Jesus, according to Matthew, agreed so entirely with Rousseau,
and felt the danger so strongly, that when people who were not
ill or in trouble came to him and asked him to exercise his
powers as a sign of his mission, he was irritated beyond measure,
and refused with an indignation which they, not seeing Rousseau's
point, must have thought very unreasonable. To be called "an evil
and adulterous generation" merely for asking a miracle worker to
give an exhibition of his powers, is rather a startling
experience. Mahomet, by the way, also lost his temper when people
asked him to perform miracles. But Mahomet expressly disclaimed
any unusual powers; whereas it is clear from Matthew's story that
Jesus (unfortunately for himself, as he thought) had some powers
of healing. It is also obvious that the exercise of such powers
would give rise to wild tales of magical feats which would expose
their hero to condemnation as an impostor among people whose good
opinion was of great consequence to the movement started by his
mission.

But the deepest annoyance arising from the miracles would be the
irrelevance of the issue raised by them. Jesus's teaching has
nothing to do with miracles. If his mission had been simply to
demonstrate a new method of restoring lost eyesight, the miracle
of curing the blind would have been entirely relevant. But to say
"You should love your enemies; and to convince you of this I will
now proceed to cure this gentleman of cataract" would have been,
to a man of Jesus's intelligence, the proposition of an idiot. If
it could be proved today that not one of the miracles of Jesus
actually occurred, that proof would not invalidate a single one
of his didactic utterances; and conversely, if it could be proved
that not only did the miracles actually occur, but that he had
wrought a thousand other miracles a thousand times more
wonderful, not a jot of weight would be added to his doctrine.
And yet the intellectual energy of sceptics and divines has been
wasted for generations in arguing about the miracles on the
assumption that Christianity is at stake in the controversy as to
whether the stories of Matthew are false or true. According to
Matthew himself, Jesus must have known this only too well; for
wherever he went he was assailed with a clamor for miracles,
though his doctrine created bewilderment.

So much for the miracles! Matthew tells us further, that Jesus
declared that his doctrines would be attacked by Church and
State, and that the common multitude were the salt of the earth
and the light of the world. His disciples, in their relations
with the political and ecclesiastical organizations, would be as
sheep among wolves.


MATTHEW IMPUTES DIGNITY TO JESUS.

Matthew, like most biographers, strives to identify the opinions
and prejudices of his hero with his own. Although he describes
Jesus as tolerant even to carelessness, he draws the line at the
Gentile, and represents Jesus as a bigoted Jew who regards his
mission as addressed exclusively to "the lost sheep of the house
of Israel." When a woman of Canaan begged Jesus to cure her
daughter, he first refused to speak to her, and then told her
brutally that "It is not meet to take the children's bread and
cast it to the dogs." But when the woman said, "Truth, Lord; yet
the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master's table,"
she melted the Jew out of him and made Christ a Christian. To
the woman whom he had just called a dog he said, "O woman, great
is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt." This is somehow
one of the most touching stories in the gospel; perhaps because
the woman rebukes the prophet by a touch of his own finest
quality. It is certainly out of character; but as the sins of
good men are always out of character, it is not safe to reject
the story as invented in the interest of Matthew's determination
that Jesus shall have nothing to do with the Gentiles. At all
events, there the story is; and it is by no means the only
instance in which Matthew reports Jesus, in spite of the charm of
his preaching, as extremely uncivil in private intercourse.


THE GREAT CHANGE.

So far the history is that of a man sane and interesting apart
from his special gifts as orator, healer, and prophet. But a
startling change occurs. One day, after the disciples have
discouraged him for a long time by their misunderstandings of his
mission, and their speculations as to whether he is one of the
old prophets come again, and if so, which, his disciple Peter
suddenly solves the problem by exclaiming, "Thou are the Christ,
the son of the living God." At this Jesus is extraordinarily
pleased and excited. He declares that Peter has had a revelation
straight from God. He makes a pun on Peter's name, and declares
him the founder of his Church. And he accepts his destiny as a
god by announcing that he will be killed when he goes to
Jerusalem; for if he is really the Christ, it is a necessary part
of his legendary destiny that he shall be slain. Peter, not
understanding this, rebukes him for what seems mere craven
melancholy; and Jesus turns fiercely on him and cries, "Get thee
behind me, Satan."

Jesus now becomes obsessed with a conviction of his divinity, and
talks about it continually to his disciples, though he forbids
them to mention it to others. They begin to dispute among
themselves as to the position they shall occupy in heaven when
his kingdom is established. He rebukes them strenuously for this,
and repeats his teaching that greatness means service and not
domination; but he himself, always instinctively somewhat
haughty, now becomes arrogant, dictatorial, and even abusive,
never replying to his critics without an insulting epithet, and
even cursing a fig-tree which disappoints him when he goes to it
for fruit. He assumes all the traditions of the folk-lore gods,
and announces that, like John Barleycorn, he will be barbarously
slain and buried, but will rise from the earth and return to
life. He attaches to himself the immemorial tribal ceremony of
eating the god, by blessing bread and wine and handing them to
his disciples with the words "This is my body: this is my blood."
He forgets his own teaching and threatens eternal fire and
eternal punishment. He announces, in addition to his Barleycorn
resurrection, that he will come to the world a second time in
glory and establish his kingdom on earth. He fears that this may
lead to the appearance of impostors claiming to be himself, and
declares explicitly and repeatedly that no matter what wonders
these impostors may perform, his own coming will be unmistakable,
as the stars will fall from heaven, and trumpets be blown by
angels. Further he declares that this will take place during the
lifetime of persons then present,


JERUSALEM AND THE MYSTICAL SACRIFICE.

In this new frame of mind he at last enters Jerusalem amid great
popular curiosity; drives the moneychangers and sacrifice sellers
out of the temple in a riot; refuses to interest himself in the
beauties and wonders of the temple building on the ground that
presently not a stone of it shall be left on another; reviles the
high priests and elders in intolerable terms; and is arrested by
night in a garden to avoid a popular disturbance. He makes no
resistance, being persuaded that it is part of his destiny as a
god to be murdered and to rise again. One of his followers shows
fight, and cuts off the ear of one of his captors. Jesus rebukes
him, but does not attempt to heal the wound, though he declares
that if he wished to resist he could easily summon twelve million
angels to his aid. He is taken before the high priest and by him
handed over to the Roman governor, who is puzzled by his silent
refusal to defend himself in any way, or to contradict his
accusers or their witnesses, Pilate having naturally no idea that
the prisoner conceives himself as going through an inevitable
process of torment, death, and burial as a prelude to
resurrection. Before the high priest he has also been silent
except that when the priest asks him is he the Christ, the Son of
God, he replies that they shall all see the Son of Man sitting at
the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven. He
maintains this attitude with frightful fortitude whilst they
scourge him, mock him, torment him, and finally crucify him
between two thieves. His prolonged agony of thirst and pain on
the cross at last breaks his spirit, and he dies with a cry of
"My God: why hast Thou forsaken me?"


NOT THIS MAN BUT BARRABAS

Meanwhile he has been definitely rejected by the people as well
as by the priests. Pilate, pitying him, and unable to make out
exactly what he has done (the blasphemy that has horrified the
high priest does not move the Roman) tries to get him off by
reminding the people that they have, by custom, the right to have
a prisoner released at that time, and suggests that he should
release Jesus. But they insist on his releasing a prisoner named
Barabbas instead, and on having Jesus crucified. Matthew gives no
clue to the popularity of Barabbas, describing him simply as "a
notable prisoner." The later gospels make it clear, very
significantly, that his offence was sedition and insurrection;
that he was an advocate of physical force; and that he had killed
his man. The choice of Barabbas thus appears as a popular choice
of the militant advocate of physical force as against the
unresisting advocate of mercy.


THE RESURRECTION.

Matthew then tells how after three days an angel opened the
family vault of one Joseph, a rich man of Arimathea, who had
buried Jesus in it, whereupon Jesus rose and returned from
Jerusalem to Galilee and resumed his preaching with his
disciples, assuring them that he would now be with them to the
end of the world. At that point the narrative abruptly stops. The
story has no ending.


DATE OF MATTHEW'S NARRATIVE.

One effect of the promise of Jesus to come again in glory during
the lifetime of some of his hearers is to date the gospel without
the aid of any scholarship. It must have been written during the
lifetime of Jesus's contemporaries: that is, whilst it was still
possible for the promise of his Second Coming to be fulfilled.
The death of the last person who had been alive when Jesus said
"There be some of them that stand here that shall in no wise
taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom"
destroyed the last possibility of the promised Second Coming, and
bore out the incredulity of Pilate and the Jews. And as Matthew
writes as one believing in that Second Coming, and in fact left
his story unfinished to be ended by it, he must have produced his
gospel within a lifetime of the crucifixion. Also, he must have
believed that reading books would be one of the pleasures of the
kingdom of heaven on earth.


CLASS TYPE OF MATTHEW'S JESUS

One more circumstance must be noted as gathered from Matthew.
Though he begins his story in such a way as to suggest that Jesus
belonged to the privileged classes, he mentions later on that
when Jesus attempted to preach in his own country, and had no
success there, the people said, "Is not this the carpenter's
son?" But Jesus's manner throughout is that of an aristocrat, or
at the very least the son of a rich bourgeois, and by no means a
lowly-minded one at that. We must be careful therefore to
conceive Joseph, not as a modern proletarian carpenter working
for weekly wages, but as a master craftsman of royal descent.
John the Baptist may have been a Keir Hardie; but the Jesus of
Matthew is of the Ruskin-Morris class.

This haughty characterization is so marked that if we had no
other documents concerning Jesus than the gospel of Matthew, we
should not feel as we do about him. We should have been much less
loth to say, "There is a man here who was sane until Peter hailed
him as the Christ, and who then became a monomaniac." We should
have pointed out that his delusion is a very common delusion
among the insane, and that such insanity is quite consistent with
the retention of the argumentative cunning and penetration which
Jesus displayed in Jerusalem after his delusion had taken
complete hold of him. We should feel horrified at the scourging
and mocking and crucifixion just as we should if Ruskin had been
treated in that way when he also went mad, instead of being cared
for as an invalid. And we should have had no clear perception of
any special significance in his way of calling the Son of God the
Son of Man. We should have noticed that he was a Communist; that
he regarded much of what we call law and order as machinery for
robbing the poor under legal forms; that he thought domestic ties
a snare for the soul; that he agreed with the proverb "The nearer
the Church, the farther from God;" that he saw very plainly that
the masters of the community should be its servants and not its
oppressors and parasites; and that though he did not tell us not
to fight our enemies, he did tell us to love them, and warned us
that they who draw the sword shall perish by the sword. All this
shows a great power of seeing through vulgar illusions, and a
capacity for a higher morality than has yet been established in
any civilized community; but it does not place Jesus above
Confucius or Plato, not to mention more modern philosophers and
moralists.



MARK.

THE WOMEN DISCIPLES AND THE ASCENSION.

Let us see whether we can get anything more out of Mark, whose
gospel, by the way, is supposed to be older than Matthew's. Mark
is brief; and it does not take long to discover that he adds
nothing to Matthew except the ending of the story by Christ's
ascension into heaven, and the news that many women had come with
Jesus to Jerusalem, including Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had
cast seven devils. On the other hand Mark says nothing about the
birth of Jesus, and does not touch his career until his adult
baptism by John. He apparently regards Jesus as a native of
Nazareth, as John does, and not of Bethlehem, as Matthew and Luke
do, Bethlehem being the city of David, from whom Jesus is said by
Matthew and Luke to be descended. He describes John's doctrine as
"Baptism of repentance unto remission of sins": that is, a form
of Salvationism. He tells us that Jesus went into the synagogues
and taught, not as the Scribes but as one having authority: that
is, we infer, he preaches his own doctrine as an original moral-
ist instead of repeating what the books say. He describes the
miracle of Jesus reaching the boat by walking across the sea, but
says nothing about Peter trying to do the same. Mark sees what he
relates more vividly than Matthew, and gives touches of detail
that bring the event more clearly before the reader. He says, for
instance, that when Jesus walked on the waves to the boat, he was
passing it by when the disciples called out to him. He seems to
feel that Jesus's treatment of the woman of Canaan requires some
apology, and therefore says that she was a Greek of Syrophenician
race, which probably excused any incivility to her in Mark's
eyes. He represents the father of the boy whom Jesus cured of
epilepsy after the transfiguration as a sceptic who says "Lord, I
believe: help thou mine unbelief." He tells the story of the
widow's mite, omitted by Matthew. He explains that Barabbas was
"lying bound with them that made insurrection, men who in the
insurrection had committed murder." Joseph of Arimathea, who
buried Jesus in his own tomb, and who is described by Matthew as
a disciple, is described by Mark as "one who also himself was
looking for the kingdom of God," which suggests that he was an
independent seeker. Mark earns our gratitude by making no mention
of the old prophecies, and thereby not only saves time, but
avoids the absurd implication that Christ was merely going
through a predetermined ritual, like the works of a clock,
instead of living. Finally Mark reports Christ as saying, after
his resurrection, that those who believe in him will be saved and
those who do not, damned; but it is impossible to discover
whether he means anything by a state of damnation beyond a state
of error. The paleographers regard this passage as tacked on by a
later scribe. On the whole Mark leaves the modern reader where
Matthew left him.



LUKE.

LUKE THE LITERARY ARTIST.

When we come to Luke, we come to a later storyteller, and one
with a stronger natural gift for his art. Before you have read
twenty lines of Luke's gospel you are aware that you have passed
from the chronicler writing for the sake of recording important
facts, to the artist, telling the story for the sake of telling
it. At the very outset he achieves the most charming idyll in the
Bible: the story of Mary crowded out of the inn into the stable
and laying her newly-born son in the manger, and of the shepherds
abiding in the field keeping watch over their flocks by night,
and how the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of
the Lord shone around them, and suddenly there was with the angel
a multitude of the heavenly host. These shepherds go to the
stable and take the place of the kings in Matthew's chronicle.
So completely has this story conquered and fascinated our
imagination that most of us suppose all the gospels to contain
it; but it is Luke's story and his alone: none of the others have
the smallest hint of it.


THE CHARM OF LUKE'S NARRATIVE.

Luke gives the charm of sentimental romance to every incident.
The Annunciation, as described by Matthew, is made to Joseph, and
is simply a warning to him not to divorce his wife for
misconduct. In Luke's gospel it is made to Mary herself, at much
greater length, with a sense of the ecstasy of the bride of the
Holy Ghost. Jesus is refined and softened almost out of
recognition: the stern peremptory disciple of John the Baptist,
who never addresses a Pharisee or a Scribe without an insulting
epithet, becomes a considerate, gentle, sociable, almost urbane
person; and the Chauvinist Jew becomes a pro-Gentile who is
thrown out of the synagogue in his own town for reminding the
congregation that the prophets had sometimes preferred Gentiles
to Jews. In fact they try to throw him down from a sort of
Tarpeian rock which they use for executions; but he makes his way
through them and escapes: the only suggestion of a feat of arms
on his part in the gospels. There is not a word of the
Syrophenician woman. At the end he is calmly superior to his
sufferings; delivers an address on his way to execution with
unruffled composure; does not despair on the cross; and dies with
perfect dignity, commending his spirit to God, after praying for
the forgiveness of his persecutors on the ground that "They know
not what they do." According to Matthew, it is part of the
bitterness of his death that even the thieves who are crucified
with him revile him. According to Luke, only one of them does
this; and he is rebuked by the other, who begs Jesus to remember
him when he comes into his kingdom. To which Jesus replies, "This
day shalt thou be with me in Paradise," implying that he will
spend the three days of his death there. In short, every device
is used to get rid of the ruthless horror of the Matthew
chronicle, and to relieve the strain of the Passion by touching
episodes, and by representing Christ as superior to human
suffering. It is Luke's Jesus who has won our hearts.


THE TOUCH OF PARISIAN ROMANCE.

Luke's romantic shrinking from unpleasantness, and his
sentimentality, are illustrated by his version of the woman with
the ointment. Matthew and Mark describe it as taking place in the
house of Simon the Leper, where it is objected to as a waste of
money. In Luke's version the leper becomes a rich Pharisee; the
woman becomes a Dame aux Camellias; and nothing is said about
money and the poor. The woman washes the feet of Jesus with her
tears and dries them with her hair; and he is reproached for
suffering a sinful woman to touch him. It is almost an adaptation
of the unromantic Matthew to the Parisian stage. There is a
distinct attempt to increase the feminine interest all through.
The slight lead given by Mark is taken up and developed. More is
said about Jesus's mother and her feelings. Christ's following of
women, just mentioned by Mark to account for their presence at
his tomb, is introduced earlier; and some of the women are named;
so that we are introduced to Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod's
steward, and Susanna. There is the quaint little domestic episode
between Mary and Martha. There is the parable of the Prodigal
Son, appealing to the indulgence romance has always shown to
Charles Surface and Des Grieux. Women follow Jesus to the cross;
and he makes them a speech beginning "Daughters of Jerusalem."
Slight as these changes may seem, they make a great change in the
atmosphere. The Christ of Matthew could never have become what is
vulgarly called a woman's hero (though the truth is that the
popular demand for sentiment, as far as it is not simply human,
is more manly than womanly); but the Christ of Luke has made
possible those pictures which now hang in many ladies' chambers,
in which Jesus is represented exactly as he is represented in the
Lourdes cinematograph, by a handsome actor. The only touch of
realism which Luke does not instinctively suppress for the sake
of producing this kind of amenity is the reproach addressed to
Jesus for sitting down to table without washing his hands; and
that is retained because an interesting discourse hangs on it.


WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH.

Another new feature in Luke's story is that it begins in a world
in which everyone is expecting the advent of the Christ. In
Matthew and Mark, Jesus comes into a normal Philistine world like
our own of today. Not until the Baptist foretells that one
greater than himself shall come after him does the old Jewish
hope of a Messiah begin to stir again; and as Jesus begins as a
disciple of John, and is baptized by him, nobody connects him
with that hope until Peter has the sudden inspiration which
produces so startling an effect on Jesus. But in Luke's gospel
men's minds, and especially women's minds, are full of eager
expectation of a Christ not only before the birth of Jesus, but
before the birth of John the Baptist, the event with which Luke
begins his story. Whilst Jesus and John are still in their
mothers' wombs, John leaps at the approach of Jesus when the two
mothers visit one another. At the circumcision of Jesus pious men
and women hail the infant as the Christ.

The Baptist himself is not convinced; for at quite a late period
in his former disciple's career he sends two young men to ask
Jesus is he really the Christ. This is noteworthy because Jesus
immediately gives them a deliberate exhibition of miracles, and
bids them tell John what they have seen, and ask him what he
thinks now: This is in complete contradiction to what I have
called the Rousseau view of miracles as inferred from Matthew.
Luke shows all a romancer's thoughtlessness about miracles; he
regards them as "signs": that is, as proofs of the divinity of
the person performing them, and not merely of thaumaturgic
powers. He revels in miracles just as he revels in parables: they
make such capital stories. He cannot allow the calling of Peter,
James, and John from their boats to pass without a comic
miraculous overdraft of fishes, with the net sinking the boats
and provoking Peter to exclaim, "Depart from me; for I am a
sinful man, O Lord," which should probably be translated, "I want
no more of your miracles: natural fishing is good enough for my
boats."

There are some other novelties in Luke's version. Pilate sends
Jesus to Herod, who happens to be in Jerusalem just then, because
Herod had expressed some curiosity about him; but nothing comes
of it: the prisoner will not speak to him. When Jesus is ill
received in a Samaritan village James and John propose to call
down fire from heaven and destroy it; and Jesus replies that he
is come not to destroy lives but to save them. The bias of Jesus
against lawyers is emphasized, and also his resolution not to
admit that he is more bound to his relatives than to strangers.
He snubs a woman who blesses his mother. As this is contrary to
the traditions of sentimental romance, Luke would presumably have
avoided it had he not become persuaded that the brotherhood of
Man and the Fatherhood of God are superior even to sentimental
considerations. The story of the lawyer asking what are the two
chief commandments is changed by making Jesus put the question to
the lawyer instead of answering it.

As to doctrine, Luke is only clear when his feelings are touched.
His logic is weak; for some of the sayings of Jesus are pieced
together wrongly, as anyone who has read them in the right order
and context in Matthew will discover at once. He does not make
anything new out of Christ's mission, and, like the other
evangelists, thinks that the whole point of it is that Jesus was
the long expected Christ, and that he will presently come back to
earth and establish his kingdom, having duly died and risen again
after three days. Yet Luke not only records the teaching as to
communism and the discarding of hate, which have, of course,
nothing to do with the Second Coming, but quotes one very
remarkable saying which is not compatible with it, which is, that
people must not go about asking where the kingdom of heaven is,
and saying "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" because the kingdom of
heaven is within them. But Luke has no sense that this belongs to
a quite different order of thought to his Christianity, and
retains undisturbed his view of the kingdom as a locality as
definite as Jerusalem or Madagascar.



JOHN.

A NEW STORY AND A NEW CHARACTER.

The gospel of John is a surprise after the others. Matthew, Mark
and Luke describe the same events in the same order (the
variations in Luke are negligible), and their gospels are
therefore called the synoptic gospels. They tell substantially
the same story of a wandering preacher who at the end of his life
came to Jerusalem. John describes a preacher who spent
practically his whole adult life in the capital, with occasional
visits to the provinces. His circumstantial account of the
calling of Peter and the sons of Zebedee is quite different from
the others; and he says nothing about their being fishermen. He
says expressly that Jesus, though baptized by John, did not
himself practise baptism, and that his disciples did. Christ's
agonized appeal against his doom in the garden of Gethsemane
becomes a coldblooded suggestion made in the temple at a much
earlier period. Jesus argues much more; complains a good deal of
the unreasonableness and dislike with which he is met; is by no
means silent before Caiaphas and Pilate; lays much greater stress
on his resurrection and on the eating of his body (losing all his
disciples except the twelve in consequence); says many apparently
contradictory and nonsensical things to which no ordinary reader
can now find any clue; and gives the impression of an educated,
not to say sophisticated mystic, different both in character and
schooling from the simple and downright preacher of Matthew and
Mark, and the urbane easy-minded charmer of Luke. Indeed, the
Jews say of him "How knoweth this man letters, having never
learnt?"


JOHN THE IMMORTAL EYEWITNESS.

John, moreover, claims to be not only a chronicler but a witness.
He declares that he is "the disciple whom Jesus loved," and that
he actually leaned on the bosom of Jesus at the last supper and
asked in a whisper which of them it was that should betray him.
Jesus whispered that he would give a sop to the traitor, and
thereupon handed one to Judas, who ate it and immediately became
possessed by the devil. This is more natural than the other
accounts, in which Jesus openly indicates Judas without eliciting
any protest or exciting any comment. It also implies that Jesus
deliberately bewitched Judas in order to bring about his own
betrayal. Later on John claims that Jesus said to Peter "If I
will that John tarry til I come, what is that to thee?"; and
John, with a rather obvious mock modesty, adds that he must not
claim to be immortal, as the disciples concluded; for Christ did
not use that expression, but merely remarked "If I will that he
tarry till I come." No other evangelist claims personal intimacy
with Christ, or even pretends to be his contemporary (there is no
ground for identifying Matthew the publican with Matthew the
Evangelist); and John is the only evangelist whose account of
Christ's career and character is hopelessly irreconcilable with
Matthew's. He is almost as bad as Matthew, by the way, in his
repeated explanations of Christ's actions as having no other
purpose than to fulfil the old prophecies. The impression is more
unpleasant, because, as John, unlike Matthew, is educated,
subtle, and obsessed with artificial intellectual mystifications,
the discovery that he is stupid or superficial in so simple a
matter strikes one with distrust and dislike, in spite of his
great literary charm, a good example of which is his
transfiguration of the harsh episode of the Syrophenician woman
into the pleasant story of the woman of Samaria. This perhaps is
why his claim to be John the disciple, or to be a contemporary of
Christ or even of any survivor of Christ's generation, has been
disputed, and finally, it seems, disallowed. But I repeat, I take
no note here of the disputes of experts as to the date of the
gospels, not because I am not acquainted with them, but because,
as the earliest codices are Greek manuscripts of the fourth
century A.D., and the Syrian ones are translations from the
Greek, the paleographic expert has no difficulty in arriving at
whatever conclusion happens to suit his beliefs or disbeliefs;
and he never succeeds in convincing the other experts except when
they believe or disbelieve exactly as he does. Hence I conclude
that the dates of the original narratives cannot be ascertained,
and that we must make the best of the evangelists' own accounts
of themselves. There is, as we have seen, a very marked
difference between them, leaving no doubt that we are dealing
with four authors of well-marked diversity; but they all end in
an attitude of expectancy of the Second Coming which they agree
in declaring Jesus to have positively and unequivocally promised
within the lifetime of his contemporaries. Any believer compiling
a gospel after the last of these contemporaries had passed away,
would either reject and omit the tradition of that promise on the
ground that since it was not fulfilled, and could never now be
fulfilled, it could not have been made, or else have had to
confess to the Jews, who were the keenest critics of the
Christians, that Jesus was either an impostor or the victim of a
delusion. Now all the evangelists except Matthew expressly
declare themselves to be believers; and Matthew's narrative is
obviously not that of a sceptic. I therefore assume as a matter
of common sense that, interpolations apart, the gospels are
derived from narratives written in the first century A.D. I
include John, because though it may be claimed that he hedged his
position by claiming that Christ, who specially loved him,
endowed him with a miraculous life until the Second Coming, the
conclusion being that John is alive at this moment, I cannot
believe that a literary forger could hope to save the situation
by so outrageous a pretension. Also, John's narrative is in many
passages nearer to the realities of public life than the simple
chronicle of Matthew or the sentimental romance of Luke. This may
be because John was obviously more a man of the world than the
others, and knew, as mere chroniclers and romancers never know,
what actually happens away from books and desks. But it may also
be because he saw and heard what happened instead of collecting
traditions about it. The paleographers and daters of first
quotations may say what they please: John's claim to give
evidence as an eyewitness whilst the others are only compiling
history is supported by a certain verisimilitude which appeals to
me as one who has preached a new doctrine and argued about it, as
well as written stories. This verisimilitude may be dramatic art
backed by knowledge of public life; but even at that we must not
forget that the best dramatic art is the operation of a
divinatory instinct for truth. Be that as it may, John was
certainly not the man to believe in the Second Coming and yet
give a date for it after that date had passed. There is really no
escape from the conclusion that the originals of all the gospels
date from the period within which there was still a possibility
of the Second Coming occurring at the promised time.


THE PECULIAR THEOLOGY OF JESUS.

In spite of the suspicions roused by John's idiosyncrasies, his
narrative is of enormous importance to those who go to the
gospels for a credible modern religion. For it is John who adds
to the other records such sayings as that "I and my father are
one"; that "God is a spirit"; that the aim of Jesus is not only
that the people should have life, but that they should have it
"more abundantly" (a distinction much needed by people who think
a man is either alive or dead, and never consider the important
question how much alive he is); and that men should bear in mind
what they were told in the 82nd Psalm: that they are gods, and
are responsible for the doing of the mercy and justice of God.
The Jews stoned him for saying these things, and, when he
remonstrated with them for stupidly stoning one who had done
nothing to them but good works, replied "For a good work we stone
thee not; but for blasphemy, because that thou, being a man,
makest thyself God." He insists (referring to the 82nd psalm)
that if it is part of their own religion that they are gods on
the assurance of God himself, it cannot be blasphemy for him,
whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, to say "I am
the son of God." But they will not have this at any price; and he
has to escape from their fury. Here the point is obscured by the
distinction made by Jesus between himself and other men. He says,
in effect, "If you are gods, then, a fortiori, I am a god." John
makes him say this, just as he makes him say "I am the light of
the world." But Matthew makes him say to the people "Ye are the
light of the world." John has no grip of the significance of
these scraps which he has picked up: he is far more interested in
a notion of his own that men can escape death and do even more
extraordinary things than Christ himself: in fact, he actually
represents Jesus as promising this explicitly, and is finally led
into the audacious hint that he, John, is himself immortal in the
flesh. Still, he does not miss the significant sayings
altogether. However inconsistent they may be with the doctrine he
is consciously driving at, they appeal to some sub-intellectual
instinct in him that makes him stick them in, like a child
sticking tinsel stars on the robe of a toy angel.

John does not mention the ascension; and the end of his narrative
leaves Christ restored to life, and appearing from time to time
among his disciples. It is on one of these occasions that John
describes the miraculous draught of fishes which Luke places at
the other end of Christ's career, at the call of the sons of
Zebedee.


JOHN AGREED AS TO THE TRIAL AND CRUCIFIXION.

Although John, following his practice of showing Jesus's skill as
a debater, makes him play a less passive part at his trial, he
still gives substantially the same account of it as all the rest.
And the question that would occur to any modern reader never
occurs to him, any more than it occurred to Matthew, Mark, or
Luke. That question is, Why on earth did not Jesus defend
himself, and make the people rescue him from the High Priest? He
was so popular that they were unable to prevent him driving the
money-changers out of the temple, or to arrest him for it. When
they did arrest him afterwards, they had to do it at night in a
garden. He could have argued with them as he had often done in
the temple, and justified himself both to the Jewish law and to
Caesar. And he had physical force at his command to back up his
arguments: all that was needed was a speech to rally his
followers; and he was not gagged. The reply of the evangelists
would have been that all these inquiries are idle, because if
Jesus had wished to escape, he could have saved himself all that
trouble by doing what John describes him as doing: that is,
casting his captors to the earth by an exertion of his miraculous
power. If you asked John why he let them get up again and torment
and execute him, John would have replied that it was part of the
destiny of God to be slain and buried and to rise again, and that
to have avoided this destiny would have been to repudiate his
Godhead. And that is the only apparent explanation. Whether you
believe with the evangelists that Christ could have rescued
himself by a miracle, or, as a modern Secularist, point out that
he could have defended himself effectually, the fact remains that
according to all the narratives he did not do so. He had to die
like a god, not to save himself "like one of the princes." *

    * Jesus himself had refered to that psalm (LXXII) in which
      men who have judged unjustly and accepted the persons of the
      wicked (including by anticipation practically all the white
      inhabitants of the British Isles and the North American
      continent, to mention no other places) are condemned in the
      words, "I have said, ye are gods; and all of ye are children
      of the Most High; but ye shall die like men, and fall like
      one of the princes."

The consensus on this point is important, because it proves the
absolute sincerity of Jesus's declaration that he was a god. No
impostor would have accepted such dreadful consequences without
an effort to save himself. No impostor would have been nerved to
endure them by the conviction that he would rise from the grave
and live again after three days. If we accept the story at all,
we must believe this, and believe also that his promise to return
in glory and establish his kingdom on earth within the lifetime
of men then living, was one which he believed that he could, and
indeed must fulfil. Two evangelists declare that in his last
agony he despaired, and reproached God for forsaking him. The
other two represent him as dying in unshaken conviction and
charity with the simple remark that the ordeal was finished. But
all four testify that his faith was not deceived, and that he
actually rose again after three days. And I think it unreasonable
to doubt that all four wrote their narratives in full faith that
the other promise would be fulfilled too, and that they
themselves might live to witness the Second Coming.


CREDIBILITY OF THE GOSPELS.

It will be noted by the older among my readers, who are sure to
be obsessed more or less by elderly wrangles as to whether the
gospels are credible as matter-of-fact narratives, that I have
hardly raised this question, and have accepted the credible and
incredible with equal complacency. I have done this because
credibility is a subjective condition, as the evolution of
religious belief clearly shows. Belief is not dependent on
evidence and reason. There is as much evidence that the miracles
occurred as that the battle of Waterloo occurred, or that a large
body of Russian troops passed through England in 1914 to take
part in the war on the western front. The reasons for believing
in the murder of Pompey are the same as the reasons for believing
in the raising of Lazarus. Both have been believed and doubted by
men of equal intelligence. Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we
cannot explain, surround us on every hand; life itself is the
miracle of miracles. Miracles in the sense of events that violate
the normal course of our experience are vouched for every day:
the flourishing Church of Christ Scientist is founded on a
multitude of such miracles. Nobody believes all the miracles:
everybody believes some of them. I cannot tell why men who will
not believe that Jesus ever existed yet believe firmly that
Shakespear was Bacon. I cannot tell why people who believe that
angels appeared and fought on our side at the battle of Mons, and
who believe that miracles occur quite frequently at Lourdes,
nevertheless boggle at the miracle of the liquefaction of the
blood of St. Januarius, and reject it as a trick of priestcraft.
I cannot tell why people who will not believe Matthew's story of
three kings bringing costly gifts to the cradle of Jesus, believe
Luke's story of the shepherds and the stable. I cannot tell why
people, brought up to believe the Bible in the old literal way as
an infallible record and revelation, and rejecting that view
later on, begin by rejecting the Old Testament, and give up the
belief in a brimstone hell before they give up (if they ever do)
the belief in a heaven of harps, crowns, and thrones. I cannot
tell why people who will not believe in baptism on any terms
believe in vaccination with the cruel fanaticism of inquisitors.
I am convinced that if a dozen sceptics were to draw up in
parallel columns a list of the events narrated in the gospels
which they consider credible and incredible respectively, their
lists would be different in several particulars. Belief is
literally a matter of taste.


FASHIONS OF BELIEF.

Now matters of taste are mostly also matters of fashion. We are
conscious of a difference between medieval fashions in belief and
modern fashions. For instance, though we are more credulous than
men were in the Middle Ages, and entertain such crowds of
fortunetellers, magicians, miracle workers, agents of
communication with the dead, discoverers of the elixir of life,
transmuters of metals, and healers of all sorts, as the Middle
Ages never dreamed of as possible, yet we will not take our
miracles in the form that convinced the Middle Ages. Arithmetical
numbers appealed to the Middle Ages just as they do to us,
because they are difficult to deal with, and because the greatest
masters of numbers, the Newtons and Leibnitzes, rank among the
greatest men. But there are fashions in numbers too. The Middle
Ages took a fancy to some familiar number like seven; and because
it was an odd number, and the world was made in seven days, and
there are seven stars in Charles's Wain, and for a dozen other
reasons, they were ready to believe anything that had a seven or
a seven times seven in it. Seven deadly sins, seven swords of
sorrow in the heart of the Virgin, seven champions of
Christendom, seemed obvious and reasonable things to believe in
simply because they were seven. To us, on the contrary, the
number seven is the stamp of superstition. We will believe in
nothing less than millions. A medieval doctor gained his
patient's confidence by telling him that his vitals were being
devoured by seven worms. Such a diagnosis would ruin a modern
physician. The modern physician tells his patient that he is ill
because every drop of his blood is swarming with a million
microbes; and the patient believes him abjectly and instantly.
Had a bishop told William the Conqueror that the sun was
seventy-seven miles distant from the earth, William would
have believed him not only out of respect for the Church, but
because he would have felt that seventy-seven miles was the
proper distance. The Kaiser, knowing just as little about it as
the Conqueror, would send that bishop to an asylum. Yet he (I
presume) unhesitatingly accepts the estimate of ninety-two and
nine-tenths millions of miles, or whatever the latest big figure
may be.


CREDIBILITY AND TRUTH.

And here I must remind you that our credulity is not to be
measured by the truth of the things we believe. When men believed
that the earth was flat, they were not credulous: they were using
their common sense, and, if asked to prove that the earth was
flat, would have said simply, "Look at it." Those who refuse to
believe that it is round are exercising a wholesome scepticism.
The modern man who believes that the earth is round is grossly
credulous. Flat Earth men drive him to fury by confuting him with
the greatest ease when he tries to argue about it. Confront him
with a theory that the earth is cylindrical, or annular, or
hour-glass shaped, and he is lost. The thing he believes may be
true, but that is not why he believes it: he believes it because
in some mysterious way it appeals to his imagination. If you ask
him why he believes that the sun is ninety-odd million miles off,
either he will have to confess that he doesn't know, or he will
say that Newton proved it. But he has not read the treatise in
which Newton proved it, and does not even know that it was
written in Latin. If you press an Ulster Protestant as to why he
regards Newton as an infallible authority, and St. Thomas Aquinas
or the Pope as superstitious liars whom, after his death, he will
have the pleasure of watching from his place in heaven whilst
they roast in eternal flame, or if you ask me why I take into
serious consideration Colonel Sir Almroth Wright's estimates of
the number of streptococci contained in a given volume of serum
whilst I can only laugh at the earlier estimates of the number of
angels that can be accommodated on the point of a needle, no
reasonable reply is possible except that somehow sevens and
angels are out of fashion, and billions and streptococci are all
the rage. I simply cannot tell you why Bacon, Montaigne, and
Cervantes had a quite different fashion of credulity and
incredulity from the Venerable Bede and Piers Plowman and the
divine doctors of the Aquinas-Aristotle school, who were
certainly no stupider, and had the same facts before them. Still
less can I explain why, if we assume that these leaders of
thought had all reasoned out their beliefs, their authority
seemed conclusive to one generation and blasphemous to another,
neither generation having followed the reasoning or gone into the
facts of the matter for itself at all.

It is therefore idle to begin disputing with the reader as to
what he should believe in the gospels and what he should
disbelieve. He will believe what he can, and disbelieve what he
must. If he draws any lines at all, they will be quite arbitrary
ones. St. John tells us that when Jesus explicitly claimed divine
honors by the sacrament of his body and blood, so many of his
disciples left him that their number was reduced to twelve. Many
modern readers will not hold out so long: they will give in at
the first miracle. Others will discriminate. They will accept the
healing miracles, and reject the feeding of the multitude. To
some the walking on the water will be a legendary exaggeration of
a swim, ending in an ordinary rescue of Peter; and the raising of
Lazarus will be only a similar glorification of a commonplace
feat of artificial respiration, whilst others will scoff at it as
a planned imposture in which Lazarus acted as a confederate.
Between the rejection of the stories as wholly fabulous and the
acceptance of them as the evangelists themselves meant them to be
accepted, there will be many shades of belief and disbelief, of
sympathy and derision. It is not a question of being a Christian
or not. A Mahometan Arab will accept literally and without
question parts of the narrative which an English Archbishop has
to reject or explain away; and many Theosophists and lovers of
the wisdom of India, who never enter a Christian Church except as
sightseers, will revel in parts of John's gospel which mean
nothing to a pious matter-of-fact Bradford manufacturer. Every
reader takes from the Bible what he can get. In submitting a
precis of the gospel narratives I have not implied any estimate
either of their credibility or of their truth. I have simply
informed him or reminded him, as the case may be, of what those
narratives tell us about their hero.


CHRISTIAN ICONOLATRY AND THE PERILS OF THE ICONOCLAST.

I must now abandon this attitude, and make a serious draft on the
reader's attention by facing the question whether, if and when
the medieval and Methodist will-to-believe the Salvationist and
miraculous side of the gospel narratives fails us, as it plainly
has failed the leaders of modern thought, there will be anything
left of the mission of Jesus: whether, in short, we may not throw
the gospels into the waste-paper basket, or put them away on the
fiction shelf of our libraries. I venture to reply that we shall
be, on the contrary, in the position of the man in Bunyan's
riddle who found that "the more he threw away, the more he had.
"We get rid, to begin with, of the idolatrous or iconographic
worship of Christ. By this I mean literally that worship which is
given to pictures and statues of him, and to finished and
unalterable stories about him. The test of the prevalence of this
is that if you speak or write of Jesus as a real live person, or
even as a still active God, such worshippers are more horrified
than Don Juan was when the statue stepped from its pedestal and
came to supper with him. You may deny the divinity of Jesus; you
may doubt whether he ever existed; you may reject Christianity
for Judaism, Mahometanism, Shintoism, or Fire Worship; and the
iconolaters, placidly contemptuous, will only classify you as a
freethinker or a heathen. But if you venture to wonder how Christ
would have looked if he had shaved and had his hair cut, or what
size in shoes he took, or whether he swore when he stood on a
nail in the carpenter's shop, or could not button his robe when
he was in a hurry, or whether he laughed over the repartees by
which he baffled the priests when they tried to trap him into
sedition and blasphemy, or even if you tell any part of his story
in the vivid terms of modern colloquial slang, you will produce
an extraordinary dismay and horror among the iconolaters. You
will have made the picture come out of its frame, the statue
descend from its pedestal, the story become real, with all the
incalculable consequences that may flow from this terrifying
miracle. It is at such moments that you realize that the
iconolaters have never for a moment conceived Christ as a real
person who meant what he said, as a fact, as a force like
electricity, only needing the invention of suitable political
machinery to be applied to the affairs of mankind with
revolutionary effect.