PREFACE TO ANDROCLES AND THE LION: ON THE PROSPECTS OF
CHRISTIANITY

BERNARD SHAW

1912


CONTENTS:

Why not give Christianity a Trial?
Why Jesus more than Another?
Was Jesus a Coward?
Was Jesus a Martyr?
The Gospels without Prejudice
The Gospels now unintelligible to Novices
Worldliness of the Majority
Religion of the Minority. Salvationism
The Difference between Atonement and Punishment
Salvation at first a Class Privilege; and the Remedy
Retrospective Atonement; and the Expectation of the Redeemer
Completion of the Scheme by Luther and Calvin
John Barleycorn
Looking for the End of the World
The Honor of Divine Parentage

MATTHEW
The Annunciation: the Massacre: the Flight
John the Baptist
Jesus joins the Baptists
The Savage John and the Civilized Jesus
Jesus not a Proselytist
The Teachings of Jesus
The Miracles
Matthew imputes Bigotry to Jesus
The Great Change
Jerusalem and the Mystical Sacrifice
Not this Man but Barabbas
The Resurrection
Date of Matthew's Narrative
Class Type of Matthew's Jesus

MARK
The Women Disciples and the Ascension

LUKE
Luke the Literary Artist
The Charm of Luke's Narrative
The Touch of Parisian Romance
Waiting for the Messiah

JOHN
A New Story and a New Character
John the Immortal Eye Witness
The Peculiar Theology of Jesus
John agreed as to the Trial and Crucifixion
Credibility of the Gospels
Fashions of Belief Credibility and Truth
Christian Iconolatry and the Peril of the Iconoclast
The Alternative to Barabbas
The Reduction to Modern Practice of Christianity
Modern Communism
Redistribution
Shall He Who Makes, Own?
Labor Time
The Dream of Distribution According to Merit
Vital Distribution
Equal Distribution
The Captain and the Cabin Boy
The Political and Biological Objections to Inequality
Jesus as Economist
Jesus as Biologist
Money the Midwife of Scientific Communism
Judge Not
Limits to Free Will
Jesus on Marriage and the Family
Why Jesus did not Marry
Inconsistency of the Sex Instinct For Better for Worse
The Remedy
The Case for Marriage
Celibacy no Remedy
After the Crucifixion
The Vindictive Miracles and the Stoning of Stephen
Confusion of Christendom
Secret of Paul's Success
Paul's Qualities
Acts of the Apostles
The Controversies on Baptism and Transubstantiation
The Alternative Christs
Credulity no Criterion
Belief in Personal Immortality no Criterion
The Secular View Natural, not Rational, therefore Inevitable
"The Higher Criticism"
The Perils of Salvationism
The Importance of Hell in the Salvation Scheme
The Right to refuse Atonement
The Teaching of Christianity
Christianity and the Empire



PREFACE ON THE PROSPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY

WHY NOT GIVE CHRISTIANITY A TRIAL?

The question seems a hopeless one after 2000 years of resolute
adherence to the old cry of "Not this man, but Barabbas." Yet it
is beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, in spite of
his strong right hand, his victories, his empires, his millions
of money, and his moralities and churches and political
constitutions. "This man" has not been a failure yet; for nobody
has ever been sane enough to try his way. But he has had one
quaint triumph. Barabbas has stolen his name and taken his cross
as a standard. There is a sort of compliment in that. There is
even a sort of loyalty in it, like that of the brigand who breaks
every law and yet claims to be a patriotic subject of the king
who makes them. We have always had a curious feeling that though
we crucified Christ on a stick, he somehow managed to get hold of
the right end of it, and that if we were better men we might try
his plan. There have been one or two grotesque attempts at it by
inadequate people, such as the Kingdom of God in Munster, which
was ended by crucifixion so much more atrocious than the one on
Calvary that the bishop who took the part of Annas went home and
died of horror. But responsible people have never made such
attempts. The moneyed, respectable, capable world has been
steadily anti-Christian and Barabbasque since the crucifixion;
and the specific doctrine of Jesus has not in all that time been
put into political or general social practice. I am no more a
Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle reader; and yet, like
Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas and Caiaphas; and I am
ready to admit that after contemplating the world and human
nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the world's
misery but the way which would have been found by Christ's will
if he had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman.
Pray do not at this early point lose patience with me and shut
the book. I assure you I am as sceptical and scientific and
modern a thinker as you will find anywhere. I grant you I know a
great deal more about economics and politics than Jesus did, and
can do things he could not do. I am by all Barabbasque standards
a person of much better character and standing, and greater
practical sense. I have no sympathy with vagabonds and talkers
who try to reform society by taking men away from their regular
productive work and making vagabonds and talkers of them too; and
if I had been Pilate I should have recognized as plainly as he
the necessity for suppressing attacks on the existing social
order, however corrupt that order might be, by people with no
knowledge of government and no power to construct political
machinery to carry out their views, acting on the very dangerous
delusion that the end of the world was at hand. I make no defence
of such Christians as Savonarola and John of Leyden: they were
scuttling the ship before they had learned how to build a raft;
and it became necessary to throw them overboard to save the crew.
I say this to set myself right with respectable society; but I
must still insist that if Jesus could have worked out the
practical problems of a Communist constitution, an admitted
obligation to deal with crime without revenge or punishment, and
a full assumption by humanity of divine responsibilities, he
would have conferred an incalculable benefit on mankind, because
these distinctive demands of his are now turning out to be good
sense and sound economics.

I say distinctive, because his common humanity and his subjection
to time and space (that is, to the Syrian life of his period)
involved his belief in many things, true and false, that in no
way distinguish him from other Syrians of that time. But such
common beliefs do not constitute specific Christianity any more
than wearing a beard, working in a carpenter's shop, or believing
that the earth is flat and that the stars could drop on it from
heaven like hailstones. Christianity interests practical
statesmen now because of the doctrines that distinguished Christ
from the Jews and the Barabbasques generally, including
ourselves.


WHY JESUS MORE THAN ANOTHER?

I do not imply, however, that these doctrines were peculiar to
Christ. A doctrine peculiar to one man would be only a craze,
unless its comprehension depended on a development of human
faculty so rare that only one exceptionally gifted man possessed
it. But even in this case it would be useless, because incapable
of spreading. Christianity is a step in moral evolution which is
independent of any individual preacher. If Jesus had never
existed (and that he ever existed in any other sense than that in
which Shakespear's Hamlet existed has been vigorously questioned)
Tolstoy would have thought and taught and quarrelled with the
Greek Church all the same. Their creed has been fragmentarily
practised to a considerable extent in spite of the fact that the
laws of all countries treat it, in effect, as criminal. Many of
its advocates have been militant atheists. But for some reason
the imagination of white mankind has picked out Jesus of Nazareth
as THE Christ, and attributed all the Christian doctrines to him;
and as it is the doctrine and not the man that matters, and, as,
besides, one symbol is as good as another provided everyone
attaches the same meaning to it, I raise, for the moment, no
question as to how far the gospels are original, and how far they
consist of Greek and Chinese interpolations. The record that
Jesus said certain things is not invalidated by a demonstration
that Confucius said them before him. Those who claim a literal
divine paternity for him cannot be silenced by the discovery that
the same claim was made for Alexander and Augustus. And I am not
just now concerned with the credibility of the gospels as records
of fact; for I am not acting as a detective, but turning our
modern lights on to certain ideas and doctrines in them which
disentangle themselves from the rest because they are flatly
contrary to common practice, common sense, and common belief, and
yet have, in the teeth of dogged incredulity and recalcitrance,
produced an irresistible impression that Christ, though rejected
by his posterity as an unpractical dreamer, and executed by his
contemporaries as a dangerous anarchist and blasphemous madman,
was greater than his judges.


WAS JESUS A COWARD?

I know quite well that this impression of superiority is not
produced on everyone, even of those who profess extreme
susceptibility to it. Setting aside the huge mass of inculcated
Christ-worship which has no real significance because it has no
intelligence, there is, among people who are really free to think
for themselves on the subject, a great deal of hearty dislike of
Jesus and of contempt for his failure to save himself and
overcome his enemies by personal bravery and cunning as Mahomet
did. I have heard this feeling expressed far more impatiently by
persons brought up in England as Christians than by Mahometans,
who are, like their prophet, very civil to Jesus, and allow him a
place in their esteem and veneration at least as high as we
accord to John the Baptist. But this British bulldog contempt is
founded on a complete misconception of his reasons for submitting
voluntarily to an ordeal of torment and death. The modern
Secularist is often so determined to regard Jesus as a man like
himself and nothing more, that he slips unconsciously into the
error of assuming that Jesus shared that view. But it is quite
clear from the New Testament writers (the chief authorities for
believing that Jesus ever existed) that Jesus at the time of his
death believed himself to be the Christ, a divine personage. It
is therefore absurd to criticize his conduct before Pilate as if
he were Colonel Roosevelt or Admiral von Tirpitz or even Mahomet.
Whether you accept his belief in his divinity as fully as Simon
Peter did, or reject it as a delusion which led him to submit to
torture and sacrifice his life without resistance in the
conviction that he would presently rise again in glory, you are
equally bound to admit that, far from behaving like a coward or a
sheep, he showed considerable physical fortitude in going through
a cruel ordeal against which he could have defended himself as
effectually as he cleared the moneychangers out of the temple.
"Gentle Jesus, meek and mild" is a snivelling modern invention,
with no warrant in the gospels. St. Matthew would as soon have
thought of applying such adjectives to Judas Maccabeus as to
Jesus; and even St. Luke, who makes Jesus polite and gracious,
does not make him meek. The picture of him as an English curate
of the farcical comedy type, too meek to fight a policeman, and
everybody's butt, may be useful in the nursery to soften
children; but that such a figure could ever have become a centre
of the world's attention is too absurd for discussion; grown men
and women may speak kindly of a harmless creature who utters
amiable sentiments and is a helpless nincompoop when he is called
on to defend them; but they will not follow him, nor do what he
tells them, because they do not wish to share his defeat and
disgrace.


WAS JESUS A MARTYR?

It is important therefore that we should clear our minds of the
notion that Jesus died, as some are in the habit of declaring,
for his social and political opinions. There have been many
martyrs to those opinions; but he was not one of them, nor, as
his words show, did he see any more sense in martyrdom than
Galileo did. He was executed by the Jews for the blasphemy of
claiming to be a God; and Pilate, to whom this was a mere piece
of superstitious nonsense, let them execute him as the cheapest
way of keeping them quiet, on the formal plea that he had
committed treason against Rome by saying that he was the King of
the Jews. He was not falsely accused, nor denied full
opportunities of defending himself. The proceedings were quite
straightforward and regular; and Pilate, to whom the appeal lay,
favored him and despised his judges, and was evidently willing
enough to be conciliated. But instead of denying the charge,
Jesus repeated the offence. He knew what he was doing: he had
alienated numbers of his own disciples and been stoned in the
streets for doing it before. He was not lying: he believed
literally what he said. The horror of the High Priest was
perfectly natural: he was a Primate confronted with a heterodox
street preacher uttering what seemed to him an appalling and
impudent blasphemy. The fact that the blasphemy was to Jesus a
simple statement of fact, and that it has since been accepted as
such by all western nations, does not invalidate the proceedings,
nor give us the right to regard Annas and Caiaphas as worse men
than the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Head Master of Eton. If
Jesus had been indicted in a modern court, he would have been
examined by two doctors; found to be obsessed by a delusion;
declared incapable of pleading; and sent to an asylum: that is
the whole difference. But please note that when a man is charged
before a modern tribunal (to take a case that happened the other
day) of having asserted and maintained that he was an officer
returned from the front to receive the Victoria Cross at the
hands of the King, although he was in fact a mechanic, nobody
thinks of treating him as afflicted with a delusion. He is
punished for false pretences, because his assertion is credible
and therefore misleading. Just so, the claim to divinity made by
Jesus was to the High Priest, who looked forward to the coming of
a Messiah, one that might conceivably have been true, and might
therefore have misled the people in a very dangerous way. That
was why he treated Jesus as an imposter and a blasphemer where we
should have treated him as a madman.


THE GOSPELS WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

All this will become clear if we read the gospels without
prejudice. When I was young it was impossible to read them
without fantastic confusion of thought. The confusion was so
utterly confounded that it was called the proper spirit to read
the Bible in. Jesus was a baby; and he was older than creation.
He was a man who could be persecuted, stoned, scourged, and
killed; and he was a god, immortal and all-powerful, able to
raise the dead and call millions of angels to his aid. It was a
sin to doubt either view of him: that is, it was a sin to reason
about him; and the end was that you did not reason about him, and
read about him only when you were compelled. When you heard the
gospel stories read in church, or learnt them from painters and
poets, you came out with an impression of their contents that
would have astonished a Chinaman who had read the story without
prepossession. Even sceptics who were specially on their guard,
put the Bible in the dock, and read the gospels with the object
of detecting discrepancies in the four narratives to show that
the writers were as subject to error as the writers of
yesterday's newspaper.

All this has changed greatly within two generations. Today the
Bible is so little read that the language of the Authorized
Version is rapidly becoming obsolete; so that even in the United
States, where the old tradition of the verbal infallibility of
"the book of books" lingers more strongly than anywhere else
except perhaps in Ulster, retranslations into modern English have
been introduced perforce to save its bare intelligibility. It is
quite easy today to find cultivated persons who have never read
the New Testament, and on whom therefore it is possible to try
the experiment of asking them to read the gospels and state what
they have gathered as to the history and views and character of
Christ.


THE GOSPELS NOW UNINTELLIGIBLE TO NOVICES.

But it will not do to read the gospels with a mind furnished only
for the reception of, say, a biography of Goethe. You will not
make sense of them, nor even be able without impatient weariness
to persevere in the task of going steadily through them, unless
you know something of the history of the human imagination as
applied to religion. Not long ago I asked a writer of
distinguished intellectual competence whether he had made a study
of the gospels since his childhood. His reply was that he had
lately tried, but "found it all such nonsense that I could not
stick it." As I do not want to send anyone to the gospels with
this result, I had better here give a brief exposition of how
much of the history of religion is needed to make the gospels and
the conduct and ultimate fate of Jesus intelligible and
interesting.


WORLDLINESS OF THE MAJORITY.

The first common mistake to get rid of is that mankind consists
of a great mass of religious people and a few eccentric atheists.
It consists of a huge mass of worldly people, and a small
percentage of persons deeply interested in religion and concerned
about their own souls and other peoples'; and this section
consists mostly of those who are passionately affirming the
established religion and those who are passionately attacking it,
the genuine philosophers being very few. Thus you never have a
nation of millions of Wesleys and one Tom Paine. You have a
million Mr. Worldly Wisemans, one Wesley, with his small
congregation, and one Tom Paine, with his smaller congregation.
The passionately religious are a people apart; and if they were
not hopelessly outnumbered by the worldly, they would turn the
world upside down, as St. Paul was reproached, quite justly, for
wanting to do. Few people can number among their personal
acquaintances a single atheist or a single Plymouth Brother.
Unless a religious turn in ourselves has led us to seek the
little Societies to which these rare birds belong, we pass our
lives among people who, whatever creeds they may repeat, and in
whatever temples they may avouch their respectability and wear
their Sunday clothes, have robust consciences, and hunger and
thirst, not for righteousness, but for rich feeding and comfort
and social position and attractive mates and ease and pleasure
and respect and consideration: in short, for love and money. To
these people one morality is as good as another provided they are
used to it and can put up with its restrictions without
unhappiness; and in the maintenance of this morality they will
fight and punish and coerce without scruple. They may not be the
salt of the earth, these Philistines; but they are the substance
of civilization; and they save society from ruin by criminals and
conquerors as well as by Savonarolas and Knipperdollings. And as
they know, very sensibly, that a little religion is good for
children and serves morality, keeping the poor in good humor or
in awe by promising rewards in heaven or threatening torments in
hell, they encourage the religious people up to a certain point:
for instance, if Savonarola only tells the ladies of Florence
that they ought to tear off their jewels and finery and sacrifice
them to God, they offer him a cardinal's hat, and praise him as a
saint; but if he induces them to actually do it, they burn him as
a public nuisance.


RELIGION OF THE MINORITY.  SALVATIONISM.

The religion of the tolerated religious minority has always been
essentially the same religion: that is why its changes of name
and form have made so little difference. That is why, also, a
nation so civilized as the English can convert negroes to their
faith with great ease, but cannot convert Mahometans or Jews. The
negro finds in civilized Salvationism an unspeakably more
comforting version of his crude creed; but neither Saracen nor
Jew sees any advantage in it over his own version. The Crusader
was surprised to find the Saracen quite as religious and moral as
himself, and rather more than less civilized. The Latin Christian
has nothing to offer the Greek Christian that Greek Christianity
has not already provided. They are all, at root, Salvationists.

Let us trace this religion of Salvation from its beginnings. So
many things that man does not himself contrive or desire are
always happening: death, plagues, tempests, blights, floods,
sunrise and sunset, growths and harvests and decay, and Kant's
two wonders of the starry heavens above us and the moral law
within us, that we conclude that somebody must be doing it all,
or that somebody is doing the good and somebody else doing the
evil, or that armies of invisible persons, benefit-cut and
malevolent, are doing it; hence you postulate gods and devils,
angels and demons. You propitiate these powers with presents,
called sacrifices, and flatteries, called praises. Then the
Kantian moral law within you makes you conceive your god as a
judge; and straightway you try to corrupt him, also with presents
and flatteries. This seems shocking to us; but our objection to
it is quite a recent development: no longer ago than Shakespear's
time it was thought quite natural that litigants should give
presents to human judges; and the buying off of divine wrath by
actual money payments to priests, or, in the reformed churches
which discountenance this, by subscriptions to charities and
church building and the like, is still in full swing. Its
practical disadvantage is that though it makes matters very easy
for the rich, it cuts off the poor from all hope of divine favor.
And this quickens the moral criticism of the poor to such an
extent, that they soon find the moral law within them revolting
against the idea of buying off the deity with gold and gifts,
though they are still quite ready to buy him off with the paper
money of praise and professions of repentance. Accordingly, you
will find that though a religion may last unchanged for many
centuries in primitive communities where the conditions of life
leave no room for poverty and riches, and the process of
propitiating the supernatural powers is as well within the means
of the least of the members as within those of the headman, yet
when commercial civilization arrives, and capitalism divides the
people into a few rich and a great many so poor that they can
barely live, a movement for religious reform will arise among the
poor, and will be essentially a movement for cheap or entirely
gratuitous salvation. To understand what the poor mean by
propitiation, we must examine for a moment what they mean by
justice.


THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT

The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and
partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in
the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong
has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering.
It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this
compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for
the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers;
but a moment's reflection will show that this utilitarian
application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the
shedding of innocent blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of
guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the
murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a
mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine
wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a
sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection
of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves
is the essence of sacrifice and expiation. However much the
Philistines have succeeded in confusing these things in practice,
they are to the Salvationist sense distinct and even contrary.
The Baronet's cousin in Dickens's novel, who, perplexed by the
failure of the police to discover the murderer of the baronet's
solicitor, said "Far better hang wrong fellow than no fellow,"
was not only expressing a very common sentiment, but trembling on
the brink of the rarer Salvationist opinion that it is much
better to hang the wrong fellow: that, in fact, the wrong fellow
is the right fellow to hang.

The point is a cardinal one, because until we grasp it not only
does historical Christianity remain unintelligible to us, but
those who do not care a rap about historical Christianity may be
led into the mistake of supposing that if we discard revenge, and
treat murderers exactly as God treated Cain: that is, exempt them
from punishment by putting a brand on them as unworthy to be
sacrificed, and let them face the world as best they can with
that brand on them, we should get rid both of punishment and
sacrifice. It would not at all follow: on the contrary, the
feeling that there must be an expiation of the murder might quite
possibly lead to our putting some innocent person--the more
innocent the better--to a cruel death to balance the account with
divine justice.


SALVATION AT FIRST A CLASS PRIVILEGE; AND THE REMEDY

Thus, even when the poor decide that the method of purchasing
salvation by offering rams and goats or bringing gold to the
altar must be wrong because they cannot afford it, we still do
not feel "saved" without a sacrifice and a victim. In vain do we
try to substitute mystical rites that cost nothing, such as
circumcision, or, as a substitute for that, baptism. Our sense of
justice still demands an expiation, a sacrifice, a sufferer for
our sins. And this leaves the poor man still in his old
difficulty; for if it was impossible for him to procure rams and
goats and shekels, how much more impossible is it for him to find
a neighbor who will voluntarily suffer for his sins: one who will
say cheerfully "You have committed a murder. Well, never mind: I
am willing to be hanged for it in your stead?"

Our imagination must come to our rescue. Why not, instead of
driving ourselves to despair by insisting on a separate atonement
by a separate redeemer for every sin, have one great atonement
and one great redeemer to compound for the sins of the world once
for all? Nothing easier, nothing cheaper. The yoke is easy, the
burden light. All you have to do when the redeemer is once found
(or invented by the imagination) is to believe in the efficacy of
the transaction, and you are saved. The rams and goats cease to
bleed; the altars which ask for expensive gifts and continually
renewed sacrifices are torn down; and the Church of the single
redeemer and the single atonement rises on the ruins of the old
temples, and becomes a single Church of the Christ.


RETROSPECTIVE ATONEMENT, AND THE EXPECTATION OF THE REDEEMER

But this does not happen at once. Between the old costly religion
of the rich and the new gratuitous religion of the poor there
comes an interregnum in which the redeemer, though conceived by
the human imagination, is not yet found. He is awaited and
expected under the names of the Christ, the Messiah, Baldur the
Beautiful, or what not; but he has not yet come. Yet the sinners
are not therefore in despair. It is true that they cannot say, as
we say, "The Christ has come, and has redeemed us;" but they can
say "The Christ will come, and will redeem us," which, as the
atonement is conceived as retrospective, is equally consoling.
There are periods when nations are seething with this expectation
and crying aloud with prophecy of the Redeemer through their
poets. To feel that atmosphere we have only to take up the Bible
and read Isaiah at one end of such a period and Luke and John at
the other.


COMPLETION OF THE SCHEME BY LUTHER AND CALVIN

We now see our religion as a quaint but quite intelligible
evolution from crude attempts to propitiate the destructive
forces of Nature among savages to a subtle theology with a costly
ritual of sacrifice possible only to the rich as a luxury, and
finally to the religion of Luther and Calvin. And it must be said
for the earlier forms that they involved very real sacrifices.
The sacrifice was not always vicarious, and is not yet
universally so. In India men pay with their own skins, torturing
themselves hideously to attain holiness. In the west, saints
amazed the world with their austerities and self-scourgings and
confessions and vigils. But Luther delivered us from all that.
His reformation was a triumph of imagination and a triumph of
cheapness. It brought you complete salvation and asked you for
nothing but faith. Luther did not know what he was doing in the
scientific sociological way in which we know it; but his instinct
served him better than knowledge could have done; for it was
instinct rather than theological casuistry that made him hold so
resolutely to Justification by Faith as the trump card by which
he should beat the Pope, or, as he would have put it, the sign in
which he should conquer. He may be said to have abolished the
charge for admission to heaven. Paul had advocated this; but
Luther and Calvin did it.


JOHN BARLEYCORN

There is yet another page in the history of religion which must
be conned and digested before the career of Jesus can be fully
understood. people who can read long books will find it in
Frazer's Golden Bough. Simpler folk will find it in the peasant's
song of John Barleycorn, now made accessible to our drawingroom
amateurs in the admirable collections of Somersetshire Folk Songs
by Mr. Cecil Sharp. From Frazer's magnum opus you will learn how
the same primitive logic which makes the Englishman believe today
that by eating a beefsteak he can acquire the strength and
courage of the bull, and to hold that belief in the face of the
most ignominious defeats by vegetarian wrestlers and racers and
bicyclists, led the first men who conceived God as capable of
incarnation to believe that they could acquire a spark of his
divinity by eating his flesh and drinking his blood. And from the
song of John Barleycorn you may learn how the miracle of the
seed, the growth, and the harvest, still the most wonderful of
all the miracles and as inexplicable as ever, taught the
primitive husbandman, and, as we must now affirm, taught him
quite rightly, that God is in the seed, and that God is immortal.
And thus it became the test of Godhead that nothing that you
could do to it could kill it, and that when you buried it, it
would rise again in renewed life and beauty and give mankind
eternal life on condition that it was eaten and drunk, and again
slain and buried, to rise again for ever and ever. You may, and
indeed must, use John Barleycorn "right barbarouslee," cutting
him "off at knee" with your scythes, scourging him with your
flails, burying him in the earth; and he will not resist you nor
reproach you, but will rise again in golden beauty amidst a great
burst of sunshine and bird music, and save you and renew your
life. And from the interweaving of these two traditions with the
craving for the Redeemer, you at last get the conviction that
when the Redeemer comes he will be immortal; he will give us his
body to eat and his blood to drink; and he will prove his
divinity by suffering a barbarous death without resistance or
reproach, and rise from the dead and return to the earth in glory
as the giver of life eternal.


LOOKING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

Yet another persistent belief has beset the imagination of the
religious ever since religion spread among the poor, or, rather,
ever since commercial civilization produced a hopelessly poor
class cut off from enjoyment in this world. That belief is that
the end of this world is at hand, and that it will presently pass
away and be replaced by a kingdom of happiness, justice, and
bliss in which the rich and the oppressors and the unjust shall
have no share. We are all familiar with this expectation: many of
us cherish some pious relative who sees in every great calamity a
sign of the approaching end. Warning pamphlets are in constant
circulation: advertisements are put in the papers and paid for by
those who are convinced, and who are horrified at the
indifference of the irreligious to the approaching doom. And
revivalist preachers, now as in the days of John the Baptist,
seldom fail to warn their flocks to watch and pray, as the great
day will steal upon them like a thief in the night, and cannot be
long deferred in a world so wicked. This belief also associates
itself with Barleycorn's second coming; so that the two events
become identified at last.

There is the other and more artificial side of this belief, on
which it is an inculcated dread. The ruler who appeals to the
prospect of heaven to console the poor and keep them from
insurrection also curbs the vicious by threatening them with
hell. In the Koran we find Mahomet driven more and more to this
expedient of government; and experience confirms his evident
belief that it is impossible to govern without it in certain
phases of civilization. We shall see later on that it gives a
powerful attraction to the belief in a Redeemer, since it adds to
remorse of conscience, which hardened men bear very lightly, a
definite dread of hideous and eternal torture.


THE HONOR OF DIVINE PARENTAGE

One more tradition must be noted. The consummation of praise for
a king is to declare that he is the son of no earthly father, but
of a god. His mother goes into the temple of Apollo, and Apollo
comes to her in the shape of a serpent, or the like. The Roman
emperors, following the example of Augustus, claimed the title of
God. Illogically, such divine kings insist a good deal on their
royal human ancestors. Alexander, claiming to be the son of
Apollo, is equally determined to be the son of Philip. As the
gospels stand, St. Matthew and St. Luke give genealogies (the two
are different) establishing the descent of Jesus through Joseph
from the royal house of David, and yet declare that not Joseph
but the Holy Ghost was the father of Jesus. It is therefore now
held that the story of the Holy Ghost is a later interpolation
borrowed from the Greek and Roman imperial tradition. But
experience shows that simultaneous faith in the descent from
David and the conception by the Holy Ghost is possible. Such
double beliefs are entertained by the human mind without
uneasiness or consciousness of the contradiction involved. Many
instances might be given: a familiar one to my generation being
that of the Tichborne claimant, whose attempt to pass himself off
as a baronet was supported by an association of laborers on the
ground that the Tichborne family, in resisting it, were trying to
do a laborer out of his rights. It is quite possible that Matthew
and Luke may have been unconscious of the contradiction: indeed
the interpolation theory does not remove the difficulty, as the
interpolators themselves must have been unconscious of it. A
better ground for suspecting interpolation is that St. Paul knew
nothing of the divine birth, and taught that Jesus came into the
world at his birth as the son of Joseph, but rose from the dead
after three days as the son of God. Here again, few notice the
discrepancy: the three views are accepted simultaneously without
intellectual discomfort. We can provisionally entertain half a
dozen contradictory versions of an event if we feel either that
it does not greatly matter, or that there is a category
attainable in which the contradictions are reconciled.

But that is not the present point. All that need be noted here is
that the legend of divine birth was sure to be attached sooner or
later to very eminent persons in Roman imperial times, and that
modern theologians, far from discrediting it, have very logically
affirmed the miraculous conception not only of Jesus but of his
mother.

With no more scholarly equipment than a knowledge of these habits
of the human imagination, anyone may now read the four gospels
without bewilderment, and without the contemptuous incredulity
which spoils the temper of many modern atheists, or the senseless
credulity which sometimes makes pious people force us to shove
them aside in emergencies as impracticable lunatics when they ask
us to meet violence and injustice with dumb submission in the
belief that the strange demeanor of Jesus before Pilate was meant
as an example of normal human conduct. Let us admit that without
the proper clues the gospels are, to a modern educated person,
nonsensical and incredible, whilst the apostles are unreadable.
But with the clues, they are fairly plain sailing. Jesus becomes
an intelligible and consistent person. His reasons for going
"like a lamb to the slaughter" instead of saving himself as
Mahomet did, become quite clear. The narrative becomes as
credible as any other historical narrative of its period.



MATTHEW.

THE ANNUNCIATION: THE MASSACRE: THE FLIGHT

Let us begin with the gospel of Matthew, bearing in mind that it
does not profess to be the evidence of an eyewitness. It is a
chronicle, founded, like other chronicles, on such evidence and
records as the chronicler could get hold of. The only one of the
evangelists who professes to give first-hand evidence as an
eyewitness naturally takes care to say so; and the fact that
Matthew makes no such pretension, and writes throughout as a
chronicler, makes it clear that he is telling the story of Jesus
as Holinshed told the story of Macbeth, except that, for a reason
to be given later on, he must have collected his material and
completed his book within the lifetime of persons contemporary
with Jesus. Allowance must also be made for the fact that the
gospel is written in the Greek language, whilst the first-hand
traditions and the actual utterances of Jesus must have been in
Aramaic, the dialect of Palestine. These distinctions were
important, as you will find if you read Holinshed or Froissart
and then read Benvenuto Cellini. You do not blame Holinshed or
Froissart for believing and repeating the things they had read or
been told, though you cannot always believe these things
yourself. But when Cellini tells you that he saw this or did
that, and you find it impossible to believe him, you lose
patience with him, and are disposed to doubt everything in his
autobiography. Do not forget, then, that Matthew is Holinshed and
not Benvenuto. The very first pages of his narrative will put
your attitude to the test.

Matthew tells us that the mother of Jesus was betrothed to a man
of royal pedigree named Joseph, who was rich enough to live in a
house in Bethlehem to which kings could bring gifts of gold
without provoking any comment. An angel announces to Joseph that
Jesus is the son of the Holy Ghost, and that he must not accuse
her of infidelity because of her bearing a son of which he is not
the father; but this episode disappears from the subsequent
narrative: there is no record of its having been told to Jesus,
nor any indication of his having any knowledge of it. The
narrative, in fact, proceeds in all respects as if the
annunciation formed no part of it.

Herod the Tetrarch, believing that a child has been born who will
destroy him, orders all the male children to be slaughtered; and
Jesus escapes by the flight of his parents into Egypt, whence
they return to Nazareth when the danger is over. Here it is
necessary to anticipate a little by saying that none of the other
evangelists accept this story, as none of them except John, who
throws over Matthew altogether, shares his craze for treating
history and biography as mere records of the fulfillment of
ancient Jewish prophecies. This craze no doubt led him to seek
for some legend bearing out Hosea's "Out of Egypt have I called
my son," and Jeremiah's Rachel weeping for her children: in fact,
he says so. Nothing that interests us nowadays turns on the
credibility of the massacre of the innocents and the flight into
Egypt. We may forget them, and proceed to the important part of
the narrative, which skips at once to the manhood of Jesus.


JOHN THE BAPTIST

At this moment, a Salvationist prophet named John is stirring the
people very strongly. John has declared that the rite of
circumcision is insufficient as a dedication of the individual to
God, and has substituted the rite of baptism. To us, who are
accustomed to baptism as a matter of course, and to whom
circumcision is a rather ridiculous foreign practice of no
consequence, the sensational effect of such a heresy as this on
the Jews is not apparent: it seems to us as natural that John
should have baptized people as that the rector of our village
should do so. But, as St. Paul found to his cost later on, the
discarding of circumcision for baptism was to the Jews as
startling a heresy as the discarding of transubstantiation in the
Mass was to the Catholics of the XVI century.


JESUS JOINS THE BAPTISTS

Jesus entered as a man of thirty (Luke says) into the religious
life of his time by going to John the Baptist and demanding
baptism from him, much as certain well-to-do young gentlemen
forty years ago "joined the Socialists." As far as established
Jewry was concerned, he burnt his boats by this action, and cut
himself off from the routine of wealth, respectability, and
orthodoxy. He then began preaching John's gospel, which, apart
from the heresy of baptism, the value of which lay in its
bringing the Gentiles (that is, the uncircumcized) within the
pale of salvation, was a call to the people to repent of their
sins, as the kingdom of heaven was at hand. Luke adds that he
also preached the communism of charity; told the surveyors of
taxes not to over-assess the taxpayers; and advised soldiers to
be content with their wages and not to be violent or lay false
accusations. There is no record of John going beyond this.


THE SAVAGE JOHN AND THE CIVILIZED JESUS

Jesus went beyond it very rapidly, according to Matthew. Though,
like John, he became an itinerant preacher, he departed widely
from John's manner of life. John went into the wilderness, not
into the synagogues; and his baptismal font was the river Jordan.
He was an ascetic, clothed in skins and living on locusts and
wild honey, practising a savage austerity. He courted martyrdom,
and met it at the hands of Herod. Jesus saw no merit either in
asceticism or martyrdom. In contrast to John he was essentially a
highly-civilized, cultivated person. According to Luke, he
pointed out the contrast himself, chaffing the Jews for
complaining that John must be possessed by the devil because he
was a teetotaller and vegetarian, whilst, because Jesus was
neither one nor the other, they reviled him as a gluttonous man
and a winebibber, the friend of the officials and their
mistresses. He told straitlaced disciples that they would have
trouble enough from other people without making any for
themselves, and that they should avoid martyrdom and enjoy
themselves whilst they had the chance. "When they persecute you
in this city," he says, "flee into the next." He preaches in the
synagogues and in the open air indifferently, just as they come.
He repeatedly says, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice," meaning
evidently to clear himself of the inveterate superstition that
suffering is gratifying to God. "Be not, as the Pharisees, of a
sad countenance," he says. He is convivial, feasting with Roman
officials and sinners. He is careless of his person, and is
remonstrated with for not washing his hands before sitting down
to table. The followers of John the Baptist, who fast, and who
expect to find the Christians greater ascetics than themselves,
are disappointed at finding that Jesus and his twelve friends do
not fast; and Jesus tells them that they should rejoice in him
instead of being melancholy. He is jocular and tells them they
will all have as much fasting as they want soon enough, whether
they like it or not. He is not afraid of disease, and dines with
a leper. A woman, apparently to protect him against infection,
pours a costly unguent on his head, and is rebuked because what
it cost might have been given to the poor. He poohpoohs that
lowspirited view, and says, as he said when he was reproached for
not fasting, that the poor are always there to be helped, but
that he is not there to be anointed always, implying that you
should never lose a chance of being happy when there is so much
misery in the world. He breaks the Sabbath; is impatient of
conventionality when it is uncomfortable or obstructive; and
outrages the feelings of the Jews by breaches of it. He is apt to
accuse people who feel that way of hypocrisy. Like the late
Samuel Butler, he regards disease as a department of sin, and on
curing a lame man, says "Thy sins are forgiven" instead of "Arise
and walk," subsequently maintaining, when the Scribes reproach
him for assuming power to forgive sin as well as to cure disease,
that the two come to the same thing. He has no modest
affectations, and claims to be greater than Solomon or Jonah.
When reproached, as Bunyan was, for resorting to the art of
fiction when teaching in parables, he justifies himself on the
ground that art is the only way in which the people can be
taught. He is, in short, what we should call an artist and a
Bohemian in his manner of life.


JESUS NOT A PROSLETYST

A point of considerable practical importance today is that be
expressly repudiates the idea that forms of religion, once
rooted, can be weeded out and replanted with the flowers of a
foreign faith. "If you try to root up the tares you will root up
the wheat as well." Our proselytizing missionary enterprises are
thus flatly contrary to his advice; and their results appear to
bear him out in his view that if you convert a man brought up in
another creed, you inevitably demoralize him. He acts on this
view himself, and does not convert his disciples from Judaism to
Christianity. To this day a Christian would be in religion a Jew
initiated by baptism instead of circumcision, and accepting Jesus
as the Messiah, and his teachings as of higher authority than
those of Moses, but for the action of the Jewish priests, who, to
save Jewry from being submerged in the rising flood of
Christianity after the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction
of the Temple, set up what was practically a new religious order,
with new Scriptures and elaborate new observances, and to their
list of the accursed added one Jeschu, a bastard magician, whose
comic rogueries brought him to a bad end like Punch or Til
Eulenspiegel: an invention which cost them dear when the
Christians got the upper hand of them politically. The Jew as
Jesus, himself a Jew, knew him, never dreamt of such things, and
could follow Jesus without ceasing to be a Jew.


THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS.

So much for his personal life and temperament. His public career
as a popular preacher carries him equally far beyond John the
Baptist. He lays no stress on baptism or vows, and preaches
conduct incessantly. He advocates communism, the widening of the
private family with its cramping ties into the great family of
mankind under the fatherhood of God, the abandonment of revenge
and punishment, the counteracting of evil by good instead of by a
hostile evil, and an organic conception of society in which you
are not an independent individual but a member of society, your
neighbor being another member, and each of you members one of
another, as two fingers on a hand, the obvious conclusion being
that unless you love your neighbor as yourself and he
reciprocates you will both be the worse for it. He conveys all
this with extraordinary charm, and entertains his hearers with
fables (parables) to illustrate them. He has no synagogue or
regular congregation, but travels from place to place with twelve
men whom he has called from their work as he passed, and who have
abandoned it to follow him.


THE MIRACLES

He has certain abnormal powers by which he can perform miracles.
He is ashamed of these powers, but, being extremely
compassionate, cannot refuse to exercise them when afflicted
people beg him to cure them, when multitudes of people are
hungry, and when his disciples are terrified by storms on the
lakes. He asks for no reward, but begs the people not to mention
these powers of his. There are two obvious reasons for his
dislike of being known as a worker of miracles. One is the
natural objection of all men who possess such powers, but have
far more important business in the world than to exhibit them, to
be regarded primarily as charlatans, besides being pestered to
give exhibitions to satisfy curiosity. The other is that his view
of the effect of miracles upon his mission is exactly that taken
later on by Rousseau. He perceives that they will discredit him
and divert attention from his doctrine by raising an entirely
irrelevant issue between his disciples and his opponents.

Possibly my readers may not have studied Rousseau's Letters
Written From The Mountain, which may be regarded as the classic
work on miracles as credentials of divine mission. Rousseau
shows, as Jesus foresaw, that the miracles are the main obstacle
to the acceptance of Christianity, because their incredibility
(if they were not incredible they would not be miracles) makes
people sceptical as to the whole narrative, credible enough in
the main, in which they occur, and suspicious of the doctrine
with which they are thus associated. "Get rid of the miracles,"
said Rousseau, "and the whole world will fall at the feet of
Jesus Christ." He points out that miracles offered as evidence of
divinity, and failing to convince, make divinity ridiculous. He
says, in effect, there is nothing in making a lame man walk:
thousands of lame men have been cured and have walked without any
miracle. Bring me a man with only one leg and make another grow
instantaneously on him before my eyes; and I will be really
impressed; but mere cures of ailments that have often been cured
before are quite useless as evidence of anything else than desire
to help and power to cure.