THE LAST CREDULITY OF SCEPTICISM.
THOSE who feel an interest in estimating the relative judg- ment and common-sense shown by the various critics of the original documents of Christianity, should read M. Ernest Havet's paper in the Revue des Deux Mondes, for April 1st, on "The Accounts of the Life of Jesus." M. Ernest Havet, who is a member of the Institute of France, and one of the most
considerable of the sceptical school of critics, develops, in that paper, his own view of the Gospels, and contrasts it to some extent with the more credulous view of M. Ronan, which he condemns as expressing rather "the emotion and enthusiasm of the painter standing before the picture he has drawn, than the judgment of the historian." M. Ernest Havet endeavours to embody strictly "the judgment of the historian" in the criticism of the Gospels which lie gives us, and we shall endeavour as tersely but also as accurately as possible, to summarise and criticise his results.
M. Havet holds, of course, with all his school, that any trace of miracle invalidates, so far as it goes, the story in which it is incorporated ; but he believes it possible that a certain non- miraculous healing influence on the nerves of the insane may have been exerted by Christ, and that this may have been the germ of the stories of miracle attributed to him. Prediction or prophecy in any accurate sense M. Havet regards as sheer miracle, and therefore dates even the earliest of the Four Gospels, even the Gospel of Mark, after the destruction of Jerusalem, since the prophecy of that event could not, in his opinion, have originated before it took place. So far, however, M. Havet only echoes the universal rationalist view, and there would be nothing deserving of special notice in his criticism, if he confined his rejection of the Gospel narratives to all those parts of them which involve miracle or prophecy, or both. But M. Havet &s criticism is much more original. He goes far beyond Ronan, and if we remember rightly, far beyond Strauss, in his attenuation of what had been supposed to be inspiring and imposing in the character of our Lord him- self. The oldest of the ospels,—which he is probably quite n i
ght n considering to be the second in our New Testament,—
having been written, according to him, certainly more than forty years after the death of Jesus, he holds that there is no external authority at all for any detail it contains in which we can detect the evidence of ideas inappropriate to what he considers to have
been the conditions of the life of Jesus. He not only absolutely denies, of course, that Jesus ever predicted his own death, still less his resurrection, but holds that the only incontestable fact which the Gospel contains is that Jesus was crucified by the order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor. He does not even sec any evidence that Jesus asserted himself to be the Messiah at all ; he does not see any evidence, and does not
The Jesus of fact was, then, in M. Havet's estimation, probably a man who believed, like Joan of Arc, implicitly (but falsely) in his own inspiration ; who did not per- suade or prove, but commanded ; who felt " virtue go out of him ;" who made faith the cardinal necessity of life ; who had, something in him of severity, and even bitterness ; who almost roughly preferred his disciples to his mother and his brethren ; who assailed his own followers as a "faithless and perverse generation," almost with the man- ner of " a charlatan angered that his prestige did not carry all before it ;" who rebuked Peter as a tempter with the same asperity ; and whose harshness in the sayings concerning the cutting off of the hand or foot which might cause us to offend was only rivalled by the rebuff to the Syrophconician woman, that 'it is not meet to take the children's bread and to cast it toldogs." Nevertheless, M. Havet recognises a certain probable truth in the assertion of the so-called meekness of Jesus, only it was a meekness excluding violence and imperiousness, not excluding chagrin and bitter melancholy. The bitterness against the powers of this world became, however, in Jesus, pity towards the feeble and the miserable ; but "even in his tenderness he keeps the tone of severity." When the disciples are disposed to keep at a distance the children who are brought to him to bless, Jesus was "indignant "; he resented the interference, even while he was preparing to bless the innocent. The true Jesus, says M. Havet, never preached brotherhood with the Samaritans,—the parable of the Good Samaritan is altogether of a later date,— and though one may hope that the story of the demons entering into the herd, of swine was not supported by any saying of Jesus which appeared to imply so coarse an illusion, it is certain, says M. Havet, that the faith of Jesus was a very narrow one. He was no thinker ; he never brought light to dissipate the shadows ; the verse in St. John's Gospel which attributes to him the great saying," God is a Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth," is altogether an anachronism, and in contradiction with the drift of the elder Evangelists. He was no philosopher, nor "a master of those who know," nor a politician,nor a captain, nor a poet ; he was "unable to render to humanity any of the believe, that there was any solemn condemnation of him by the Sanhedrim, beyond a disavowal to Pilate of all responsibility for his teaching. He sees no evidence, and is evidently inclined to reject the assertions of the Gospels to that effect, that Jesus predicted the rejection of his teaching by the Jews, and the preaching of his Gospel to the Gentiles. Finally, he contests the assumption that Jesus ever made special enemies of the Pharisees, or pronounced the solemn denunciations of them attributed to him in the Gospels. All those assertions of the Gospels, M. Havet believes to be after-thoughts, attributed to Jesus or incorporated in the traditions of his life, by a later generation, who had gradually magnified his person, the character of his struggle with his contemporaries, his foresight, and his discernment of the rancour implicitly contained in the Pharisaic dogmatism, as time developed their own faith and its affinities and repul- sions. Because James the brother of Jesus was subsequently condemned by the Sanhedrim, the Christian society sup- posed, in M. Havet's view, that still more must Christ have been so condemned ; but, according to this critic, the religious world of Judaism was absolutely indifferent to the teaching of Jesus at the time of his life, and it was only the political anxieties of the Romans which led to his execution. He does not even believe in the treachery of Judas, holding that St. Paul's language about Jesus appearing to "the Twelve," shows that St. Paul at that time knew nothing of the sup- posed treachery of Judas. He rejects as utterly apocry- phal the account of the Last Supper, which he believes to have originated with St. Paul himself, and to have been borrowed by the Evangelists from St. Paul. And after all these rejections, he remarks very justly that so little remains, that it may be said to be " the soul of Jesus itself that escapes us." Nevertheless, as a negative critic is seldom quite happy in the humility of pure negation, M. Havet proceeds to suggest reserves, holding it impossible that no trace of the reality which led to such vast results should remain,—which means, to our thinking, that his own method has landed him iu a perfectly absurd and impossible result. So he applies himself to the task of discriminating, in the Gospel of Mark, what may at least be the true Jesus, by evaporating all supernatural elements, and all other visible anachronisms. Let us see, then, what remains as the Jesus of M. Havet's analysis.
great services which those different powers of the spirit render it." He was only a man of power through the force of his heart, through his strength of passion, through his goodness. He loved his country and his religion to such a point, that he could not bear the humiliation of the one and the ruin of the other, and, it was that which made him believe SO unquestion- ably in the coining of the kingdom of God. He was purely a Jew, and never said a word that was Christian, as distinguished from Jewish, in any sense but this, that he preached a scrt of detachment from the present life not characteristic of the older Judaism, but due to the obstacles and miseries of the life of the day. However, he was a Jew, ardent and exalted, "born in a country. which nourished independent and uudocile spirits ; one who obeyed his own inspirations more willingly than be obeyed authority ; a man of Nature rather than of the Schools; made to compromise the Sanhedrim of Jerusalem and to ruin himself ; but made also to move the souls of men."
Such is M. Havet's view of Jesus Christ. The only criticism which forces itself upon us is a very simple one. It is that after effectually weeding Christ's Gospel of everything in it which could grow in power, M. Havel does not see the diffi- culty presented by the fact that it did grow, and grow rapidly, in power, If Jesus Christ was a Jew of no foresight, of little in- sight, who never announced, if he ever believed in, his own Messiah- ship; who, though his language was of great authority, had suffered within a year or two the penalty of a shameful death for the authority he had usurped; who predicted nothing, who founded nothing, who made no provision for the future, who did not even impose on his twelve chief disciples any iujunctiou to teach or baptise iu his name (for M. Havet clearly believes that even the College of Apostles was an institu- tion founded after the death of Jesus),—why in the world should. such a Jew as this have infused into his disciples so intense and profound a conviction of his resurrection from the dead, of his actual life ill them, of his spiritual reign over them, of the finality of his kingdom, and of its extension to all nations, a conviction so intense and profound that they devoted their lives, and devoted them with the most brilliant success, to the preaching of his Gospel to Jew and Gentile alike ? M. Havet's ingenious incredulity appears to us to have created a great many far worse difficulties than it has removed. He is so scandalised at the anachronism, as he thinks it, of Christ's universality and foresight, that he denies him all universality and foresight, and so leaves us with the paradox of an euthusi- esti° and growing Church, looking backwards and upwards in gratitude and love, to one to whom it owed little or nothing of the debt with which its heart was burdened. Ho explains away all Christli miracles and prophecies, only to leave us wondering why his disciples, crushed by the Roman power and the con- tempt of an alien Jewish Synagogue, not only invented on his behalf wonders that never happened, anticipations that were neither uttered nor fulfilled, but found in these figments a limit- less store of joyful and productive energy. He explaius away Jesus as a figure certainly not superior, perhaps inferior, to John the Baptist, only to make the difficulty why his posthumous life in the world was in so different a plane, absolutely insuper- able. In a word, M. Havet attenuates to the uttermost point the moral grandeur of the Founder of the Christian Faith, only to make us marvel more and more whence its abundant life aid, actually proceed. If it is not the creation of Christ, it is certainly
a creation out of nothing, and this is apparently the result of M. Havet's elaborate criticism. For our own parts, we think it more sober and rational to suppose that Christ's disciples had full certainty of knowledge and power in their master which transcended all their own knowledge and power, which was greater than Judaism, and burst the bonds of Pharisaism ; which foresaw death and overcame it, which gave them strength for their life without him, and, renewed that strength from day to day. If this be superstition, superstition must mean the disposition to believe that causes are adequate to their effects, and that great trees do not grow without roots.
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