye that planned their symmetry and their colours and sweetness Saint Paul is conspicuously a man of the town a citizen of no mean city and he dismisses the animals abruptly he has hardly an allusion to the familiar and homely aspects of nature so frequent and so pleasant in the speech of Jesus he finds nature if not quite lengthened claw yet groaning together subject to vanity in bondage to corruption travailing in pain looking forward in a sort of desperate hope to a freedom not yet realised nature is far less tragic for Jesus far happier perhaps because he knew nature on closer terms of intimacy nature as he portrays things we're a touch with a heavenly father than we should guess from Paul and there is no hint in his recorded words that he held the ground to be under a curse if we are to use abstract terms and philosophise his thought a little we may agree that the four facts Jesus notes in nature are its mystery its regularity its impartiality and its peacefulness what he finds in nature is not unlike what Wordsworth also finds a power that is the visible quality in shape and image of right reason that matures her processes by steadfast laws gives birth to no impatient or fallacious hopes no heat of passion or excessive zeal no vain conceits provokes to no quick turns of self-applauding intellect but trains to meekness and exalts by humble faith holds up before the mind intoxicate with present objects and the busy dance of things that pass away a temperate show of objects that endure this is not a passage that one could imagine the historical Jesus speaking or still less writing but the essential ideas chime in with his observation and his attitude for the earth bringeth forth fruit of itself first the blade then the ear and after that the full corn in the ear man can count safely on earth's cooperation from it all and in it all Jesus read deep into God's mind and methods it has often been remarked how apt Jesus was to go away to pray alone in the desert or on the hillside in the night or the early dawn probably no new habit induced by the crowded days of his ministry but an old way of his from youth the full house perhaps would prompt it apart from what he found in the open Saint Augustine in a very appealing confession tells us how his prayers may be disturbed if he cuts sight of a lizard snapping up flies on the wall of his room the bird flying to her nest the fox creeping to his hole did these break into the prayers of Jesus and with what effect was it in such hours that he learned his deepest lessons from the birds and the lilies of the field why not as he sat out in the wild under the open sky did the stars never speak to him as to the Hebrew psalmist and Roman Virgil when I consider thy heavens the work of thy fingers the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained what is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou visitest him it is a question men have to meet and face and if we can trust Matthew's statement an utterance of his in later years called out by the sneer of a Pharisee shows how he had made the old poet's answer his own out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise if this were a solitary utterance of his thought upon nature it might be ranked with one or two pointed citations he made of the letter of the Old Testament but it is safe perhaps to take it as one of many indications of his communion with God in nature the wind blowing in the night where it listed must we authenticate every verse of the fourth Gospel before we believe that he listened to it also and caught something at any rate in later years when his friends are overdriven and weary quiet and open-air in a desert place are what he prescribes of them and wishes to share with them surely a hint of old experience but now let us turn back to Nazareth for as the Gospel reminds us there he grew up the city teaches the man said the Old Greek poet Sao Nides and it does as we see and more than we sometimes realize Jesus grew up in an oriental town in the middle of its life a town with poor houses bad smells and worse stories tragedies of widow and prodigal son of unjust judge and grasping publican yes and comedies too we know at once from general knowledge of Jewish life and custom and from the recorded facts that he read the scriptures that he wed to school and we could guess fairly safely that he played with his school fellows even if he had not told us what the games were at which they played at weddings and at funerals as if his life's location were endless imitation sometimes the children were sulky and would not play how strange and how delightful that the great Gospel full of God's word for mankind should have a little corner at it for such reminiscences of children's games we cannot suppose that he had access to many books but he knew the Old Testament well and familiarly better and more aptly than some people expected traces of other books have been found in his teaching not many and some of them doubtful generally one would conclude that apart from the Old Testament his education was not very bookish he found it in home and shop in the desert on the road and in the marketplace it is interesting to gather from the Gospel what Jesus says of the talk of men and it is surprising to find how much it is till we realise how very much in ancient times he was the education at the marketplace the school where some of the most abiding lessons were learnt is it not so still in the East here was a boy however who watched men and their words more closely than they cast on whose ears words fell not as old coinages but as new minting with the marks of thought still rough and bright on them indexes to the speaker proverbs of the market every people has of its own it is nought it is nought sayeth the buyer but after he has gone his way then he boastseth and the seller has all the variants of caveat empty ready to retort in antiquity and in the East today apart from machine made things we find the same uncertainty in most transactions as to the value of the article the same eagerness of both seller and buyer to get at the supposed special knowledge of the other and the same preliminary skirmish of proposal protest offer refusal and oath Jesus stands by the stall watching some small sale with the bright earnest eyes which we find so often in the gospels the buyer swears on his head that he will not give more than so much then by the altar he won't get the thing by the earth it isn't worth it by the heaven the seller gave that for it so the battle rages and at last the bargain is struck the buyer raises his price the seller takes less than he gave for the thing neither has believed the other but each as the keen eyes of the onlooker see feels he has overreached the other heaven has been invoked and what is heaven the listener's ears he saw the throne of God and on it won before whose face heaven itself and earth will flee away and be brought back again for judgment and by heaven and by him who sits on the throne men will swear falsely for an anna or two how can they? it is because nothing's grow something the words make a mist about the thing in later days Jesus told his followers not swear at all to stick to yes and no then a leader in the religious world passes and the loiterers have a new interest for the moment rabbi rabbi they say and the great man moves onward obviously pleased with the greeting in the marketplace soon as he is out of hearing it is no longer rabbi he is called talk turns to another tune how little the fine word meant how lightly the title was given worse still the title will stand between a man and the facts of life some will use it to deceive him others, impressed by it are silent in his presence one way and another the facts are kept from him seeing he sees not and he comes to live in an unreal world how many men today will say what they really think before a man in clerical dress or a dignitary however trivial be not he called rabbi was the counsel Jesus gave to his followers and he would accept neither rabbi nor good master nor any other title till he saw how much it meant master they said we know that thou art true and teach us the way of God in truth neither carest thou for any man for thou regardest not the person of men but as the evangelist continues Jesus perceived their wickedness he had heard such things before and was not trapped Hosanna in the highest strange to think of the quiet figure riding in the midst of the excited crowd open-eyed and undeceived in his hour of triumph as little perturbed to when his name is cast out as evil how little men's praise and their blame matter when your eyes are fixed on God when you have him and his facts to be your inspiration on the other hand when you have not contact with God how much men's talk counts and how easy it is to lose all sense of fact by and by the talk veers round to what Pilate had done to the Galileans if the dates fit or if for the moment we can make them fit or anticipate once for all and be done with the bizarre talk which never stopped Pilate had killed the Galileans when they went up to Jerusalem yes, mingled their own blood you might say with the blood of their sacrifices what would he do next there was no telling what was needed it was bound to come and then the voice sank or adjudiced again it would not be surprising there were no newspapers no approved and reliable sources of news such as we boast to have from our government and millionaires all was rumour bizarre talk low there and low there prohibitis o mones said Tacitus of Rome were forbidden so there were more of them the Messiah must come some time said one man who might be a friend of the zealots in any case, reflected another those Galileans had probably angered heaven and got their deserts ill luck like that could hardly come by accident think of the tower that fell at Siloam anybody could see that there was a judgement in it might it not be said that God had discredited John the Baptist now his head was taken off so men speculated Jesus saw through all this and was radiantly clear about it so they chatted and he heard then the talk took another turn and tales were told bad eyes flashed and lips smacked as one storyteller eclipsed the other in the familiar vein the Arabian knights are tales of the crowd it is said rather than literature in their origin and will give clues enough to what might be told Jesus heard and he saw what it meant and afterwards he told his friends from within out of the heart of men proceed evil thoughts adulteries, fornications murders, foolishness all these evil things come from within and defile the man the evil thought takes shape to find utterance and gains thereby a new vitality a new power for evil and may haunt both speaker and listener forever with its defiling memory by and by he intervened and spoke himself everyone was shocked and said blasphemy they were not used to think of God as he did and it seemed improper then the whole question of human speech rises for him what did they mean by their words what could their minds be like God dragged in and flung about like a counter at a game of barter but if you speak real meaning about God it is blasphemy rabbi, rabbi to the great man's face he turned his back and his name is smirched forever by a witty improvisation why? why should men do such things? the magic in the idle tale ten minutes and the memory is stained forever with what not one of them would forget however he might wish to try to forget the words are loose and idle careless flung out without purpose but to pass the moment and they live forever and work mischief how can they be so light? and yet have such power later on he told his friends what he had seen in this matter of words they come from within and the speaker's whole personality false or true is behind what he says the good or bad treasure of his heart there are no grapes growing on the bramble bush no wonder that of every idle word men shall give account of on the day of judgment the idle word the word unstudied comes straight from the innmost man the spontaneous overflow from the spirit within natural and inevitable proof of his quality and they react with the life that brought them forth so he grows up in a real world and among real people he goes to school with the boys of his own age and lives at home with his mother and brothers and sisters he reads the Old Testament and forms a habit of going to the synagogue all points to a home where religion was real the first word he learned to say was probably Aber and it struck the keynote of his thoughts but he knew the world without as well turned on to it early the keen eyes that saw all and he recognized what he saw knowledge of men but without cynicism a loving heart still in spite of his freedom from illusions these are among the gifts that his environment gave him or failed to take away from him end of chapter 2