CHAPTER XV.

COMMENCEMENT OF THE LEGEND OF JESUS—HIS OWN IDEA OF HIS SUPERNATURAL CHARACTER.

Jesus, having completely lost his Jewish faith, and being filled with revolutionary ardour, returned to Galilee. His ideas are now expressed with perfect clearness. The simple aphorisms of the first part of his prophetic career, borrowed in part from the Jewish rabbis anterior to him, and the beautiful moral teachings of his second period, are discarded for a decided policy. The Law must be abolished; and it is to be abolished by him. The Messiah has come, and he it is who is the Messiah. The kingdom of God is soon to be revealed; and it is he who will reveal it. He knows well that he will suffer for his boldness; but the kingdom of God cannot be conquered without violence; it is by crises and commotions that it is to be established. The Son of man after his death will return in glory, accompanied by legions of angels, and those who have rejected him will be confounded.

The boldness of such a conception ought not to surprise us. Long before this Jesus regarded his relation to God as that of a son to his father. That which in others would be insupportable pride ought not in him to be treated as presumption.

The title of “Son of David” was the first that he accepted, probably without his being implicated in the innocent frauds by which it was sought to secure it to him. The family of David had, as it appears, been long extinct; nor did the Asmoneans, who were of priestly origin, nor Herod, nor the Romans dream for a moment that any representative 138whatever of the ancient dynasty existed in their midst. But from the close of the Asmonean dynasty the dream of an unknown descendant of the ancient kings, who should avenge the nation of its enemies, worked in every brain. The universal belief was that the Messiah would be son of David, and, like him, would be born at Bethlehem. The first thought of Jesus was not this exactly. The remembrance of David, which was uppermost in the minds of the majority of the Jews, had nothing in common with his heavenly reign. He believed himself the Son of God, and not the son of David. His kingdom, and the deliverance which he meditated, were of quite another order. But opinion on this point made him do himself a sort of violence. The immediate consequence of the proposition, “Jesus is the Messiah,” was this other proposition, “Jesus is the son of David.” He allowed a title to be given him without which he could not hope for success. And in the end he appears to have taken pleasure in it, inasmuch as he performed most willingly the miracles which were asked of him by those who used this title in addressing him. In this, as in many other circumstances of his life, Jesus yielded to the notions which were current in his time, although they were not precisely his own. He associated with his doctrine of the “kingdom of God” all that could stimulate the heart and the imagination. Hence it is that we have seen him adopt the baptism of John, although it could not be of much importance to him.

One great difficulty presented itself, to wit, his birth at Nazareth, which was of public notoriety. We do not know whether Jesus endeavoured to remove this objection. Perhaps it did not present itself in Galilee, where the idea that the son of David should be a Bethlehemite was less spread. To the Galilean idealist, moreover, the title of “son 139of David” was sufficiently justified, if he to whom it was given should retrieve the glory of his race, and bring back the great days of Israel. Did Jesus, by his silence, assent to the fictitious genealogies which his partisans invented in order to prove his royal descent? Did he know anything of the legends invented to prove that he was born at Bethlehem; and particularly of the attempt to connect his Bethlehemite origin with the census which had taken place by order of Quirinius, the imperial legate. We cannot tell. The inexactitude and the contradictions of the genealogies lead to the belief that they were the result of popular notions operating at various points, and that none of them was sanctioned by Jesus. Never with his own lips does he designate himself son of David. His disciples, much less enlightened than he, some-times magnified what he said of himself; but very often he knew nothing of these exaggerations. And we must add that, during the first three centuries, considerable portions of Christendom obstinately denied the royal descent of Jesus and the authenticity of the genealogies.

The legend about him was thus the result of a great and entirely spontaneous conspiracy, and began to surround him during his lifetime. There has been no great event in history which has not given rise to a series of fables; and Jesus could not, even had he wished, put a stop to these popular creations. Doubtless a sagacious observer would have detected in them the germ of the narratives which were to ascribe to him a supernatural birth, either by reason of the idea, very prevalent in ancient times, that the incomparable man could not be born of the ordinary relations of the two sexes; or for the purpose of fulfilling the requirements of an imperfectly understood chapter of Isaiah, which was believed to foretell that the 140Messiah should be born of a virgin; or, lastly, as the result of a belief that the “breath of God,” already regarded as a divine hypostasis, was a principle of fecundity. There was by this time, no doubt, more than one current anecdote regarding his infancy, conceived for the purpose of showing in his biography the accomplishment of the Messianic ideal, or rather the prophetic, that the allegorical exigences of the times reputed to the Messiah. A generally admitted idea was that the Messiah should be announced by a star, that messengers from far countries should come soon after his birth to render him homage, and to bring presents to him. It was alleged that the oracle was accomplished through the pretended Chaldean astrologers who should arrive about that time at Jerusalem. At other times he was connected from his birth with celebrated men, such as John the Baptist, Herod the Great, and two aged persons, Simeon and Anna, who had left memories of great sanctity. A rather loose chronology characterised these combinations, which for the most part were founded on a travesty of real facts. But a singular spirit of gentleness and goodness, an intensely popular sentiment, permeated all these fables, and made them a supplement to his preaching. It was especially after the death of Jesus that such narratives received their development. We can, however, believe that they were circulated during his life even, exciting no more than pious credulity and simple admiration.

That Jesus never dreamt of passing himself for an incarnation of the true God, there can be no doubt. Such an idea was quite foreign to the Jewish mind; and there is no trace of it in the three first gospels; we only find it alluded to in portions of the fourth, which cannot be accepted as reflecting the thoughts of Jesus. Sometimes Jesus 141even seems to take precautions to repress such a doctrine. The accusation that he made himself God, or the equal of God, is presented, even in the fourth Gospel, as a calumny of the Jews. In the latter Gospel he declares himself less than his Father. Elsewhere he avows that the Father has not revealed everything to him. He believes himself to be more than an ordinary man, but separated from God by an infinite distance. He is Son of God, but all men are or may become so, in divers degrees. Every one each day ought to call God his father; all who are raised again will be sons of God. The divine son-ship was attributed in the Old Testament to beings who, it was by no means pretended, were equal with God. The word “son” has in the Semitic tongues and in the New Testament the widest meaning. Besides, the idea Jesus had of man was not that low idea which a cold Deism has introduced. In his poetic conception of nature, one breath alone pervades the universe: the breath of man is that of God; God dwells in man, and lives by man, the same as man dwells in God, and lives by God. The transcendent idealism of Jesus never permitted him to have a very clear notion of his own personality. He is his Father, his Father is he. He lives in his disciples; he is everywhere with them; his disciples are one, as he and his Father are one. The idea to him is everything; the body, which makes the distinction of individuals, is nothing.

The title “Son of God,” or simply “Son,” became thus for Jesus a title analogous to “Son of man,” with the sole difference that he called himself “Son of man,” and does not seem to have made the same use of the phrase, “Son of God.” The title, Son of man, expressed his character as judge; that of Son of God, participation in the supreme designs and his power. This power had no limits. His Father had given him all power. He had the right to alter even the Sabbath. No one could know the Father but through him. The Father had delegated to him the right to judge. Nature obeyed him: but she obeys also all who believe and pray, for faith can do everything.

We must bear in mind that no idea of the laws of nature marked, either in his own mind or in that of his hearers, the limit of the impossible. The witnesses of his miracles thanked God “for having given such power unto men.” He pardoned sins; he is superior to David, to Abraham, to Solomon, to the prophets. We do not know in what form, nor to what extent, these affirmations of himself were made. Jesus ought not to be judged by the rule governing our petty conventionalities. The admiration of his disciples overwhelmed and carried him away. It is evident that the title of Rabbi, with which he was at first contented, no longer satisfied him; the title even of prophet or messenger of God responded no longer to his ideas. The position which he assigned himself was that of a superhuman being, and he wished to be regarded as having a higher relationship with God than other men. But it must be observed that these words, “superhuman” and “supernatural,” borrowed from our pitiful theology, had no meaning in the exalted religious consciousness of Jesus. To him nature and the development of humanity were not limited kingdoms outside of God—paltry realities subject to the laws of a desperate rigorism. There was no supernatural for him, for the reason that there was no nature. Intoxicated with infinite love, he forgot the heavy chain which holds the spirit captive; he cleared at one bound the abyss, impossible to most, which the weakness of the human faculties has formed between God and man.

We cannot mistake in these affirmations of Jesus the germ of the doctrine which was, later on, to make of him a divine hypostasis, in identifying him with the Word, or “second God,” or eldest Son of God, or Angel Metathronas, which Jewish theology created apart from him. A sort of necessity produced this theology, in order to correct the extreme rigour of the old Monotheism, to place 143near God a vicegerent, to whom the eternal Father is supposed to delegate the government of the universe. The belief that certain men are incarnations of divine faculties or “powers” was wide-spread; the Samaritans possessed about the same time a thaumaturgus, which they identified with the “great power of God.” For nearly two centuries, the speculative minds of Judaism had yielded to the tendency of personifying the divine attributes, and certain expressions which were connected with the Divinity. Thus, the “breath of God,” which is often referred to in the Old Testament, is considered as a separate being, the “Holy Spirit” In like manner, the “Wisdom of God” and the “Word of God” became distinct existing entities. This was the germ of the process which has engendered the Sephiroth of the Cabbala, the Æons of Gnosticism, the hypostasis of Christianity, and all that dry mythology, consisting of personified abstractions, to which Monotheism is obliged to resort when it wishes to pluralise the Deity.

Jesus appears to have remained a stranger to these hair-splittings of theology, which were soon to fill the world with barren disputes. The meta-physical theory of the Word, such as we find it in the writings of his contemporary Philo, in the Chaldæan Targums, and even in the book of “Wisdom,” is neither seen in the Logia of Matthew, nor in general in the synoptics, the most authentic interpreters of the words of Jesus. The doctrine of the Word, in fact, had nothing in common with Messianism. The “Word” of Philo, and of the Targums, is in no sense the Messiah. It was later that Jesus came to be identified with the Word, and when, in starting from that principle, there was created quite a new theology, very different from that of the “kingdom of God.” The essential character of the Word was that of Creator and of Providence. Now, 144Jesus never pretended to have created the world, nor to govern it. His office was to judge it, to renovate it. The position of president at the final assizes of humanity, was the function which Jesus attached to himself, and the office which all the first Christians attributed to him. Until the great day he sits at the right hand of God, as His Metathronos, His first minister, and His future avenger. The superhuman Christ of the Byzantine absides, seated as judge of the world, in the midst of the apostles in the same rank with him, and superior to the angels who only assist and serve, is the identical representation of that conception of the “Son of man” of which we find the first features so strongly indicated in the book of Daniel.

In any case, the rigour of scholastic rejection had no place in such a world. All the collection of ideas we have just stated formed in the mind of the disciples a theological system so little settled that the Son of God, this kind of duplication of the Divinity, is made to act purely as man. He is tempted—he is ignorant of many things—he corrects himself—he changes his opinion—he is cast down, discouraged—he asks his Father to spare him trials—he is submissive to God as a son. He who must judge the world does not know the date of the day of judgment. He takes precautions for his safety. Immediately after his birth he has to be concealed to escape from powerful men who wish to kill him. All this is simply the work of a messenger of God—of a man protected and favoured by God. We must not ask here for logic or sequence. The need Jesus had of obtaining credence, and the enthusiasm of his disciples, piled up contradictory notions. To those who believed in the coming of the Messiah, and to the enthusiastic readers of the books of Daniel and of Enoch, he was the Son of man; to the Jews holding the 145common faith, and to the readers of Isaiah and Micah, he was the Son of David; to the disciples he was the Son of God, or simply the Son. Others, without being blamed by the disciples, took him for John the Baptist risen from the dead, for Elias, for Jeremiah, conformable to the popular belief that the ancient prophets were about to reappear, in order to prepare the way of the Messiah.

An absolute conviction, or rather the enthusiasm which freed him from the possibility of doubt, shrouded all this boldness. We, with our cold and scrupulous natures, little understand how any one can be so entirely possessed by the idea of which he has made himself the apostle. To us, the deeply earnest races, conviction signifies to be sincere with one's self. But sincerity to one's self has not much meaning to Oriental peoples, little accustomed to the subtleties of the critical spirit. Honesty and imposture are words which, in our rigid consciences, are opposed as two irreconcilable terms. In the East they are connected by a thousand subtle links and windings. The authors of the Apocryphal books (of “Daniel” and of “Enoch” for instance), men highly exalted, in order to aid their cause, committed, without a shadow of scruple, an act which we should term a fraud. The literal truth has little value to the Oriental; he sees everything through the medium of his ideas, his interests, and his passions.

History is impossible if we do not fully admit that there are many standards of sincerity. Faith knows no other law than the interest in that which it believes to be true. The aim which it pursues being for it, absolutely holy, it makes no scruple about introducing bad arguments into a thesis where good ones do not succeed. If such a proof is not sound, how many others are? If such a prodigy is not real, how many others have been so? How 146many pious men, convinced of the truth of their religion, have sought to conquer the obstinacy of other men, by the use of means the weakness of which they could clearly apprehend? How many stigmatics, fanatics, and occupants of convents have been carried away by the influence of the world in which they lived, and by their individual beliefs in feigned acts, either for the purpose of not being considered as beneath others, or to sustain the cause when in danger! All great things are done through the people; now we can only lead the people by adapting ourselves to their ideas. The philosopher who, knowing this, isolates and intrenches himself in his nobleness, is highly praiseworthy. But he who takes humanity with its illusions, and seeks to act with it and upon it, cannot be blamed. Cæsar knew well that he was not the son of Venus; France would not be what it is if it had not for a thousand years believed in the Holy Ampulla of Rheims. It is, of course, easy for us, who are so powerless, to call this falsehood, and, proud of our feeble honesty, to treat with contempt the heroes who have accepted the battle of life under other conditions. When we have effected by our scruples what they accomplished by their falsehoods, we shall have the right to be severe upon them. At least, we must make a marked distinction between societies like our own, where everything takes place in the full light of reflection, and simple and credulous societies, in which the beliefs that have governed ages have been born. Nothing great has been established which does not rest on a legend. The only culprit in such cases is the humanity which is willing to be deceived.