[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR] Sm,—Mr. Joad's impression on
re-reading the Gospels was rather like mine on first reading them. I first came to grips with them at the age of twenty-four, with no Christian back- ground, with only a fragmentary acquaintance of the Eliza- bethan translation and with a long training in the appreciation of classical Greek. The effect on me of the Gospels in the original was lamentable in the extreme. As for Jesus, He struck me as a terrible person, much more like a Hitler or Mussolini, or the kind of power man these admire, than like the image evoked for me by the phrase " gentle Jesus, meek and mild." I fixed on the same kind of objectionable sayings and incidents as Mr. Joad does. No doubt he knows that there are more favourable interpretations given of these. But he may reasonably ask, just as I asked, why he should accept these more favourable interpretations and what is to be the criterion of correct interpretation.
The answer, it seems to me, comes only if we first accept the God of the Sermon on the Mount, and seek and accept His will for our daily lives according to the standards of that Sermon. As a result, a new sensitiveness to personality begins to develop in us, something like the wisdom and deepening we get from a shaking-up experience, and we attain to an understanding of all those objectionable points which make them consonant with the personality that spoke the Sermon. They are not, however, toned down in the least. The secret of the personality of Jesus and of the God He revealed is that it is goodness which is power and power which is goodness. We, however, especially in these days, are used to goodness which is aspiring in direct proportion to its impotence and to power which is dynamic in direct proportion to its crimi- nality. Hence we cannot understand and arc shocked by a combination of power and goodness, though this is precisely what we need.
The impression made on me by my first reading of the Gospels and on Mr. Joad by his second reading of them must, it seems to me, resemble exactly the impression produced by Jesus Himself on the Pharisees of His times, who were, after all, good, idealistic, cultured people like Mr. Joad and my- self. It is the impression which those who have reproduced the spirit of Jesus in the way called for by the spirit of their age have always made on the Pharisees of that particular age.
—Yours sincerely, PHILIP LEON. University College, Leicester.
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