[In the following essay, originally published in 1927, Holmes argues that The Life of Jesus was one of the most important and revolutionary books written in the nineteenth century and that the work remains a classic because of Renan's scholarly breadth and literary clarity.]

“Ernest Renan's Vie de Jésus,” said the late Joseph Henry Allen, famous scholar and church historian, “is the one great literary monument of a century of New Testament criticism.” This tribute to the immortal Frenchman's masterpiece was paid in 1895, just thirty-two years after its publication in 1863. Now that another thirty-two years have passed away, the tribute is seen to be inadequate. Renan's Life of Jesus is something more than a great monument of New Testament criticism. As we look back upon the nineteenth century as a definite period of history, we see that this book was one of the world-shaking books of a world-shaking epoch. It ranks with Darwin's Origin of Species and Marx's Das Kapital as a work which changed forever the currents of the world's thought and life.

In its own day, the Life of Jesus was a sensation of the first order. It brought down upon its author's devoted head such a whirlwind of rage and calumny as few men have ever endured, and fewer still survived. “Jew sprung from the blood of Judas Iscariot” was by no means the worst of the insults he received. The loss of his professorship in the Collège de France was only one of the penalties he suffered. “At the same time, and by the same token,” says Renan's most recent biographer, Dr. Lewis Freeman Mott, “he became one of the most celebrated men of the world. Henceforth not a word he uttered was spoken unheard.”

From the first hour of its publication, the Life of Jesus sold like a Waverly Novel. Its success was “immediate and immense,” unprecedented for a scholarly work on a religious subject. Like Macauley's History of England, it lay on every library table, and was the subject of universal discussion. New editions of 5,000 copies each were exhausted in eight or ten days. Two months after the book's appearance, Renan writes his friend, Bersot, that “in this last period, the sale, far from slowing up, even goes faster.” By November, five months after its initial publication, eleven editions, 60,000 copies, had been exhausted. Already there were German, Italian and Dutch translations of the book, and an English translation was on the way. A new and still wider circulation was opened up in March, 1864, when Renan published, under the simple title, Jesus, a cheap edition for the poor—“the true disciples of Jesus,” as he called them. Offered at one franc 25 centimes the copy, this edition enjoyed an enormous sale. In 1876, the work was thoroughly revised, and incorporated in the author's Origines du Christianisme as Volume I of a series which was completed in 1881 by Volume VII on the reign of Marcus Aurelius.

Since this date, innumerable editions of the Life have appeared in France and other countries. The furor, of course, has long since died away. The book is today only one of a great host of biographies of the Nazarene, many of which have superceded it in scholarship, as others have surpassed it in radical opinion. But two full generations after its original appearance, Renan's volume is read more widely than any of its successors, and stands as the one sure standard by what these others are judged. Whatever the errors and inadequacies revealed by later extensions of knowledge, and “whatever the various schools may think of it,” says Dr. Mott, “it is still a living book.” The passing of time, that is today, has only served to establish Renan's Life of Jesus as the classic work upon the subject.

In recalling this amazing chapter of literary history, it may be well to consider some of the influences which were at work in the making of such a record.

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Conspicuous is the fact that Renan's book was the first biography of Jesus, in the modern historical and literary sense of that word. From the time of Paul, down through all the centuries of Christian history, Jesus was regarded as the Messiah, the Son of God, the Divine Redeemer—that is, as a being apart, not in history but above history. All the writing about him, therefore, was theological, not scientific. The Christ was exalted that men might praise him, not studied and interpreted that men might know him. He was a revelation, like the Bible, to be accepted on penalty of outlawry in this world and damnation in the next. Not till Strauss wrote his stupendous Leben Jesus, was the spell upon the Nazarene broken. But the German studied the documents rather than the person, and presented not a man but a myth.

To Renan was left the opportunity and the task of writing about Jesus as a figure of history, and thus of producing a biography in the form and spirit of Voltaire's biography of Charles XII, or Southey's biography of Nelson. Renan set to work, in other words, to study and describe the Nazarene in exactly the same way in which he would have set to work to study and describe any other famous leader of humanity. He treated Jesus as other biographers had treated other great and famous men. Jesus, to him, was not divine, but human; he was not a being without time and place, but a Jew, born in Palestine, in the reign of Augustus. The Gospels were not scriptures, but documents, historical sources; “If the Gospels are like other books,” wrote Renan, in the Preface to the thirteenth edition of the Life, “I am right in treating them in the same manner as the student of Greek, Arabian, or Hindu lore treats its legendary documents which he studies. Criticism knows no infallible texts; its first principle is to admit the possibility of error in the text which it examines.” In the same way, Renan discarded every last vestige of the miraculous; “miracles,” he wrote, “are things which never happen,” and therefore, things which Jesus never did.

The result of such an attitude, now ordinary enough, but in the middle of the last century extraordinary beyond words to describe, was a life of Jesus which was human, natural, strictly critical, throughout. In this sense, it was something strange, unprecedented. When this book came out with its simple, yet devastating statement, “Jésus naguit á Nazareth, petite ville de Galilée. … Il sortit des rangs du peuple. Son père, Joseph, et sa mère, Marie, etaient des gens de mediocre condition” (Jesus was born at Nazareth, a small town of Galilee. … He sprang from the ranks of the people. His father, Joseph, and his mother, Mary, were of humble station), the world simply gasped in astonishment and horror. In two sentences there disappeared the lovely Bethlehem story, the dogma of the Virgin Birth, the whole theology of the incarnation and the atonement. And the remainder of the book kept pace with its beginning! Here was the story of a Jewish young man who lived, preached, suffered, made mistakes as well as performed brave deeds, said foolish as well as wise things, did no wonders beyond the wonders of the valiant soul, and at last died, was buried, and remained in the grave. This was a story never written before. It discovered a new phenomenon—the Jesus of History! And it shook the world like an earthquake.

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It is this fact which explains the sensation created by Renan's book. But the sensation is only part of the story. What stirred the public with excitement and the church with anger, stirred as well the amazement and admiration of students. For here was a work of profound learning, a production worthy of one of the half-dozen greatest scholars of the nineteenth century.

It is not always remembered how supreme a figure was Renan among the scholars of his time—among the scholars, indeed, of all time. Master of a brilliant style, his achievements in the field of literature have tended to obscure, if not to hide altogether, his imperishable achievements in the field of learning. The great historian, Mommsen, saw the point when he declared, with some heat, that Renan was a true scholar, “in spite of the beauty of his style”! Certainly, Renan's life was a triumphant record of scholarly labors.

Abandoning the priesthood at the age of twenty-two, he pursued his studies at the University, the School of Oriental Languages, and the Collège de France, and in four years attracted marked attention by winning prizes, contributing extensively to periodicals, and publishing his first book, Avenir de la Science (The Future of Science). In 1849, he was sent by the Ministry of Education, and under instructions from the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, on a mission to investigate the libraries of Italy and report on their manuscript collections, particularly the Syrian and Arabic. On his return in 1851, he received an appointment as attaché in the department of manuscripts at the Bibliothéque Nationale, began writing for the Revue des deu Mondes, took his degree of Docteur-és-lettres, and was elected to the Council of the Societé Asiatique. The next few years were crowded with exhaustive studies, and voluminous writings in magazines both lay and learned. In 1856 he was elected to the Academy of Inscription and Belles-Lettres. In 1859 appeared his Essais de morale et de critique, and a translation of the Book of Job. In 1860, after publishing a translation of the Song of Songs, he accepted a mission to excavate Phoenician remains in Syria, under the inspiration of which he wrote the first draft of his Life of Jesus at Ghazir. On his return to Paris he was appointed professor of Hebrew, Chaldean and Syrian languages in the Collège de France by imperial decree dated January 11, 1862, an honor which he was destined to lose the following year when his Life of Jesus was published. After a second oriental trip in 1864-65, there followed years of exhausting work, first, on his Origins of Christianity, and secondly, on his History of the People of Israel, two of the supreme productions of nineteenth century scholarship. Master of many languages, ancient and modern, erudite in the lore of ages and places, expert in the technique of investigation and interpretation, imbued with the ideal as well as the methods of modern science, a man simple, sincere, courageous, “a saint, even if judged by the teachings of the Galilean Lake,” Renan ranks, alike in spirit and in achievement, with men like Darwin and Pasteur as one of the immortals.

It was learning of this profound and extensive type which Renan brought to the writing of his Life of Jesus. More than any other man who has ever written upon the subject, with the possible exception of Nathaniel Schmidt, he was master of all the varied and complex material of language, history, tradition, locale, which went into the making of his work. The Life has often been condemned as imaginative. So it is—a masterpiece of the creative imagination! “If in writing the life of Jesus,” said Renan, in his famous Preface, “one should confine himself to setting forth those matters which are certain, he must limit himself to a few lines … the texts give no certainty … we must strive to divine what they conceal, without being ever quite certain of having found it.” But such imagination is the imagination of the archeologist who constructs a city from broken stones, of the paleontologist who conceives an extinct animal from scattered bones and teeth. Whatever conjecture entered into Renan's work was backed by a wealth of learning controlled by a fearless and faithful mind. It is this which gives to the Life of Jesus an authority which has endured unshaken to this day.

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But not yet have we explained the popularity of the book. This rested neither upon the sensational character of its conclusions, nor upon the authoritative nature of its learning, but upon its rare artistic qualities. We have spoken of Renan's literary style. This was unparalleled in the France of the nineteenth century for beauty, as the style of Voltaire was unparalleled in the France of the eighteenth century for clarity. The French are nearly always good writers; their greatest authors are the master stylists of the world; and of these Ernest Renan stands among the first. Put every other virtue aside, and his Life of Jesus is immortal simply as a piece of literature. If its conclusions were discredited, and its scholarship outgrown, we should still read it, as we read the Republic of Plato, for its perfection as a work of art. The loveliness of the Palestinian countryside, seen with Renan's own eyes and painted in upon the canvas with a brush of extraordinary skill—the color and bustle of the scene in Israel where Jesus lived—the ineffable charm of the brave young man who called his disciples and proclaimed the Kingdom—the pathos and passion of his experiences among his people—the unforgettable scenes of the last journey and the last week—these, as Renan presents them, are an eternal part of the literature of the world. They are among the things which man will not let die. The Life, be it said, does not rest alone upon such pages, as its main contribution is certainly not to be found in them. But these are what caught and held the multitude of readers who seized the volume when it came from the press, and it is what makes it now, when its pioneering work is done, a supremely “living book.” Today, as not yesterday, we can get our information elsewhere, and get it more fully and accurately. But nowhere else can we read the immortal story in such magic phrases as those with which it has been clothed by Renan. Like a painting of Raphael, it must endure forever in the wonder and affection of mankind.

Sainte-Beuve, leading critic of his day, recognized and acclaimed this fact. Pointing out that the Life, addressed to the public, had reached its address, he said, “To be historian and story teller from this new point of view, (Renan) had to begin by being above all a diviner, a poet drawing inspiration from the spirit of times and places, and painter able to read the lines of the horizon, the least vestiges left on the slopes of the hills, and skilled in evoking the genius of the region and the landscape. He has thus succeeded in producing a work of art even more than a history, and this presupposes on the part of the author a union, till now almost unique, of superior qualities, reflective, delicate, and brilliant.”

It is this combination of qualities which makes Renan's Life of Jesus the most famous and enduring work upon the subject ever written. If we were to estimate its supreme contribution to mankind, it would be its effect in clearing the way for a scientific and historical approach to the study of the Nazarene and of Christianity. Strauss undoubtedly broke the ground here, but Renan as undoubtedly drove the plough and planted the first seed. “You won for us,” said Sainte-Beuve, “the right of discussion in this matter, hitherto forbidden.” Since the publication of the Life, the study of New Testament times has been on a new basis, of fact instead of fiction, of truth instead of tradition. This whole field, hitherto set apart as a field of magic and miracle, has been reclaimed to history and the normal life of man. The multiplying biographies of Jesus, never so numerous nor so free as in our time, are as so many memorials to the master. And his own work, as this latest edition so eloquently certifies, still reigns among them!