About the Work
The Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan is a historical study of the founder of Christianity, written in French and presented in this edition in an English translation dated December 1863. The book opens with a dedication to the memory of the author’s sister, Henriette, who died at Byblus in September 1861. Renan recalls that the pages were composed at Ghazir, where she read and copied each sheet as it was written, and that her questions and doubts returned him continually to the “sublime object” of their shared thoughts. The dedication is one of the most personal passages in the volume, and it sets the tone for a work that is at once scholarship and elegy.
“The great problem of the present age is to preserve the religious spirit, whilst getting rid of the superstitions and absurdities that deform it, and which are alike opposed to science and common sense.”
The edition includes an introduction by John Haynes Holmes (omitted from this text for copyright reasons), a translator’s preface, an author’s introduction on the sources, and twenty-eight chapters. The translator’s preface, dated December 1863, acknowledges the difficulty of rendering a work admired for its style and eloquence, notes that the translation was revised by competent persons, and frames the book as a contribution to the great problem of the age: preserving the religious spirit while discarding superstitions opposed to science and common sense. The translator names the works of F. W. Newman, Bishop Colenso, and Essays and Reviews as serving the same end, and observes that Renan’s book created a storm among the “obscurantists” of France. He sympathizes with the book’s earnest spirit without endorsing all its opinions.
The author’s introduction explains that the present volume is the first of a projected four-part history of the origin of Christianity. The first book treats the particular fact that started the new religion, filled by the Founder himself. The second would treat the apostles and immediate disciples, the revolutions of religious thought in the first two generations, closing about the year 100, when the last friends of Jesus were dead and the New Testament books were fixed almost in their present forms. The third would show Christianity under the Antonines, its slow development and permanent war against the empire. The fourth would show the decisive progress from the Syrian emperors onward, the crumbling of the learned system of the Antonines, the irrevocable decadence of ancient civilization, and the moment when the Christian Church, grown numerous, forgot its millennial dreams, broke its ties with Judaism, and entered the Greek and Roman world. Renan doubts he has the life and strength for so vast a plan; he would be satisfied, after the Life of Jesus, to relate the history of the apostles, the formation of the resurrection legends, the first acts of the Church of Jerusalem, the life of Saint Paul, the crisis under Nero, the appearance of the Apocalypse, the fall of Jerusalem, the foundation of the Hebrew-Christian sects of Batanea, the compilation of the Gospels, and the rise of the great schools of Asia Minor. Everything pales, he writes, beside that marvellous first century.
Context
The book belongs to the middle of the nineteenth century, a period in which the critical study of the Bible was transforming both scholarship and religious belief. Renan writes as a man of his age, addressing readers who have felt the pressure of science and common sense against inherited superstition. The translator’s preface makes this explicit: the great problem of the age is to preserve the religious spirit while getting rid of superstitions opposed to science and common sense. Renan’s work is placed alongside the writings of F. W. Newman, Bishop Colenso, and Essays and Reviews as a contribution to that end.
The author’s introduction situates the book within a larger scholarly conversation. Renan cites French works for points treated briefly: Albert Reville’s Etudes Critiques sur l’Evangile de saint Matthieu, Reuss’s Histoire de la Theologie Chretienne au Siecle Apostolique, Michel Nicolas’s Des Doctrines Religieuses des Juifs, and Strauss’s Vie de Jesus, translated by Littre. He also mentions the Revue de Theologie et de Philosophie Chretienne under Colani, and in a footnote Gustave d’Eichthal’s Les Evangiles. On Strauss he observes that the criticism of Gospel details leaves little to be desired, though Strauss may err on the question of Gospel compilation and takes too much theological, too little historical ground. A footnote denies that Strauss ever denied the existence of Jesus; his book implies it, though he supposes the individual character of Jesus less distinct than perhaps in reality.
The sources Renan claims to have neglected none of are five great collections: the Gospels and New Testament writings; the Old Testament Apocrypha; Philo; Josephus; and the Talmud. Philo, he says, shows thoughts fermenting in minds occupied with great religious questions; he lived in a different province of Judaism but was free from the littlenesses of Jerusalem—truly the elder brother of Jesus. Philo was sixty-two when the Prophet of Nazareth was at his height and survived him at least ten years. The Talmud, Josephus, and the Apocrypha supply the background of Jewish life and thought against which the Gospel narratives are read.
The book thus stands at the intersection of several currents: the critical study of the Gospels in Germany and France, the liberal Protestant effort to separate the religion of Jesus from later dogma, and the Romantic fascination with the landscape and poetry of the Holy Land. Renan’s own travels in Palestine, and the death of his sister there, give the book a personal dimension that distinguishes it from purely academic treatments.
Structure of the Book
The book follows the life of Jesus from his place in the history of the world to the essential character of his work, in twenty-eight chapters. The first four chapters establish the setting. Chapter I, “Place of Jesus in the History of the World,” argues that the Semitic race, and especially Israel, produced the religion of humanity, and traces the development of Jewish monotheism from the nomadic patriarchs through the prophets to the Maccabean persecutions and the apocalyptic dreams they inspired. Chapter II, “Infancy and Youth of Jesus—His First Impressions,” describes Nazareth, its landscape, its fountain, and the horizon that formed the child’s world. Chapter III, “Education of Jesus,” treats his schooling, his reading of the Hebrew writings in Aramean translations, and the exegetical methods of the Targums and Midrashim. Chapter IV, “The Order of Thought Which Surrounded the Development of Jesus,” describes the apocalyptic atmosphere of the time—the tension of a people living in expectation, the Persian and Jewish theories of successive ages, the doctrine of resurrection, and the fermentation of ideas into which Jesus entered as soon as he began to think.
Chapters V through VII trace the beginnings of the ministry. Chapter V, “The First Sayings of Jesus—His Ideas of a Divine Father and of a Pure Religion—First Disciples,” describes the death of Joseph, the move to Cana, the trade of carpenter, and the first disciples. Chapter VI, “John the Baptist—Visit of Jesus to John, and His Abode in the Desert of Judea—Adoption of the Baptism of John,” introduces the ascetic of the priestly race, his life in the desert, his preaching, and his arrest by Antipas. Chapter VII, “Development of the Ideas of Jesus Respecting the Kingdom of God,” describes the forty days in the desert, the return to Galilee, and the formation of the idea of the kingdom.
Chapters VIII through XII cover the Galilean ministry. Chapter VIII, “Jesus at Capernaum,” describes the failure at Nazareth, the return to Capernaum, and the synagogue missions. Chapter IX, “The Disciples of Jesus,” introduces the inner circle—the sons of Zebedee, Simon Bar-jona, and the others. Chapter X, “The Preachings on the Lake,” describes the topography of the Lake of Tiberias and the seed finding well-prepared soil. Chapter XI, “The Kingdom of God Conceived as the Inheritance of the Poor,” treats the social character of the kingdom. Chapter XII, “Embassy from John in Prison to Jesus—Death of John—Relations of His School with That of Jesus,” describes the Baptist’s last message and his execution.
Chapters XIII through XVIII trace the expansion and the growing opposition. Chapter XIII, “First Attempts on Jerusalem,” describes the first journey to the capital. Chapter XIV, “Intercourse of Jesus with the Pagans and the Samaritans,” treats his encounters beyond the boundaries of Judaism. Chapter XV, “Commencement of the Legends Concerning Jesus—His Own Idea of His Supernatural Character,” describes the idealization of the Master. Chapter XVI, “Miracles,” treats the miracle stories. Chapter XVII, “Definitive Form of the Ideas of Jesus Respecting the Kingdom of God,” describes the final shape of his teaching. Chapter XVIII, “Institutions of Jesus,” treats the founding of the church.
Chapters XIX through XXIII describe the crisis. Chapter XIX, “Increasing Progression of Enthusiasm and of Exaltation,” describes the growing fervor. Chapter XX, “Opposition to Jesus,” describes the hostility of the official classes. Chapter XXI, “Last Journey of Jesus to Jerusalem,” describes the journey to the capital. Chapter XXII, “Machinations of the Enemies of Jesus,” describes the plotting against him. Chapter XXIII, “Last Week of Jesus,” describes the final days.
Chapters XXIV through XXVIII describe the end and the aftermath. Chapter XXIV, “Arrest and Trial of Jesus,” describes the betrayal and the hearings before the authorities. Chapter XXV, “Death of Jesus,” describes the crucifixion. Chapter XXVI, “Jesus in the Tomb,” describes the burial and the first rumors of resurrection. Chapter XXVII, “Fate of the Enemies of Jesus,” describes the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the persecutors. Chapter XXVIII, “Essential Character of the Work of Jesus,” concludes with a meditation on the permanent significance of his life and teaching.
Inside the Book
Dedication and the Author’s Introduction
The book opens with a dedication to the pure soul of Renan’s sister Henriette, who died at Byblus in 1861. He recalls composing these pages at Ghazir alone with her, she reading and copying each sheet as the sea, villages, ravines, and mountains lay at their feet; her questions and doubts returned him to the sublime object of their shared thought. She told him she would love the book because it was made with her, and believed truly religious souls would take pleasure in it. Then fever seized them both at once, and he awoke alone. She sleeps in the land of Adonis, near Byblus and the sacred stream where women of the ancient mysteries mingled their tears; he asks her to reveal the truths that conquer death.
A translator’s preface of December 1863 confesses the difficulty of rendering a work admirable for style and beauty, and of reproducing its terseness and eloquence; the translation was revised by competent hands, though errors may remain. The great problem of the age, the translator says, is to keep the religious spirit while shedding superstitions opposed to science and common sense—a task served by Newman, Bishop Colenso, and Essays and Reviews, and to which Renan’s book will contribute, as the storm it raised among the obscurantists of France shows. The translator sympathizes with its earnest spirit without adopting all its opinions.
The Plan of the Work
Renan explains that a history of the origin of Christianity ought to embrace the obscure, subterranean periods from the religion’s beginnings until it became a public fact, and would consist of four books. The first, presented here, treats the particular fact that started the new religion, filled by the Founder. The second would treat the apostles and immediate disciples—the revolutions of religious thought in the first two generations—closing about the year 100, when the last friends of Jesus were dead and the New Testament books were fixed almost in their present forms. The third would show Christianity under the Antonines, its slow development and permanent war against the empire through the second century. The fourth would show the decisive progress from the Syrian emperors: the learned system of the Antonines crumbling, ancient civilization’s irrevocable decadence, Christianity profiting, Syria conquering the West, and Jesus with the gods and deified sages of Asia taking possession of a society that philosophy and civil government no longer sufficed. Then Eastern religions took precedence; the Church, grown numerous, forgot its millennium dreams, broke with Judaism, and entered the Greek and Roman world. Renan doubts he has life and strength for so vast a plan, and would be satisfied, after the Life of Jesus, to relate the history of the apostles, the Christian conscience after Jesus’s death, the formation of the resurrection legends, the first acts of the Church of Jerusalem, the life of Saint Paul, the crisis under Nero, the appearance of the Apocalypse, the fall of Jerusalem, the foundation of the Hebrew-Christian sects of Batanea, the compilation of the Gospels, and the rise of the great schools of Asia Minor originated by John. Everything pales beside that marvellous first century; from 50 to 75 events are seen better than from 100 to 150.
Method and Sources
The plan, Renan says, prevented long critical dissertations in the text; a continuous system of notes lets readers verify each statement from the authorities, limited to quotations from primary sources—the original passages on which every assertion or conjecture rests. For points treated briefly he cites French works: Reville’s Etudes Critiques sur l’Evangile de saint Matthieu, Reuss’s Histoire de la Theologie Chretienne au Siecle Apostolique, Michel Nicolas’s Des Doctrines Religieuses des Juifs, Strauss’s Vie de Jesus translated by Littre, and the Revue de Theologie et de Philosophie Chretienne under Colani, with a footnote adding Gustave d’Eichthal’s Les Evangiles. On Strauss he observes that the criticism of Gospel details leaves little to be desired, though Strauss may err on the compilation of the Gospels and takes too much theological, too little historical ground; a footnote denies that Strauss ever denied Jesus’s existence, though his book implies it. Renan claims to have neglected no source. Five great collections remain: the Gospels and New Testament writings; the Old Testament Apocrypha; Philo; Josephus; and the Talmud. Philo shows thoughts fermenting in minds occupied with great religious questions; living in a different province of Judaism, free from Jerusalem’s littlenesses, he was truly Jesus’s elder brother—sixty-two when the Prophet of Nazareth was at his height, and surviving him at least ten years.
The Gospels and Their Authority
The text then turns to the composition and authority of the Gospels. Behind the synoptics lie two original documents: the Logia of Matthew, Jesus’ discourses, forming a complete whole when detached, and the primitive narrative left by Mark, based on Peter’s recollections. The first and second Gospels rest on a common document, the second being a slightly modified reproduction; the discourses were early written in Aramean, and Jesus’ deeds early recorded. These were not dogmatically fixed texts; many other Gospels claimed eyewitness tradition, and Papias and others preferred oral tradition, since men believed the world was near its end and cared little to compose books for the future. Hence the Gospel texts had little authority for 150 years, and additions and combinations were made freely; Justin’s Memoirs of the Apostles differed from our texts and he never quotes them textually, and the Ebionite quotations share this character. Only when tradition weakened, in the second half of the second century, did texts bearing apostolic names gain decisive authority and legal force. The Gospels proceed from the branch of the Christian family nearest Jesus; Matthew’s compilation was likely done northeast of Palestine, in Gaulonitis, Auranitis, and Batanea, where Christians fled during the Roman war and where Jesus’ relatives were still found in the second century.
The Fourth Gospel
Doubts about the fourth Gospel, Renan says, have better foundation. Papias, connected with John’s school, says nothing of a Life of Jesus by John, though he collected oral narratives from Aristion and Presbyteros Joannes, and Eusebius would have mentioned it. Intrinsic difficulties abound: precise eyewitness narration alongside discourses totally different from Matthew’s; a more satisfactory plan of Jesus’ life, yet passages showing the compiler’s dogmatic interest, ideas foreign to Jesus, and indications against the narrator’s good faith, with blemishes possibly from an ardent sectarian. Renan dares not be sure a Galilean fisherman wrote it entirely, but holds it originated toward the end of the first century from the great school of Asia Minor connected with John. Exterior evidence: by 150 the fourth Gospel existed and was attributed to John by Justin, Athenagoras, Tatian, Theophilus of Antioch, and Irenaeus, who came from John’s school with only Polycarp between; its role in Gnosticism, Montanism, and the Quartodeciman quarrel is decisive, and the first epistle of John is by the same author, recognized by Polycarp, Papias, and Irenaeus. Internally, the author speaks as eyewitness and wishes to pass for the apostle John; no example exists in the apostolic world of such falsehood.
The Brothers of the Lord and the Town of Nazareth
Renan pauses over a genealogical puzzle: the four men named as sons of Mary, the mother of Jesus—Jacob, Joseph, Simon, and Jude—reappear later as sons of Mary and Cleophas. Only this hypothesis dissolves the absurdity of two sisters each bearing three or four identically named sons, and of supposing that James and Simon, the first two bishops of Jerusalem, called “brothers of the Lord,” were genuine brothers of Jesus who began as his enemies and then converted. The evangelist, hearing these four sons of Cleophas called “brothers of the Lord,” mistakenly inserted their names into the gospel lists, while the real brothers’ names stayed obscure. “Brother of the Lord” was, in the primitive Church, a kind of order akin to the apostles.
Jesus’s sisters were married at Nazareth, and he spent the first years of his youth there. Nazareth was a small town set in a hollow at the summit of the mountains that close the plain of Esdraelon on the north—a heap of huts built without style, harsh and poor like the Semitic villages of today, its houses like cubes of stone surrounded by vines and fig-trees. Yet the surroundings are charming; no place was better suited to dreams of perfect happiness. Even now Nazareth is a delightful abode, the one spot in Palestine where the mind feels relief from the desolation oppressing it elsewhere. The people are amiable and cheerful, the gardens fresh and green; Anthony the Martyr, at the end of the sixth century, compared the fertility of its valleys to paradise. The fountain where the town’s life and gaiety once concentrated is destroyed, its channels holding only a muddy stream, but the beauty of the women who gather there in the evening—remarked even in the sixth century and looked on as a gift of the Virgin—is still strikingly preserved. Mary was no doubt there almost daily, taking her place with her jar among her companions.
The Horizon of Jesus
From the town the horizon is limited, but ascending the plateau swept by perpetual breeze, the prospect is splendid. To the west lie the outlines of Carmel plunging into the sea; before one spread the double summit above Megiddo, the mountains of Shechem’s country with their patriarchal holy places, the hills of Gilboa, the little group attached to Shunem and Endor, and Tabor with its rounded form that antiquity compared to a bosom. Through a depression between the mountains of Shunem and Tabor appear the valley of the Jordan and the high plains of Peraea. To the north, the mountains of Safed incline toward the sea. Such was the horizon of Jesus—this enchanted circle, cradle of the kingdom of God, was for years his world. Even later he departed little beyond the familiar limits of his childhood: northward, almost on the flank of Hermon, Caesarea-Philippi marked his furthest advance into the Gentile world; southward, the sombre Samaritan hills foreshadowed the dreariness of Judea beyond, parched as by a scorching wind of desolation and death.
If the world, remaining Christian but attaining a better idea of the esteem in which its religion’s origin should be held, should wish to replace the mean and apocryphal sanctuaries of the dark ages with authentic holy places, it is upon this height of Nazareth that it will rebuild its temple. There, at the birthplace of Christianity and centre of its Founder’s actions, the great church ought to be raised in which all Christians may worship. There too, where sleep Joseph the carpenter and thousands of forgotten Nazarenes who never passed beyond the horizon of their valley, would be the best station in the world for the philosopher to contemplate the course of human affairs, to console himself for their uncertainty, and to reassure himself as to the Divine end the world pursues through countless falterings.
The Education of Jesus
This aspect of Nature, at once smiling and grand, was the whole education of Jesus. He learned to read and write, doubtless by the Eastern method—a book placed in the child’s hands, repeated in cadence with his little comrades until he knew it by heart. It is doubtful whether he understood the Hebrew writings in their original tongue; his biographers make him quote them according to Aramean translations, and his principles of exegesis resembled those in vogue, forming the spirit of the Targums and Midrashim. The schoolmaster in small Jewish towns was the hazzan, or reader of the synagogue.
The Jewish People and the Messianic Dream
From the Babylonian captivity to the Middle Ages the Jewish people lived in a state of extreme tension, producing interpreters who wrote as if in a fever, rarely on reason’s middle path. Jewish thinkers were the first to seek a general theory of human progress, not separating humanity’s lot from their own small race. Greece, confined to itself, had admirable historians but no general philosophy of history embracing all humanity before the Roman era. The Jew, through a prophetic sense, made history enter into religion, perhaps owing something to Persia. Persia conceived world history as successive evolutions, each presided over by a prophet with a hazar—a reign of a thousand years—preparing the reign of Ormuzd; at the exhaustion of the chiliasms comes paradise, with one language, one law, one government, preceded by calamities in which Dahak breaks his chains and two prophets console mankind. These ideas reached Rome, inspiring prophetic poems about periods of history, succession of gods, world renovation, and a final golden age. Daniel, Enoch, and parts of the Sibylline books express the same theory among Jews. Such thoughts were held only by a few lively imaginations; the author of Esther despised the rest of the world, and the epicurean author of Ecclesiastes thought little of the future. Great achievements come from the minority; despite their defects, the Jewish people authored history’s finest disinterested enthusiasm. Opposition makes a country’s glory: Socrates was Athens’ glory though put to death; Spinoza, the greatest modern Jew, was expelled by the synagogue; Jesus was Israel’s glory, crucified.
A gigantic dream haunted the Jewish people, renewing youth in decrepitude. Stranger to individual recompense, Judea concentrated love and desire on the national future, possessing divine promises of a boundless future. As reality from the ninth century BCE gave the world to physical force, she took refuge in impossible ideas. Before the captivity, weakened earthly hopes led to dreams of restoring David’s house and the triumph of theocracy over idolatry. At the captivity, a harmonious poet saw a future Jerusalem with distant isles as tributaries, in colors suggesting Jesus’ visions six centuries off. Cyrus’s victory seemed to realize these hopes; Avesta disciples and Jehovah’s adorers believed themselves brothers. Persia banished the multiple devas, transforming them into demons, drawing from old Arian naturalistic imaginations a species of Monotheism. Israel reposed under the Achemenidae, and under Xerxes made itself feared by Iranians. But the triumphal, often cruel entry of Greek and Roman civilization into Asia threw Israel back on dreams, invoking the Messiah as judge and avenger; a complete renovation, a world-shaking revolution, was needed to satisfy its thirst for vengeance.
Resurrection and the Burning Atmosphere
Had Israel possessed the spiritualistic doctrine dividing man into body and soul, this paroxysm of rage would not have existed; that doctrine came from Greek philosophy, not Jewish tradition. Ancient Hebrew writings contain no trace of future rewards or punishments.
Herodias, Antipas, and the Imprisonment of John
Herodias, granddaughter of Herod the Great, was violent, ambitious, and passionate, detesting Judaism and despising its laws. Married against her will to her uncle Herod, a disinherited son of Mariamne who played no public part, she found her husband’s inferior position intolerable and determined to be sovereign at any cost. Antipas became her instrument: desperately enamored, he promised to marry her and repudiate his first wife, the daughter of Hareth, king of Petra and emir of the neighboring Perean tribes. Warned of the plot, the Arabian princess concealed her intention, pretended to wish to journey to Machero in her father’s territory, and had herself conducted thither by Antipas’s officers.
Machero was a colossal fortress built by Alexander Jannaeus and rebuilt by Herod, standing in an abrupt wady east of the Dead Sea—a wild, desolate country believed haunted by demons—on the boundary of Hareth’s and Antipas’s lands, then in Hareth’s possession. Warned in time, Hareth prepared everything for his daughter’s flight, and she was conducted from tribe to tribe to Petra. The almost incestuous union of Antipas and Herodias then took place. Jewish marriage laws were a constant rock of offence between the irreligious Herods and strict Jews, and John, energetically blaming Antipas, echoed the general feeling. This sufficed to decide Antipas to act on his suspicions: he arrested the Baptist and shut him in Machero, probably seized after Hareth’s daughter departed. More timid than cruel, Antipas did not wish to kill him; some said he feared popular sedition, others that he took pleasure listening to the prisoner, whose conversations threw him into perplexities. The detention was prolonged; John preserved extended influence in prison, corresponded with his disciples, appears again in connection with Jesus, and his faith in the near Messiah only grew firmer.
The Development of Jesus’s Ideas
Until John’s arrest, around the summer of the year 29, Jesus did not quit the Dead Sea and Jordan neighborhood. A desert sojourn was considered preparation for great things, and Jesus passed forty days there with only savage beasts, fasting rigorously. The desert was popularly regarded as the residence of demons, and it was believed Jesus underwent terrible trials there, Satan assailing him with illusions and seductive promises, and that angels afterward ministered to him. Probably coming from the desert, Jesus learned of John’s arrest. He had no reason to stay in a partly strange country, and perhaps feared involvement in severities toward John. He regained Galilee, his true home, ripened by experience and conscious of his originality through contact with a great man very different from himself.
On the whole, John’s influence was more hurtful than useful to Jesus, checking his development; Jesus likely had ideas superior to John’s when descending to the Jordan, inclining toward baptism only by concession. Had the Baptist remained free, Jesus might never have thrown off external rites, remaining an unknown Jewish sectary. With John imprisoned, his school diminished and Jesus was left to his own impulses; he owed John only lessons in preaching and popular action, thenceforth preaching with greater power and authority. His sojourn with John—more by the natural progress of his own thought than by John’s influence—ripened his ideas on the kingdom of heaven. His watchword henceforth is the good tidings that the kingdom of God is at hand. He is no longer simply a delightful moralist but the transcendent revolutionary seeking to renovate the world from its foundations. To await the kingdom of God becomes synonymous with being a disciple of Jesus—a phrase already familiar to Jews, but to which Jesus gave a moral sense and social application even the author of Daniel scarcely dared imagine.
He declared evil the reigning power in the present world; Satan is prince of this world, and everything obeys him; kings kill prophets, priests and doctors do not practice what they command, the righteous are persecuted, the good weep. The world is the enemy of God and His saints, but God will awaken and avenge His saints; the day is at hand, the abomination at its height. The advent will be a great sudden revolution; the actual state being bad, one must conceive nearly its reverse; the first shall be last. Good and bad are mixed like tares and grain, and the master lets them grow until the hour of violent separation. The kingdom is like a great net gathering good and bad fish, the good preserved and the rest thrown away. The germ will not be recognizable at first: like a mustard-seed, smallest of seeds but becoming a tree where birds repose, or like leaven fermenting the whole meal. A series of parables, often obscure, expressed the event’s suddenness, apparent injustice, and inevitable final character.
Jesus’s first thought—so rooted it probably had no beginning, part of his very being—was that he was the Son of God, the friend of his Father, the doer of his will. The persuasion that he was to establish the kingdom took absolute possession of his mind; he regarded himself as the universal reformer. Heavens, earth, nature, madness, disease, and death were but his instruments; in heroic will he believed himself all-powerful. If earth would not submit, it would be broken up and purified by fire.
The Decisive Success at Capernaum
A group of men and women, marked by juvenile frankness and simple innocence, adhered to Jesus and declared, “Thou art the Messiah.” Since the Messiah was expected to be the son of David, they conceded him this synonymous title. Jesus allowed it gladly, though it might embarrass him because his birth was well known. His own preferred name was “Son of Man,” a humble title directly tied to Messianic hopes, which he used as a synonym for “I,” a pronoun he avoided. He was never addressed by this title, presumably because it would fully apply only on the day of his future appearance.
His center of action at this period was Capernaum on the lake of Gennesareth. Its name suggests a small town of ancient character, opposed to Roman-built towns like Tiberias, and it was so little known that Josephus took it for a fountain, the fountain being more celebrated than the village. Like Nazareth, Capernaum had no history and had not shared in the profane movement favored by the Herods. Jesus was much attached to it and made it a second home.
Soon after his return he attempted to begin his work at Nazareth but failed. According to one biographer he could perform no miracle there. Local knowledge of his unimportant family injured his authority: people could not regard as son of David one whose brother, sister, and brother-in-law they saw daily. His family strongly opposed him and refused to believe in his mission. The Nazarenes, more violent, reportedly wished to kill him by throwing him from a steep rock. Jesus remarked this was the fate of all great men, applying the proverb that no one is a prophet in his own country.
Synagogue Missions and the Growing Flock
Undiscouraged, he returned to Capernaum, met a more favorable reception, and organized missions among small surrounding towns. People assembled chiefly on Saturday, the day he chose for teaching. Each town had its synagogue—a small rectangular room with a portico, decorated in Greek style.
The Forerunner and the Galilean Stranger in Jerusalem
Malachi had promised a messenger who would prepare the way before God’s chosen one, and popular belief held that this messenger was Elias, descending from heaven to reconcile God with his people. Sometimes Enoch or Jeremiah were joined to him as precursors, an idea so strikingly close to Parsee doctrine that Renan suspects its origin lies there. By the time of Jesus this expectation was woven into Jewish Messianic theory: two faithful witnesses in garments of repentance would open the great drama. Against this background Jesus and his disciples had no doubt about John the Baptist’s mission. When scribes objected that Elias had not appeared, they answered that Elias was come, that John was Elias raised from the dead—a man who recalled the ancient prophet by his manner of life and his defiance of political authority. Jesus praised his forerunner as greater than any born of women and blamed the Pharisees for refusing his baptism.
Respect for John endured through the first Christian generation, and he was even made a relative of Jesus. To ground Jesus’s mission in admitted testimony, it was claimed that John recognized him as the Messiah at first sight, confessed himself unworthy to untie his sandals, and at first refused to baptize him. Renan treats these as exaggerations, refuted by the doubtful form of John’s last message, yet John remains in legend the austere forerunner, the gloomy preacher of repentance who announces the kingdom and dies before beholding it. His beheading by Herodias opened the era of Christian martyrs. His school did not die with him: it lived on beside the school of Jesus, at first on good terms. Years after both masters’ deaths people were still baptized with John’s baptism; Apollos and many Ephesian Christians belonged to both camps, and Josephus attached himself to an ascetic named Banou who closely resembled John. Toward the year 80 baptism was contending with Christianity, especially in Asia Minor, and the sects of Hemero-baptists, Baptists, and Elchasaites, whose descendants survive among the Mendaites, share John’s origin. His true school, partly mixed with Christianity, dwindled into a small heresy; by his self-abnegation he won a unique place in humanity’s religious pantheon.
First Attempts on Jerusalem
Jesus went almost every year to Jerusalem for the passover, and it was in the year 31, certainly after John’s death, that the most important visit occurred. Many disciples followed him, and he conformed to the pilgrimage so as not to wound Jewish opinion, with which he had not yet broken. These journeys were essential to his design: to play a leading part he must leave Galilee and attack Judaism in its stronghold. The little Galilean community was far from at home in Jerusalem, a city of pedantry, acrimony, disputes, and narrow fanaticism, where the Pharisees dominated and the study of the Law had shrunk to casuistry. Its theological culture refined no intellect; the scribe’s learning was barbarous and absurd, filled its possessors with ridiculous pride, and looked on Greek culture as the learned Mussulman looks on European civilization.
This society weighed heavily on the tender minds of the north. The contempt of the Hierosolymites for the Galileans made separation complete: in the temple they met only insult, a contemptuous priesthood laughed at their simple devotion, their corrupt dialect and confused letters were mocked, and “foolish Galileans” had become proverbial. They were thought not of pure Jewish blood, and no one expected Galilee to produce a prophet; only a badly interpreted passage in Isaiah let them hope. The reputation of Nazareth was especially bad. The parched land around Jerusalem deepened Jesus’s dislike—valleys without water, arid stony soil, scarcely any ancient monuments.
Jesus and the Celebrated Doctors
Jesus seems to have had no connection with the celebrated doctors of his time. Hillel and Shammai were dead; the greatest authority was Gamaliel, a man of liberal spirit, tolerant through good society, not scrupling to gaze even on pagan women, and versed in Greek. After Jesus’s death Gamaliel spoke moderately of the new sect, and Paul sat at his feet, but Jesus probably never entered his school.
The Destroyer of Judaism
One idea Jesus carried from Jerusalem and henceforth rooted in his mind: no union was possible between him and the ancient Jewish religion. The abolition of the sacrifices that had disgusted him, the suppression of a haughty priesthood, and the abrogation of the Law appeared absolutely necessary. From this time he stands not as a Jewish reformer but as a destroyer of Judaism. Others had hinted that the Messiah would bring a new law for all the earth, and the Essenes were nearly indifferent to the temple, but Jesus was the first to dare to say that from his time, or rather from John’s, the Law was abolished. When driven to extremities he lifted the veil entirely, using the image of new cloth on an old garment and new wine in old bottles. This was his chief characteristic as teacher and creator. The temple excluded all but Jews; Jesus held that every well-disposed man who received and loved him was a son of Abraham. The pride of blood was the great enemy to be combated. He was no longer a Jew but in the highest degree revolutionary, proclaiming the rights of man rather than of the Jew, the religion of the heart rather than of blood. Moses was superseded, the temple rendered useless and irrevocably condemned.
Intercourse with Pagans and Samaritans
Following these principles, Jesus despised all religion not of the heart. The vain practices of devotees and the exterior strictness that trusted to formality for salvation found in him a mortal enemy. He cared little for fasting, preferred forgiveness to sacrifice, and made love of God, charity, and mutual forgiveness his whole law—nothing could be less priestly, for the priest advocates public sacrifice while discouraging private prayer that dispenses with his office. We should seek in vain in the Gospel for one religious rite recommended by Jesus. Baptism was of secondary importance; about prayer he prescribed only that it proceed from the heart. Many thought mere good-will could replace genuine love of goodness, imagining they could win the kingdom by crying “Rabbi, Rabbi”; he rebuked them, proclaiming that his religion consisted in doing good, and quoted Isaiah: this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.
The Sabbath was the principal point on which the whole edifice of Pharisaic scruples was raised. That ancient and excellent institution had become a pretext for miserable disputes and superstitious beliefs—even intermittent springs were accounted “Sabbatical.” This was where Jesus loved best to defy his adversaries, openly violating the Sabbath and answering reproaches with subtle raillery. He despised still more the modern observances tradition had added to the Law: ablutions and over-subtle distinctions between pure and impure found in him a pitiless opponent. Nothing entering a man from without defiles him, he said; what comes out of him is what defiles. The Pharisees, propagators of these mummeries, were unceasingly denounced as blind leaders of the blind, a generation of vipers.
The Superhuman Consciousness
Renan argues it is certain Jesus never intended to pass himself off as an incarnation of God. Such an idea was wholly foreign to the Jewish mind, and the synoptic gospels contain no trace of it; it appears only in portions of John, which cannot be accepted as expressing Jesus’s own thoughts.
The Kingdom of God as the Rind of the Sacred Fruit
Renan pauses to weigh the idea that had carried Jesus and his followers this far. The “kingdom of God,” he argues, was a chimera—yet it was the thick rind enclosing the sacred fruit that would nourish Christianity through its long career. This fantastic city of God, endlessly pursued, became the principle of futurity animating every reformer from Joachim of Flora to the Protestant sectaries of the modern age. The impotent effort to build a perfect society produced the extraordinary tension that made the true Christian an athlete wrestling against the existing order. But the same idea bred great errors: the end of the world, suspended as a perpetual menace, provoked periodic panics across the centuries and left society so uncertain of its own existence that it contracted a servile humility, rendering the Middle Ages inferior to antiquity and to modern times. Where Christ’s coming had first been greeted with joy, a world grown old clung to life, and the day of grace turned into a day of wrath.
Even amid barbarism the idea remained fruitful. Against the feudal church, sects and holy persons protested in the name of the Gospel, and in modern times dreams of ideal social organization blossom from the same root. All social revolutions, Renan predicts, will be grafted onto this phrase—though socialist attempts tainted by coarse materialism will stay barren until they recover the true spirit of Jesus: absolute idealism, the principle that to possess the world one must renounce it. The phrase also answers the soul’s craving for a supplementary destiny, a final reparation in which virtuous humanity is rewarded and the ideal figure of Jesus confounds the frivolous and the selfish.
Institutions of Jesus
Jesus was never wholly absorbed in apocalyptic dreams, and the proof is that he laid, with rare forethought, the foundation of a church destined to endure. He chose the twelve apostles—among them the sons of Jonas and of Zebedee, James son of Cleophas, Philip, Nathaniel, Thomas, Matthew, Simon Zelotes, Thaddeus, and Judas of Kerioth—a number probably shaped by the twelve tribes of Israel. Peter held a fraternal priority, and to this privileged group Jesus confided the propagation of his work. Nothing about them resembled a regular sacerdotal school; the lists are uncertain, two or three figures remain obscure, and at least Peter and Philip were married with children.
Jesus surrounded himself with mystery, reserving certain teachings for the twelve and postponing full testimony until after his death. “What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light.” During his lifetime the apostles preached, never straying far, announcing the speedy coming of the kingdom. They went from town to town relying on Eastern hospitality, for the guest in the East holds authority superior to the master of the house; remove that ancient right, Renan says, and the propagation of Christianity becomes inexplicable. The laborer is worthy of his hire; once installed, the messengers were to remain, eating and drinking what was offered, greeting each house with the salaam, and shaking the dust from their shoes where they were rejected.
The Monachal Ideal and Its Dangers
The primitive Church could not have become a lasting society without the variety of germs Jesus deposited. More than a century passed before the true Christian Church disengaged itself from the little sect of “latter-day saints”—just as Buddhism began as a rule for monks, and as the Franciscan order would have done had it become the rule of all society. Jesus himself never advanced beyond this first, entirely monachal period. He preached war against nature and total severance from the ties of blood, demanding that his followers leave house, parents, brethren, and wife for the kingdom’s sake. He required absolute poverty, no money or provisions or change of raiment, no prepared defence when arraigned, since the heavenly advocate would inspire them. He predicted persecutions, hatred, scourging, and betrayal by brother and father, yet told them not to fear those who kill the body. In fits of severity he abolished every natural tie: whoever does not hate father, mother, wife, children, and his own life cannot be his disciple. Something strange and more than human spoke in these words, like a fire reducing everything to a frightful wilderness—the sombre giant whom a grand presentiment drew ever further out of humanity’s pale. Yet the same lips offered singular sweetness: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” A great danger lurked in this exalted morality: by detaching man from earth it severed the ties of life, so that the Christian might be praised for being a bad son or a bad patriot, and a fatal germ of theocracy entered the world.
Conflict with the Pharisees
Jesus’s conflicts with official hypocrisy were continual. Reformers typically oppose the text of sacred books to tradition, but Jesus appealed to the conscience and cut through both text and commentaries at once; his mission concerned the future, not the past. Disputes broke out over external practices—ablutions and the like—which neither he nor his disciples observed. What wounded him most was the Pharisees’ air of assurance, their paltry worship ending in vain titles while the heart went unimproved. The parable of the Pharisee and the publican rendered this thought: the one thanking God he was not as other men, the other smiting his breast and begging mercy; the publican, said Jesus, went down justified. The consequence was a hate death alone could satisfy. John the Baptist had provoked similar enmities, but the war with Jesus was to the death. His exquisite irony struck home, becoming everlasting stigmas—a Nessus-shirt of ridicule woven with divine skill, where Socrates and Molière only touched the skin, he carried fire to the marrow. It was just that this master of irony should pay for his triumph with his life; even in Galilee the Pharisees sought to ruin him, and he ran into danger of his own free will, drawn toward Judea as by a charm, anxious to fulfill the proverb that a prophet must not die outside Jerusalem.
The Last Journey to Jerusalem
Jesus had long sensed the dangers around him and for some eighteen months avoided the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. At the feast of Tabernacles his relations, always malevolent and incredulous, pressed him to go, seemingly insinuating a hidden project to ruin him. Suspecting treachery, he at first refused; but when the pilgrims’ caravan set out, he started unknown to everyone, almost alone. It was his last farewell to Galilee.
Doctrines of Growing Conflict
His terrible doctrine of the substitution of the Gentiles—that the kingdom would be transferred to others because its intended recipients would not receive it—became a fearful menace against the aristocracy. The title “Son of God,” openly assumed in parables where his enemies appeared as murderers of heavenly messengers, was open defiance to the Judaism of the Law, and his bold appeal to the poor was still more seditious. He declared he had come so that those who see not might see, and those who see might be made blind. His dislike of the temple forced from him an imprudent speech: “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands.” The sentence was seized upon as a pretext, reappeared in the preamble of his death-warrant, and rang in his ears at Golgotha.
Bethphage, Gethsemane, and the Weight of the Mission
Renan pauses over Bethphage, arguing from the Mishnah and Talmud that it was less a village than a kind of pomaerium reaching to the foot of the temple’s eastern basement, ringed by its own wall—the Gospels, he insists, never plainly call it a village. He likewise rejects the exaggerated population figures for Jerusalem: Hecataeus’s 120,000, and even the notion of a city quadruple the size of the modern one, which does not reach 15,000. Cicero’s contemptuous “paltry little town” is nearer the mark.
A deep melancholy settled on Jesus in his final days, though his temper had generally been joyous and serene. All the narratives agree that before his arrest he passed through doubt and trouble, an anticipated agony. Some report the cry, “Now is my soul troubled. O Father, save me from this hour”; some a voice from heaven, or an angel sent to console him. One widely spread version sets the scene in the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus withdrew a stone’s throw from his sleeping disciples, taking only Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and fell on his face in prayer, his soul sad unto death, until resignation to the divine will sustained him. Renan doubts the synoptics’ placement of this on the last night, asking why John, an intimate witness, omits it from his circumstantial account of Thursday evening. What can safely be said is that the weight of his accepted mission pressed cruelly upon him; human nature asserted itself; perhaps he hesitated, and terror and doubt threw him into an exhaustion worse than death. Renan wonders whether he remembered Galilee’s fountains, the vine and fig-tree, the young maidens who might have loved him—whether he cursed his destiny or regretted not remaining a simple artisan of Nazareth. These inward troubles were a sealed letter to his disciples, who understood nothing and supplied conjectures. Soon his divine nature regained supremacy; he might still have avoided death but would not; love for his work sustained him, and he resolved to drink the cup to the dregs. Henceforth he is entirely himself: the incomparable hero of the Passion, founder of the rights of free conscience, model for suffering souls.
The Council and the Betrayal of Judas
The triumph of Bethphage—the provincials’ bold act, celebrating their Messiah-King at Jerusalem’s very gates—completed the exasperation of the Pharisees and the temple aristocracy. A new council was held on Wednesday, the 12th of Nisan, at the house of Joseph Kaiapha, and Jesus’ immediate arrest was resolved. To avoid a scene, and fearing an outbreak since Jesus was popular, and because the Passover began Friday evening, they fixed the arrest for Thursday, deciding not to seize him in the temple where he came daily, but to observe his habits and take him in a retired place. The priests’ agents sounded his disciples and found what they sought in Judas of Kerioth, who betrayed his Master, gave information, and undertook to guide the arresting troop.
Renan doubts this excess of vileness, noting that Judas had been a disciple, an apostle, one who performed miracles and drove out demons. Legend describes eleven saints and one reprobate, but reality does not proceed by such absolute categories. Avarice, the synoptics’ motive, does not suffice: a man keeping the purse, knowing his loss by his chief’s death, would hardly abandon his profits for a small sum; John does not even speak of payment. Nor does wounded self-love at Bethany explain it. John’s portrayal of him as a thief and unbeliever from the beginning is improbable. Renan prefers jealousy or dissension among the disciples, confirmed by John’s peculiar hatred of Judas. Less pure in heart, Judas had become unconsciously narrow-minded through his office; the treasurer overcame the apostle; his murmurings at Bethany suggest he thought the Master cost his spiritual family too dear, and this mean economy caused other collisions. Renan holds the curses on Judas somewhat unjust: perhaps more awkwardness than perversity; the people’s moral conscience is quick but unstable, at the mercy of impulse, and trifling spite could convert a partisan into a traitor. If desire for a few pieces of silver turned his head, he did not wholly lose moral sentiment, since he repented and, it is said, killed himself.
Thursday, the 13th of Nisan
Each moment now counts more than whole ages. The next evening began the Passover, begun by eating the Paschal lamb and continuing seven days with unleavened bread, the first and last days peculiarly solemn. The disciples prepared for the feast. Jesus is led to be believed to have known of Judas’s treachery and suspected his fate. In the evening he took his last repast with his disciples. It was not the ritual Passover, as was afterward supposed owing to an error of a day in reckoning, but for the primitive church this Thursday supper was the true passover, the seal of the new covenant; each disciple connected his most cherished remembrances with it, and it became the corner-stone of Christian piety and the starting-point of the most fruitful institutions. John’s narrative, expressly stating that Jesus died the same day the Paschal lamb was eaten, carries greater authority than the synoptics’ system.
Jesus Before Pilate
In the morning the chief priests and elders assembled again. Their aim was to have Pilate ratify the Sanhedrim’s condemnation, which, since the Roman occupation, was no longer sufficient on its own. The procurator lacked the imperial legate’s power over life and death, but since Jesus was not a Roman citizen, only the governor’s authorization was needed. Renan explains that when a political people subjects a nation in which civil and religious laws are confounded, the Romans were brought to give the Jewish law a sort of official support: Roman law did not apply to Jews, who remained under the canonical law recorded in the Talmud, just as Arabs in Algeria are still governed by the code of Islamism. Though neutral in religion, the Romans often sanctioned penalties for religious faults—comparable to the sacred cities of India under English dominion.
The priests’ agents bound Jesus and led him to the judgment-hall, the former palace of Herod adjoining the Tower of Antonia. It was the morning of the day the Paschal lamb was eaten—Friday the 14th of Nisan, April 3. The Jews would have been defiled by entering, so they remained outside. Pilate, informed, ascended the tribunal in the open air at the place called Gabbatha, or in Greek Lithostrotos, because of its pavement. He displayed annoyance at being mixed up in the affair, then shut himself in the judgment-hall with Jesus. A conversation took place whose precise details are lost, no witness being able to repeat it to the disciples, but whose tenor John appears to have well divined.
Pontius Pilate, surnamed from the pilum or javelin of honor, had hitherto had no relation with the new sect. Indifferent to Jewish internal quarrels, he saw only intemperate imaginations and disordered brains. He did not like the Jews, but they detested him more, thinking him hard, scornful, passionate, and accusing him of improbable crimes. Jerusalem, a centre of national fermentation, was seditious and insupportable for a foreigner.
Main Arguments
The central argument of the book is that the life of Jesus can be written as history, not as dogma. Renan treats the Gospels as legendary biographies, comparable to the Legends of the Saints and the Lives of Plotinus, Proclus, and Isidore, rather than as either biographies after the manner of Suetonius or fictitious legends in the style of Philostratus. He illustrates the point with an analogy: three or four old soldiers of the Empire writing Napoleon’s life from memory would contain numerous errors and great discordances—one placing Wagram before Marengo, another saying Napoleon drove Robespierre’s government from the Tuileries, a third omitting important expeditions—yet the hero’s character would emerge truthfully. So with the Gospels: the evangelists display entire indifference to everything not of the very spirit of Jesus; contradictions of time, place, and persons were regarded as insignificant; the higher the inspiration attributed to Jesus’ words, the less granted to the compilers, who saw themselves as simple scribes caring only to omit nothing they knew.
A second argument concerns the composition of the Gospels. Renan distinguishes two original documents behind the synoptics: the Logia of Matthew, containing Jesus’ discourses, which form a complete whole when detached, and the primitive narrative left by Mark, based on Peter’s recollections. The first and second Gospels rest on a common document, with the second Gospel a slightly modified reproduction. The discourses were early written in Aramean; Jesus’ deeds were early recorded. These were not dogmatically fixed texts; many other Gospels claimed eyewitness tradition. Papias and others preferred oral tradition, since men believed the world was near its end and cared little to compose books for the future. Hence the Gospel texts had little authority for 150 years; additions and combinations were made freely. Justin’s “Memoirs of the Apostles” differed from our texts and he never quotes them textually; the pseudo-Clementine (Ebionite) quotations share this character. Only when tradition weakened, in the second half of the second century, did texts bearing apostolic names gain decisive authority and legal force.
A third argument concerns the fourth Gospel. Renan holds that doubts about it have better foundation. Papias, connected with John’s school, says nothing of a Life of Jesus by John, though he collected oral narratives from Aristion and Presbyteros Joannes; Eusebius would have mentioned it. The intrinsic difficulties are considerable: precise eyewitness narration alongside discourses totally different from Matthew’s; a more satisfactory plan of Jesus’ life yet passages showing the compiler’s dogmatic interest, ideas foreign to Jesus, and indications against the narrator’s good faith. The author dares not be sure a Galilean fisherman wrote it entirely, but holds it originated toward the end of the first century from the great school of Asia Minor connected with John. Exterior evidence places it by 150, attributed to John by Justin, Athenagorus, Tatian, Theophilus of Antioch, and Irenaeus; Irenaeus came from John’s school, with only Polycarp between. Its role in Gnosticism, Montanism, and the Quartodeciman quarrel is decisive. The first epistle of John is by the same author, recognized by Polycarp, Papias, and Irenaeus.
A fourth argument concerns the historical value of the discourses. If Jesus spoke as Matthew represents, he could not have spoken as John relates; no critic hesitates. John’s Gospel shows the apologist’s preoccupation, the sectarian’s mental reservation. Jesus did not found his work by pretentious tirades. The synoptics’ charm, Hebraistic idiom, analogies with Jewish doctors, and harmony with Galilee contrast with John’s obscure Gnosticism and distorted metaphysics. Some admirable gleams truly from Jesus exist, but the mystic tone does not match Jesus’ eloquence; a new spirit, Gnosticism, has begun. The discourses harmonize with Asia Minor’s syncretical philosophy; John drank from these springs. After 68 (Apocalypse) and 70 (Jerusalem’s destruction), the old apostle, disabused of a near Son of Man, may have inclined to surrounding ideas, attributing them to Jesus. Probably John had little share; the change was made around him. Precious notes from the apostle may have been used by disciples differently. Chapter twenty-one was added later, honoring Peter after his death and answering objections from John’s death. A decisive test: one writing the Life of Jesus without predetermined theory will often prefer John’s narration, especially the last months and passion features; but no meaningful Life can be composed from John’s discourses. These are artificial, like Plato’s dialogues rendering Socrates’ conversations—variations on a theme. The vocabulary differs: “kingdom of God” occurs but once; the style matches John’s Epistles; new mystical language (“world,” “truth,” “life,” “light,” “darkness”) appears.
A fifth argument concerns the Semitic race and the religion of humanity. The Indo-European religious intuitions were naturalistic—a moral, poetic embrace of Nature, full of the Infinite, expressed later by Shakespeare and Goethe. This was not theology or moral philosophy but melancholy, tenderness, imagination, and earnestness. Yet faith could not come from it because these worships struggled to detach from Polytheism and lacked a clear symbol. Brahminism survived only through India’s conservatism; Buddhism failed in the West; Druidism remained national; Greek reforms did not suffice. Persia alone made a dogmatic, almost Monotheistic religion, but possibly borrowed, and Persia did not convert the world—it was itself converted by Mohammedanism. The Semitic race has the glory of making the religion of humanity. The Bedouin patriarch, free from a corrupted world, prepared mankind’s faith. His superiority lay in antipathy to Syrian voluptuous worships, simple ritual, no temples, and insignificant theraphim. Among nomadic Semites, the Beni-Israel was chosen. Ancient relations with Egypt increased their repulsion to idolatry. A Law or Thora, attributed to Moses, became the code of Monotheism with germs of social equality and morality.
A sixth argument concerns the kingdom of God. Jesus declared evil the reigning power in the present world; Satan is “prince of this world,” everything obeys him; kings kill prophets, priests and doctors do not what they command, the righteous are persecuted, the good weep. The “world” is the enemy of God and His saints, but God will awaken and avenge His saints; the day is at hand, the abomination at its height. The advent will be a great sudden revolution; the actual state being bad, conceive nearly its reverse; the first shall be last. Good and bad are mixed like tares and grain; the master lets them grow; the hour of violent separation will come. The kingdom is like a great net gathering good and bad fish; the good preserved, the rest thrown away. The germ will not be recognizable at first: like a mustard-seed, smallest of seeds but becoming a tree where birds repose; or like leaven fermenting the whole meal. A series of parables, often obscure, expressed the event’s suddenness, apparent injustice, and inevitable final character.
A seventh argument concerns the originality of Jesus. Jesus carried to their conclusion principles already established in Judaism, which the official classes increasingly despised. Greek and Roman prayers are characterized as egotistical verbiage; no Pagan priest urged reconciliation with a brother before offering a gift at the altar. Alone in antiquity, the Jewish prophets, especially Isaiah, glimpsed true worship through antipathy to the priesthood, as in the denunciations of sacrifices, incense, and blood-filled hands. Later, certain doctors—Simeon the just, Jesus son of Sirach, Hillel—almost reached this point, declaring the sum of the Law to be righteousness. Philo, in the Judaeo-Egyptian world, attained ideas of high moral sanctity leading to disregard of the Law’s observances. Shemaia and Abtalion proved liberal casuists; Rabbi Johanan placed works of mercy above study of the Law. But Jesus alone proclaimed these principles effectively. He was least a priest, greatest enemy of forms that stifle religion; by this all are his disciples and successors, and he laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion, deserving the Divine rank accorded him. An absolutely new idea—worship founded on purity of heart and human brotherhood—entered the world through him.
An eighth argument concerns the necessity of action. Conceiving the good is insufficient; it must succeed among men, requiring less pure paths. If the Gospel were confined to some chapters of Matthew and Luke it would be more perfect, but would Jesus have converted the world without miracles? Had he died at this period, no page would wound us, but he would have remained unknown, lost among great unknown spirits; truth would not have been promulgated. Jesus, son of Sirach, and Hillel uttered aphorisms almost as exalted, yet Hillel will never be accounted Christianity’s founder. In morals as in art, precept is nothing, practice everything; truth attains full value only realized as fact. The palm is his who was mighty in words and works, discerning the good and causing its triumph at the price of his blood. Jesus, from this double point of view, is without equal.
Key Concepts
The kingdom of God is the central concept of Jesus’ teaching. Renan argues that Jesus gave the phrase a moral sense and social application even the author of Daniel scarcely dared imagine. To await the kingdom of God becomes synonymous with being a disciple of Jesus. The kingdom is conceived as the inheritance of the poor, a great sudden revolution in which the first shall be last, good and bad are separated like tares from grain, and the germ grows imperceptibly like a mustard-seed or leaven.
The Son of Man is the title Jesus preferred for himself. Renan notes that it occurs eighty-three times in the Gospels, always in Jesus’ discourses. It is a humble title directly tied to Messianic hopes; Jesus used it as a synonym for “I,” which he avoided. He was never addressed by this title, presumably because it would fully apply only on the day of his future appearance. The disciples conceded him the title of Messiah, or son of David, which he allowed gladly, though it might embarrass him because his birth was well known.
The Son of God is the persuasion that Jesus was the friend of his Father, the doer of his will. Renan argues that this thought was so rooted in Jesus that it probably had no beginning, part of his very being. The persuasion that he was to establish the kingdom took absolute possession of his mind; he regarded himself as the universal reformer. Heavens, earth, nature, madness, disease, death were but his instruments; in heroic will he believed himself all-powerful.
The Logia of Matthew are the discourses of Jesus, which form a complete whole when detached. Renan holds that these were early written in Aramean and that they constitute one of the two original documents behind the synoptics. The other is the primitive narrative left by Mark, based on Peter’s recollections.
The legendary biography is Renan’s term for the Gospels. They are neither biographies after the manner of Suetonius nor fictitious legends in the style of Philostratus; they are legendary biographies, comparable to the Legends of the Saints and the Lives of Plotinus, Proclus, and Isidore. Inexactitude is particularly felt, yet the hero’s character emerges truthfully.
The Ebionim are the small Christian sects of Batanea preserving Syro-Chaldean, who in some respects followed the course marked out by Jesus. The Gospel according to the Hebrews and the Gospel according to the Egyptians matter because they were written in Aramean like Matthew’s Logia, appearing to constitute one version of Matthew’s Gospel, and because they were the Gospel of the Ebionim. Yet in their present state these Gospels are inferior as critical authorities to the compilation of Matthew’s Gospel now possessed.
The apocalypse is the literary form of the Jewish dreams of the end. The first apocalypse, “The Book of Daniel,” appeared in the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes—a revival of prophecy with a sombre passion. Daniel, Enoch, and parts of the Sibylline books express the same theory of successive ages, each presided over by a prophet with a hazar (chiliasm, a reign of a thousand years), analogous to India’s Avataer, preparing the reign of Ormuzd.
The resurrection is the doctrine that the righteous will live again to participate in the Messianic reign, in the flesh, as kings and judges, present at their ideas’ triumph and their enemies’ humiliation. Renan notes that among ancient Israel only indecisive traces of this fundamental dogma exist. The Sadducee, disbelieving it, was faithful to old Jewish doctrine; the Pharisee, believing in resurrection, was the innovator. In religion the zealous sect innovates, progresses, and has influence. Resurrection, different from immortality of the soul, proceeded naturally from anterior doctrines and the people’s position; perhaps Persia furnished elements.
The synagogue is the center of Jewish life and the instrument of Jesus’ power. Each town had its synagogue—a small rectangular room with a portico, Greek-decorated. Synagogues were little independent republics with extensive jurisdiction, issuing honorary decrees, voting binding resolutions, and ordaining corporal punishments. Liberty for anyone to become reader and commentator afforded marvelous facilities for propagating new ideas. This was Jesus’ most habitual means of doctrinal instruction: he entered the synagogue, stood to read, the hazzan offered the book, he unrolled it, read the day’s parasha or haphtara, and drew a lesson conforming to his own ideas.
The hazzan is the reader or apparitor of the synagogue, who offered the book to Jesus when he stood to read. Other officers included a president, “elders,” deputies (secretaries or messengers conducting correspondence between synagogues), and a shammash (sacristan).
The Nazir is one vowed to abstinences. John the Baptist was a Nazir from infancy, vowed to abstinences. The desert attracted him; he led a Yogi-like life, clothed in skins or camel’s hair, eating locusts and wild honey.
The Essenes or Therapeutae were groups of ascetics near John’s birthplace, on the Dead Sea’s eastern shores. The spirit of the time favored small churches—the period of the Essenes or Therapeutae. Sect chiefs were imagined as recluses with rules, like founders of religious orders.
Themes
The idealization of Jesus is a recurring theme. Renan argues that Jesus would be a phenomenon unparalleled in history if, with the part he played, he had not early become idealized. Legends about Alexander were invented before his companions in arms became extinct; those about St. Francis d’Assisi began in his lifetime. A rapid metamorphosis operated in the twenty or thirty years after Jesus’ death, imposing on his biography the peculiarities of an ideal legend. Death adds perfection to the most perfect man. Many anecdotes were conceived to prove Messianic prophecies had been accomplished. No Jewish work of the time gives a series of prophecies exactly declaring what the Messiah should accomplish; many Messianic allusions quoted by the evangelists are so subtle and indirect that one cannot believe they all responded to a generally admitted doctrine. Sometimes they reasoned: “The Messiah ought to do such a thing; now Jesus is the Messiah; therefore Jesus has done such a thing.”
The tension of Jewish expectation is another theme. From the Babylonian captivity to the Middle Ages, the Jewish people lived in a state of extreme tension, producing interpreters who wrote as if in a fever, rarely on reason’s middle path. Jewish thinkers were the first to seek a general theory of human progress, not separating humanity’s lot from their own small race. A gigantic dream haunted the Jewish people, renewing youth in decrepitude. Stranger to individual recompense, Judea concentrated love and desire on the national future, possessing divine promises of a boundless future. As reality from the ninth century BCE gave the world to physical force, she took refuge in impossible ideas.
The landscape of Galilee is a theme that runs through the book.
