CHAPTER XI.

SECRET OF THE BEAUTIES OF THE GOSPEL.

What is chiefly remarkable in the new Gospel is an immense literary progress. The general effect is that of a fairy palace constructed wholly of luminous stones. An exquisite vagueness in the transitions and the chronological relations gives to this divine composition the light attractiveness of a child’s story. “At that hour,” “at that time,” “that day,” “it happened that,” and a crowd of other formulæ which look precise, but which are nothing of the kind, hold the narrative as it were in suspense between earth and heaven. Thanks to the uncertainty of the time, the Gospel story only touches the reality. An airy genius whom one touches, one embraces, but who never strikes against the pebbles in the road, speaks to us and enchants us. We do not stop to ask if he is certain of what he tells us. He doubts nothing, and he knows nothing. There is an analogous charm in the affirmation of a woman who subjugates us while she makes us smile. It is in literature what a picture of a child by Correggio or a Virgin of sixteen by Raphael is in art.

The language is of the same character and perfectly appropriate to the subject. By a veritable tour de force the clear and childlike method of the Hebrew narrative, the fine and exquisite stamp of the Hebrew proverbs, have been translated into a Hellenic dialect, correct enough as far as grammatical forms are concerned, but in which the old learned syntax is completely cast aside. It has been remarked that the Gospels were the first books written in the Greek of everyday life. The Greek of antiquity is there, in effect, modified in the analytical sense of modern languages. The Hellenist cannot but admit that the language is commonplace and weak; he is certain that from the classical point of view the Gospel has neither style, nor plan, nor beauty; but it is the masterpiece of popular literature, and in one sense the most ancient popular book that has been written. That half-articulate language has the additional advantage of preserving its character in different versions, so that for such writings the translation is as valuable as the original.

This simplicity of form ought to give rise to no illusion. The word “truth” has not the same significance for the Oriental as for ourselves. The Oriental tells with a bewitching candour and with the accent of a witness, a crowd of things which he has not seen and about which he is by no means certain. The fantastic tales of the Exodus from Egypt, which are told in Jewish families during the Feast of the Passover, deceive nobody, yet none the less they enchant those who listen to them. Every year the scenic representations by which they commemorate the martyrdom of the sons of Ali in Persia, are enriched with some new invention designed to render the victims more interesting and their murderers more hateful. There is more passion in these episodes than anyone might think possible. It is the especial quality of the Oriental agada to touch most profoundly those who 105best know how fictitious it is. It is its triumph to have created such a masterpiece that all the world is deceived by it, and for want of knowing laws of this kind the credulous West has accepted as infallible truth the recital of facts which no human eye has ever seen.

The especial quality of a literature of logia, of hadith, is to go on increasing. After the death of Mohammed the number of words which “the people of the Bench” attributed to him was not to be counted. It was the same with Jesus. To the charming apologues which he had really pronounced, others were added conceived in the same style, which it is very difficult to distinguish from the genuine. The ideas of the time expressed themselves especially in those seven admirable parables of the kingdom of God, where all the innocent rivalries of the golden age of Christianity have left their traces. Some persons were aggrieved by the low rank of those who entered the Church; the doors of the churches of St Paul opening with both leaves, appeared to them a scandal; they wanted a selection, a preliminary examination, a censorship. The Shamaites in like manner desired that no man should be admitted to Jewish teaching unless he were intelligent, modest, of good family, and rich. To these exigent persons an answer was given in the shape of a parable of a man who prepared a dinner, and who, in the absence of the regularly invited guests, invited the lame, the vagabonds, and the beggars; or of a fisherman whose net gathered of every kind, both bad and good, the choice being made afterwards. The eminent place which Paul, once one of the enemies of Jesus, one of the last comers to the Gospel work, occupied amongst the faithful of these early days, excited murmurs. This was the occasion of the workers who were engaged at the eleventh hour, and were rewarded equally with those who had borne the burden and heat of the day. A statement of 106Jesus, “the last shall be first and the first shall be last,” had furnished the text. The owner of a vineyard goes out at various hours of the day to hire labourers. He takes all that he can find, and in the evening the last corners who had worked but a single hour, are paid exactly as those who had toiled the whole day through. The struggle of two generations of Christians is seen here very clearly. When the converted appeared to say with sadness that the places were taken, and that they had to fill a secondary part, this beautiful parable was quoted to them, from which it was evident that they had no reason to envy the ancients.

The parable of the tares also signifies in its way the mixed composition of the kingdom, wherein Satan himself has sometimes power to cast in a few grains. The mustard seed expresses its future greatness; the leaven its fermentative force; the hidden treasure and the pearl of great price; the thread, its success, mixed with perils in the future. “The first shall be last,” “many are called but few chosen,” such were the maxims which they especially loved to repeat. The expectation of Jesus above all inspired living and strong comparisons. The image of the thief in the night, the lightning which shines from the east to the west, of the fig tree whose young shoots announce the approach of summer, filled all minds. They repeated the charming fable of the wise and the foolish virgins, masterpieces of simplicity, of art, of wit, of subtlety. Both awaited the bridegroom, but as he was long in coming, they all slumbered. Then in the middle of the night was heard the cry, “Behold him! Behold him:” The wise virgins, who had carried oil in their flasks, soon lighted their lamps, but the foolish were confounded. There was no place for them at the banquet.

We do not say that these exquisite fragments are not the work of Jesus. The great difficulty of a history 107of the origins of Christianity is to distinguish in the Gospels between the part that comes directly from Jesus, and the part which is inspired by his spirit. Jesus having written nothing, and the editors of the Gospels having handed down to us pell-mell his own authentic words and those which have been attributed to him, there is no critic sufficiently subtle to work in such a case with absolute certainty. The life of Jesus, and the history of the compilation of the Gospels, are two subjects which are so interwoven that the boundary between them must be left undefined, at the risk of appearing to contradict oneself. In reality, this contradiction is of small consequence. Jesus is the veritable creator of the Gospel; Jesus did all, even what has been only attributed to him; his legend and himself are inseparable; he was so identified with his idea that his idea became himself, absorbed him, made his biography what it ought to be. There was in him what theologians call “communication of the idioms.” The same communication exists between the first and last book but one of this history. If that is a defect, it is a defect springing out of the nature of the subject, and we have thought it would be a mark of truth not to seek to avoid it. What is striking in any case is the original physiognomy of these narratives. Whatever may be the date of their compilation, they are truly Galilean flowers blossoming beneath the sacred feet of the divine dreamer.

The Apostolic instructions, such as our Gospel presents them, appear in some respects to proceed from the ideal of the Apostle formed upon the model of Paul. The impression left by the life of the great missionary had been profound. Many apostles had already suffered martyrdom for having carried to the people the appeals of Jesus. The Christian preacher was imagined as appearing before kings, before the highest tribunals, and proclaiming Christ. The first principle of this apostolic eloquence was not to prepare 108the discourses. The Holy Ghost would at the moment put into the mind of the preacher what he ought to say. In travelling, no provision, no money, not even a scrip, not even a change of garments, not even a staff. The workman deserved his daily bread. When the apostolic missionary entered into a house he might remain there without scruple, eating and drinking what was given to him, without feeling himself obliged to give in return anything but the word and wishes for health. This was the principle of Paul, but he did not put it in practice except amongst people of whom he was altogether sure, as for example with the woman of Philippi. Like Paul, the apostolic traveller was guarded in the dangers of the way by a Divine protection; he played with serpents, poisons did not affect him. His lot will be the hatred of the world, persecution. . . . Tradition always exaggerates the primitive feature. It is in some sort a necessity of the memory, the mind retaining better strongly accented and hyperbolical words than measured sentences. Jesus had too profound a knowledge of the souls of men not to know that rigour and exigence are the best means of gaining them and keeping them under the yoke. We do not, however, believe that he ever went to the excess which has been attributed to him, and the sombre fire which animates the apostolic instructions, appears to us, in part, a reflection of the feverish ardour of Paul.

The author of the Gospel according to Matthew takes no decisive aide in the great questions which divided the Church. He is neither an exclusive Jew after the manner of James, nor a lax Jew after the fashion of Paul. He feels the necessity for attaching the Church to Peter, and insists upon the prerogative of this last. On the other hand, he allows certain shades of ill will to appear against the family of Jesus and against the first Christian generation. He suppresses, in particular, in the list of the appearances of 109Jesus after the Resurrection, the part played by James, whom the disciples of Paul held as an avowed enemy. Opposite theories may find equally valuable support from him from time to time. At times he speaks of faith almost in the tone of St Paul’s Epistles. The author accepts from tradition sayings, parables, miracles, decisions in the most contrary senses, provided they are edifying, without any effort to reconcile them. Here there is a question of evangelising Israel; there the world. The Canaanitish woman, received at first with hard words, is then saved, and a history is begun to prove that Jesus has only been sent to the house of Israel, which finishes up with an exaltation of the faith of a Pagan woman. The centurion of Capernaum finds from the first both grace and favour. The legal chiefs of the nation have been more opposed to the Messiah than Pagans such as the magi, Pilate and Pilate’s wife. The Jewish people pronounce their own curse upon themselves. They have not chosen to enter the feast of the Kingdom of God prepared for them; the people of the highway—the Gentiles—will take their place. The formula, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time . . . but I tell you,” is placed repeatedly in the mouth of Jesus. The society to which the author addresses himself is a society of converted Jews. The polemic against the unconverted Jews occupies him much. His quotations of the prophetic texts, as well as of a certain number of circumstances related by him, refer to the assaults which the faithful had to submit to on the part of the orthodox majority, and especially to the great objection of these official representatives of the nation to believe in the Messianic character of Jesus.

The Gospel of St Matthew, like almost all fine compositions, was the work of a conscience in some sort double. The author is at once Jew and Christian; the new faith has not killed the old, nor has it taken 110any of its poetry from it. He loves two things at the same moment. The spectator enjoys the struggle without discomfort. Charming state to be in, without as yet anything being determined. Exquisite transition, excellent for art, where a conscience is a peaceable field of battle upon which opposing parties contend without either being overthrown! Although the pretended Matthew speaks of the Jews in the third person and as though they were strangers, his spirit, his apology, his Messianism, his exegesis, his piety, are essentially those of a Jew. Jerusalem is for him essentially “the holy city,” “the holy place.” Missions are in his eyes the appanage of the Twelve; he does not associate St Paul with them, and he certainly does not accord to this last a special vocation, although the apostolic instructions such as he gives them contain more than one feature drawn from the life of the great preacher of the Gentiles. His aversion to the Pharisees does not prevent him from admitting the authority of Judaism. Christianity is with him like a newly-blown flower, which still bears the envelope of the bud from which it has escaped.

In this lay one of his strong points. The supreme ability in the work of conciliation is to deny and affirm at the same moment, to practise the Ama tanquam osurus of the sage of antiquity. Paul suppresses all Judaism, and even all religion, to replace everything by Jesus. The Gospels hesitate, and remain in a much more delicate half-light? Does the Law still exist? Yes, and no. Jesus fulfilled it and destroyed it. The Sabbath? He suppressed and maintained it. The Jewish ceremonies? He observes them, and will not allow of their being held to. Every religious reformer has to observe this rule; men are not discharged from a burden impossible to be borne, except he takes it for himself without reserve or softening. The contraction was everywhere. When the Talmud has quoted on the same line opinions which exclude each other 111absolutely, it finishes by this formula:—“And all these opinions are the word of life.” The anecdote of the Canaanitish woman is the true image at this moment of Christianity. She prays. “I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” Jesus answers to her. She approaches, and worships him. “It is not meet to take the children’s bread and to cast it to the dogs.” “Truth, Lord, but the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from the Master’s table.” “Oh, woman, great is thy faith; be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” The converted Pagan finished by carrying off, by force of humility, and on condition of submitting first to the ill reception of an aristocracy which wished to be flattered and solicited, all that she desired.

Such a state of mind, to say the truth, agreed only with a single kind of hatred—the hatred of the Pharisee, the official Jew. The Pharisee, or, more properly, the hypocrite (for the word was now used in an abusive sense, just as with us the name of Jesuit is applied to a host of people who form no part of the society founded by Loyola), had to appear especially guilty, opposed in everything to Jesus. Our Gospel groups into a single invective, full of virulence, all the discourses which Jesus pronounced at various times against the Pharisees. The author undoubtedly took this fragment from some previous collection which had not the ordinary form. Jesus is there accredited with having made numerous journeys to Jerusalem; the punishment of the Pharisees is predicted in a vague fashion, which carries us back to the date before the revolution in Judea.

From all this results a Gospel infinitely superior in beauty to that of Mark, but of a much smaller historical value. Mark remains, as far as facts are concerned, the only authentic record of the life of Jesus. The narratives which the pseudo-Matthew adds to those of Mark are only legends; the modifications which he applies to the tales of Mark are only 112methods of hiding certain difficulties. The assimilation of the elements which the author takes from Mark is effected in the roughest way; the digestion—if such an expression may be permitted—is not completed; the morsels are left whole, so that they may still be recognised. In this connection Luke will introduce great improvements. But what gives value to the work attributed to Matthew, are the discourses attributed to Jesus, preserved with an extreme fidelity, and probably in the relative order in which they were first written.

This was more important than biographical exactitude, and the Gospel of Matthew, all things considered, is the most important book of Christianity—the most important book that has ever been written. It was not without reason that in the classification of the writings of the new Bible it received the first place. The biography of a great man is a part of his work. St Louis would not be what he is in the conscience of humanity, without Joinville. The life of Spinoza, by Colerus, is the finest of Spinoza’s works. Epictetus owes almost as much to Arrian, Socrates to Plato and to Xenophon. Jesus in the same way is in part made by the Gospel. In this sense, the compilation of the Gospels is, next to the personal action of Jesus, the leading fact of the history of the origins of Christianity; I will even add of the history of humanity. The habitual reading of the world is a book where the priest is always in fault, where respectable people are always hypocrites, where the lay authorities are always scoundrels, and where all the rich are damned. This book—the most revolutionary and dangerous ever written—the Roman Church has prudently put aside; but it has not been able to prevent it from bearing fruit. Malevolent towards the priesthood, contemptuous of austerity, indulgent towards the loose liver of good heart, the Gospels have been the perpetual nightmare of the hypocrite. The man of the Gospel has 113been an opponent of pedantic theology, of hierarchical haughtiness, of the ecclesiastical spirit such as the centuries have made it. The Middle Ages burned it. In our days, the great invective of the twenty-third chapter of St Matthew against the Pharisees is still a sanguinary satire on those who cover themselves with the name of Jesus, and whom Jesus, if he were to return to this world, would drive out with scourges.

Where was the Gospel of St Matthew written? Everything appears to indicate that it was in Syria, for a Jewish circle which knew scarcely anything but Greek, but which had some idea of Hebrew. The author makes use of the original Gospels written in Hebrew; yet it is doubtful whether the original Hebrew of the Gospel texts ever went out of Syria. In five or six cases, Mark had preserved little Aramaic phrases uttered by Jesus; the pseudo-Matthew effaces all of them with but one exception. The character of the traditions proper to our evangelist is exclusively Galilean. According to him, all the appearances of Jesus after the Resurrection took place in Galilee. His first readers appear to have been Syrians. He gives none of those explanations of customs and those topographical notes which are to be found in Mark. On the contrary, there are details which, meaningless at Rome, were interesting in the East. A Greek Gospel appeared a precious thing; but the gaps in that of Mark were striking, and they were filled up. The Gospel which resulted from these additions came in time to Rome. Hence the explanation of Luke’s ignorance of it in that city about 95.

Hence, also, the explanation of the reasons why to exalt the new work and to oppose to the name of Mark that of a superior authority, the text was attributed to the Apostle Matthew. Matthew was a Judeo-Christian apostle, living an ascetic life like that of James, abstaining from flesh, and living only upon vegetables and the shoots of trees. Perhaps his former occupation 114of publican gave rise to the idea that, accustomed to writing, he more than anyone else was likely to record the facts of which he was credited with having been a witness. Certainly Matthew was not the editor of the work which bears his name. The Apostle had long been dead when the Gospel was composed, and the book, besides, absolutely could not have been the work of such an author. Never was book so little that of an eye-witness. How, if our Gospel were the work of an apostle, could it possibly have been so defective in all that concerns the public life of Jesus? Perhaps the Hebrew Gospel with which the author completed that of Mark, bore the name of Matthew. Perhaps the collection of Logia bore that name. The addition of the Logia being what gave character to the new Gospel, the name of the apostle guaranteeing these Logia may have been preserved to designate the author of the work which drew its chief value from these additions. All that is doubtful. Papias believes the work to be really that of Matthew, but after fifty or sixty years the means of solving so complicated a question must have been wanting.

What is certain, in any case, is that the work attributed to Matthew had not the authority which its title would lead one to suppose, and was not accepted as final. There have been many similar attempts which are no longer in existence. The mere name of an apostle was not enough to recommend a work of this kind. Luke, who was not an apostle, and whom we shall soon see resuming the attempt at a Gospel embodying and superseding the others, was, in all probability, ignorant of the existence of that said to be according to Matthew.