by Will Durant
The oldest extant copies of the Gospels go back only to the third century. The original compositions were apparently written between A.D. 60 and 120, and were therefore exposed to two centuries of errors in transcription, and to possible alterations to suit the theology or aims of the copyist’s sect or time. Christian writers before 100 quote the Old, but never the New, Testament. The only reference to a Christian gospel before 150 is in Papias, who, about 135, reports an unidentified “John the Elder” as saying that Mark had composed his gospel from memories conveyed to him by Peter.15 Papias adds: “Matthew transcribed in Hebrew the Logia”— apparently an early Aramaic collection of the sayings of Christ. Probably Paul had some such document, for though he mentions no gospels he occasionally quotes the direct words of Jesus.II Criticism generally agrees in giving the Gospel of Mark priority, and in dating it between 65 and 70. Since it sometimes repeats the same matter in different forms,16 it is widely believed to have been based upon the Logia, and upon another early narrative which may have been the original composition of Mark himself. Our Gospel of Mark was apparently circulated while some of the apostles, or their immediate disciples, were still alive; it seems unlikely, therefore, that it differed substantially from their recollection and interpretation of Christ.17 We may conclude, with the brilliant but judicious Schweitzer, that the Gospel of Mark is in essentials “genuine history.”18
Orthodox tradition placed Matthew’s Gospel first. Irenaeus19 describes it as originally composed in “Hebrew”—i.e., Aramaic; but it has come down to us only in Greek. Since in this form it apparently copies Mark, and probably also the Logia, criticism inclines to ascribe it to a disciple of Matthew rather than to the “publican” himself; even the most skeptical students, however, concede to it as early a date as A.D. 85-90.20 Aiming to convert Jews, Matthew relies more than the other evangelists on the miracles ascribed to Jesus, and is suspiciously eager to prove that many Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in Christ. Nevertheless, it is the most moving of the four Gospels, and must be ranked among the unconscious masterpieces of the world’s literature.
The Gospel according to St. Luke, generally assigned to the last decade of the first century, announces its desire to co-ordinate and reconcile earlier accounts of Jesus, and aims to convert not Jews but gentiles. Very probably Luke was himself a gentile, the friend of Paul, and the author of the Acts of the Apostles.21 Like Matthew he borrows much from Mark.22 Of the 661 verses in the received text of Mark over 600 are reproduced in Matthew, and 350 in Luke, mostly word for word.23 Many passages in Luke that are not in Mark occur in Matthew, again nearly verbatim; apparently Luke borrowed these from Matthew, or Luke and Matthew took them from a common source, now lost. Luke works up these candid borrowings with some literary skill; Renan thought this Gospel the most beautiful book ever written.24
The Fourth Gospel does not pretend to be a biography of Jesus; it is a presentation of Christ from the theological point of view, as the divine Logos or Word, creator of the world and redeemer of mankind. It contradicts the synoptic gospels in a hundred details and in its general picture of Christ.25 The half-Gnostic character of the work, and its emphasis on metaphysical ideas, have led many Christian scholars to doubt that its author was the apostle John.26 Experience suggests, however, that an old tradition must not be too quickly rejected; our ancestors were not all fools. Recent studies tend to restore the Fourth Gospel to a date near the end of the first century. Probably tradition was correct in assigning to the same author the “Epistles of John”; they speak the same ideas in the same style.
In summary, it is clear that there are many contradictions between one gospel and another, many dubious statements of history, many suspicious resemblances to the legends told of pagan gods, many incidents apparently designed to prove the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, many passages possibly aiming to establish a historical basis for some later doctrine or ritual of the Church. The evangelists shared with Cicero, Sallust, and Tacitus the conception of history as a vehicle for moral ideas. And presumably the conversations and speeches reported in the Gospels were subject to the frailties of illiterate memories, and the errors or emendations of copyists.
All this granted, much remains. The contradictions are of minutiae, not substance; in essentials the synoptic gospels agree remarkably well, and form a consistent portrait of Christ. In the enthusiasm of its discoveries the Higher Criticism has applied to the New Testament tests of authenticity so severe that by them a hundred ancient worthies—e.g., Hammurabi, David, Socrates—would fade into legend.III Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed—the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus’ arrest, Peter’s denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels. After two centuries of Higher Criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of Western man.
II. THE GROWTH OF JESUS
Both Matthew and Luke assign Jesus’ birth to “the days when Herod was king of Judea”27—consequently before 3 B.C.. Luke, however, describes Jesus as “about thirty years old” when John baptized him “in the fifteenth year of Tiberius”27a—i.e., A.D. 28-29; this would place Christ’s birth in the year 2-1 B.C. Luke adds that “in those days there went out a decree of Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed . . . when Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Quirinius is known to have been legate in Syria between A.D. 6 and 12; Josephus notes a census by him in Judea, but ascribes it to A.D. 6-7;28 we have no further mention of this census. Tertullian29 records a census of Judea by Saturninus, governor of Syria 8-7 B.C.; if this is the census that Luke had in mind, the birth of Christ would have to be placed before 6 B.C.. We have no knowledge of the specific day of his birth. Clement of Alexandria (ca. 200) reports diverse opinions on the subject in his day, some chronologists dating the birth April 19, some May 20; he himself assigned it to November 17, 3 B.C. As far back as the second century the Eastern Christians celebrated the Nativity on January 6. In 354 some Western churches, including those of Rome, commemorated the birth of Christ on December 25; this was then erroneously calculated as the winter solstice, on which the days begin to lengthen; it was already the central festival of Mithraism, the natalis invicti solis, or birthday of the unconquered sun. The Eastern churches clung for a time to January 6, and charged their Western brethren with sun worship and idolatry, but by the end of the fourth century December 25 had been adopted also in the East.30
Matthew and Luke place the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, five miles south of Jerusalem; thence, they tell us, the family moved to Nazareth in Galilee. Mark makes no mention of Bethlehem, but merely names Christ “Jesus of Nazareth.”IV His parents gave him the quite common name Yeshu’a (our Joshua), meaning “the help of Yahveh”; the Greeks made this into lesous, the Romans into lesus.
He was apparently one of a large family, for his neighbors, marveling at his authoritative teaching, asked, “Where did he get this wisdom, and the power to do these wonders? Is he not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother named Mary, and are not his brothers named James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? And do not his sisters live here among us?”31 Luke tells the story of the Annunciation with some literary art, and puts into the mouth of Miriam—Mary—that Magnificat which is one of the great poems embedded in the New Testament.
Next to her son, Mary is the most touching figure in the na
rrative: rearing him through all the painful joys of motherhood, proud of his youthful learning, wondering later at his doctrine and his claims, wishing to withdraw him from the exciting throng of his followers and bring him back to the healing quiet of his home (“thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing”), helplessly witnessing his crucifixion, and receiving his body into her arms; if this is not history it is supreme literature, for the relations of parents and children hold deeper dramas than those of sexual love. The tales later circulated, by Celsus and others, about Mary and a Roman soldier are by critical consent “clumsy fabrications.”32 Not so awkward are the stories, chiefly contained in the apocryphal or uncanonical gospels, about the birth of Christ in a cave or stable, the adoration of the shepherds and the Magi, the massacre of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt; the mature mind will not resent this popular poetry. The virgin birth is not mentioned by Paul or John; and Matthew and Luke, who tell of it, trace Jesus back to David through Joseph, by conflicting genealogies; apparently the belief in the virgin birth rose later than that in the Davidic descent.
The evangelists tell us little of Christ’s youth. When he was eight days old he was circumcized. Joseph was a carpenter, and the occupational heredity usual in that age suggests that Jesus followed that pleasant trade for a time. He knew the craftsmen of his village, and the landlords, stewards, tenants, and slaves of his rural surroundings; his speech is studded with them. He was sensitive to the natural beauties of the countryside, to the grace and color of flowers, and the silent fruitfulness of trees. The story of his questioning the scholars in the temple is not incredible; he had an alert and curious mind, and in the Near East a boy of twelve already touches maturity. But he had no formal education. “How is it,” his neighbors asked, “that this man can read when he has never gone to school?”33 He attended the synagogue, and heard the Scriptures with evident delight; the Prophets and the Psalms above all sank deep into his memory, and helped to mold him. Perhaps he read also the books of Daniel and Enoch, for his later teaching was shot through with their visions of the Messiah, the Last Judgment, and the coming Kingdom of God.
The air he breathed was tense with religious excitement. Thousands of Jews awaited anxiously the Redeemer of Israel. Magic and witchcraft, demons and angels, “possession” and exorcism, miracles and prophecies, divination and astrology were taken for granted everywhere; probably the story of the Magi was a necessary concession to the astrological convictions of the age.34 Thaumaturgists—wonder-workers—toured the towns. On the annual journeys that all good Palestinian Jews made to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, Jesus must have learned something of the Essenes, and their half-monastic, almost Buddhistic, life;V possibly he heard also of a sect called “Nazarenes,” who dwelt beyond the Jordan in Peraea, rejected Temple worship, and denied the binding character of the Law.36 But the experience that aroused him to religious fervor was the preaching of John, the son of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth.
Josephus tells John’s story in some detail.37 We tend to picture the Baptist as an old man; on the contrary, he was apparently of the same age as Jesus. Mark and Matthew describe him as garbed in haircloth, living on dried locusts and honey, standing beside the Jordan, and calling people to repentance. He shared the asceticism of the Essenes, but differed from them in holding one baptism to be enough; his name “the Baptist” may be a Greek equivalent of “Essene” (bather) .38 To his rite of symbolic purification John added a menacing condemnation of hypocrisy and loose living, warned sinners to prepare themselves for the Last Judgment, and proclaimed the early coming of the Kingdom of God.39 If all Judea should repent and be cleansed of sin, said John, the Messiah and the Kingdom would come at once.
In or shortly after “the fifteenth year of Tiberius,” says Luke, Jesus came down to the Jordan to be baptized by John. This decision, by a man now “about thirty years old,”40 attested Christ’s acceptance of John’s teaching; his own would be essentially the same. His methods and character, however, were different: he would himself never baptize anyone,41 and he would live not in the wilderness but in the world. Soon after this meeting Herod Antipas, tetrarch (“ruler of four cities”) of Galilee, ordered the imprisonment of John. The Gospels ascribe the arrest to John’s criticism of Herod’s acts in divorcing his wife and marrying Herodias while she was still the wife of his half brother Philip. Josephus attributes the arrest to Herod’s fear that John was fomenting a political rebellion in the guise of a religious reformation.42 Mark43 and Matthew44 tell here the story of Salome, Herodias’ daughter, who danced so alluringly before Herod that he offered her any reward she might name. At her mother’s urging, we are told, she asked for the head of John, and the tetrarch reluctantly accommodated her. There is nothing in the Gospels about Salome loving John, nor anything in Josephus about her share in John’s death.
III. THE MISSION
When John was imprisoned Jesus took up the Baptist’s work, and began to preach the coming of the Kingdom.45 He “returned to Galilee,” says Luke, “and taught in the synagogues.”46 We have an impressive picture of the young idealist taking his turn at reading the Scriptures to the congregation at Nazareth, and choosing a passage from Isaiah:
The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach glad tidings to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the down-trodden free.47
“The eyes of everyone in the synagogue,” Luke adds, “were fixed upon him. And he began by saying to them, ’This passage of Scripture has been fulfilled here in your hearing today.’ And they all spoke well of him, and were astonished at the winning words that fell from his lips.”48 When the news came that John had been beheaded, and his followers sought a new leader, Jesus assumed the burden and the risk, at first retiring cautiously to quiet villages, always refraining from political controversy, then more and more boldly proclaiming the gospel of repentance, belief, and salvation. Some of his hearers thought he was John risen from the dead.49
It is difficult to see him objectively, not only because the evidence is derived from those who worshiped him, but even more because our own moral heritage and ideals are so closely bound up with him and formed on his example that we feel injured in finding any flaw in his character. His religious sensitivity was so keen that he condemned severely those who would not share his vision; he could forgive any fault but unbelief. There are in the Gospels some bitter passages quite out of key with what else we are told about Christ. He seems to have taken over without scrutiny the harshest contemporary notions of an everlasting hell where unbelievers and unrepentant sinners would suffer from inextinguishable fire and insatiable worms.50 He tells without protest how the poor man in heaven was not permitted to let a single drop of water fall upon the tongue of the rich man in hell.51 He counsels nobly, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” but he cursed the men and cities that would not receive his gospel, and the fig tree that bore no fruit.52 He may have been a bit harsh to his mother.53 He had the puritan zeal of the Hebrew prophet rather than the broad calm of the Greek sage. His convictions consumed him; righteous indignation now and then blurred his profound humanity; his faults were the price he paid for that passionate faith which enabled him to move the world.
For the rest he was the most lovable of men. We have no portrait of him, nor do the evangelists describe him; but he must have had some physical comeliness, as well as spiritual magnetism, to attract so many women as well as men. We gather from stray words54 that, like other men of that age and land, he wore a tunic under a cloak, had sandals on his feet, and probably a cloth headdress falling over his shoulders to shield him from the sun.55 Many women sensed in him a sympathetic tenderness that aroused in them an unstinted devotion. The fact that only John tells the story of the woman taken in adultery is no argument against its truth; it does not help John’s theology, and is completely in character with Christ.VI Of like beauty, and hardly within the inventive powers of the
evangelists, is the account of the prostitute who, moved by his ready acceptance of repentant sinners, knelt before him, anointed his feet with precious myrrh, let her tears fall upon them, and dried them with her hair; of her Jesus said that her sins were forgiven “because she loved much.”57 We are told that mothers brought their children to be touched by him, and “he took the children in his arms, laid his hands upon them, and blessed them.”58
Unlike the prophets, the Essenes, and the Baptist, he was no ascetic. He is represented as providing abundant wine for a marriage feast, as living with “publicans and sinners,” and receiving a Magdalene into his company. He was not hostile to the simple joys of life, though he was unbiologically harsh on the desire of a man for a maid. Occasionally he partook of banquets in the homes of rich men. Generally, however, he moved among the poor, even among the almost untouchable Amhaarez so scorned and shunned by Sadducees and Pharisees alike. Realizing that the rich would never accept him, he built his hopes upon an overturn that would make the poor and humble supreme in the coming Kingdom. He resembled Caesar only in taking his stand with the lower classes, and in the quality of mercy; otherwise what a world of outlook, character, and interests separated them! Caesar hoped to reform men by changing institutions and laws; Christ wished to remake institutions, and lessen laws, by changing men. Caesar too was capable of anger, but his emotions were always under the control of his clear-eyed intellect. Jesus was not without intellect; he answered the tricky questions of the Pharisees with almost a lawyer’s skill, and yet with wisdom; no one could confuse him, even in the face of death. But his powers of mind were not intellectual, did not depend upon knowledge; they were derived from keenness of perception, intensity of feeling, and singleness of purpose. He did not claim omniscience; he could be surprised by events; only his earnestness and enthusiasm led him to overestimate his capacities, as in Nazareth and Jerusalem. That his powers were nevertheless exceptional seems proved by his miracles.