The Life of Jesus. Ernest Renan

exegetists of Jerusalem, was fully revealed to his grand genius. The Law does not appear to have had much charm for him; he thought that he could do something better. But the religious lyrics of the Psalms were in marvellous accordance with his poetic soul; they were, all his life, his food and sustenance. The prophets—Isaiah in particular, and his successor in the record of the time of the captivity—with their brilliant dreams of the future, their impetuous eloquence, and their invectives mingled with enchanting pictures, were his true teachers. He read also, no doubt, many apocryphal works—i.e., writings somewhat modern, the authors of which, for the sake of an authority only granted to very ancient writings, had clothed themselves with the names of prophets and patriarchs. One of these books especially struck him, namely, the Book of Daniel. This book, composed by an enthusiastic Jew of the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, under the name of an ancient sage,[1] was the résumé of the spirit of those later times. Its author, a true creator of the philosophy of history, had for the first time dared to see in the march of the world and the succession of empires, only a purpose subordinate to the destinies of the Jewish people. Jesus was early penetrated by these high hopes. Perhaps, also, he had read the books of Enoch, then revered equally with the holy books,[2] and the other writings of the same class, which kept up so much excitement in the popular imagination. The advent of the Messiah, with his glories and his terrors—the nations falling down one after another, the cataclysm of heaven and earth—were the familiar food of his imagination; and, as these revolutions were reputed near, and a great number of persons sought to calculate the time when they should happen, the supernatural state of things into which such visions transport us, appeared to him from the first perfectly natural and simple.

      [Footnote 1: The legend of Daniel existed as early as the seventh century B.C. (Ezekiel xiv. 14 and following, xxviii. 3). It was for the necessities of the legend that he was made to live at the time of the Babylonian captivity.]

      [Footnote 2: Epist. Jude, 14 and following; 2 Peter ii. 4, 11; Testam. of the Twelve Patriarchs, Simeon, 5; Levi, 14, 16; Judah, 18; Zab., 3; Dan, 5; Naphtali, 4. The "Book of Enoch" still forms an integral part of the Ethiopian Bible. Such as we know it from the Ethiopian version, it is composed of pieces of different dates, of which the most ancient are from the year 130 to 150 B.C. Some of these pieces have an analogy with the discourses of Jesus. Compare chaps. xcvi.-xcix. with Luke vi. 24, and following.]

      That he had no knowledge of the general state of the world is apparent from each feature of his most authentic discourses. The earth appeared to him still divided into kingdoms warring with one another; he seemed to ignore the "Roman peace," and the new state of society which its age inaugurated. He had no precise idea of the Roman power; the name of "Cæsar" alone reached him. He saw building, in Galilee or its environs, Tiberias, Julias, Diocæsarea, Cæsarea, gorgeous works of the Herods, who sought, by these magnificent structures, to prove their admiration for Roman civilization, and their devotion toward the members of the family of Augustus, structures whose names, by a caprice of fate, now serve, though strangely altered, to designate miserable hamlets of Bedouins. He also probably saw Sebaste, a work of Herod the Great, a showy city, whose ruins would lead to the belief that it had been carried there ready made, like a machine which had only to be put up in its place. This ostentatious piece of architecture arrived in Judea by cargoes; these hundreds of columns, all of the same diameter, the ornament of some insipid "Rue de Rivoli" these were what he called "the kingdoms of the world and all their glory." But this luxury of power, this administrative and official art, displeased him. What he loved were his Galilean villages, confused mixtures of huts, of nests and holes cut in the rocks, of wells, of tombs, of fig-trees, and of olives. He always clung close to Nature. The courts of kings appeared to him as places where men wear fine clothes. The charming impossibilities with which his parables abound, when he brings kings and the mighty ones on the stage,[1] prove that he never conceived of aristocratic society but as a young villager who sees the world through the prism of his simplicity.

      [Footnote 1: See, for example, Matt. xxii. 2, and following.]

      Still less was he acquainted with the new idea, created by Grecian science, which was the basis of all philosophy, and which modern science has greatly confirmed, to wit, the exclusion of capricious gods, to whom the simple belief of ancient ages attributed the government of the universe. Almost a century before him, Lucretius had expressed, in an admirable manner, the unchangeableness of the general system of Nature. The negation of miracle—the idea that everything in the world happens by laws in which the personal intervention of superior beings has no share—was universally admitted in the great schools of all the countries which had accepted Grecian science. Perhaps even Babylon and Persia were not strangers to it. Jesus knew nothing of this progress. Although born at a time when the principle of positive science was already proclaimed, he lived entirely in the supernatural. Never, perhaps, had the Jews been more possessed with the thirst for the marvellous. Philo, who lived in a great intellectual centre, and who had received a very complete education, possessed only a chimerical and inferior knowledge of science.

      Jesus, on this point, differed in no respect from his companions. He believed in the devil, whom he regarded as a kind of evil genius,[1] and he imagined, like all the world, that nervous maladies were produced by demons who possessed the patient and agitated him. The marvellous was not the exceptional for him; it was his normal state. The notion of the supernatural, with its impossibilities, is coincident with the birth of experimental science. The man who is strange to all ideas of physical laws, who believes that by praying he can change the path of the clouds, arrest disease, and even death, finds nothing extraordinary in miracle, inasmuch as the entire course of things is to him the result of the free will of the Divinity. This intellectual state was constantly that of Jesus. But in his great soul such a belief produced effects quite opposed to those produced on the vulgar. Among the latter, the belief in the special action of God led to a foolish credulity, and the deceptions of charlatans. With him it led to a profound idea of the familiar relations of man with God, and an exaggerated belief in the power of man—beautiful errors, which were the secret of his power; for if they were the means of one day showing his deficiencies in the eyes of the physicist and the chemist, they gave him a power over his own age of which no individual had been possessed before his time, or has been since.

      [Footnote 1: Matt. vi. 13.]

      His distinctive character very early revealed itself. Legend delights to show him even from his infancy in revolt against paternal authority, and departing from the common way to fulfill his vocation.[1] It is certain, at least, that he cared little for the relations of kinship. His family do not seem to have loved him,[2] and at times he seems to have been hard toward them.[3] Jesus, like all men exclusively preoccupied by an idea, came to think little of the ties of blood. The bond of thought is the only one that natures of this kind recognize. "Behold my mother and my brethren," said he, in extending his hand toward his disciples; "he who does the will of my Father, he is my brother and my sister." The simple people did not understand the matter thus, and one day a woman passing near him cried out, "Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which gave thee suck!" But he said, "Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it."[4] Soon, in his bold revolt against nature, he went still further, and we shall see him trampling under foot everything that is human, blood, love, and country, and only keeping soul and heart for the idea which presented itself to him as the absolute form of goodness and truth.

      [Footnote 1: Luke ii. 42 and following. The Apocryphal Gospels are full of similar histories carried to the grotesque.]

      [Footnote 2: Matt. xiii. 57; Mark vi. 4; John vii. 3, and following.]

      [Footnote 3: Matt. xii. 48; Mark iii. 33; Luke viii. 21; John ii. 4; Gospel according to the Hebrews, in St. Jerome, Dial. adv. Pelag., iii. 2.]

      [Footnote 4: Luke xi. 27, and following.]