[ p. 3 ]
THE LIFE OF JESUS OF NAZARETH WITH WHICH THIS NARRATIVE IS CONCERNED COMMENCES WITH HIS BAPTISM, AT ABOUT THE AGE OF THIRTY, BY JOHN THE BAPTIST. Of his life before that critical moment we know nothing save what his own words tell us, and what we may confidently deduce from them.
What we can thus establish or conjecture concerning the birth, the childhood, and the early manhood of Jesus is little enough; but it is of deep importance.
While he taught in the Temple in the last days before his arrest and crucifixion he put to his people this pregnant question :
“How can the scribes say that the Messiah is David’s son? For David himself, speaking in the Holy Spirit, said: [ p. 4 ]
The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand,
Until I make thine enemies a footstool for thy feet.
David himself calls him ‘Lord.’ Then how can he be his son?” Thus it is established, by Jesus’ own words, that he was not descended of David’s line; and it follows inexorably that the accounts of Jesus’ descent and birth in the gospels of Matthew and Luke have the beauty not of truth, but of legend. The birth in the manger at Bethlehem, the Star in the East, the visit of the Wise Men, are devoid of all historical reality. These wonderful things did not happen. What did happen was more wonderful. To Joseph, a carpenter in the village of Nazareth in Galilee, and his wife Mary, a son was born. It is unlikely that there was anything extraordinary about him; men of commanding genius are seldom extraordinary children. His mother saw nothing very extraordinary in him, for she never believed in him. His father is an utterly shadowy figure ; he is not even mentioned in the earliest Gospel of Mark; and it is even possible that the report that [ p. 5 ] he was a carpenter may have been deduced from the fact that Jesus had been one. However that may be, it is evident that Joseph the father had passed out of Jesus’ life at an early age. Probably he died while Jesus was a baby. We must conceive Jesus, during most of his childhood, as a fatherless little boy. He had four brothers, James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and at least two sisters. In what place he came among them we cannot say; but it is more probable that he was among the youngest than among the eldest.
Though from his baptism onwards until his death there was a complete severance between Jesus and his family, it would be inhuman to conclude that the incompatibility reached back to his childhood. He may have been a lonely, but certainly he was not an unhappy, little boy; he played, like any other little boy, at dances and funerals in the market place; and he watched, with a curious and wondering eye, the small doings of a poor household the setting of dough to rise, the close sweeping of the floor for a lost shilling, the patching of a coat so threadbare that the piece of new cloth tore the old away. His mother must have been poor to a, degree. In his after-life Jesus could pick [ p. 6 ] out a poor widow from a crowd, and know as by instinct that the halfpenny she dropped into the Temple money-box was all she had.
In the material sense, and in that sense alone, the childhood of Jesus was meager. He knew what it was to go hungry ; and we may suppose that the thin sustenance of his early days was in part the cause of the two contradictory characteristics of his manhood his power of physical endurance and his constitutional frailty. For many weeks after his baptism he starved in the desert, for many months of his “ministry” he lived the hard life of a fugitive, and all was well; yet on the Cross he died within six hours, whereas the ordinary criminal frequently endured for two days. Much, incredibly much, of his final weakness must have been due to the incessant and ever-increasing demands made by his spirit on his body; but yet not all. A fundamental frailty there was, and it probably came from the rigors of his childhood.
Nevertheless, it was a full and happy childhood, and something more than these, or any, epithets can convey. Jesus’ childhood was of the utmost significance to him. He thought of it, in later years, as an age of completeness, ancj he felt that his life [ p. 7 ] as a little boy had been fuller and truer than his life as a man, and that in growing up he had lost something infinitely precious that it was worth the whole world to regain. For that something he found many names: sometimes he called it the Kingdom of God, sometimes Life itself. It was a condition of security, of spontaneity, of freedom from all doubt and division. He never forgot it.
So he grew up to be a carpenter, doubtless a good one; for there is an instinctive completeness about the later man which makes us imagine him a good man of his hands—but delicate hands. He had learned the Law and the Prophets ; none of the Scribes and Pharisees knew the Scriptures as he did, with the same easy creative mastery. He felt that he knew, and he did know, the authentic voice of God from among the many voices of his prophets. But against the adamantine Law, and the thousand rigid and trifling interpretations of the Tradition, he rebelled. If that was religion, he would have none of it.
Of this time of rebellion we know absolutely nothing. What happened to him in the fateful years between twenty and thirty is hidden from us; we only know that he became what he was—the [ p. 8 ] profoundest teacher, the bravest hero, the most loving man, that this world has ever known. What happened to make him this we shall imagine according to our conception of how the greatest men are made. One or two things we may say for certain. He plunged into the world; direct, firsthand experience of life, and more than village life, speaks in all his sayings. He suffered; he was bound to suffer. No man learns infinite love save through the infinite of suffering. And a third thing which is certain is that he sinned. No man was ever less of a humbug than Jesus. When he went out to be baptized by John, he went out to be baptized for “the remission of his sins.” He was the last man on earth to seek such a baptism had he not been conscious of sin. No man despised mere ritual and empty ceremony more profoundly than he. He was baptized for his sins because he had sinned.
But sin is a vague word. The sins of a great man are not as the sins of a little one ; and the most grievous sin of a sensitive man would be imperceptible to a callous conscience. Jesus’ sins were the sins of a man of supreme spiritual genius, who knew and taught that the outward act was less [ p. 9 ] significant than the inwftrd attitude. To such a man an inward despair concerning the existence of God would be far more terrible than any lawless living in which the inward despair should find its utterance.
It would be foolish to speculate further on the nature of Jesus’ sin. Enough that in his own conviction, he had sinned ; and that on the news of the appearance of John, preaching the imminent end of the world and a baptism for the remission of sins, he went down from Nazareth to a desert place by the side of the Jordan to be baptized by him. He was then about thirty years old. At that age, and in that place, Jesus first enters the pages of history. With his baptism by John our real knowledge of him begins.