CHAPTER XVII

THE JESUS-FIGURE OF M. LOISY

It is the same, finally, with the story of the original evangel as with the story of the tragedy; M. Loisy fails to come within sight of historicity in the one case as in the other. Having fallen back on the thesis, so popularized by Renan, that faith in the necessary resurrection of the Messiah created the legend of the empty tomb and the divine apparitions, he proceeds to formulate the Teaching which had created the faith. The historic creed of Christianity is thus figured as a pyramid poised on the apex of a hallucination; but we are assured that the hallucination resulted from the greatness of the Personality of the slain Teacher.

Taking no note of any other conception of a possible origination of the cult, M. Loisy pronounces that to explain it we must hold that the "group of adherents" had before the crucifixion evolved a "religious life" sufficiently deep to sustain the feeling that the death of the Master was an accident, "grave no doubt [!] and perturbing, but reparable"; [175] and to explain this religious life he goes back to the Master's doctrine. And the moment he begins his exposition he vacillates anew over the old dilemma:--

Jesus pursued a work, not the propagation of a belief; he did not explain theoretically the Kingdom of Heaven, he prepared its coming by exhorting men to repent. Nevertheless even the work of Jesus attaches itself to the idea of the celestial kingdom; it defines itself in that idea, which presupposes, implies, or involves with it other ideas. It is this combination of ideas familiar to Christ that we must reconstruct with the help of the Gospels.... The idea of the kingdom of God is, in a sense, all the Gospel; but it is also all Judaism.... [176]

Exactly. Jesus, in effect, preached just what the Baptist is said to have preached; only without baptism. The monition to repent was simply the monition of all the prophets and all the eschatologists; and it had not the attraction of baptism which the evangel of the Baptist was said to have. So that the Twelve, on the showing of M. Loisy, went through Jewry uttering only one familiar phrase--and casting out devils--and dooming those who refused to hear them. And, by their own report, it was in casting out devils that they had their success. The simple name of Jesus, according to the Gospels, availed for that where he had never appeared in person. Yet, again, the name is used by non-adherents for the same purpose (Mk. ix, 38). And still M. Loisy confidently claims that there is no trace of a pre-Christian Jesus cult in Palestine! [177]

Concerning the nullity of the original evangel he is quite unwittingly explicit when he is resisting the myth theory; albeit in the act of contradicting himself:--

Paul, indeed, proclaims [se réclame du] an immortal Christ, or more exactly a Christ dead and re-arisen, not the Jesus preaching the evangel in Galilee and at Jerusalem. But his attitude is easy to explain.... He was aware of the circumstances of the death of Christ, and of what was preached by his followers.... If he boasted of having learned nothing from the old [sic] apostles, it was that, in reality, he had never been at their school.... But he was able [il lui arrive] also to affirm the conformity of his teaching with theirs: that is what he did in the passage ... touching the death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul converted had nothing to demand of the first apostles of Jesus, because he knew already what they had preached. [178]

So that the doctrine of an immortal or resurrected Christ was the sole doctrine of the Apostles. There was no other evangel. And this doctrine, which had just been declared to be born of the personal impression made by Jesus on his followers, is also the doctrine of Paul, who had never seen Jesus.

The primary evangel having thus simply disappeared, we revert to the Jesuine Teaching (addressed in large part only to the disciples) which had formed among disciples and adherents such a "religious life" as served to develop the conviction that the Master could not really die, and so prepared the foundation upon which Paul built historic Christianity. [179] We have seen how M. Loisy vacillates over the Founder's conception of the Kingdom of God in relation to his moral teaching. When it is a question of a myth theory, M. Loisy insists upon exactitude. "In order that the thesis should be sustainable, it would be necessary that a well-defined myth should have existed in some Jewish sect." [180] But there is no call for well-defined proofs or notions when it is a question of defending the tradition. For our critic, Jesus is first and foremost an intense believer in a miraculous advent of that Kingdom which had come simply to mean "the sovereignty of God." [181] Even this conception is of necessity vague to the last degree:--

The primitive nationalism subsisted at least in the framework [cadre] and the exterior economy of the kingdom of God; it maintained itself also in [jusque dans] the evangel of Jesus. At the same time the kingdom of God is not a simple moral reform, to safeguard the law of the celestial Sovereign and guarantee the happiness of the faithful. The action of Yahweh ... governs the entire universe.... [The cosmological tradition] developed the idea of a definite triumph of light over darkness, of order over chaos, a triumph which was to be the final victory of good over evil.... The terrestrial kingdoms ... were to disappear, to give place to the reign of Israel, which was the reign of the just, the reign of God. In this great instauration of the divine order, in this regeneration of the universe, the divine justice was to manifest itself by the resurrection of all the true faithful. [182]

This transformation, then--the long current dream of Jewry--was to be a vast miracle, and in that miracle Jesus believed he was to play the part of the Messiah, the divine representative. That expectation sustained him till the moment of his death. [183] Nevertheless "his idea of the reign of God was not a patriotic hallucination or the dream of an excited [exalté] mystic. The reign of God is the reign of justice." [184] (As if the second sentence proved the first.) And yet, all the while: "On the whole, the Gospel ethic is no more consistent than the hope of the kingdom.... Considered in themselves, as the Gospel makes them known to us, they are not mythic but mystic." [185]

Thus helped to a definite conception, we turn to the ethic, which we have seen to be in the main a compilation from Jewish literature. This fact M. Loisy admits, only to deny that it has any significance:--

He opposes the voice of his conscience to the tradition of the doctors. There lies precisely the originality of his teaching, which, if one recomposed the materials piece by piece, could be found scattered in the Biblical writings or in the sayings of the rabbis. Like every man who speaks to men, Jesus takes his ideas in the common treasure of his environment and his time; but as to what he makes of it [pour le parti qu'il en tire] one does not say that it proceeds from any one. This independence results, probably, at once from his character and from the circumstances of his education. [186]

Thus, as regards the Sermon on the Mount, the act of collecting a number of ethical precepts and maxims from the current literature and lore of one's people and curtly enouncing them, without development, is a proof of supreme moral originality, and is to be regarded as opposing the voice of one's conscience to tradition. Had the rabbis, then, no conscience? Was their ethic a mere tradition, even when they gave out or originated the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount? Was Hillel but a mouth-piece of the law? M. Loisy must in justice pardon us for avowing that so far he has but duplicated a worn-out paralogism, and that he has evaded the plain documentary fact that the Sermon is a literary compilation, [187] and not a discourse at all.

And when we turn to specific teachings, his commentary does but compel us to ask how the teaching which he insists upon taking as genuinely uttered by the Teacher can be associated with the Messianist he has been describing. Accepting as genuine the story of the woman taken in adultery, now bracketed in the English Revised Version as being absent from the most ancient manuscripts, but presumably found in the lost Gospel of the Hebrews, [188] he remarks that "the elect of the kingdom must not use marriage; they were to be as the angels in heaven"; [189] and at the same time he describes the veto on divorce as "a trait so personal to the teaching of Christ, and so difficult to comprehend if one denies all originality to that teaching." [190] That is to say, the believer in the speedy end of all marriage relations, and the establishment of a new and angelic life for all who survive, occupied himself earnestly with the restriction or abolition of divorce!

At other junctures M. Loisy is ready to see how the doctrines of sections and movements in the later Christian Church were introduced into the Gospels. He will not admit of such an explanation here. Does he then see a supreme moral inspiration in the Montanists and other Christian sectaries who set their faces against the sexual instinct? Has he forgotten the text in Malachi (ii, 14-16), vetoing a heartless divorce? And has he never heard of the saying of Rabbi Eliezer, echoed elsewhere in the Talmud, that the altar sheds tears over him who puts away his first wife? Is the moral originality of the Gospel teaching to be established by merely ignoring all previous teaching to the same effect?

But it is hardly necessary thus to revert to the question of the ethical originality of the Gospel teaching: the essential issue here is the impossible combination presented to us by M. Loisy as his historical Jesus. Without any sign of misgiving he offers us the figure of a mystic awaiting the imminent end of the old order of things and the substitution of a new and heavenly order, doubled with a moralist deeply preoccupied over certain details of the vanishing life and a prescription for their regulation in the future in which they were not to exist. M. Loisy is, indeed, liable to be censured by the orthodox and the "liberals" alike for his explicit avowal that "It is very superfluous to seek in the Gospel a doctrine of social economy, or even a program of moral conduct for individual existences which were to go on according to the order of nature, in the indefinite sequence of humanity." [191] This seems to overlook the passage (Mt. xxv, 34-46) in which eternal life is promised to those who succour the distressed. Such a rule for conduct does seem to indicate some regard for the continuance of life on the normal lines. It is, we know, a simple adaptation from the ritual of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but it has had from many commentators even such praise for "originality" as M. Loisy has bestowed on the Teaching in general.

Such teaching is, in point of fact, quite undeserving of praise for "spirituality," inasmuch as it in effect recommends benevolence as a way of securing eternal life. He who succours the distressed on the motive so supplied is plainly a long way below the Good Samaritan or the simple compassionate human being of everyday life. But this is really the ground-note of all the Gospel ethic. The Beatitudes are promises of compensatory bliss; and, indeed, in a system which founds upon immortality there is no escape from this kind of motivation. The Pagan appeal, made alternately to nobleness and to concern for good repute among one's fellows, is clearly on the higher plane, and would tend to maintain, so far as mere moral appeal can, a nobler type of human being. It is not even clear, in the light of the general Judaism of the doctrine of the Kingdom, whether "one of these my brethren" can mean more than "one of the faith."

But however that may be, we have to note that for M. Loisy the promise of reward at the judgment for help given to the distressed is not a Jesuine utterance. It occurs only in Matthew; and we may readily agree that, if such an allocution were really delivered by the alleged Founder, it could not conceivably have been left to one collector to preserve it. "The redactor of the first Gospel," comments M. Loisy in his best critical vein, "thought he ought to put this here to complete his collection of instructions concerning the parousia and the great judgment. It is ... a piece in which is developed, from the point of view of the last judgment, the word of the Lord: 'He that receiveth you receiveth me.'" So that a teaching which still makes a great impression on the Christian consciousness is confessedly but a development by an unknown hand of a bare Messianic phrase. "It has been visibly arranged to close the compilation of discourses and parables made here by the redactor of the first Gospel." [192]

Yet when we come to the parable of the Good Samaritan, which occurs only in Luke, and which also cannot be conceived as being deliberately omitted by the previous evangelists if it had been uttered by the Master, M. Loisy indulges in a very long discourse that reads like a preserved sermon, only to conclude that "the parable of the Samaritan thus offers itself as one of the most authentic testimonies [un témoignage authentique entre tous] of the teaching of Jesus. It is clear that the evangelist has not invented it, but that he has found it ready made, and that he has only given it a frame, in his fashion." [193] It is with a certain embarrassment over the spectacle of a good scholar's divagation that one proceeds to point to the absolute non sequitur in M. Loisy's comment. Supposing we agree that the evangelist found the parable ready made, wherein is this case differentiated from that of the passage in Matthew last noted? That is at least as likely to have been found ready made; yet it is not in that case claimed by M. Loisy that the passage is therefore a record of a real Jesuine utterance. He sees that it is a "patch," a development.

Now, the parable of the Good Samaritan is a plain documentary "patch," an insertion without context, between the address of Jesus to the disciples after that to the returned Seventy (whose mission M. Loisy had somewhat nervously dismissed as the evangelist's "figurative frame for the evangelizing of the pagans" [194]) and the resumption: "Now, as they went on their way...." It is impossible to imagine a more palpable insertion. First the mythic Seventy, the creation of a Gentilizing Christian, make their report on the exact lines of the report of the Twelve; then Jesus addresses them; then he "rejoices in the Holy Spirit." Then, "turning to the disciples, he said privately, Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see...." This last suggests an earlier allocution to the Twelve which has had to be turned into a "private" speech to them to distinguish it from the reply to the Seventy. [195] But however that may be, the natural sequel is verse 38, "Now, as they went on their way...." And it is between these points of natural connection that we get the parable episode beginning: "And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him...."

Well may M. Loisy say that the episode is a thing "found ready made"; it has certainly no place in the original document. But it was "made" by a later hand, and it was inserted either by him who made it or by him who "found" it. It is the work of a Gentilizer, aiming at Jewish priests and Levites, and in a less degree at the scribes, whom he treats as comparatively open to instruction. It is part of the Gentilizing propaganda which evolved the story of the mission of the Seventy, and it is naturally inserted after that episode. But to admit that to be a work of redaction and to call the parable a genuine Jesuine utterance is only to give one more distressing illustration of the common collapse of the simplest principles of documentary criticism under the sway of conservative prepossession. M. Loisy retains the parable of the Good Samaritan as Jesuine simply because he feels that to abandon it is to come near making an end of the claim for the moral originality of the Gospels. It is probably from a Gentile hand, though it may conceivably have come from an enlightened Jew.

And so we find M. Loisy, with all his scholarly painstaking and his laudable measure of candour, presenting us finally with an uncritical result. His historical Jesus will not cohere. It is a blend of early Judaic eschatology with later ethical common sense, early Judaic humanity and particularism with later Gentile universalism; even as the Gospels are a mosaic of a dozen other diverging and conflicting tendencies, early and late. "One can explain to oneself Jesus," exclaims M. Loisy; "one cannot explain to oneself those who invented him." [196] Let the reader judge for himself whether M. Loisy has given us any explanation; and whether, after our survey, there is any scientific difficulty in the conception of an imaginary personage produced, like an ideal photograph resulting from a whole series of superimposed portraits, by the continued travail of generations of men variously bent on picturing a Messiah for their hopes, a God for their salvation, and a Teacher for their lives.