© 1995 Ann Bendall
© 1995 The Brotherhood of Man Library
About the book The Religions of Man, by Huston Smith, 1958 (Harper and Row Inc. New York)
This renowned book, which is written in as simple a language as its subject permits, develops a section to each of the following religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, and Christ-ianity. In addition, at the end of each section, the author provides a list of recommended readings on that religion.
Besides its history, its theology, and its founding personality (if there was one), the author traces the beginning of the religion right through to its present day theology and philosophy. This article presents a summary of what the author says about the beginnings of Christianity.
Basically, Christianity is an historical religion. That is to say, it is not founded primarily on universal principles but in concrete events—actual historical happenings. The most important of these is the life of a little known Jewish carpenter who was born in a stable, died at the age of thirty three as a criminal rather than as a hero, never travelled more than ninety miles from his birthplace, owned nothing, attended no college, marshalled no army, and, instead of producing books, did his only writing in the sand! Nevertheless his birthday is kept across the world and his death day sets a gallows against every skyline. Who then, was he?
When we try to pin down the biographical details of Jesus life we are immediately stuck—and disappointed by how little information is available. We do not know what he looked like, and when we pass from physiognomy to biography, solid information is again surprisingly scant. We know that he was born in Palestine during the reign of Herod the Great, probably around 4 B.C. He grew up in or near Nazareth, presumably after the fashion of the normal Jew of the times. He was baptised by John, a dedicated prophet who was electrifying the region with his proclamation of God’s coming judgment. In his early thirties he had a teaching-healing career, focussed largely in Galilee, which lasted no more than three years. In time, he incurred the hostility of some of his compatriots and also the suspicions of Rome, which led to his execution by crucifixion on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
These come close to being all the undisputed facts of Jesus’ career that we have. One cannot relate them without sensing how unimportant such facts really are when taken by themselves. To see the stature of his life and its historical moment we must turn to the kind of person he was, the quality and power of his life. Here, fortunately, we are on much firmer ground, for though, as John Knox said, the gospels do not succeed in fully revealing Jesus, they are utterly unable to conceal him. Whatever may be lacking in our picture of Jesus, we know more than enough to characterize him as a person of strange and incomparable greatness. Out of obscurity, he steps forth in heroic dimensions. He belonged to first century Palestine. It produced him but it cannot explain him.
No man in history has been more exalted since his death—but it is important to remember that no generation has exalted Jesus more than did his own, the generation of Peter, James, and Paul.
What was there in this life that forced those who knew it best to come to the conclusion that it was divine? The answer takes three parts—what he did, what he said, and what he was.
As Peter put it simply, “He went about doing good.” Easily and without self-consciousness, he moved among the dregs of his society, prostitutes and tax extortionists. Healing, helping people out of the chasms of despair, counselling them in their crises, he went about doing good. He went about doing it with such single-mindedness and effectiveness in fact that the people that were with him from day to day found their estimate of him modulating to a new category. They found themselves thinking that if God is pure goodness, if he were to take human form, then this is how he would act.
It was not only what Jesus did, however, that made his contemporaries think of him in new dimensions. It was also what he said.
There has been a great deal of controversy over the originality of Jesus teachings. Possibly the most balanced view is that of the great Jewish scholar, Klausner. If you take the teachings of Jesus separately, he wrote, you can find every one of them parallelled in either the Old Testament or its commentary, the Talmud. If, on the other hand, you take them as a whole, they have an urgency, an ardent vivid quality, an abandon, and, above all, a complete absence of second rate material that makes them refreshingly new.
The language of Jesus is, in fact, a fascinating study in itself, quite apart from its content. If simplicity, concentration, and the sense of what is vital are marks of great religious literature, these qualities alone would make Jesus’ words immortal. But this is just the beginning. They carry an extravagance of which wiser men, mindful of capacity for balanced judgment, are incapable. Indeed, their passionate quality has led one poet to coin a special word for Jesus’ language, calling it “gigantesque.” If your hand offends you, cut it off. If you eye stands between you and the best, gouge it out. Jesus is always talking about things like camels going through needles’ eyes, about men who fastidiously strain the gnats from their drink while oblivious of the camels humping down their gullet. His characters go round with timbers protruding from their eyes while looking for tiny specks in the eyes of their neighbors.
He talks of people whose outer lives are as stately as mausoleums while their inner lives stink of bodies in putrefaction. This is not rhetorical language skilfully added for effect. The language is part of the man himself, stemming from the urgency and passion of his driving conviction.
And what did he use this language to say? Not a great deal quantitatively, as far as our records have it. All the words of Jesus, as reported in the New Testament, can be spoken in two hours. Yet they are the most repeated words in the world: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye also unto them.” “Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Most of the time, however, he told stories—parables we call them. People who heard these stories were moved to exclaim, “Never spake man thus.”
They were astonished. And small wonder. If we are not it is only because we have heard his words so often that their edges have worn smooth by familiarity. If we could recover their original impact, we too would be startled. Their beauty would not cover the fact that they are “hard sayings,” a scheme of values so radically at odds with those by which we live that they would rock us like an earthquake.
We are told that the publican and the harlot go to heaven before those who are outwardly righteous, whereas the world assumes that the good people, the respectable people, the people who fulfil the norm and have nothing to be ashamed of, will lead the heavenly procession. There blows through these teachings, Berdyaev has said, a wind of freedom and liberty that frightens the world and makes it want to deflect them by postponement—not yet, not yet! H.G. Wells was evidently right. Either there was something mad about this man—or our hearts are still too small for what he was trying to say.
And what, precisely, was he trying to say? Taken together, his parables and his beatitudes, indeed everything he said, form the surface of a burning glass which focusses man’s awareness on the two most important facts about life: God’s overwhelming love for man, and the need for man to receive this love, then let it flow out again toward his neighbors.
Jesus was an authentic child of Judaism, heir to the best of her magnificent religious heritage. As such he inherited the Jewish vision of a God of infinite loving kindness whose entire being is bent on man’s salvation. If Jesus differed from his compatriots, it was only in taking this vision of God more seriously and sensing it more directly, not in believing something different.
Plainly the crater from which Jesus’ strenuous perfectionism issues is God’s astonishing love for man. Correlatively the reason we find this ethic incredible is that we do not share the premise on which it is based. The reason the love Jesus proposed is so demanding is that it is to be absolutely free, geared entirely to our neighbor’s needs, not his due. And the reason this seemed to Jesus the natural way to look at the matter is that this is the way God’s love has come to us.
Certainly the most impressive thing about the teachings of Jesus is not that he taught them but that he lived them. His entire life was one of complete humility, self-giving, and love which sought not its own. The supreme evidence of his humility, as E.C. Colwell has pointed out, is that it is impossible to discover what Jesus thought of himself. He was not concerned that men should know what he was. His concern was for people to know God and his will for their lives. By indirection this tells us something about what Jesus thought of himself too, but it is obvious he thought infinitely less of himself than he did of God.
Through the pages of the gospels Jesus emerges as a man of surpassing charm and winsomeness who bore about him, as someone has said, no strangeness at all save the strangeness of perfection.
In the end, especially when he laid down his life for his friends, it seemed to those who knew him best that here was a man in whom the human ego had disappeared completely, leaving his life so completely under the will of God that it became perfectly transparent to that will. It came to the point that, as they looked at Jesus, they were looking at the way God would be if he were to assume human form.