SOURCE: Hutchison, William G. Introduction to Renan's Life of Jesus, translated by William G. Hutchison, pp. ix-xxxii. London: Walter Scott, 1897.

[In the following essay, Hutchison examines the early criticism of The Life of Jesus as well as the sources Renan used to write his biography.]

The year 1860 marked an important point in the life of Ernest Renan. Having acquired, by years of hard work and unremitting study, a European reputation as man of letters and as a writer of authority on the Semitic languages and Oriental archæology, he was commissioned by the Imperial government to proceed to Syria and undertake an expedition in quest of ancient Phœnician monuments, sites, and inscriptions. For this welcome opportunity of coming face to face with the land whose peoples, languages, and traditions had been of life-long and absorbing interest to him, Renan was probably indebted to his friend Prince Napoleon (“Plon Plon”), and, in a still greater degree, to a remarkable woman, Madame Cornu, to whose influence with Napoleon III. were due important improvements in higher education and the promotion of scientific and archæological research by the state. Renan's Phœnician expedition was perhaps the most notable of the scientific missions undertaken at the national cost.

Renan reached Beyrout in October. He was accompanied by his wife and his sister Henriette; and the latter remained with him after Madame Renan's enforced return to France. She was his constant companion and assistant; but he went home alone. At Byblos brother and sister were simultaneously stricken with fever, and Renan awoke from a long interval of unconsciousness to find that Henriette was dead. This bereavement was the great sorrow of a happy life. Like Madame Cornu, Henriette had been a silent benefactor, a good genius of whom the world knew little but of whom her brother knew much. From his short biographical sketch—originally printed for private circulation—and from the volume of correspondence recently published, one may learn how deeply he was indebted to her tender and unselfish solicitude, to her unfailing love, and to her unswerving intellectual honesty. As is related in the exquisitely phrased dedication to the present volume, the Life of Jesus had been begun, carried on, and, in its first form, completed during Renan's stay in Palestine, in the midst of the scenes in which the tragic story it relates had taken place. How clearly the essential features of the Syrian landscape impressed themselves on the historian, and with what subtle charm he rendered those impressions, one may judge from the praise that has been bestowed on his descriptions by later travellers.

But, while the Life of Jesus was in a high degree inspired by Renan's sojourn in the East, there can be no doubt that it would have been written had the author never left France. In a sense his whole previous life had formed a preparation for his task of chronicling the beginnings of Christianity, and all his studies had been subsidiary to the historical treatment cf what, in his view, was the most significant cycle of events in history. In an essay, first published about ten years before his visit to the East, he had submitted some previous historians of Jesus to a critical examination, the most interesting feature of which is the section devoted to Strauss, whose first Life of Jesus had appeared in 1835. Despite his high appreciation of the German writer, Renan's view of Jesus as an actual person, the events of whose career were rather nuclei of legendary tradition than pure myths, and his characteristically French distrust of metaphysical theory, somewhat qualify his praise of the Leben Jesu.

It was only after careful revision that Renan's own book was given to the world. Considering the effusive emotion that not infrequently characterises the work, even in its final form, one may feel some gratitude for the fact that Renan, according to his own account, spent a year in toning down the exuberance of his first draft.¹ On its publication in 1863 it was soon apparent that the Life of Jesus was to be one of the most hotly discussed books of the century. By a very large public it was welcomed with undiscriminating applause. As Sainte-Beuve acutely remarked, we find in modern society a considerable number of persons, not believers, and yet at the same time neither decidedly nor systematically sceptical. Having, like Renan himself, a very full appreciation of the luxury of religious emotion, they are too deeply impressed with vague notions of the omnipotence of science, and, more or less unconsciously, have absorbed the modern spirit too much to be enticed back to the ancient ways. To this large body of readers, somewhat nebulous in their opinions, and disinclined to justify them in self-examination, Renan appealed with great success. It was pleasing for them to find that they had been Christians sans le savoir, and Christians without the difficulties and intellectual self-surrender of less easily satisfied souls. That the excessive praise of such readers as these should be balanced by a no less excessive depreciation on the part of the orthodox, and that the latter should turn and attempt to rend the new apostle to the Laodiceans, was but natural. Archbishops, Jesuits, priests, theological professors, and dissenting ministers joined eagerly in a heresy hunt of unprecedented dimensions, the heavens were darkened with a multitude of pamphlets, and reviews, and controversial treatises; pulpits rang with indignant denunciations; Renan's private character was picturesquely defamed; and an anonymous but pious lady, with the best intentions in the world, commenced the monthly despatch to him of a letter containing the brief warning, “There is a hell!”

That biography is one of the least facile of arts, that its really great and successful examples can be counted on the fingers, is almost platitude. The difficulties of adequately analysing one of our fellows, of reaching the secrets of his inmost nature, of satisfactorily accounting for his often inconsistent actions and ideas, are such as to make the path of the biographer one of great difficulty. While the novelist has only to obey his own æsthetic conscience and avoid any decided breach of probability, the writer of biography must necessarily come into conflict with those whose conceptions of his subject are already formed, and as diverse from his own as they well can be. And when that subject happens to be a man of a different age, of a different race, the materials for whose life are at once scanty and in great part untrustworthy, it is easy to see that the pitfalls and risk of error incidental to all biography are increased tenfold. All these difficulties Renan had in his work, and, over and above, he had the special difficulty of dealing with a subject in which everybody takes an interest, of which everybody has a theory, of which many people have a theory that in their minds is a certainty to be defended with passionate zeal, and with every available weapon.

It was perhaps only to be expected that orthodox critics of the last category should disregard their Master's aphorism about casting the first stone, and charge Renan with the terrible offence of having an à priori theory of his subject. Why it was unfair for him to have his own theory of Jesus, and how indeed he could have avoided forming one, are matters too deep for me to fathom. Dean Farrar, and for that matter, the author of the fourth Gospel, have never, so far as I know, been accused of unfairness on the ground that they had a firm belief in the divinity of Jesus before commencing their respective biographies. Interest in a subject is surely essential to its adequate treatment, and interest implies the formation of opinions.

But the champions of religious dogmas, whatever the particular creed held by them, have never looked with favour on the formation of opinions other than their own. Sois mon frère ou je vous tue, is a phrase that might come very appropriately from the lips of religious fanatics, whether Mohammedan zealots putting captive towns to the sword, or the officers of the Inquisition chastening heretics and freethinkers with a foretaste of hell fire. Of course nobody thought of putting Renan on the rack or tying him to the stake; but the doctrine that error—for which read deviation from orthodox theory—is a sin, coloured every reply to his book that came from the orthodox forces. However the leaders of these forces might differ among themselves, they were agreed that Christianity stands or falls by miracles and the supernatural, that any one who does not admit the divinity of Jesus is not qualified to write about him, and that, if he does write, his work is valueless, or rather, pernicious. In fairness it should be added that zealots at the opposite pole of thought, agreeing with their opponents that the existence of Christianity depends on the miraculous, attacked Renan with great warmth, on the ground that he unduly glorified the subject of his biography.² The sceptical friend whom Sainte-Beuve introduces into his critique of the Life of Jesus is very severe on what he regards as unnecessary concessions on the part of the author. Renan, he says, resembles Charles II. telling General Monk to be anything he likes except king; all titles, all honours, all glories are to be ascribed to Jesus so long as he is not called God.³

For freethinkers who have grown conservative in their disbelief all assertion of the positive value, the enduring truth immanent in Christianity must be more or less galling; and passage from a Christianity relying on miracles and metaphysical theories about vicarious sacrifice, incarnation, and the Council of the Trinity to a Christianity relying on everyday human experience, must also be painful to those who think these miracles and theories essential to their faith. To Renan, however, such an assertion and such a passage seemed necessary, and credit for having done his best in the matter may at least be accorded him, however much his work may be attacked as regards execution and detail. Of the principal orthodox controversial works directed against the Vie de Jésus, I do not think it unfair to say that in them all the greater part of the adverse criticism, except such as might proceed equally well from an agnostic, is based on the assumption that, Jesus being God, Renan had no right to give him the same biographical treatment as he would have given to Socrates or Mohammed. In other words, he was wrong in weighing probabilities, in examining evidence, using that which seemed valuable and rejecting that which seemed valueless, or, in short, in using any of the comparative methods employed in writing secular history. To take some obvious instances, he had no right to assume that unusual events, alleged to have taken place in uncritical times when people were too little acquainted with nature to distinguish between it and super-nature, and not observed to recur in times when they can be scientifically tested, are unworthy of full credence; he had no right to point out the falsification by reality of the belief cherished by Jesus, or his reporters, of the imminent coming of the Messiah to judge and reign over the earth;⁴ he had no right to remark on the obvious differences between the synoptic Jesus and the Jesus of the fourth Gospel, or to base his conception of the Master on the no less obvious fact that, historically, the former Jesus is much the more possible.

But the Life of Jesus was not primarily intended as a work of religious edification, though indeed I once heard an “anti-infidel” lecturer in Hyde Park call it one of his favourite books; it was an attempt at a historical view of the life and work “of a wonderful spirit, far above the heads of his reporters, still farther above the head of our popular theology, which has added its own misunderstanding of the reporters to the reporters' misunderstanding of Jesus.”⁵ In other words, Renan considered it essential to his purpose not to conceive of his authorities as supernaturally inspired works—which, as his orthodox critics usually forget, remains to be proved—but as books full of contradictions, myths, and naïve ignorance, in which the truth is only to be found by a process of sifting. “Criticism,” as he remarked, “knows of no infallible texts; its first principle is to admit the possibility of error in the text which it studies.”⁶ It need scarcely be added that, while every serious student has long admitted this as an axiom for general historical investigation, it is only recently, and with considerable reluctance, that the principle has been partially adopted by orthodox writers dealing with religious history. To approach the critical consideration of an historical work there is then but one legitimate method—to inquire first, What are its authorities? and secondly, What use has been made of these authorities? Let us briefly consider these two questions in relation to the present work.

Renan's chief authorities may be classed under five heads: (1) The works of Philo, (2) those of Josephus, (3) the so-called Apocryphal books of the Old Testament, (4) the Talmud, and (5) the Gospels and other New Testament writings. Of course, besides these principal sources of information, there were innumerable others. Renan's encyclopædic reading, and his faculty for collecting and systematising his knowledge, make his pages bristle with references and citations. It was remarked of Hume that his History of England would have been more accurate but for his occasional necessity of imagining his facts, from the difficulty of navigating his portly person to the other end of the sofa where the means of verification lay. However much one may ascribe to Renan's imagination, his industry in collecting and utilising evidence from every quarter cannot be gainsaid. It will be well to give a brief outline of his views on the writings stated above.

The study of Philo permits one to judge of the ideas that were active in the world immediately before the birth of Jesus and during his lifetime. Although Philo lived in a Judaistic centre altogether removed from that of Jesus, and though there is no probability of his ever having even heard of him, there are curious parallelisms between the teachings of the Alexandrian doctor and those of the peasant of Nazareth. Similar parallelisms are also to be noted, it is true, with the recorded Logia of Hillel and other Jewish teachers anterior to Jesus.⁷ The works of Josephus, the Old Testament apocryphal writings (such as the book of Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, the Jewish portion of the Sibylline Poems, and the book of Daniel⁸) and the Talmud, are of like service in giving a picture of contemporary thought and history and of the motive forces influencing them. Renan believes the notice of Jesus in the history of Josephus to be, in the main, authentic, although probably retouched by the Christians, who regarded his work as an essential document in their history and—probably in the second century—circulated an edition of it, corrected in accordance with their own ideas. The possible connection of the author of Luke and the Acts with Josephus I shall remark on later. In the Talmud (the compilation of which, Renan thinks, extended from about 200 to 500 a.d.) innumerable and important details of the Gospels find a commentary. Jewish theology and Christian theology having followed two parallel paths, the history of one cannot be understood without reference to the other.

The New Testament writings were naturally the main foundation for the Life of Jesus, and the author's use of them one of the principal points of attack by orthodox critics, the latter's grievance being his separation of what he regarded as historical from what he considered legendary and of the nature of Aberglaube. It was of course in the Synoptics, especially in Mark and Matthew, that he found most trustworthy material for the making of his history. But neither in Matthew nor in Mark in their present form do we have the original Gospels attributed to these writers. The first records of Jesus must of course have been oral. It was only when eye-witnesses were beginning to disappear, and when the idea of a closely approaching heavenly kingdom seemed to recede farther and farther into the future, that adherents sought to give floating reminiscence of their Master a durable form, and to write down the sayings and anecdotes that were in danger of being forgotten. And with these authentic reports of the sayings and doings of Jesus, it requires no great knowledge of human nature to believe, many others of an apocryphal kind must have been mingled. The members of the early Church, on special occasions or when confronted by special difficulties, must often have pondered what Jesus would have had to say about the matter. Considering that there was no settled New Testament canon, and that the material now forming this canon was then in a fluid state, it is easy to see how such hypothetical utterances, by passing from mouth to mouth, might ultimately be accepted as authentic. The first written Gospel was that known as the Gospel of the Hebrews, which was extant among the Judaistic Christians of Syria, until their destruction in the fifth century; and it somewhat resembled the Gospel of Matthew, though the latter was a perfectly distinct work. Mark indeed, a short biography dealing mainly with the acts of Jesus, was the first synoptic Gospel to be written, and the author of Matthew used both it and the Hebrew Gospel in the composition of his work, which is distinctively a report of the Logia or sayings of Jesus.⁹ Neither of these Gospels could remain absolutely fixed. Even in the second century oral tradition was preferred, and, no doubt, those who possessed copies of one of the books were in the habit of adding details which might reach them from other sources, and of combining and amplifying narratives.

The Gospel of Luke is of a nature different from the more or less fragmentary Gospels of Mark and Matthew. “It is the work of a man who selects, prunes, combines.” In other words, it is a professedly complete history founded on previous documents. Renan does not think it probable that Luke, whom he holds to be the author of the Acts, knew the Gospel of Matthew, but he assimilated the whole of Mark, while about a third part of his book is to be found in neither the first nor the second Synoptic but comes from other sources. Luke's Gospel, in contrast to the more exclusive spirit of Peter, James, and the Judaistic Christians, is the Gospel of universal brotherhood and forgiveness of sins, and would appear to be the work of a disciple of Paul, a partisan for the admission of Gentiles, publicans, sinners, and heretics into the Christian community, an exponent of the wider view of the Master's teaching as applicable to all men in all lands.¹⁰ Renan, who does not attach the same historical value to Luke as to Mark and Matthew, dates it from Rome about the end of the first century, and he attributes the many analogies between it and the history of Josephus to the authors' contemporary residence in that city. An even more direct connection between the two writers is maintained by Holtzmann and other German critics, proceeding on the generally recognised assumption that Luke was not a Jew but a Gentile Christian, from which they postulate that he got his knowledge of Jewish history from Josephus, whose works were largely circulated in Rome at the time.

However difficult the problem of the dates and connection of the Synoptics might be, and whatever careful discrimination was required in order to settle even tentatively the historical value that could be reasonably attached to them, the Gospel known as that of John presented difficulties of a still more serious nature, difficulties which Renan recognised by completely changing his views regarding the fourth Gospel in the thirteenth edition of the Life of Jesus, and devoting many pages to a discussion and defence of his new position. The theories, which have been, and are, held of the authenticity of the Gospel in question may be conveniently divided into four classes. In the first place we have the ordinary orthodox view, which requires no comment, that the fourth Gospel was written by John, son of Zebedee, that the facts recounted in it actually occurred, and that the discourses it attributes to Jesus were really uttered by him. Secondly, there is the theory, adopted by Renan in the earlier editions of his book, that the fourth Gospel is substantially the work of the apostle John, although it may have been edited and retouched by his disciples, that the events related are direct traditions, but that the discourses are frequently free compositions, only expressing the way in which the author conceived of the mind of Jesus. This comparatively moderate theory, held by Reuss, Ewald, and others, is in strong contrast to the more thoroughgoing scepticism of Baur, Strauss, Réville, and the Tübingen school generally, who maintained the absolute untrustworthiness of the fourth Gospel, and the impossibility of regarding its relation of either events or discourses as historical. In short, we have before us a work of imagination, partly allegorical, in which the author's intention is not to give a plain biographical narrative, but to disseminate his own views of Jesus.

Renan's instinctive dislike to taking extreme or negative views, or at least to enunciating them distinctly, led him finally to a position midway between the theory originally held by him and the last-mentioned hypothesis. He regarded the fourth Gospel as not being the work of John, but as having been attributed to him by its author, one of his disciples writing about the year 100. The discourses are, he thought, entirely fictitious, or at least only represent the teaching of Jesus as Plato's Dialogues represent that of Socrates, but the narrative portions include valuable traditions, in part derived directly from John. Considering that Renan devotes more than a hundred closely printed pages to justifying and amplifying the theory which I have just epitomised, it is obviously impossible for me to deal adequately with the matter in the limits of a short introduction. I can only give therefore the briefest outline of his reasons for abandoning his first and more conservative conception, and for not adopting that of Tübingen.

To determine the approximate date of a literary work, it is admittedly necessary to take external evidence by finding when it was first mentioned or quoted. It is in the present instance significant that neither Polycarp, who was one of John's most devoted disciples, nor Papias, who must have had intercourse with some of John's followers and was ever eager for any scraps of tradition he could collect, says a word of a written Gospel by John, while Justin, even if he knew the work, does not connect it with the author of the Apocalypse. Moreover, in the pseudo-Clementine Homilies, in Marcion, and in the apocryphal Gospels, there is no indication of the fourth Gospel being given the same canonical authority as those of the Synoptics. On the other hand, it must have been written not later than 100, before full canonicity had been acquired by the synoptic Gospels, since otherwise it would have scarcely diverged so far from them; and it must have won its own place in the canon towards the close of the second century, for it played an important part in a theological controversy concerning the Passover at Laodicea about 170, and Theophilus of Antioch (about 180) positively asserts it to be from the pen of John. This stamp of authenticity, moreover, argues the existence of the book (probably as an edifying though uncanonical work) for some time preceding; such honour would scarcely have been accorded to a recent narrative.

What is to be gleaned from internal evidence? The author, whoever he was, attempts to pose as John, as an eye-witness of the events recorded, and throughout is manifest his desire to show that apostle in the best light, to exhibit him as taking a leading rôle, as being “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” In accordance with the wish to make the narrative appear the relation of an actual observer, there is much apparent exactitude of detail on many small points,¹¹ and in these Renan sees traditions proceeding directly from John. But of course the chief characteristic of the book is its discourses—discourses in which the exact position of the supernatural Jesus is stated with a metaphysical subtlety which in no way harmonises with the Logia of the Synoptics, or indeed with what one might naturally expect from a poor peasant belonging to a race which had, up to that time, exhibited no taste for abstract speculation, but which is entirely consistent with the intellectual state of Asia Minor at the time at which Renan supposes the Gospel to have been written. It is also to be noted that parables and exorcisms of demons, both frequent in the Synoptics, are entirely wanting. What argues moreover against the idea that this metaphysical treatise on the Logos could have been written by a Jewish fisherman, “an apostle of the circumcision,” is that the author speaks of the Jews, their ceremonies and festivals, from an outsider's point of view, and almost disdainfully.¹² From these arguments which I have briefly summarised, Renan concludes that the fourth Gospel is not one of the earlier Christian books, and that it has not the same value to the historian as those attributed to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Between the two conceptions implied in this contrast choice must be made: “If Jesus spoke as Matthew represents him, he could not have spoken as John represents him.”¹³

Into an examination of Renan's exegetical theories I do not propose to enter. Such an examination would occupy a great many pages, and, after all, would only appeal to specialists. But one does not require to be a specialist in order to form an opinion of Renan's treatment of his subject, and of the general lines of the work as history and as literature. Its merits as a piece of literature are indeed very great. That supremely beautiful instrument for prose, the French language, has seldom been handled with higher distinction or with more consummate mastery than in certain passages of the Life of Jesus, passages of haunting beauty, which nevertheless are not of the nature of “purple patches,” but have the quality of being integral and inevitable parts of the work in its totality. He had indeed subject-matter which was, in many respects, of great beauty morally and æsthetically, and it naturally inspired one of such extreme sensitivity to moral and æsthetic beauty. But he had the defects of his qualities in full measure. A friendly critic phrased the matter very neatly. “It must be confessed,” said Réville, “that on the whole his Jesus appeals less to conscience than to the æsthetic sense.” That in him legitimate and honest sentiment was but too ready to turn to sentimentalism, that occasionally he seems to feel for the mere pleasure of feeling, and betrays himself with such false and jangled notes as the sentimentalist is doomed to strike, is only too evident. Far too often the mingled nobility and sweetness of his utterance is apt to lose the former element and become almost nauseously saccharine in intensity. It is like passing from the Good Friday music in Parsifal to the treacly mysticism of the Stabat Mater. Facilis descensus—once let Renan begin to lose himself in clouds of universal benevolence and nebulous religiosity, and he perseveres in the downward course until the end of a chapter brings him back to his subject. This tendency of his art to over-reach itself and defeat its own object is manifest, not only in the style, but in the whole plan and character of the book. It begins with pastoral comedy and ends with tragedy. Obviously the antithesis is intended, but not less obviously the insistence with which it is urged makes it forced, unreal, almost theatrical. This is particularly characteristic of the earlier chapters of the book. Jesus is a sort of theological troubadour, the disciples a band of “happy children,” amiable enthusiasts whose innocent doubts are gently but triumphantly crushed with a smile or a look, their life a delectable combination of idyllic vagrancy and fêtes champêtres. Orthodox conceptions of the founder and the beginnings of Christianity have assuredly been often grotesque and unreal in all conscience, but it has been reserved for a professedly serious student of history to put on record this Gospel in Dresden china, this picnic Christianity. Nor is the organic unity present which should make it possible for this charmant docteur with his douceur extraordinaire to be identified with the sombre géant of later days. I concede that the antithesis was actually existent, that Jesus on Calvary was very different from Jesus on the shore of Genesareth, and I have the fullest appreciation for Renan's treatment of the closing scenes of his tragedy, but I entirely fail to see that the former and latter Jesus as he presents them are consistent one with the other.

From the same source proceeds his frequent laxity in the use of certain words and phrases. To turn a sentence, to elaborate a peroration, he permits himself a latitude of expression which, in cold blood, he would probably have softened down, if not repudiated. To take the most cogent instance, he certainly lays himself open to the cross fire of both orthodox and heterodox critics by his indiscriminate and irresponsible employment of the words “God” and “Father,” which might provoke a direct query as to whether he believed in a God or not, and, if not, why he constantly seemed to assume God's existence. One is sometimes persuaded of the truth of the saying that language was given to man to conceal thought. I am not forgetful that every man is entitled to his own definition of God; Spinoza was fond of repeating that “the love of God” was man's summum bonum, and, by the phrase “love of God,” expressing a passionate zeal in the quest of scientific truth. Yet, to say the least of it, such diverse definitions are somewhat bewildering to the plain man. And, as the plain man in his thousands was among Renan's readers, such equivocal usages of speech were scarcely commendable.

The mention of Spinoza's name at this point may recall another aspect of that thinker's work, of interest in the present case—his naturalistic explanations of some Old Testament miracles,—the Red Sea retreating before a strong wind, the Shunamite's son revived by the natural heat of Elisha's body, and so forth. Ingenious attempts of this kind were not altogether to Renan's taste, but he has not much better to offer: his treatment of miracles throughout is neither adequate nor satisfactory. In a manner scarcely worthy of a true critic, he makes no attempt to conceal his distaste for the whole matter, and, while he is too honest to minimise the importance of alleged supernatural occurrences giving an initial impetus to the new religion, he insists on their mere trickery and fraud in terms that betray his anxiety to point out that Jesus had far rather have worked no miracles at all, that he only worked them because it was expected of him to do so, because, had he not chosen to be a thaumaturgist, he would have had no success. This idea of Jesus deliberately making his choice in the matter and reluctantly conceding to popular opinion, seems to me as grotesque as Renan's sweeping condemnation of thaumaturgists,¹⁴ in which order must necessarily be included Charcot, Heidenhain, and every modern physician who employs hypnotic suggestion as a therapeutic agent. If by such means disease can be successfully treated, why should they not be used? I think it was of Napoleon that an opposing general complained, that he won his victories only by a culpable disregard of the laws of strategy.

Nor are Renan's views embodied in a comprehensive and consistent whole; several miracles he does not mention at all, such as the incident of the Gadarene swine, that of the feeding of the multitude, and that of Jesus walking on the sea. On the production of wine from water at Cana he only bestows a passing reference without comment. In the majority of cases he adopts the well-known expedient of looking the difficulty boldly in the face, and passing on.¹⁵ He does not seem to have a sufficiently full appreciation of the value of suggestion in the large number of pathological states due to neurotic causes. This of course may be explained by the fact that the subject has in great measure been investigated since the publication of his book. A valuable commentary on the Gospel miracles might be compiled, I imagine, from the clinical records of the Salpetrière. Such a commentary would probably show a very substantial basis of truth for the great majority of the healing miracles recorded of Jesus.

These miracles indeed may well be considered separately from those which are evidently of a mythical nature. In classifying or discussing occurrences of this kind, the first thing is to settle what we mean by a miracle. The orthodox person who asserts belief in miracles as infractions of the laws of nature—that glib phrase for observed sequences of phenomena—and the sceptic who denies them in a like manner, are equally exponents of a fallacy. Those who see in nature limitless possibilities, who believe that nature is all-inclusive and all-sufficing, who recognise that our science throws but a tiny flicker of light into the darkness around us, cannot accept the phrase “infraction of nature” as being other than meaningless. “The day-fly has better grounds for calling a thunder-storm supernatural than has man, with his experience of an infinitesimal fraction of duration, to say that the most astonishing event that can be imagined is beyond the scope of natural causes.”¹⁶ Renan, if I read him aright, has a tendency to imagine that the last word is said in the matter, that science can only speak negatively, that there is no hope of fresh light being cast. But those who see in experimental psychology a science, new indeed, but still a science, can scarcely endorse his verdict. To take a crucial instance: is the hypothesis that an apparition of the Master appeared to the disciples after his death so utterly absurd, that Renan can afford to dismiss the point in half a page of rhetorical questions and unctuous platitudes about the disciples' devotion and the divine power of woman's love?

But, reversing the procedure of the prophet who was called to give curses and disappointed his employer by bestowing blessings, I am confining myself to merely negative criticism, when the occasion manifestly requires some assertion of the positive value of the work which follows. This positive value, I imagine, mainly resides in its subjective aspect, in its character as an account of the immensely important movement of a long past age by one of the most interesting and sensitive intellects of our own century. This subjective quality is of course so apparent on every page, that it is generally the first point of attack for those who engage in the adverse criticism of the book. Renan indeed is a good instance of the egoistic historian, the narrator who is rather lyrical than dramatic; the Jesus with whom he presents us is a Renanised Jesus—a Jesus who is gentle, ironical, at times almost gay—a Jesus, in short, who in many features resembles M. Ernest Renan. But what would we have? A biography of Jesus suited to every one's taste is out of the question; apart from necessary diversities of view, the materials are too scanty and too thickly encrusted with legend, for adequately historical treatment to be possible. “So redt' ich wenn ich Christus wär”—“Had I been Christ I should have spoken so:”—the words might come from any one attempting such a treatment, a treatment which must less resemble history in its strict sense than the historical novel or play. Gaps, it is true, exist in all history, and the palm is to him who can best use his imagination in filling them up. But the history of the founder of Christianity consists mainly of gaps, and the personal equation being so important a feature in Renan's literary labours, we need feel neither surprised nor indignant that his ingenious attempts at filling up these gaps should partake so greatly of the character of a personal revelation.

Not only indeed have we a personal revelation in the Life of Jesus, we have a revelation of the time-spirit. I have already pointed out how aptly it fitted the intellectual and emotional temperament of a certain large number of persons; but, in no small measure, it had a wider bearing and represented a general tendency. To use a modern cant phrase, it appeared at a psychological moment. The somewhat barren deism of the eighteenth century, having fulfilled its purpose, had become a creed—or lack of creed—outworn. The deistic writers were fast fading into the limbo of oblivion. They had not written in vain so far as influence went, but if their influence remained, their books were forgotten. It is only Voltaire's wit, and his flashes of humorous common sense, that attract even the limited amount of attention from readers that his “philosophical works” now receive. Diderot, of course, was so much more than a destructive critic and facile writer, that, if anything, his reputation has a tendency to grow. But Holbach and his circle—Mirabaud, Fréret, Dumarsis, and the rest, have gone the way to dusty death.

Renan was not indeed the first French writer of this century to recognise the change which German exegesis had made in the problem. Reuss, Réville, and Scherer possess a European reputation as biblical critics, and all three were active before the publication of the Life of Jesus; while the foundation of the Révue Germanique had also had a deep influence on the formation of intellectual opinion in France. But Renan was the first to draw the attention of a wider public than that of savants and men of letters; and there can be little doubt that his success was mainly due to those of his characteristics—his insistent idealism, his almost devotional unction, and, it must be confessed, his frequent sentimentalism—in which he most widely diverged from the sceptics of the previous century.

These sceptics, who were fond of the discussion, if not the practice of ethics, seemed scarcely to realise that the world was not to be regenerated by rational codes of morals and ideals of justice alone. As Renan points out with great force, two elements contributed to the success of Christianity, a miraculous element and a moral element. The former gave the necessary initial impetus, the latter made the movement endure. In addition to these two powerful causes was the greatest cause of all,—the assertion by Jesus of love as the principle that should underlie the whole conduct of life. The Greek and Roman philosophers had made justice this underlying principle. But justice is an abstraction not to be understood by the people, or always by the philosophers themselves. Every one, on the other hand, can understand the love which Jesus taught as the greatest of all commandments, and, while he may see in it a counsel of perfection, can recognise aspiration towards that perfection as an essential feature in human progress.

Notes

1. [Ernest Renan,] Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse, p. 355.

2. See, for example, Opinion des déistes rationalistes sur la Vie de Jésus selon M. Renan, par P. Larroque, Paris, 1863, a work which amply justifies the saying of the Goncourts, that when incredulity becomes a faith it is more unreasonable than religion.

3. Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, tom. vi.

4. The extremely significant sayings reported in Matt. x. 23, Luke xxi. 32, and Luke ix. 27, should be noted. See also 1 Cor. vii. 29; Philipp. iv. 5; 1 Peter iv. 7; 1 John ii. 18; James v. 8, 9; 1 Thess. iv. 16, 17.

5. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, p. 119.

6. Vie de Jésus: Préface de la 13^me édition, p. 5.

7. See pp. 23 and 285. I hardly think, however, that Renan lays sufficient stress on the points of contact between the Hindu religions and Christian doctrine. Without taking Schopenhauer's extreme view, that an agreement is brought about in the most essential matters between Old Testament doctrines and the Indian religions, and that everything which is true in Christianity is to be found in Brahmanism and Buddhism—a view which obviously implies the satisfaction of “jesting Pilate's” demand for a definition of truth—there can be no doubt that resemblances exist, resemblances which extend to form as well as to idea. Thus the saying of Jesus, “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” and his comparison with a grain of mustard seed may be placed beside, “This Self of mine in the heart within is smaller than a grain of rice, or a grain of mustard seed, or a grain of millet, or a grain of millet's kernel; this Self of mine, in the heart within, is greater than the earth, greater than the air, greater than heaven, greater than these worlds” (Chhandogya Upanishad, iii. 14, 3).

8. Some of Renan's reasons for classing the book of Daniel with the apocryphal writings may be briefly summarised. The character of the two languages in which it is written, the use of Greek words, the definite and dated account of events extending almost to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, the incorrect details of Babylon, the apocalyptic character of the visions, and the place of the book in the Hebrew canon outside the series of the Prophets, lead him to think that the work was a fruit of the great religious exaltation caused among the Jews by the persecution of Antiochus.

9. Papias, bishop of Hierapolis (in the first half of the second century), draws this distinction; he speaks of an anecdotic narrative written by Mark from reminiscences derived from the apostle Peter, and of a collection of sayings made by Matthew.

10. Note, for instance, that in Luke seventy disciples are sent out by Jesus, in the other Gospels only twelve.

11. See, for example, John ii. 6; iv. 52; v. 5; vi. 9, 19; xxi. 11.

12. See, for example, John ii. 6, 13; vi. 4; x. 31, 33; xviii. 36; xix. 31, 38, 42.

13. Renan's Introduction, p. 69.

14. See p. 163.

15. An exception must be made in the case of the Lazarus miracle. Here Renan, abandoning his more plausible hypothesis of premature burial, and following the somewhat far-fetched theory of Strauss and Baur, complacently pronounces the whole affair a pious fiction.

16. T. H. Huxley, Life of Hume, p. 132.