[ p. vii ]
DO not propose to offer an apology for this book. I wrote it because I needed to write it. The time had come when it had become urgent upon me to make up my mind about Jesus. For reasons which concern myself alone, I desired, if I could, to make him wholly real to myself.
The Jesus who is presented in these pages is simply the Jesus who is real to me the Jesus in whose real existence I can, and in whom I do, believe. Because I desired to present him clearly, I have not only excluded, without warning or apology, incidents in the familiar story which I hold to be apocryphal, but I have put aside many sayings and incidents which I believe to be wholly authentic, because to include them would obscure the narrative. My aim has been simply to establish a point of view from which the profound and astonishing unity of the life and teaching of Jesus can be grasped, and my hope is that those who can [ p. viii ] accept this point of view will find that the authentic sayings and incidents which I have omitted will fall naturally into place without exposition of mine.
For more than a century able minds have been at work trying to re-create the Jesus of history. I owe them much; yet the debt is less than I imagined it would be when I began this book. I quickly found that there was no consensus of critical opinion save on the few points which I had already established for myself, namely, the priority of Mark’s Gospel, the fact that it had been used by Matthew and Luke in the composition of their Gospels, and the impossibility of regarding the Fourth Gospel as historical. Outside this narrow territory I was surprised to find a welter of conflicting opinions, among which my own appeared to have as good a right to existence as another’s. After a time, indeed, it occurred to me that it might have a better right than some. My training as a literary critic might be the equivalent of the more specialized training of the professor of divinity. For much of my life has been spent in the effort to understand men of genius. And Jesus was above all else a man of genius. Of course there are many [ p. ix ] to whom he was above all else a supernatural being—a God. I cannot share that belief because I do not know what it means. But it is perhaps worth pointing out that those who truly hold it are themselves compelled to some such inquiry and effort at re-creation as I have attempted. For to hold the Catholic Faith that Jesus was very God means also to believe that he was very Man ; and to believe this is to believe that his life upon this earth must have come to pass in one way alone. No fiat of Omnipotence can contrive that a single event should happen in different ways at the same moment Therefore the effort of a century of critical research to re-create Jesus the man should receive at least the sympathetic attention of those who do verily believe in the God of the Catholic Faith. It is a matter for pity and regret that it has been but rarely given.
Yet it is a matter for more pity and deeper regret that those earnest Christians who have given it should have been left with a sense of the emptiness, even of the sacrilege, of some of the Higher Criticism. From my own experience I well understand, and heartily sympathize with, the simple Christian who cries, “They have taken away my [ p. x ] Master, and I know not where they have laid him.” I confess that not a little advanced criticism of the Gospel narratives repels me as a man, and irritates me as a critic, by its assumption that Jesus was an ordinary kind of man. Criticism of this kind seems never to pause to think the obvious thought that if Jesus had been an ordinary kind of man, it would not now, nineteen hundred years after his death, be striving to prove that he was.
The Germans, as they have achieved some of the greatest victories in this field, have committed some of the worst excesses. But the taint is to be found in English criticism also. The offenders are circumspect ; but sometimes one catches an unmistakable glimpse of le bout de l’oreille qui perce. I cannot forget two recent books, in one of which an eminent English theologian described Jesus, on his lonely and terrible journey to Jerusalem to die for mankind, as “a fanatic;” in the other a bishop of the Church of England declared that “Jesus added nothing to human thought.” It seems to me that I might fairly claim to be as good a Christian though indeed I make no claim to the title as such learned and orthodox expositors of the Faith, I do at least sincerely believe that Jesus of Nazareth [ p. xi ] was the wisest and the bravest, therefore the greatest man who has lived upon this earth. Let that belief be my credentials ; perhaps they are no worse than orthodoxy.
I will not vex my readers with an account of the various conceptions of the historical Jesus which have been put forward during the last hundred years. The conception of him as a man of genius is, however, conspicuous by its absence. Even Renan, whose life of Jesus is, for all its shortcomings, of an altogether higher order than any other, condescends to Jesus as a village illuminé. And in more recent years, when controversy has raged over what is called the eschatological interpretation of Jesus, spurious dilemmas have been created (it seems to me) mainly by the refusal to acknowledge that the nature of Jesus was altogether richer and more creative than his hard-and-fast interpreters are able to conceive.
Jesus was, of course, more, much more, than a man of genius. To the creative imagination of the great man of genius was added in him the power to live and die for his vision of things to come. Therefore the concept of the man of genius cannot be wholly adequate to his reality; but it is at least [ p. xii ] relevant to the author of sayings and parables that have haunted the souls of men for nineteen hundred years ; and it absolves us from accepting those adamantine and unreal dilemmas with which the more ruthless critics delight to demonstrate their prowess.
Yet even here I am anxious not to be misunderstood. Jesus is more than a teacher of an ultimate wisdom. If I thought he was only that, I would not have written a book to show it Jesus was a teacher who died to save men who would not listen to his teaching. No other teacher has done that And that sets him above and apart from all other teachers. It does not mean, as some may hold, that he added to the wisdom of the teacher the blindness of a fanatic. The combination is unthinkable and impossible. It means that to the wisdom of the perfect teacher in him was added the love of the perfect brother. There have perhaps been others as wise as Jesus, but none have had his love. Therefore there have been none so wise. To be wise and love this is beyond all wisdom.
No one can understand Jesus who does not understand his teaching; but no one can understand his teaching who does not understand his life and [ p. xiii ] death. The teaching without the life, the life without the teaching these are incomprehensible. Because Jesus taught Life itself not how to live but Life. In the words of the man who was in spirit, but not in fact, his beloved disciple, who understood once and for all time the eternal significance of his Master, Jesus “came that we might have life and have it more abundantly.” The old ways of approach to that life-giving stream are closed to many modern men. For these I write. We have to know him after the flesh. There is for us no other way. But to know him after the flesh is to know him after the spirit : for we shall find that he was, in very truth, the ineffable Word made Flesh.