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CHAPTER II

THE LIFE OF JESUS

'HE Life of Jesus is naturally the first of Renan's seven volumes on the Origins of Christianity. Even more than its successors it is a work, not of erudition, not of technical exegesis, but of moral and psychological enquiry, based on historical documents. Renan was certainly familiar with the curious mosaic of Le Nain de Tillemont, he knew almost by heart the New Testament, he had read and re-read the pages of Josephus; to this foundation, solid if restricted, he added a rare archæological capacity, an acquaintance with the monuments, moneys, and inscriptions of the first centuries of our era which, of a surety, no other religious historian possesses; he was, moreover, a traveller, whom a year's residence in Syria had accustomed to the horizons, the races, and the character of the Holy Land: the fresh impressions of his visit colour every page; but, above all, he was a psychologist, a man who had once believed, who had felt the pulse of his soul, with as much curiosity as

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anguish, during the long years in which that dear belief expired: a man to whom, even after its death, the impulse of Faith remained the holiest, and the most interesting thing in the universe. His rustic and religious origin enabled this man of science to enter into the spirit of a credulous country folk, and to analyse, without illusion, without derision, the creative process of their minds. The result is a master-piece. pure idyll of Galilee, hardly less sacred to Renan than to the most fervent Churchman; the Passion of Jerusalem; the religious East; and philosophic Greece, animating a Syrian people with the spirit of the Gospel of St John; the dogmatic force and fervour of St Paul, supplying, as it were, channels and imperishable aqueducts for the New Source of Life which the rod of Jesus had set welling; all the great concourse of saints, martyrs, mystics, heretics, and charlatans who laboured together blindly in a Cause superior to even the noblest among them; and the cruel consolidating force of persecution; and Nero, the Antichrist, throwing into stronger relief the ideal perfection of Jesus: all this, grouped against a vast Mediterranean background-Syria, Antioch, Alexandria, Athens, Rome-lives and glows before us in the pages of Renan.

In the beginning there was a Life of unequalled

perfection. The origins of Christianity begin with the Life of Jesus. To write a Life of Jesus has been the fatality of modern theology, for the hero of a biography can only be a man. The Christ, who, at a given date, was born of Jewish stock, in the obscure village of a distant Roman protectorate; who grew to manhood among certain Syrian peasants, whose appearance, education, and racial character he shared; who spoke an Aramean dialect, and never knew Greek; loses, by just so much as he gains in historic precision, the vague glory of universal Divinity. The theologian who would write the life of Jesus should compose a hymn. In such matters the Trisagion alone is really orthodox.

So early as 1838, Salvador, and towards 1860, Bunsen, had published, in their different fashions, material towards a history of the early Church. In 1840, Littré's translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus acquainted the French public with the speculations of Tübingen. More than to any of these, Renan owed to Herder: Herder, whose philosophy of history had helped to mould his mind. That elegant philosopher, Christian archæologist, and philologist, fully alive to the literary excellence of the text he examines, that man of feeling and ideas, in

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fluenced by his age and largely influencing it,was a man after Renan's heart. He never understood the austere and hard-headed rationalists of the school of Tübingen, as deficient in tact and measure as they are rich in knowledge.

Renan's debt to Tübingen has been exaggerated. The fault and the charm of his Life of Jesus is that he wrote it insufficiently prepared. The charm- because its extraordinary spontaneity makes the book a sort of fifth Gospel

-the gospel, if you will, according to Thomas Didymus. The pages written on the mud floor of a Syrian cottage, with Josephus and the Gospels for their only sponsors, keep the freshness, the life and the beauty of their original inspiration. Renan's Life of Jesus is the biography of a divinity written by a worshipper still prostrate before the dead body of his god, but convinced there will be no resurrection. Its superiority is its profound religious sentiment, its living, vibrating atmosphere of the East, its sense of the human personality, the life of Jesus.

Strauss, on the other hand, is a gnostic of the nineteenth century. All that he touches turns to allegory, myth, and symbol. His Christ is an on-a glittering abstraction. The aureole which the faith of the multitude has lit around the face of Jesus blinds him to the

features which it frames. His Saviour is a logical deduction from prophecy. We wonder why the first Christians lived hard, and died harder, for love of so unreal a Messiah. There is no life in these dead bones. The dogmatic man of science has no sense of a thing so delicate, so fluctuating, so spontaneous, so mysterious, as the birth of a faith.

But only a German university can produce the sum of labour necessary to collect, control, revise and criticise the vast material of any given history. If, when he began his Life of Jesus, Renan had been better acquainted with the researches of Strauss, Baur, Hilgenfeld, Reuss, Schwegler, Ewald, Zeller, and other erudites, he would not have taken a document of, we suppose, the end of the first century for a contemporary narrative of the life of Christ. A characteristic preference for ideas over facts, an affinity for the man who philosophises about events rather than for him who simply records them, led Renan to lay the greatest stress on the Gospel according to St John. Later on he saw the error of his ways, and, with the good faith he always showed, he recast many passages of his original work: after the thirteenth edition the difference is striking. But something undecided, embarrassed, clings to the work, which I consider inferior to at least