PREFACE

TO THE

THIRTEENTH EDITION.

THE twelve first editions of this work differ only from one another in respect of a few trifling changes. The present edition, on the contrary, has been revised and corrected with the greatest care. During the four years which have elapsed since the book appeared, I have laboured incessantly to improve it. The numerous criticisms to which it has given rise have rendered the task in certain respects an easy one. I have read all those which contain anything important. I believe I can conscientiously affirm that not once have the outrage and the calumny, which have been imported into them, hindered me from deriving profit from the just observations which those criticisms might contain. I have weighed everything, tested everything. If, in certain cases, people should wonder why I have not answered fully the censures which have been made with such extreme assurance, and as if the errors alleged have been proved, it is not that I did not know of these censures, but that it was impossible for me to accept them. In the majority of such cases I have added in a note the texts or the considerations which have deterred me from changing my opinion, or better, by making some slight change of expression, I have endeavoured to show wherein lay the contempt of my critics. These notes, though very brief and containing little more than an indication of the sources at first hand, xare sufficient in every case to point out to the intelligent reader the reasonings which have guided me in the composition of my texts.

To attempt to answer in detail all the accusations which have been brought against me, it would have been necessary for me to triple or quadruple this volume: I should have had to repeat things which have already been well said, even in French; it would have been necessary to enter into a religious discussion, a thing that I have absolutely interdicted myself from doing; I should have had to speak of myself, a thing I shall never do. I write for the purpose of promulgating my ideas to those who seek the truth. As for those persons who would have, in the interests of their belief, that I am an ignoramus, an evil genius, or a man of bad faith, I do not pretend to be able to modify their opinions. If such opinions are necessary for the peace of mind of certain pious people, I would make it a veritable scruple to disabuse them of them.

The controversy, moreover, if I had entered upon it, would have led me most frequently to points foreign to historical criticism. The objections which have been directed against me have proceeded from two opposing parties. One set has been addressed to me by freethinkers, who do not believe in the supernatural, nor, consequently, in the inspiration of the sacred books; another set by theologians of the liberal Protestant school, who hold such broad doctrinal views that the rationalists and they can readily understand one another. These, adversaries and I find ourselves on common ground; we start with the same principles; we can discuss according to the rules followed in all questions relating to matters of history, philology, and archæology. As to the refutations of my book (and these are much the most numerous) which have been made by orthodox theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, who believe in the supernatural and in the sacred character of the books of the Old and New Testament, they all involve a fundamental misapprehension. If the miracle has any reality, this book is but a tissue of errors. If the Gospels are inspired books, and true, consequently, to the letter, xifrom beginning to end, I have been guilty of a great wrong in not contenting myself with piecing together the broken fragments of the four texts, like as the Harmonists have done, only to construct thus an ensemble at once most redundant and most contradictory. If, on the contrary, the miracle is an inadmissible thing, then I am right in regarding the books which contain miraculous recitals as histories mixed with fiction, as legends full of inaccuracies, errors, and of systematic expedients. If the Gospels are like other books I am right in treating them in the same manner as the Hellenist, the Arabian, the Hindoo treated the legendary documents which they studied. Criticism does not recognise infallible texts; its first principle is to admit that in the text which is examined there is the possibility of error. Far from being accused of scepticism, I ought to be classed with the moderate critics, since, instead of rejecting en bloc weak documents as so much trash, I essay to extract something historical out of them by means of delicate approximation.

And as no one asserts that to put the question in such a manner implies a petitio principii, seeing we take for granted à priori that which is proved in detail, to wit, that the miracles related by the Gospels have had no reality, that the Gospels are not books written under the inspiration of Divinity. Those two negations are not with us the result of exegesis; they are anterior to exegesis. They are the outcome of an experience which has not been denied. Miracles are things which never happen; only credulous people believe they have seen them; you cannot cite a single one which has taken place in presence of witnesses capable of testing it; no special intervention of the Divinity, whether in the composition of a book, or in any event whatever, has been proved. For this reason alone, when a person admits the supernatural, such a one is without the province of science; he accepts an explanation which is non-scientific, an explanation which is set aside by the astronomer, the physician, the chemist, the geologist, the physiologist, one which ought also to be passed over by the historian. We reject the supernatural for the same reason that we reject the existence of centaurs and hippogriffes; and this reason xiiis, that nobody has ever seen them. It is not because it has been previously demonstrated to me that the evangelists do not merit absolute credence that I reject the miracles which they recount. It is because they do recount miracles that I say, “The Gospels are legends; they may contain history, but, certainly, all that they set forth is not historical.”

It is hence impossible that the orthodox person and the rationalist who denies the supernatural can be of much assistance in such questions. In the eyes of theologians, the Gospels and the books of the Bible in general are books like no others, books more historic than the best histories, inasmuch as they contain no errors. To the rationalist, on the contrary, the Gospels are texts to which the ordinary rules of criticism ought to be applied; we are, in this respect, like the Arabs in presence of the Koran and the hadith, like the Hindoos in presence of the Vedas and the Buddhist books. Is it because the Arabs regard the Koran as infallible? Is it because we accuse them of falsifying history that they relate the origins of Islamism differently from the Mussulman theologians? Is it because the Hindoos hold the Lalitavistara to be a biography?

How are such opinions, in setting out from opposed principles, to be mutually reconciled? All rules of criticism assume that a document subjected to examination has but a relative value, that it may be in error, and that it may be improved by comparing it with a better document. The profane savant, persuaded that all books which have come down to us as legacies are the work of man, did not hesitate to do an injury to texts when the texts contradicted one another, when they set forth absurd or formal statements which had been refuted by witnesses of greater authority. Orthodoxy, on the contrary, positive in advancing that the sacred books do not contain an error or a contradiction, tolerates the most violent tactics, expedients the most desperate, in order to get out of difficulties. Orthodox exegesis is, in this way, a tissue of subtleties. An isolated subtlety may be true; but a thousand subtleties cannot at once be true. If there were in Tacitus or Polybius errors so pronounced as those committed by Luke àpropos of xiiiQuirinius and of Theudas, we should say that Tacitus and Polybius have been deceived. Reasonings which we would not admit if the question were one of Greek or Latin literature, hypotheses which a Boissonade, or even a Rollin, would never think of, are held to be plausible when the question is one of exculpating a sacred author.

Hence it is orthodoxy which is guilty of a petitio principii, when it reproaches rationalism with changing history, because the latter does not accept word for word the documents which orthodoxy holds to be sacred. Because a fact is written down, it does not thence follow that it is true. The miracles of Mahomet have been put into writing as well as those of Jesus; and certainly the Arab biographies of Mahomet, that of Ibn-Haschim, for example, has a much more historical character than the Gospels. Do we on this account admit the miracles of Mahomet? We follow Ibn-Haschim with more or less confidence when we have no reasons for doubting him. But when he relates to us things that are perfectly incredible we make no difficulty about abandoning him. Certainly, if we had four lives of Buddha, which were partly fabulous, and as irreconcilable amongst themselves as the four Gospels are to one another, and if a savant essayed to purge the four Buddhist narratives of their contradictions, we should not accuse that savant of falsifying the texts. It might well be that he attempted to unite discordant passages, that he sought a compromise, a sort of middle course, a narrative which should embrace nothing that was impossible, in which opposing testimony was balanced and misrepresented as little as possible. If, after that, the Buddhists believed in a lie, in the falsification of history, we would have a right to say to them: “The question here is not one of history, and if we must at times discard your texts it is the fault of those texts which contain things impossible of belief, and, moreover, which are contradictory.”

At the bottom of all discussion on such matters is the question of the supernatural. If the miracle and the inspiration of certain books are actual facts, our method is detestable. If the miracle and the inspiration of some books are beliefs without any reality, our method xivis the proper one. Now, the question of the supernatural is determined to us with absolute certainty, by this simple reason, that there is no room for belief in a thing of which the world can offer no experimental trace. We do not believe in a miracle, just as we do not believe in dreams, in the devil, in sorcery, or in astrology. Have we any need to refute step by step the long reasonings of astrology in order to deny that the stars influence human events? No. It is sufficient for this wholly negative, as well as demonstrable experience, that we give the best direct proof—such an influence has never been proved.

God forbid that we should be unmindful of the services that the theologians have rendered to science! The research and the constitution of the texts which serve as the basis of this history have been the work in many cases of orthodox theologians. The labour of criticism has been the work of liberal theologians. But there is one thing that a theologian can never be—I mean a historian. History is essentially disinterested. The historian has but one care, art and truth (two inseparable things; art guards the secret of the laws which are the most closely related to truth). The theologian has an interest — his dogma. Minimise that dogma as much as you will, it is still to the artist and the critic an insupportable burden. The orthodox theologian may be compared to a caged bird; every movement natural to it is intercepted. The liberal theologian is a bird, some of the feathers of whose wings have been clipped. He believes he is master of himself, and he in fact is until the moment he seeks to take his flight. Then it is seen that he is not completely the creature of the air. We proclaim it boldly; critical inquiries relative to the origin of Christianity will not have said their last word until they shall have cultivated, in a purely secular and profane spirit, the method of the Hellenists, the Arabs, the Hindoos, people strangers to all theology, who think neither of edifying, nor of scandalising, nor of defending, nor of overthrowing dogmas.

Day and night, if I might so speak, I have reflected on these questions, questions which ought to be agitated without any other prejudices than those which constitute the essence xvof reason itself. The most serious of all unquestionably is that of the historic value of the fourth Gospel. Those who have not disagreed on such problems give room for the belief that they have not comprehended the whole difficulty. We may range the opinions on this Gospel into four classes, of which the following is the abridged expression. First opinion: “The fourth Gospel was written by the Apostle John, the son of Zebedee. The statements contained in that Gospel are all true; the discourses which the author puts into the mouth of Jesus were actually held by Jesus.” This is the orthodox opinion. From the point of view of rational criticism, this is wholly untenable.

Second opinion: “The fourth Gospel is, in fact, by the Apostle John, although it may have been revised and retouched by his disciples. The facts recounted in that Gospel are direct traditions in regard to Jesus. The discourses are often from compositions expressing only the manner in which the author had conceived the mind of Jesus.” This is the opinion of Ewald, and in some respects that of Lücke, Weisse, and Reuss. This is the opinion that I adopted in the first edition of this work.

Third opinion: “The fourth Gospel is not the work of the Apostle John. It was attributed to him by some of his disciples about the year 100. The discourses are almost entirely fictitious; but the narrative parts contain valuable traditions, ascending in part to the Apostle John.” This is the opinion of Weizsaecker and of Michael Nicolas. It is the opinion which I now hold.

Fourth opinion: “The fourth Gospel is in no sense the work of the Apostle John. And whether, as regards the facts or the discourses which are reported in it, it is not a historic book; it is a work of the imagination and in part allegorical, concocted about the year 150, in which the author has proposed to himself, not to recount actually the life of Jesus, but to make believe in the idea that he himself had formed of Jesus.” Such is, with some variations, the opinion of Baur, Schwegler, Strauss, Zeller, Volkmar, Helgenfeld, Schenkel, Scholten, and Rénille.

I cannot quite ally myself to this radical party. I am convinced that the fourth Gospel has an actual connection xviwith the Apostle John, and that it was written about the end of the first century. I avow, however, that in certain passages of my first edition I inclined too much in the direction of authenticity. The probative force of some arguments upon which I insisted appear to me now of less importance. I no longer believe that Saint Justin may have put the fourth Gospel on the same footing as the synoptics amongst the “Memoires of the Apostles.” The existence of Presbyteros Joannes, a personage distinct from the Apostle John, appears to me now as very problematical. The opinion according to which John, the son of Zebedee, could have written the work, an hypothesis which I have never altogether admitted, but for which, at moments, I might have shown a certain weakness, is here discarded as improbable. Finally, I acknowledge that I was wrong in repudiating the hypothesis of a false writing, attributed to an apostle who lived in the apostolic age. The second epistle of Peter, the authenticity of which no person can reasonably sustain, is an example of a work, much less important no doubt than the fourth Gospel, counterfeited under such conditions. Moreover, this is not for the moment the capital question. The essential question is to know what use it is proper to make of the fourth Gospel when one essays to write the life of Jesus. I persist in believing that that Gospel possesses a fund of valuable information, equal to that of the synoptics, and even sometimes superior. The development of this point possesses so much importance that I have made it the basis of an appendix at the end of this volume. The portion of the introduction relating to the criticism of the fourth Gospel has been revised and completed.

In the body of the narrative several passages have also been modified in consequence of what has been just stated. All passages in a sentence which implied more or less that the fourth Gospel was by the Apostle John, or by an ocular witness of the evangelical facts, have been cut out. In order to trace the personal character of John, the son of Zebedee, I have thought of the rude Boanerge of Mark, of the terrible visionary of the Apocalypse, and not of the mystic, so full of tenderness, who has written the Gospel of xviilove. I insist, with less confidence, on certain little details which are furnished us by the fourth Gospel. The limited quotations I have made from the discourses of that Gospel have been still further restricted. I had allowed myself to follow too far the opinions of the alleged apostle in what concerned the promise of the Paraclete. In like manner I am not now so sure that the fourth Gospel is right in respect of its disagreement with the synoptics as to the day on which Jesus died. As to the time of the Lord's Supper, on the contrary, I persist in my opinion. The synoptic account which places the eucharistic institution on the last evening of Jesus appears to me to contain an improbability, equivalent to a quasi-miracle. It is hence, in my opinion, an adapted version, and founded upon a certain confusion of recollections.

The critical examination of the synoptics has not been modified throughout. It has been completed and determined on some points, notably in that which concerns Luke. As regards Lysanias, a study of the inscription of Zenodorus at Baalbeck, which I did for the Phœnician Mission, has led me to believe that the evangelist could not have made so grievous a mistake as the ingenious critics think. As regards Quirinius, on the contrary, the last memoir of M. Mommsen has settled the question against the third Gospel. Mark seems to me more and more the primitive type of the synoptic narrative and the most authoritative text.

The paragraph relative to the Apocrypha has been explained. The important texts published by M. Ceriani have been employed to advantage. I have great doubts in regard to the book of Enoch. I reject the opinion of Weisse, Volkmar, and Graetz, who believe that the whole book is posterior to Jesus. As to the most important portion of the book, which extends from chapter xxvii. to chapter lxxi., I dare not decide between the arguments of Helgenfeld and Colani, who regard this portion as posterior to Jesus; and the opinion of Hoffmann, Dillmann, Koestlin, Ewald, Lücke, and Weizsaecker, who hold it to be anterior. How much is it to be desired that the Greek text of that important writing could be found! xviiiI do not know why I persist in believing that this is not a vain hope. I have, in any case, stamped with doubt the inductions drawn from the aforenamed chapters. I have shown, on the contrary, the singular correspondences between the discourses of Jesus contained in the last chapters of the synoptic Gospels and the Apocalypses attributed to Enoch, relations in regard to which the discovery of the complete Greek text of the epistle attributed to Barnabas has cast much light, and which has been much enhanced by M. Weizsaecker. The certain results obtained by M. Volkmar in regard to the fourth book of Esdras, and which agree, in almost every particular, with those of M. Ewald, have been equally taken into consideration. Several new Talmudist citations have been introduced The portion accorded to Essenism has been enlarged.

The position I have taken in discarding the bibliography has frequently been wrongly interpreted. I believe I have loudly enough proclaimed that which I owe to the masters of German science in general, and to each of them in particular, so that such a silence might not be taxed with ingratitude. Bibliography is only useful when it is complete. Now the German genius has displayed such activity in the field of evangelical criticism that if I had cited all the works relative to the questions treated in this book I would have tripled the extent of the notes and changed the character of my narrative. One cannot accomplish everything at once. I have restricted myself, therefore, to the rule of only admitting citations at first hand. Their number has been greatly multiplied. Besides, for the convenience of French readers who are not conversant with these studies, I have continued the revision of the summary list of the writings, composed in our language, wherever I could find details which I may have omitted. Many of these works are far removed from my ideas; but all are of a nature to make the enlightened man reflect and to make him understand our discussions.

The thread of the narrative has been much changed. Certain expressions, too strong for communistic minds, which were of the essence of nascent Christianity, have been softened down. Among those holding personal relations xixwith Jesus I have admitted some whose names do not figure in the Gospels, but who are known to us through evidence worthy of credence. That which relates to the name of Peter has been modified. I have also adopted another hypothesis in regard to Levi, son of Alpheus, and his relations with the Apostle Matthew. As to Lazarus, I unhesitatingly adopt now the ingenious hypothesis of Strauss, Baur, Zeller, and Scholten, according to which the pious pauper of the parable of Luke and the person restored to life by Jesus are one and the same individual. It will nevertheless be seen how I retain some reality in associating him with Simon the Leper. I adopt likewise the hypothesis of M. Strauss in respect of divers discourses attributed to Jesus during his last days, which appear to be quotations from writings spread over the first century. The discussion of the texts as to the duration of the life of Jesus has been reduced to greater precision. The topography of Bethphage and Dalmanutha has been altered. The account of Golgotha has been reproduced from the works of M. Vogüé. A person well-versed in the history of botany has taught me to distinguish, in the orchards of Galilee, between trees which have grown there for eighteen hundred years and those which have only been transplanted there since then. Some facts have also been communicated to me in regard to the potion administered to the crucified, to which I have given a place. In general, in the account of the last hours of Jesus, I have toned down some phraseology which might have too historical an appearance. It is in such cases where the favourite explanations of M. Strauss find their best application, where symbolic and dogmatic designs let themselves be seen at each step.

I have said, and I repeat it, that if in writing the life of Jesus one confines oneself to advancing only details which are certain, it would be necessary to limit oneself to a few lines. He existed. He was from Nazareth in Galilee. There was a charm in his preaching, and he implanted in the minds of his disciples aphorisms which left a deep impression there. His two principal disciples were Peter and John, sons of Zebedee. He excited the hatred of the orthodox Jews, who brought him before Pontius Pilate, then xxprocurator of Judæa, to have him put to death. He was crucified without the gates of the city. It was believed that a short time after he was restored to life. This is what is known to us for certain, even though the Gospels had not existed or were falsehoods, through authentic texts and incontestable data, such as the evidently authentic epistles of St. Paul, the epistle to the Hebrews, the Apocalypse, and other texts believed in by all. Beyond that, it is permissible to doubt. What was his family? What in particular was his affinity to that James, “brother of the Lord,” who after his death plays an important part? Was he actually related to John the Baptist? and did the most celebrated of his disciples belong to the school of baptism before they belonged to his? What were his Messianic ideas? Did he regard himself as the Messiah? What were his apocalyptic ideas? Did he believe that he would appear as the Son of Man in the clouds? Did he imagine he could work miracles? Were the latter attributed to him during his life? Did his legend grow up round himself, and had he cognisance of it? What was his moral character? What were his ideas in regard to the admission of Gentiles into the Kingdom of God? Was he a pure Jew like James, or did he break with Judaism, as did the most enthusiastic party of the Church subsequently? What was the order of his mental development? Those who seek only the indubitable in history must keep silent upon these points. The Gospels, in respect of these questions, are not much to be relied on, seeing that they frequently furnish arguments for two opposing theses, and seeing that the character of Jesus is therein modified to suit the views of the authors. For my part I think that on such occasions it is allowable to make conjectures, provided that they are presented as such. The texts, not being historic, give no certitude, but they give something. It is not necessary to follow them with a blind confidence, it is not necessary to reject their testimony with unjust disdain. We must strive to divine what they conceal, without being absolutely certain of having found it.

It is singular that, in regard to almost all these points, it is the liberal school of theology which proposes the most sceptical solutions. The more sensible defenders of xxiChristianity have come to consider it as advantageous to leave a gap in the historical circumstances bearing upon the birth of Christianity. Miracles, Messianic prophecies, formerly the bases of the Christian apology, have become an embarrassment to it; people seek to discard them. If we would believe the partisans of this theology, amongst whom I could cite so many eminent critics and noble thinkers, Jesus never pretended to perform a miracle; he did not believe himself to be the Messiah; he had no idea of the apocalyptic discourses which have been imputed to him as touching the final catastrophe. That Papias, so excellent a traditionist, and so zealous a collector of the words of Jesus, was an enthusiastic millenarian; that Mark, the oldest and the most authoritative of the evangelical narrators, was almost exclusively preoccupied with miracles, matters little. The career of Jesus is in this way so belittled that we are many times at a loss to tell what he was. His being condemned to death has no more right to be embraced in such a hypothesis than the accident which has made of him the chief of an apocalyptic and a Messianic movement. Was it on account of his moral precepts or his discourses on the Mount that Jesus was crucified? Certainly not. These maxims had for a long time been the current coin of the synagogue. No one has ever been put to death for repeating them. When Jesus was put to death, it was for saying something more than that. A learned man, who has taken an active part in these discussions, wrote me lately: “As in former times it was necessary to prove at all hazards that Jesus was God, so in our own times the question that the Protestant theological school has to prove is that he was not only a mere man, but also that he always regarded himself as such. People persist in representing him as a man of good sense, as a practical man par excellance, and transform him into the image and according to the spirit of modem theology. I believe with you that this is not doing justice to historical truth, but is neglecting an essential side of it.”

This tendency has already been more than once logically produced in the bosom of Christianity. What did Marcion aim at? What did the Gnostics of the second century try xxiito do? Simply to discard the material circumstances of a biography, the human details of which shocked them. Baur and Strauss yielded to analogous philosophical necessities. The divine Æon which was developed by humanity has nothing to do with anecdotic incidents, with the particular life of an individual. Scholten and Schenkel held certainly to a historic and actual Jesus, but their historic Jesus is neither a Messiah, nor a prophet, nor a Jew. People do not know what he aimed at, nor comprehend either his life or his death. Their Jesus is an æon after his own manner, a being impalpable, intangible. Genuine history is not acquainted with any such beings. Genuine history must construct its edifice out of two kinds of materials, and, if I may so speak, out of two factors: the first, the general state of the human soul in a given age and in a given country; the second, the particular incidents which, uniting with general causes, determined the course of events. To explain history by accidental facts is as false as to explain it by principles which are purely philosophic. The two explanations ought mutually to sustain and complete each other. The history of Jesus and of the apostles must, above all histories, be constructed out of a vast mixture of ideas and sentiments; nor would that even be sufficient. A thousand conjectures, a thousand whims, a thousand trifles, are mixed up with ideas and sentiments. To trace at this time of day the exact details of these conjectures, whims, and trifles is impossible; what legend has taught us in regard to this may be true, but it may also not be true. In my opinion, the best course to hold is to follow as closely as possible the original narratives, to discard impossibilities, to sow everywhere the seeds of doubt, and to put forth as conjectural the diverse manners in which the event might have taken place. I am not quite sure that the conversion of St. Paul came about as we have it related in the Acts; but it took place in a manner not widely different from that, for St. Paul himself has informed us that he had a vision of the resurrected Jesus, which gave an entirely new direction to his life. I am not sure whether the narrative of the Acts as to the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost is quite historic; but the ideas which were spread abroad as to xxiiithe baptism of fire leads me to believe that a scene took place in the apostolic circle in which thunder played a part, as at Sinai. The visions of the resurrected Jesus were likewise occasionally the cause of the fortuitous circumstances interpreted by vivid and already preoccupied imaginations.

If liberal theologians repudiate explanations of this kind, it is because they do not wish to subject Christianity to the laws common to other religious movements; because also, perhaps, they are not sufficiently acquainted with the theory of spiritual life. There are no religious movements in which such deceptions do not play a great part. It may even be affirmed that they hold a permanent position in certain communities, such as the pietist Protestants, the Mormons, and the convent Catholics. In those little excited worlds it is not rare that conversions are the result of some accident, in which the anxious soul sees the finger of God. These accidents, which always contain something puerile, are concealed by the believers; it is a secret between heaven and them. A fortuitous event is nothing to a cold or indifferent soul; it is a divine symbol to a susceptible soul. To say that it was an accident which changed St. Paul and St. Ignatius Loyola through and through, or rather which gave a new turn to their activity, is certainly inexact. It was the interior movement of those strong natures which had prepared the clap of thunder; yet the thunderclap had been determined by an exterior cause. All these phenomena, moreover, had reference to a moral state which no longer belongs to us. In the majority of their actions they were governed by dreams which they had seen the preceding night, by inductions drawn from a fortuitous object which struck their first waking view, or by sounds which they believed they heard. It has happened that the wings of a bird, currents of air, or headaches, have determined the fate of the world. In order to be sincere and exhaustive it is necessary to say this; and when certain commonplace documents tell us of incidents of this kind we must take care to pass them over in silence. In history there are but few details which are certain; details, nevertheless, possess always some significance. The historian's xxivtalent consists in making a true narrative out of details which are of themselves but half true.

We can hence accord a place in history to particular incidents, without being on that account a rationalist of the old school or a disciple of Paulus. Paulus was a theologian who, wishing to have as little as possible to do with miracles, and not daring at the same time to treat the Bible narratives as legends, twisted them about so as to explain them in a wholly natural fashion. In this way Paulus desired to retain for the Bible all its authority and to enter into the real thoughts of the sacred authors. But I am a profane critic; I believe that no supernatural writing is true to the letter; I think that out of a hundred narratives of the supernatural there are eighty which have been pieced together by popular imagination. I admit, nevertheless, that in certain very rare cases legend has been derived from an actual fact and trans-formed in the imagination. As to the mass of supernatural data recounted by the Gospels and by the Acts, I shall attempt to show in five or six instances how the illusion may have been created. The theologian who is invariably methodical would have that a single explanation should hold good from one end of the Bible to the other. Criticism believes that every explanation should be attempted, or rather, that the possibility of each explanation should be successively demonstrated. That an explanation is repugnant to one's ideas is no reason for rejecting it. The world is at once an infernal and a divine comedy, a strange “round,” led by a choragus of genius, now good, now evil, now stupid; the good defile into the ranks which have been assigned to them, in view of the accomplishment of a mysterious end. History is not history if in reading it one is not by turns charmed and disgusted, grieved and consoled.

The first task of the historian is to make a careful sketch of the manner in which the events he recounts took place. Now, the history of religious beginnings transports us into a world of women and children, of brains ardent or foolish. These facts, placed before minds of a positive order, are absurd and unintelligible, and this is why countries such as England, of ponderous intellects, find it impossible to comprehend anything about it. That which is a drawback xxvto the arguments, formerly so celebrated, of Sherlock or of Gilbert West upon the resurrection, of Lyttelton upon the conversion of Saint Paul, is not the reasoning; that is a triumph of solidity; it is the just appreciation of the diversity of means. Every tentative religion with which we are acquainted exhibits unmistakably an enormous mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. Read these narratives of primitive Saint Simonism, written with admirable candour by the surviving adepts. By the side of repulsive rôles, insipid declamations, what charm! what sincerity, when the man or the woman of the people enters upon the scene, hearing the artless confession of a soul which is open to the first gentle ray which has struck it! There is more than one example of beautiful durable things which have been founded upon singular puerilities. It were useless to seek for any proportion between the conflagration and the spark which lighted it. The devotion of Salette is one of the grandest religious events of our age. These basilicas, so respectable, of Chartres and of Laon, were reared upon illusions of the same sort. The Fête-Dieu originated in the visions of a female religionist of Liège who believed that in her prayers she always saw the full moon through a small hole. We could instance movements, absolutely sincere, which have been brought about by impostors. The discovery of the holy lance at Athens, in which the fraud was so patent, decided the fortune of the Crusades. Mormonism, the beginnings of which are so shameful, has inspired courage and devotion. The religion of the Druzes rests upon a tissue of absurdities which stagger the imagination, but it has its devotees. Islamism, which is the second great event in the history of the world, would not have existed if the son of Amina had not been an epileptic. The gentle and immaculate Francis d'Assisi would not have succeeded without Brother Elia. Humanity is so feeble of mind that the purest thing has need of the co-operation of some impure agent.

Let us guard against applying our conscientious distinctions, our reasonings of cool and clear heads, to the appreciation of these extraordinary events, which are at once so much beyond and beneath us. There are those who would xxvimake Jesus a sage, a philosopher, a patriot, a good man, a moralist, or a saint. He was neither or any of these. He was a charmer. Let us not make the past our idol. Let us not believe that Asia is Europe. With us, for example, the fool is a creature outside the rules of society; we torture him so as to make him re-enter it; the horrible treatment of fools by ancient houses was the result of scholastic and Cartesian logic. In the East, the fool is a privileged being; he enters the highest councils without any one daring to stop him; people listen to him, he is consulted. He is a being believed to be in close proximity to God, inasmuch as, his individual reason being extinguished, he is believed to be a partaker in the divine reason. The wit which, through delicate raillery, rises above all defects of reason, exists only in Asia. A person educated in Islamism told me that, repairs having become necessary at the tomb of Mahomet, people at Medina for several years made an appeal to the masons, and announced that he who should descend into that dreadful place should have his head cut off on reascending. “It was necessary,” said my interlocutor to me, “to picture those places to oneself in a certain manner, and it was not for any person to say that they were otherwise.”

Troubled consciences cannot have the clearness of good sense. Now, it is only troubled consciences which can lay powerful foundations. I have tried to draw a picture in which the colours should be disposed as they are in nature, that is to say, at once grand and puerile, in which one sees the divine instinct threading its way with safety through a thousand peculiarities. If the picture had been without shade, this would have been the proof that it was false. The condition of the written proofs does not permit of us telling in what instances the illusion was consistent with itself. All that we can say is, that sometimes it has happened thus. One cannot lead for years the life of a thaumaturgist without being often cornered—without having one's hand forced by the public. The man who has a legend attaching to his life is led tyrannically by his legend. One begins by artlessness, credulity, absolute innocence; one ends in all sorts of embarrassments, and, in order to xxviisustain the divine power which is at fault, one gets out of these embarrassments through the most desperate expedients. When one is put to the wall must one leave the work of God to perish, because God is slow of coming to the relief? Did not Joan of Arc more than once make her voice heard in response to the necessities of the moment? If the account of the secret revelation which she made to King Charles VII. has any reality, a supposition which it is difficult to deny, it must have been that that innocent girl had represented that she had received through supernatural intuition that which she had heard in confidence. An exposé of religious history which does not some day disclose indirectly suppositions of this sort is for the same reason argued to be incomplete.

Every true, or probable, or possible circumstance most then have its proper place in my narration, together with its shade of probability. In such a history it will be necessary to speak not only of that which has taken place, but also of that which had a likelihood of taking place. The impartiality with which I have treated my subject has interdicted me from not accepting a conjecture, even one that shocks; for undoubtedly there were many shocking ones in the fashion of the things which are past and gone. I have applied from beginning to end the same process in an inflexible manner. I have given the good impressions which the texts have suggested to me; I could not, therefore, be silent as to the bad. I intend that my book shall retain its value even in the day when people shall have reached the point of regarding a certain amount of fraud as an element inseparable from religious history. It will be necessary to make my hero beautiful and charming (for undoubtedly he was so), and that, too, in spite of actions which, in our days, might be characterised in an unfavourable manner. People have praised me for having tried to construct a narrative lovely, human, and possible. Would my work have received these eulogiums if it had represented the origin of Christianity as absolutely immaculate? That would have been to admit the greatest of miracles. The result thence would have been a picture lifeless to the last degree. I do not say that this is for want of faults I may have made in the composition. xxviiiNevertheless, I must leave each text to produce its melodious or discordant note. If Goethe had been alive he would, with this reserve, have commended me. That great man would not have forgiven me for producing a portrait wholly celestial: he would have desired to find repellent details; for, assuredly, in actual life things happen which would wound us, if only it were given to us to see them.

The same difficulty presents itself, moreover, in the history of the apostles. This history is admirable in its way. But what can be more shocking than the glossolaly, which is attested by the unexceptionable texts of St. Paul? Liberal theologians admit that the disappearance of the body of Jesus was one of the grounds for the belief in the resurrection. What does that signify, unless the Christian conscience at that moment was two-sided, that a moiety of that conscience gave birth to the illusion of the other moiety? If the disciples themselves had taken away the body and spread themselves over the city crying, “He is risen!” the imposture would have been discovered. But there can be no doubt that it was not they themselves who did the two things. For belief in a miracle to be accepted it is indeed necessary that someone be responsible for the first rumour which is spread abroad; but, ordinarily, this is not the principal author. The rôle of the latter is limited to not exclaiming against the reputation which people have given him. Moreover, even if he did exclaim, it would be useless; popular opinion would prove stronger than he. In the miracle of Salette, people possessed a clear idea of the artifice; but the conviction that it would do good to religion carried all before it. The fraud was divided between several unconscionable persons, or rather it had ceased to be a fraud and became a misapprehension. Nobody, in that case, deceives deliberately; everybody deceives innocently. Formerly it was taken for granted that every legend implied deceivers and deceived; in our opinion, all the collaborators of a legend are at once deceived and deceivers. A miracle, in other words, presupposes three conditions: first, general credulity; second, a little complaisance on the part of some; third, tacit acquiescence in the principal author. Through a reaction against the brutal xxixexplanations of the eighteenth century, we did not fall into the trap of hypotheses which implied effects without causes. Legend does not wholly create itself: people assist in giving it birth. These points d'appui in a legend are often of a rare elasticity. It is the popular imagination which makes the ball of snow; there, nevertheless, must have been an original nucleus. The two persons who composed the two genealogies of Jesus knew quite well that the lists were not of any great authenticity. The apocryphal books, the alleged apocalypses of Daniel, Enoch, and Esdras, proceeded from persons of strong convictions; but the authors of these works knew well they were neither Daniel, Enoch, nor Esdras. The priest of Asia who composed the romance of Thekla declared that he had done it out of love for Paul. It is incumbent that we should say a great deal about the author of the fourth Gospel, who was assuredly a personage of the first order. If you chase the illusion of religious history out of one door, it will re-enter by another. In fine, it would be difficult to cite a great event of the past, whatever it might be, in an entirely defensible manner. Shall we cease to be Frenchmen because France has been founded by centuries of perfidy? Shall we refuse to profit by the benefits of the Revolution because the Revolution committed crimes without number? If the house of Capet had succeeded in creating for us a good constitutional assize, similar to that of England, would we have wrangled over the cure of the king's evil?

Science alone is pure; for science possesses nothing practical; it does not touch men; the Propaganda takes no notice of it; its duty is to prove, not to persuade or to convert. He who has discovered a theorem publishes its demonstration for those who are capable of comprehending it. He does not mount a chariot; he does not gesticulate; he does not have recourse to oratorical artifices in order to induce people to adopt it who do not perceive its truth. Enthusiasm, certainly, has its good faith, but it is an ingenuous good faith; it is not the deep reflective good faith of the savant. Only the ignorant yield to bad reasonings. If Laplace had been able to gain the multitude over to his system of the world, he would not have limited xxxhimself to mathematical demonstrations. M. Littré, in writing the life of a man whom he regarded as his master, pressed sincerity to the point of leaving nothing unsaid that would render that man more amiable. That is without example in religious history. Science alone seeks after pure truth. She alone offers good reasons for truth, and brings a severe criticism into the employment of the methods of conviction. This is no doubt the reason why, up till now, she has had no influence on the people. It may be that in the future, when people are better instructed, even as we have been led to hope, they will yield only to good and carefully deduced proofs. But it would not be equitable to judge the great men of the past according to these principles. There are natures who resign themselves to impotence, who accept humanity, with all its weaknesses, such as it is. Many great things have not been accomplished without lies and without violence. If to-morrow the incarnate ideal were to come and offer itself to men in order to govern them, it would find itself confronted by the foolish, who wish to be deceived; by the wicked, who wish to be subdued. The sole irreproachable person is the contemplative man, who only aims at finding the truth, without either caring about making it a triumph or of applying it.

Morality is not history. To paint and to record is not to approve. The naturalist who describes the transformations of the chrysalis neither blames nor praises it. He does not tax it with ingratitude because it abandons its shroud; he does not describe it as bold because it has found its wings: he does not accuse it of folly because it aspires to plunge into space. One may be the passionate friend of the true and the beautiful, and show oneself indulgent at the same time to the simple ignorance of the people. Our happiness has cost our fathers torrents of tears and deluges of blood. In order that pious souls may taste at the foot of the altar the inward consolation which gives them life, it has taken centuries of severe constraint, the mysteries of a sacerdotal polity, a rod of iron, funereal piles. The success which one owes to a wholly great institution does not demand the sacrifice of the sincerity xxxiof history. Formerly, to be a good Frenchman, it was necessary to believe in the dove of Clovis, in the national antiquities of the Treasure of Saint Denis, in the virtues of the oriflamme, in the supernatural vision of Joan of Arc; it was necessary to believe that France was the first of nations, that French royalty was superior to all other royalties, that God had for that crown a predilection altogether peculiar and was constantly engaged in protecting it. To-day we know that God protects equally all kingdoms, all empires, all republics; we own that many of the kings of France have been contemptible men; we recognise that the French character has its faults; we greatly admire a multitude of things which come from abroad. Are we on that account worse Frenchmen? We can say, on the contrary, that we are better patriots, since, in place of being blind to our faults, we seek to correct them; that, in place of depreciating the foreigner, we seek to imitate that which he has in him of good. In like manner we are Christians. He who speaks with irreverence of the royalty of the Middle Ages, of Louis XIV., of the Revolution, of the Empire, commits an act of bad taste. He who does not speak kindly of Christianity and of the Church of which he forms a part renders himself guilty of ingratitude. But filial recognition ought not to be carried to the length of closing our eyes to the truth. One is not wanting in respect to the government in making the remark that it is not able to satisfy the conflicting needs that are in man, nor to a religion in saying that she is not free from the formidable objections which science has raised against all supernatural belief. Responding to certain social exigencies and not to some others, governments fall by reason of the same causes which have founded them and which have been their strength. Responding to the aspirations of the heart at the expense of the protestations of reason, religions crumble away in turn, because no force here below can succeed in stifling reason.

That day will be unfortunate for reason when she would stifle religion. Our planet, believe me, labours at some profound work. Do not pronounce rashly upon the inutility of such and such of its parts; do not say that it is xxxiinecessary to suppress this wheel-work, which to appearance makes but the contrary play of the others. Nature, which has endowed the animal with an infallible instinct, has not put into humanity anything deceptive. From his organs you may boldly conclude his destiny. Est Deus in nobis. Religions are false when they attempt to prove the infinite, to determine it, to incarnate it, if I may so speak, but they are true when they affirm it. The greatest errors that they import into that affirmation are nothing compared to the price of the truth which they proclaim. The greatest simpleton, provided he practises the worship of the heart, is more enlightened as to the reality of things than the materialist who thinks he explains everything by accident, and leaves it there.