Scaurus continued, “I pass over a good many columns in Mark before I come to anything of the nature of a precept. Then I find the following, ‘There is nothing outside the man, entering into him, that can defile him.’ Now you might suppose that this would have been good news, addressed as it is, to the needy multitude. For it would have enabled them (you may say) to eat pork like their Greek neighbours and would have saved them trouble and expense in preparing food.
“But look at the context. Jesus is upholding the written law of Moses against the teachers of unwritten traditions. These teachers told people that if a particle of this or that came off their hands into their mouths while they were eating, they were defiled. These traditions also prescribed minute regulations about preparing meat, and about avoiding meat sold in the markets of Greek cities. Look at Paul’s Corinthian letters about this. These regulations must have been very inconvenient for the poor Jews in the Greek cities of Galilee. Jesus stood up for the poor, and for the written law, which said nothing about such details. Long after the crucifixion, Peter was told by ‘the Lord’ in a vision (you will find it in the Acts) that he might eat anything he liked, pork included. But Jesus said nothing of the kind before his death. Turn to the Acts and you will find it as I have said.”
I turned, and found, as usual, that Scaurus was right, though there was no special mention of pork in the Acts, but only of “beasts and creeping things,” which Peter calls“unclean.” Scaurus continued, “Now look carefully at what follows in Mark and Matthew. Mark represents the disciples—but Matthew represents Peter—as questioning Christ privately about this startling saying. The questioners are said to have called it a ‘parable.’ There was no ‘parable’ about it at all. But the fact was that,after the resurrection, it was revealed to Peter, or to the disciples, that the meaning of the saying ‘Nothing outside defileth’ went far beyond its original scope; so that it swept away the whole of the Levitical ordinances about things ‘unclean.’ If you examine Mark’s words carefully you will see that he inserts a comment of his own (which Matthew omits) namely that Jesusuttered these words‘purifying all kinds of food.’ If by ‘purifying,’ Mark meant ‘purifyingin effect,’ or ‘purifying,as the disciples subsequently understood,’ then he was right. If he meant ‘purifyingat once,’ or ‘purifyingin such a way as to abrogate immediately the Levitical prohibitions,’ then he was wrong; for that was not the meaning.
“What indeed do you suppose would have happened, if Jesus and his disciples had sat down to a dinner of pork on that same day? They would have been stoned by the multitude. The meaning was limited as I have said above. Mark has probably mixed together what occurred before, and what occurred after, the crucifixion. It was very natural. How many of the ‘dark sayings’ or ‘parables’ of Jesus might remain ‘dark’ to the disciples, till they reflected on them after his death! Moreover the evangelists believed that Jesus, after his death, rose again and appeared on several occasions to the disciples, apart from the rest of the world—that is, ‘in private’—and that he explained to them after death what had been dark sayings during his life. How inevitable for biographers—writing thirty, forty, or fifty years after the events they narrated—sometimes to confuse explanations, or other words of Christ, uttered ‘in private’ after death, with those uttered before death, whether in private or not! I shall have to mention other instances of such confusion. It is not surprising that Luke omits the narrative.”
I could not deny the force of this. But, though it derogatedfrom Mark as a witness, it did not seem to me to derogate from Christ as a prophet. I felt that no wise teacher could have desired, thus by a side-blow, to sweep away the whole of the national code of purifications. So I was ready to accept Scaurus’s view, at all events provisionally.
“I pass over,” said Scaurus, “the precept, ‘Beware of leaven,’ which was certainly metaphorical; and two narratives of feeding multitudes with ‘loaves,’ which in my opinion are metaphorical; and a mention of ‘crumbs,’ which my reason leads me to interpret in one way, while my desire suggests another. About this I shall say something later on, as also about predictions of being killed and rising again. Now I reach these words, ‘If anyone wishes to come after me, let him disown himself, andtake up his cross and follow me. For whosoever desires to save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for the sake of me and the gospel shall save it.’ Note that these words are preceded by a prediction that the Son of man must be ‘killed.’ Also remember that the ‘cross’ is a punishment sanctioned by Roman but not by Jewish law. Bearing these facts in mind, imagine yourself in the crowd, and tell me what you would think Christ meant, if he turned round to you and said, ‘You must take up your cross.’ Do not read on to see what I think; for I doubt whether Christ used these words. But, if he did use them, tell me what you think he meant by them.”
I was taken aback by this. For I perceived that the sense required a metaphorical rendering, and, at the same time, that such a metaphor was almost impossible among any Jews,before Christ’s crucifixion. At first I tried to justify it from Paul’s epistles, which declared that, in Christ’s death, “all died”—meaning that all, by sympathy, died to sin and rose again to righteousness. Paul said also “I have been crucified with Christ,” and “our old man”—meaning “our old human nature”—“has been crucified with Him,” and “the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.” But these expressions were all based on the Christian belief that the “cross” was the way to “resurrection.” They were quite intelligible after the resurrection, but not before it.
Then I tried to imagine myself in the circle of disciplessurrounding Socrates in prison, and the Master, with the bowl of poison in his hands, preparing to drink it, and looking up to us and saying, “If you intend to be disciples worthy of me, you too must be prepared to take up the hemlock bowl.” What, I asked, should I have understood by this? It seemed to me that the words could only mean “You, too, must be prepared to be put to death by your countrymen.”
Now as the hemlock bowl was the regular penalty among the Athenians, so the cross (as Scaurus had said) was the regular penalty among the Romansbut not among the Jews. So, when I tried honestly to respond to Scaurus’s appeal, and to imagine myself in the crowd following Jesus, and the Master turning round to us, and saying, “Take up your cross,” I was obliged to admit, “I should have taken the Master to mean, ‘If you are to be worthy followers of mine, you must be preparedto be put to death as rebels by the Romans’.”
Scaurus took the same view. “Well,” he continued, “I will anticipate your answer, for it seems to me you can only come to one conclusion. You, in the crowd, would take the words to mean that you must follow your Master to the death against the Romans. But all intelligent readers of the Christian books ought to know that he could not have said that. He was a visionary, and utterly averse to violence, so averse that he was on one occasion reproached for his inaction by John the Baptist—who once said to him, in effect, ‘Why do you leave me in prison? Why do you not stir a hand to release me?’ Moreover, if Jesus had said this, what would the chief priests have needed more than this, to get Pilate to put him to death: ‘This man said to the rabble, If you are intending to follow me, you must go with the cross on your shoulders’? ‘Can you prove this?’ would have been Pilate’s reply. They would have proved it. Then sentence would have followed at once as a matter of course. And who can deny that it would have been just?”
I certainly could not deny it. Then Scaurus pointed out to me how Luke avoided this dangerous interpretation, by inserting “daily,” so as to give the words a metaphorical twist, “Let him take up his crossdaily.” But this, he said, was manifestly an addition of Luke’s. If Jesus had inserted “daily”why should Mark and Matthew have omitted it? “Daily” would make no sense till a generation had passed away, so that “to be crucified with Christ” had become a metaphorical expression for mortifying the flesh. On this point, at all events, Scaurus seemed to me to be right.
He continued as follows, “I am disposed to think that Mark has misunderstood a Jewish phrase as referring to the cross when it really referred to something else. You know that, in Rome, a rascally slave, regarded as being on the way to crucifixion, is called ‘yoke-bearer,’ which means practically ‘cross-bearer.’ Mark, who has a good many Latinisms, might regard‘take the yoke’ as meaning ‘take the cross’—if the former expression could be proved to have been used by Jesus. Still more easily might ‘take the yoke’ be regarded as equivalent to ‘take the cross’if it could be proved that the Jews themselves connected ‘taking the yoke’ with martyrdom.
“Both these facts can be proved. In the first place, Christ actually said to the disciples, ‘Take my yokeupon you.’ It is true that this saying is preserved by Matthew alone; but its omission by others is easily explained, as I will presently shew. In my judgment, it is certain that Christ did give this precept, and that it had nothing to do with crucifixion. The context in Matthew declares that the kingdom of heaven is revealed only to ‘babes’—whom Christ elsewhere calls ‘little ones’ or those who make themselves ‘least’ in the kingdom of God—and soon afterwards come the words, ‘Take my yoke upon youand learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.’ This is the fundamental truth of Christ’s teaching, that those who make themselves the humblest of servants to one another are greatest in his ‘kingdom.’ In order to reign, one must serve, or ‘take the yoke.’
“The next fact is that Jews of the present day—so I am credibly informed—would say of a Jewish martyr that he ‘took the yokeupon himself,’ when he made a formal profession of obedience to the Law just before death. This I must ask you to take for granted. It would be too long to prove and explain.” I suppose Scaurus heard this from the teacher he called “his rabbi.” It was confirmed, to my own knowledge,by something that happened nearly thirty years ago when one of the most famous Jewish teachers, Akiba by name, was put to death under Hadrian. I heard it said by a credible eyewitness that “they combed his flesh with combs of iron,” and another added “Yes, and Akiba, all the while, kepttaking upon himself the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven,” by which he meant repeating the profession of faith.
“A third fact,” said Scaurus, “is that the Christians, from a very early period, used the word ‘yoke’ in a depreciatory sense to mean the ‘bondage’—as they called it—of the Law of Moses. Paul calls the latter ‘the yoke of bondage.’ The Christians, at their first public council, speak of it as ‘a yoke’; and a Christian writer named Barnabas says that ‘the new law’ is ‘without the yoke of necessity.’ I suspect that among the Greeks and Romans the servile associations of ‘yoke’ have also tended to the disuse of the term among the Christians of the west. You may object that the associations of ‘cross’ are still more disgraceful than those of ‘yoke.’ But I do not think they would be so for Christians, who regarded the disgrace of the cross as a step upward to what they call ‘the crown of life.’ Indeed I am rather surprised that Matthew’s tradition ‘Take my yoke upon you’ has been retained at all, even by a single evangelist.”
Most of this was new to me. But, even if it was true—as seemed to me not unlikely—the same conclusion followed as above. The mistake derogated from Mark, not from Christ. Indeed Scaurus’s interpretation seemed to me to exalt Christ. For might not some people, of austere and fanatical minds, find it easier to “take up the cross,” that is, to lacerate and torture themselves, than to “take up the yoke,” that is, to make their lives subservient to the community in a spirit of willing self-sacrifice? Indeed Scaurus himself said, “If I am right, the Christians have lost by this misunderstanding. When I say ‘lost,’ I mean ‘lost in respect of morality.’ For some may ‘take up the cross’ like the priests of Cybele, finding a pleasure in gashing themselves—such is human nature. But it is not so exciting a thing to ‘take up the yoke’ if it implies making oneself a drudge for life to commonplace people.”
This seemed very true. And afterwards I was not surprised to find that the fourth gospel contains no precept to “take up the cross.” But it commands Christians to “love one another”—a precept that nowhere occurs in Mark. Also what Scaurus said about “making oneself a drudge” was, in effect, inculcated by the fourth gospel where it commands the disciples to “wash one another’s feet.” Sometimes I have asked why this gospel did not restore the old tradition about “yoke.” Perhaps the writer avoided it as he avoids “faith,” and “repentance,” and other technical terms that might come between Christians and Christ. Scaurus himself said, “There seems to me more morality in the old rule of Moses, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ than in either ‘Take up the cross’ or ‘Take up the yoke.’ If ever this Christian superstition were to overrun the world, I could conceive of a time when half the Christians might fight with the war-cry of ‘the yoke,’ and the other half with the war-cry of ‘the cross,’ cutting one another’s throats for these emblems. But I could not so easily conceive of a time when men would ever cut one another’s throats with the war-cry, ‘We love one another’.”
These words of Scaurus seemed to me at the time to be quite true. Now, forty-five years afterwards, they seem to me true as to fact, but not quite true as to interpretation. For, since what Scaurus called “the old rule of Moses” included “Love God,” as well as “Love thy neighbour,” it followed that the Lord Jesus, in saying “Take my yoke,” meant “Serve God,” as well as “Serve man.” And, in order to serve God, must not one be prepared to suffer, as God also is called “longsuffering”? And of such “suffering” can there be any better emblem than Christ’s cross?
I cannot honestly deny the force of the evidence adduced by Scaurus to prove that the Saviour did not really utter the precept of “taking up the cross,” and that He did utter the precept of “taking up the yoke.” But I can honestly accept the former as an interpretation of the latter, an interpretation fit for Greeks and Romans when the gospel was first preached, and likely to be fit for all the races of the world till the time ofthe coming of the Lord. If Scaurus is right, only the precept of the yoke was inculcated by Christ in word. But all agree that the precept of the cross was inculcated by Christ in act. Both metaphors seem needed, and many more, to help the disciples of the Lord to apprehend the nature of His Kingdom, or Family.
Scaurus continued as follows: “I now come to a passage where Mark represents Christ as saying, ‘Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, the Son of man also shall be ashamed of him.’ This suggests to me for the first time (re-perusing these strange books after an interval of more than twenty years) that I may have been blaming Mark for not doing what, as a fact, he had no intention of doing—I mean, for not giving a collection of Christ’s utterances in connexion with the ‘good news.’ If we were to question Mark about the expression ‘me and my words,’ and to say, ‘What words do you refer to?’ perhaps he might reply, ‘I do not profess to give Christ’swords, but only their tenor.’ Perhaps Mark has in view a person, or character, rather than any gospel of ‘words.’ And I think I ought to have explained that, at the very outset of his work, Mark described a divine Voice (a thing frequently mentioned in Jewish traditions of the present day about their rabbis) calling from heaven to Christ, ‘Thou art my beloved Son.’ It is this perhaps that Mark may consider a ‘gospel,’ namely, that God, instead of sending prophets to the Jews, as in old days, now sends a Son.”
This did not seem to me a complete statement of the fact. “Gospel,” as I have said above, seemed to me to have meant, in Mark, the gospel of forgiveness of sins promised by Isaiah. And Scaurus himself was justly dissatisfied with his own explanation, for he proceeded, “Still, this is not satisfactory. For ought not the Son to have a message, as a prophet has?Nay, ought not the Son to have a much better message? The Voice from heaven is repeated at the stage of the gospel at which we have now arrived. But both before and now, it is apparently heard by no unbelievers. Nor does Christ himself ever repeat it to unbelievers. He never says, ‘I amthe Son of God,’ nor even, ‘I ama Son of God.’ He simply goes about, curing diseases, and saying ‘The sabbath is made for man,’ and, on one occasion, ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee,’ and, ‘The son of man hath authority on earth to forgive sins,’ and a few more things of this sort. What is there in all this that would induce Christ to use such an expression as, ‘Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and ofmy words’? I could understand his saying ‘of me,’ but not ‘ofmy words.’ Surely it would have been better to say, ‘Whosoever shall be unjust, or an adulterer, or a murderer, I will be ashamed of him’.”
Here it seemed to me that Scaurus had not quite succeeded in his attempt to do justice to Mark by reconsidering his gospel in the light of the words “Thou art my beloved Son.” For suppose a Son of God to have come into the world, like an Apollo or Æsculapius of souls. Suppose Him to have had a power, beyond that of Moses and the prophets, of instilling into their hearts a new kind of love of God and a new kind of love of neighbour. Lastly, suppose this Son of God to feel quite contented, and indeed best pleased, to call Himself Son of man, because He regarded man as the image of God, and because He felt, within Himself, God and man made one. Would not such a Son of God say, just as Epictetus might say, “Preserve the Man,” “Give up everything for the Man,” “Save the Man within you, destroy the Beast”? Only, being a Jew, He would not say “Man,” but “Son of man,” exhorting His disciples to be loyal to “the Son of man” and never to disown or deny “the Son of man.”
I was confirmed in this view by a mention (in this part of Mark) of “angels” with “the Son of man,” thus: “The Son of man also shall be ashamed of him when he shall come in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” This seemed to say that the Son of man although, as David said according to one interpretation of the Psalm, “below the angels” on earth,will be manifested in the glory of the Fatherwith the attendant angelsin heaven—thus reconciling the two aspects of the Son of man described by David and Daniel.
I noticed, however, that Matthew, in this passage, does not say (as Mark and Luke do) “the Son of man will be ashamed”; and it occurred to me that, where Christ used the phrase “Son of man,” and spoke about “the coming of the Son of man,” different evangelists might render these phrases differently so as to make the meaning brief and clear for Greeks. Indeed Scaurus himself suggested something of this kind, saying that some might use “I” or “me” for “Son of man” (in Christ’s words). He also added that “the Son of man” might sometimes be paraphrased as “the Rule, or Law, of Humanity”; and, said he, “Matthew has a very instructive parable, in which the Son of man in his glory and with his angels is introduced as seated on his throne, judging the Gentiles at the end of the world. Then those who have been kind and helpful and humane are rewarded because—so says the Son of man—‘Ye have been kind tome.’ ‘When have we been kind tothee?’ they reply. The Son answers, ‘Ye have been kind tothe least and humblest of my brethren. Therefore ye have been kind to me.’ This goes to the root of Christ’s doctrine. The Son of man is humanity and divinity, one with man and one with God, humanity divine.”
Scaurus went on to say that Mark’s sayings about the Son of man would have been much clearer if some parable or statement of this kind had been inserted making it clear that Christ as it were identified himself with the empire of the Son of man mentioned by the prophet Daniel, against the empire of the Beasts. “There is always a tendency,” said Scaurus, “among men of the world, and perhaps among statesmen quite as much as among soldiers—yes, and it exists among some philosophers, too, spite of their creeds—to deify force. I own I admire Christ for deifying humanity. But his biographers—Mark, in particular—do not make the deification clear. If I were to lend my copy of Mark to a fairly educated Roman gentleman, I really should not be surprised if he were to come to me, after reading it right through from beginning to end,and ask me, ‘Whoisthis Son of man?’” These words impressed me at the time; but much more afterwards when I actually met this very question in the fourth gospel, asked by the multitude at the end of Christ’s preaching, “Whoisthis Son of man?”
“After this,” said Scaurus (not speaking quite accurately, for he omitted, as I will presently shew, one short but important saying of Christ) “comes a statement that a certain kind of lunacy cannot be cured by the disciples unless they fast as well as pray. But here, I am convinced, Mark has made some mistake through not understanding ‘faith as a grain of mustard-seed,’ which the parallel Matthew has. That is a very interesting phrase, which I must go into another time.
“Close on this, occurs a prediction, with part of which I will deal later on. But about part of it I will say at once that I find it quite unintelligible. It is, ‘The Son of man is on the point of being betrayed into the handsof men.’ Why ‘of men’? Surely he could not be betrayed into the hands of anyone else! I observe that Mark and Luke say, ‘They were ignorant of this saying,’ and I am not surprised. I presume it is simply a repetition of Christ’s prediction of his violent death, introduced in order to emphasize his foreknowledge of the treachery of one of his own disciples. But I do not understand ‘of men’.”
As to this, I have shewn above that the word rendered by Scaurus “betrayed,” occurs in Isaiah’s description of the Suffering Servant, “He wasdelivered overfor our transgressions,” and that it is quoted from Isaiah by Paul. I had always rendered it “delivered over.” And now, too, it appeared to me much more likely that the Lord Jesus used the word in that sense. If so, it would have no reference to treachery, but would mean “delivered over by the Father.” This would explain “of men,” because it would mean that the Fatherin heavendelivers over His Son “into the handsof men”on earth. I have heard that one of the brethren, a learned man, explains “of men” as being opposed to “of Satan,” but “men” seems to me more likely to be in antithesis to “God.” I found afterwards that in the gospels the word “deliver over” is regularly used about Judas Iscariot “delivering over” Jesus tothe Jews. So Scaurus may be right. But Paul’s rendering seems to me to make better sense in Christ’s predictions.
I had been prepared by Paul and by Isaiah to recognise that Christ might have had in view the thought that the Son was to be “delivered over” to death by the Father for the salvation of men. Scaurus had not been thus prepared. Otherwise I think he would have been more patient with obscurities in Mark. Mark seemed to me to assume that his readers would know the general drift of “the gospel” as Isaiah predicted it, as Christ fulfilled it, and as the apostles preached it. Hence he was not so careful as the later evangelists to make his meaning clear to those who had no such knowledge. Take, for example, the words “If any one desires to be first he shall be last.” “This,” said Scaurus, “might mean ‘He shall be degraded so as to be last’.” Scaurus also attacked the saying that whosoever receives a child in Christ’s name receives Christ, and, “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall surely not enter therein.” “I suppose,” said he, “this means we are to put aside the vices of youth and manhood and to start afresh. But that is more easily said than done. And there is nothing in Mark to shew how it can be done.”
Here Scaurus seemed to me not to have quite done justice to Mark, because he had not given weight to the precept at the very beginning of his book. It was very short, and might easily have escaped me but for Paul’s guidance. Paul, I knew, taught that Abraham was “made righteous” by “having faith” in God’s good tidings. Hence I had noted, what Scaurus had not noted, thatMark, alone of the evangelists, placed the precept “Have faith,” in the first sentence uttered by Christ, saying “Have faith in the gospel.”This, then, I perceived—this “faith in the gospel” was supposed by Mark to have power to “make men righteous.”
This seemed, from a Christian point of view, to answer Scaurus’s objection, “‘Start afresh’ is more easily said than done.” The answer was—not my answer, but such an answer as I thought a Christian might make—“Yes, it is much more easily said than done. But the Son of God has authority bothto say it and to give power to do it. He says, in effect, ‘Be thou able to start afresh,’ and the manis‘able to start afresh’.”
Then, if Scaurus replied, “Prove this,” Paul came forward saying, “I at all events have received power to ‘start afresh.’ Even my enemies will attest what I have been, a persecutor of the Christians. Now I have been ‘forgiven’ by Him that has authority to forgive. The old things are passed away. Behold, they are become new.” And if Scaurus had said, “But have others been enabled to ‘start afresh’?” Paul would have answered, “Yes, multitudes, from the Euphrates to the Tiber. Do not trust me. Take a little journey from Tusculum into the poorest alleys of Rome, and judge for yourself.” Here I felt Paul would have been on such strong ground that Scaurus would have given way. “Paul”—he might have said—“is superstitious, and under hallucinations, but I must frankly confess he has the power to help people to ‘start afresh’.” That is just what I, too, felt. It was quite different from the feeling inspired in me by my own Teacher. When Epictetus said “Let bygones be bygones,” “Let us start afresh,” “Only begin and we shall see,” I felt, almost at once, that he was imagining impossibilities. When Paul said “There is a new creation,” I felt that he was describing not only a possibility but also a fact—a fact for himself and for multitudes of others; not indeed a fact for me, but, even for me, a possibility.
To return to Scaurus. “At last,” said he, “I came upon a definite precept to shew how perfection could be obtained. A rich young man asks Jesus how he can inherit eternal life. Jesus replies, ‘One thing is lacking to thee. Go, sell thy substance, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me.’ Definite enough! But is it consistent with morality? Is it not entirely against Paul’s protest, ‘Though I give all my goods to the poor and have not love, I am nothing’?” Here Scaurus did not seem to me so fair as usual. For, knowing the gospels as well as he did, he was aware that Jesus did not enjoin this rule on all, for example, on Zacchæus. He laid down no rules. One man He bade go home, another He bade follow Him. MoreoverScaurus, who accused Epictetus of borrowing from Christ, knew that Epictetus inculcated poverty and unmarried life, not on all his disciples, but on any Cynic wishing to go as a missionary; and therefore he ought not to have inferred that Jesus inculcated poverty on all His disciples because He gave it as a precept in answer to the question, “What lack I yet?” For my part, although I was not at that time a Christian, yet when I read Mark’s words, “Jesus, looking upon him, loved (or embraced) him and said,One thing is lacking to thee”—I could understand that, for this particular man, the “one thing lacking” really might be that he should “sell all that he had,” and that Jesus, knowing this, gave the precept out of His great love. Scaurus called this “a definite precept to shew how perfection could be obtained.” But I found only Matthew saying “If thou wouldest be perfect.” Mark and Luke did not here use the word “perfect.”
Scaurus proceeded thus: “Little remains to be added in the way of precepts. There is a repetition of ‘whosoever desires to be great, he shall be your servant.’ And this is supported by the saying that ‘the Son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister.’ Then comes a most startling statement, ‘All things that ye pray and ask, believe that ye received them and they shall be unto you,’ and, ‘In the moment when ye stand praying⸺’ but I have spoken of that above. I really do not think that I have omitted anything of importance. Does not this amaze you?”
About the “startling statement” I will speak later on. But here I may say that Scaurus had omitted one short precept “Have salt in yourselves.” And this, to some extent, answered one or two of his objections. For, as I understood it, “Have salt in yourselves” corresponded to a saying of Epictetus, who bade us seek help from “the Logos within us.” On one occasion (noted above) Epictetus, rebuking one of our students for saying, “Give me some precepts to guide me,” replied, “Have you not the Logos to guide you?” Mark appeared to me to represent Christ as saying, “Take into your hearts the spirit of the Son, which the Son gives you. It will be the salt of life, life for you and life passing from you toothers, purifying all your words and actions by imbuing your heart.” Elsewhere, also, Mark represented Christ as condemning the Pharisees (in the words of Isaiah) because, though they honoured God with their lips, their heart was far from Him and they “taught as doctrines the commandments of men.” Mark seemed to say “Obey the commandments of the Logos,” not “of men.” Still, I could not but admit that this brief metaphor, overlooked by Scaurus, might easily be overlooked or underrated by hundreds of other readers less careful and candid; and I was forced to sympathize—though not wholly to agree—with the outburst of disappointment which concluded his letter. “O that my old friend Plutarch had had the writing of the life of this Jewish prophet! Or that at least he had been at Mark’s elbow, to check him when he began descanting on extraneous matters and to remind him that his readers wanted to hear what he had to say about Christ, not about John the Baptist or Herod Antipas! Many of my friends think but poorly of Plutarch; but he would have been at all events infinitely superior to Mark. I do not wish to be hard upon the latter. The chariot of the gospel, so to speak, was already moving before he was harnessed to it, and he (not being a disciple of special insight or information) had to go the chariot’s way. Although his book hardly ever quotes prophecy it is based on prophecy and continually alludes to prophecy. It does not deal with Christ’s life as the ancient Jews dealt with the lives of Moses, Samuel, and David. Though it plunges into the midst of things like a book of the prophets—Jeremiah, for example, or Ezekiel—it does not give the words of the prophet in full, but runs off into all sorts of minor matters.
“You remember what Plutarch says about the importance of expression in biography. Mark occasionally attempts to represent a sort of expression—mostly by means of such phrases as ‘being moved with compassion,’ ‘being grieved,’ ‘looking steadfastly at him,’ ‘turning round,’ and so on. But the deeper sort of ‘expression,’ the prophet’s attitude towards God and man, towards the past and the future, towards the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of men—this he does not represent. Not at least consciously. Perhaps he does, sometimes,unconsciously, when he preserves Christ’s darker sayings where the later writers alter or omit them. For this, he deserves thanks. But, in spite of this, Mark’s gospel remains,me judice—regard being had to the greatness of the prophet whose life he is writing—the most inadequate of all the biographies I know.”
So far Scaurus. But his admission that Mark “sometimes preserves Christ’s darker sayings where the later writers alter or omit them” suggested to me that, in summing up, he felt that he might have passed over some of Mark’s unique traditions. And, as a fact, he had omitted “every one shall be salted with fire,” and three passages declaring that “all things are possible.” He also omitted the precept “Be at peace with one another.” Matthew and Luke omit all these, except that Matthew once has “all things are possible.”
This last tradition presents manifest difficulty. I have heard unbelievers scoff at it and ask whether “evil things” are “possible” for God. Moreover Scaurus himself urged on one occasion that not even God can undo the past. Later on, when I studied the gospels with more leisure, it seemed to me that, in saying “all things,” the Lord Jesus had constantly in view “the things of the invisible world” or “the things pertaining to the redemption of man.” So I found “all things” used in Paul’s epistle to the Philippians, declaring that the Lord Jesus Christ was to “fashion anew the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working wherebyhe is able even to subject all things unto himself.”
When I came to read the fourth gospel (called John’s), finding how often it supports Mark against Luke, I looked about for this word “possible” or “able” (for one and the same Greek adjective represents the two meanings). But John nowhere uses it. So I thought, “This then is an exception.” But I soon found that John expressed Mark’s saying, though in a different way. It is in a paradox, saying that the Son is “able to do nothing from himself.” This looks like a confession ofnot“being able.” But the sentence proceeds, “unless he sees the Father doing something”; and, after this, “The Fatherloveth the Son and sheweth him all things that He Himself is doing.” So the meaning really was, “The Son can do all that the Father is doing and wills the Son to do.” John did not therefore deny the power of the Son. He asserted it. But he disliked speaking of “power.” He avoided all words that mean “able,” “strong,” “powerful”—meaning “might” as distinct from “right.” He prefers “authority,” as when he says that the Son has “authorityto lay down his life and to take it again.”
My conclusion was that Mark had recorded the actual words of Jesus, “all things are possible,” assuming that his readers, being instructed in the teaching of the apostles, would understand that the words had a spiritual meaning, “All things are put by the Father under the feet of the Son of man.” But sometimes, as in the Healing of the Lunatic, the meaning might be ambiguous, or the context might not be so given as to make the words clear. Hence Luke always omitted or altered them, as being obscure and likely to be misunderstood. John paraphrased and explained them. If these facts were correct, it followed that a great debt was due to Mark for preserving the difficult truth when there must have been a great temptation to omit it or to alter it into what was easy but not true. Scaurus gave some weight, but hardly weight enough (I thought) to this merit in Mark.
“And now,” continued Scaurus, “I will tell you how the vision of the City of Truth and Justice, conjured up for me by that dear old dreamer Hermas, vanished into thin air. I intended to have spoken first about some of the miracles; but I will come back to them afterwards. For the present, turn over your Mark till you come nearly to the middle, and you will find a story about an act of healing at a distance. I have heard a Greek doctor tell stories of a man’s being influenced by the death of a twin brother at a distance. He invented the wordtelepatheiato express it. Well, I will invent an analogous word for healing at a distance—teliatreia. However, it is not from the miraculous point of view that I wish to discuss the story, but simply as a question of morality.
“It contains these words, ‘It is not fit to take the children’s bread and to cast it unto the dogs.’ Who says this? Jesus. To whom? To a poor woman, called ‘Greek, Syrophœnician by extraction.’ What is her offence? She has been asking Jesus to cast an evil spirit out of her daughter. Now what do you think of that? The Greeks, of old, affected to call all non-Greeks barbarians. But would their philosophers, would Socrates, or gruff Diogenes, or any respectable Greek philosopher, say such a thing to any non-Greek woman? I admit that Jesus ultimately granted this poor creature’s request. But that was only because she answered with the tact and patience of a Penelope, acquiescing in the epithet ‘dogs’ and replying, ‘Yea, Lord, yet even the dogs beneath the table eatof the crumbs of the children.’ Had it not been for her almost superhuman gentleness, she would have retired rejected, gaining from her petition nothing but the reproach of ‘dog.’ I write bitterly. I confess I felt bitter when I saw so noble and sublime a character as that of this Jewish prophet apparently degraded and polluted by an indelible taint of national uncharitableness.”
I was beginning to investigate the passage, when my eyes fell on a note that Scaurus had appended at the bottom of the column. “Since writing this, I have looked into the passage again, to see whether I could have been misled. And I notice that Luke omits the whole narrative. Also, while Mark represents thewomanas coming to Jesus and ‘asking him’ to heal the child, Matthew represents thedisciplesas coming to Jesus and ‘asking him’ to send her away. I should like to be able to believe that the woman was really a Jewess turned Gentile, that the disciples tried to drive the woman away, calling themselves ‘the children’ and her ‘the dog,’ that Jesus replied, as in Matthew, ‘It was precisely these lost degraded ones that I was sent to restore.’ In order to obtain this meaning, the changes of the text would not be very great. But I fear this cannot be maintained.”
I caught at Scaurus’s explanation, and was sorry that he himself did not hold to it. For I was more troubled by this objection of his than by anything else that he had said; and I thought long over it. Finally, I came to the conclusion that Scaurus was nearly right; that this woman, though called “a Syrophœnician by extraction,” was a Jewess (as Barnabas the Jew is called “a Cyprian by extraction”) and that she had fallen away into Greek idolatry and an evil life, so that Jesus—being, like Paul, all things to all men and women—was on this one occasion cruel in word in order to be kind in deed, stimulating her to better things. This agreed with Paul’s use of the word “dogs,” which assuredly he would not have applied except to “evil-doers.” If, however, it should be demonstrated that the woman was not a Jewess, and not leading an impure life, and that Jesus (not the disciples) used these words to her, then I should still believe in the kindness of Jesus, although thesewords were apparently unkind. No one would suspect cruelty, in a man habitually kind, except on very strong evidence. Here the evidence was not strong. The witnesses were two, not three; and the two narratives disagreed in important details. This was the conclusion to which I then came.
If Scaurus had read the epistles before the gospels, approaching the latter with some feeling of Christ’s constraining “love,” he could hardly have stumbled (so I thought and so I think still) at this single narrative. Jesus did not call the centurion a “dog.” Jesus had also supported the law of kindness against the law of the sabbath. He had said that “that which goes into the mouth” does not defile a man. He had eaten and drunk with publicans and sinners. How was it possible that a prophet of such broad and lofty views as these could call a poor afflicted woman a “dog” simply because she was not a Jewess? I longed to be near my old friend and to appeal to his common sense and justice, and I felt sure that I should have convinced him. Even if Jesus bade the missionaries at first go only to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” that seemed to me quite consistent with a purpose that in the end the gospel should be proclaimed to all nations.
In another narrative, which had caused me difficulty of the same kind, Scaurus gave me help. It is not in Mark. But I will set it down here because it bears on kindness. Matthew and Luke represented a disciple as asking to be allowed, before following Christ, to “bury” his father, and as not being allowed. “As to this,” said Scaurus, “I have no doubt that the man meant, ‘Suffer me to wait at home till I have seen my aged father into the grave and have duly buried him.’ Similarly Esau says, in effect, ‘My father will die before long. I will wait till I have mourned for him before killing Jacob.’ So, in Latin, we say ‘I have buried them all,’ meaning ‘I have survived and buried all my relations.’ My rabbi confirms me in this view. Christ always defends nature and natural affection against man’s conventions, so that it seems to me absurd to suppose that he would enjoin anything really inhuman.”
Scaurus next proceeded to attack the miraculous part of Mark’s narrative. Mark, he said, considering the smallness ofhis gospel, describes many more miracles, relatively, than Matthew and Luke. “As to miracles,” said he, “I am ready to believe in anything, miraculous or non-miraculous, on sufficient evidence. But the evidence about Mark’s miracles leads me to two conclusions. Some of them occurred but were not miraculous. The rest, although they were honestly supposed to have occurred, did not occur.
“Let us take the first class first. Mark calls them ‘powers,’i.e.works of power. That is a good name for them. But Mark seems to think that, if a man has ‘power’ to cast out demons and perform cures without medical means, such a one must be a great prophet or even a Son of God. To that I demur. I remember, when I was in Dacia, one of my men was down with fever, and bad fever, too. But when the bugles sounded out one night, and the enemy came on, beating in our outposts and pouring into our camp on the backs of some of our cowardly rascals, this brave fellow was up and doing, without helmet or armour, in the front with the best of them. Next morning, he was none the worse. Nor was there any relapse. He was quite cured. I think I have told you how Josephus described to me the casting out of a demon in the presence of Vespasian. And I might remind you of Tacitus’s story about the cure of a blind man by the same emperor. I suspect, however, that the former was a mere conjuring trick and that the latter was got up by the priests of—Serapis, I think it was. So I lay no stress on either. But I have spoken to many sensible physicians, who tell me that paralysis and some kinds of fever can be cured by what they call an emotional shock. Often the cure does not last. Some of these physicians go a little further and ascribe to certain persons a peculiar power of quieting restless patients and pacifying or even healing the insane. But I entirely refuse to believe that, if a man has such a power, he can consequently claim to be a Son of God.”
About the objection thus raised by Scaurus I have said enough already. It seemed to me that the power of permanently healing the paralysed, and permanently pacifying and healing the insane, was quite different from that of startling a paralysed man into a temporary activity. The former appearedto me allied with moral power and with steadfastness of mind, and likely to be an attribute of the Son of God. Still I was sorry that Mark devoted so much space to it. Here I agreed, in part, with Scaurus.
He then passed to the second class of miracles, “those that were honestly supposed to have occurred, but did not occur.” “If,” said he, “I assert that Mark turned metaphorical traditions into literal prose, you must not suppose that I accuse him of dishonesty. All the ancient Jews did it. Look at the story of Joshua, describing how he stopped the sun. Perhaps also you have read how God caused a stream to spring up from the Ass’s Jawbone (originally a hill of that name, like the headland or peninsula calledAss’s Jawbonein Laconia, which you and I passed together some five or six years ago). The second (the jawbone miracle) is somewhat different in origin from the first (the sun miracle). There are many shades of verbal misunderstanding capable of converting non-fact into alleged fact. There was all the more excuse for this error in Christian Jews (such as Mark and others) because of two reasons. In the first place, the prophets had predicted that all manner of disease (blindness, deafness, lameness) would be cured in the days of the Messiah (using even such expressions as ‘thy dead men shall awake’). In the second place, Christ did actually—as I have admitted—cure some diseases, such as insanity, fever, and paralysis. How, then, could it be other than a difficult task, in such circumstances, to distinguish the literal from the metaphorical traditions about the cures effected by Christ?”
I could all the less deny the force of these remarks because I had been studying the words, “Whatsoever things ye ask, praying, believe that ye have received them and they shall be unto you.” These words, if applied literally—to bread, for example, or money—were manifestly not true. Indeed they were absurd. How could a man honestly believe that he had received a thousand sesterces in the act of praying for them? But if applied spiritually, as in Paul’s prayer concerning the thorn in the flesh, they might (I felt) be true for one endowed with great faith. Paul prayed that the “thorn” might “depart” from him. In one sense it did not depart. But in anothersense, it did depart because God so increased his strength that the “thorn” became as nothing.
Now in this same passage of Mark I found the following: “Whosoever shall say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted and thrown into the sea,’ and shall not doubt in his heart but believes in that very moment that what he says is happening, it shall be unto him.” Luke also elsewhere had, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye would say to this sycamine-tree, ‘Be uprooted and be planted in the sea,’ and it would have obeyed you.” I took for granted that “mountain,” “mustard-seed,” and “sycamine-tree,” must all have been metaphorically used.
Scaurus confirmed this view, saying that the Jews were in the habit of calling a learned interpreter of the Law an uprooter of mountains,i.e.of spiritual obstacles blocking the path of the students of the law. But then he added something that amazed me, “Matthew has, ‘If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do the deed of the fig-tree, but even if ye say to this mountain, Be lifted and thrown into the sea, it shall come to pass.’ Now, ‘mountain’ being metaphorical, you might naturally anticipate that Matthew intended ‘fig-tree’ to be metaphorical. But if you look back a little, you will find thatMatthew actually imagines that there was a literal fig-tree in question. So does Mark. He and Matthew turn the metaphor into a literal miracle, as follows.
“In the first place, Jesus comes to a literal fig-tree, seeking literal fruit. He finds none. Consequently, say Mark and Matthew, a curse of barrenness was pronounced on it by Jesus. What followed? The tree was at once ‘dried up,’ or (according to Mark) ‘dried up from the roots.’ Now first note that the Hebrew word that means ‘barren’ means also ‘root up,’ ‘cut off,’ or ‘cut down.’ Then pass to Luke. He omits the whole of thismiracleabout a fig-tree. But he has aparableabout a fig-tree. The Lord of a vineyard comes to a barren fig-tree, and gives orders that it shall be ‘cut down.’ The vinedresser intercedes for it that it may be spared for one year more in case it may bear fruit.”
I looked and found that the story in Mark and Matthewwas as Scaurus had described it. But another detail astonished me. It was a phrase that followed the words, “While they were passing by early in the morning”—i.e.the morning after the curse had been pronounced—“they saw the fig-tree dried up from the roots.” Instead of writing that they were all amazed at the speed with which the curse had been fulfilled, Mark wrote, “AndPeter, remembering it, says to him, ‘Rabbi, behold, the fig-tree that thou cursedst is withered up’.” Trying to put myself in the place of Peter, I asked, “What should I have done when I approached the spot? How could I fail to be on the alert to note the tree that my Master cursed yesterday? How could any of my companions fail? How was it possible that any of us could forget? How could I possibly talk about ‘remembering’ it? How, therefore, could a historian suppose it needful to insert that I, or any of us, ‘remembered’?”
Turning to Matthew, I found that he got rid of “remembering,” and of “Peter” too, by making the miracle occur instantaneously, thus, “He said unto it [i.e.to the tree], ‘Let there be no fruit from thee henceforward for ever.’ And immediately the fig-tree withered away. And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, ‘How did the fig-tree immediately wither away’?”
Scaurus explained the whole matter as follows: “Look at Ezekiel’s saying, ‘I the Lord havedried up the green tree,’ and its context. You will find that ‘the green tree’ is Tyre. Elsewhere Luke has a proverb about ‘the green tree and the dry,’ where ‘the dry’ refers to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. So here, the fig-tree, green but barren, is Jerusalem. Luke has given the parable correctly. The Lord of the vineyard, he says, comes to a fig-tree,i.e.Jerusalem, in the vineyard, that is, in Judah. He does not say that it is green, but we may imagine that. However, it has no fruit. ‘Let it be cut down,’ says the Lord. Well, I have shewn you that ‘Let it becut down’ might mean, in Hebrew, ‘Let it bebarrenso that none may eat fruit from it,’ or ‘Let it bedried up.’ As a historical fact, the fig-tree wascut down, ordried up, when Jerusalem was destroyed by Titus. But that was not immediate. It was long after the resurrection.When Jerusalemwas destroyed, the disciplesremembered”—this explained my difficulty above mentioned—“that the Lord had pronounced this curse on Jerusalem. I could shew you, if space allowed, that the name ‘Peter’ (which would be in Hebrew ‘Simon’) might be confused (in Hebrew) with our Latin phrase ‘qui cum eo erant’ meaning ‘those that were with him,’i.e.Christ’s disciples, and also that Mark’s phrase ‘passing byearly’ may be an error for ‘passing along toinspect,visit, orseekfruit.’ Having regard to the fact that Peter died a year or two before the city was destroyed, I am inclined to think that it was ‘the disciples,’ not ‘Peter,’ that ‘remembered.’ But there is no space for details. It must suffice to have shewn you how aparableof Jesus, aboutcutting downa fig-tree, ‘remembered’ by his disciples long afterwards as referring to Jerusalem, has been converted by Mark and Matthew into a portentous miracle aboutwitheringa fig-tree instantaneously (according to Matthew) or by the following morning (according to Mark).”
This explanation of “remembering” seemed exactly to meet my difficulty. I accepted it at once. Subsequently I found that the fourth gospel twice represents the disciples as “remembering,” after Christ’s resurrection, things that He had said or done before the resurrection, which things, at the time, they had not fully understood. Moreover that gospel declared that, up to the evening before Christ’s crucifixion, His words had been “dark sayings” to them, but that the Spirit would “call them back to their minds,” or “remind them” of their meaning. This confirmed me in the conclusion that the Withering of the Fig-Tree was a parable, not a history, and that the disciples “remembered” it, and were reminded of its meaning by the Holy Spirit, after the Lord had risen from the dead.
Scaurus added a reference to a lecture of Epictetus, which, he said, I must have heard, and which bore on the story of the fig-tree. I had heard it and remembered it well. The subject was, in effect, “The Precocious Philosopher.” Epictetus likened him to a precocious fruit-tree. “You have flowered too soon,” he said; “The winter will scorch you up, or rather you are already frostbitten. Let me alone! Why do you wish me, before my season”—he meant, blooming before the seasonablepreparation—“to be withered away as you are withered yourself?” This, Scaurus said, was perhaps borrowed from Mark. I examined the text of the lecture, and it seemed to me that his conjecture was by no means improbable.
Scaurus proceeded, “I could go through Mark’s other miracles in the same way—those I mean that are not acts of healing—and shew you that they are all metaphors misunderstood. But I have given too much space to these unimportant matters. At least I consider them unimportant except so far as they shew Mark to be historically untrustworthy. Now I must pass to more important things, merely adding—as an instance of this man’s curious want of all sense of proportion—that while giving—how often must I repeat this!—a whole column to Herod Antipas’s birthday and its consequences, he does not give one line, or one word, to Christ’s resurrection—except in predictions made by Christ himself or in statements made by angels. I am not a Christian, nor a half-way Christian. But I have an immense admiration for Christ and an immense curiosity to know the exact facts about his life, death, and subsequent influence on his disciples. To me therefore, simply as a historian—or as a mere man interested in the affairs of men—this absolute silence about that which should have been most fully stated and supported by the evidence of eyewitnesses, is nothing short of provoking. Will you not agree with me, after this, that Mark is the most inadequate of biographers?”
I could scarcely believe my eyes when I read this. “Scaurus,” I said, “must for once have made a mistake, or his copy of Mark must have been defective.” But my copy confirmed his. It ended with the words, “For they were afraid.” This was too much for me. Perhaps I was overwrought with long and close study and with the strain of attempting to grapple with Scaurus’s criticisms. I remember to this day—and not with entire self-condemnation, for it was Mark, not Mark’s subject, that disappointed me—that in a sudden storm of passion I threw the gospel down and vowed I would never look at it again.
On the following morning my indignation against Mark began to seem certainly hasty and possibly unjust. True, his book was apparently without beginning or end, disfigured by superfluities and omissions, and extraordinarily disproportioned. But what if he had no time to revise it? What if it was a collection of notes about Christ’s mighty works and short sayings, which he was intending to combine with a collection of Christ’s doctrine when he died—died perhaps suddenly, perhaps was put to death? I tried to find excuses for his work. Still, I could not deny that, if Scaurus was right as to the story of the fig-tree, the earliest of the evangelists shewed a deplorable inability to distinguish the things that preceded Christ’s resurrection from the things that followed it. I resolved, however, that this should not deter me from continuing my study of the other gospels. My disappointment with Mark increased my admiration—it was not then more than admiration—for Christ, whom he seemed to me to have failed to represent. “Perhaps,” said I, “Matthew and Luke will do more justice to the subject.” So I took up their gospels. The resurrection was what I most wanted to read about. But I decided to begin at the beginning.
“In style, proportion, arrangement, and subject-matter,” said Scaurus, “Matthew and Luke are much more satisfactory than Mark, although Mark often preserves the earliest and purest form of Christ’s short sayings. When I say ‘Matthew,’ you must understand that I do not know who he is. I amconvinced that Matthew the publican, one of Christ’s twelve apostles, is not responsible for the work called by his name. Flaccus—whom I more than suspect of Christian proclivities—knows a good deal about these matters. Well, according to Flaccus, ‘Matthew’ wrote in Hebrew. ‘Everyone agrees about it,’ he says. An early Hebrew gospel would naturally be attributed to Matthew. He, being a ‘publican,’ or tax-collector, would necessarily be able to write. Peter and John are said to have been ignorant of letters. There are more styles than one in Matthew—a fact that suggests compilation. Luke, an educated man, and perhaps identical with a ‘beloved physician’ mentioned in one of Paul’s epistles, certainly compiled his books from various sources; ‘Matthew’ almost certainly did the same. Later on, I will speak of their versions of Christ’s discourses. Now I must confine myself to their accounts of a very important subject—Christ’s supernatural birth.”
Up to this point I had been reading with little interest, doubting whether it would not be better to pass on to the accounts of the resurrection. As I have explained above, my study of Paul’s epistles had not led me to believe that there would be anything miraculous about the birth of Christ. The phrase “supernatural birth,” therefore, came on me quite unexpectedly. What followed, riveted my attention: “Mark, as you know, says nothing about Christ’s parentage. First he gives, as title, ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ’—where, by the way, old Hermas has written, in my margin, ‘some add,Son of God.’ Then there is a Voice from heaven, at the moment of Christ’s baptism, heard (apparently) only by John the Baptist and Jesus, ‘Thou art my beloved Son.’ A similar Voice occurs later on. Mark represents a blind man as calling Jesus ‘son of David,’ and his fellow-townsmen say, ‘Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?’ This might indicate merely that Joseph the carpenter was dead. But ‘Son of Mary’ might be used in two other ways. The enemies of Jesus might use it to suggest that he was a bastard. The worshippers of Jesus might use it (later on) to shew that he was a Son of God, not born of any human father. Matthew has, ‘Is not this the carpenter’s son?’ This, however, Matthew mightwrite not as his own belief, but as that of Christ’s fellow-townsmen. Luke, who has ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’, gives the whole of the narrative quite differently. I should add that the first Voice from heaven is differently given in some copies of Luke.” I examined this at once. My copy had a marginal note, “Some have,Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.”
“You see,” said Scaurus, “in these early divergences, traces of early differences as to the time and manner in which Jesus became the Son of God. Paul appears to me to have believed that the sonship pre-existed in heaven. ‘God,’ he says, ‘in the fulness of time, sent forth His son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those that were under the law.’ In Job, ‘born of a woman’ implies imperfection, or mortality. In Paul, ‘born of a woman’ and ‘born under the law’ imply two self-humiliations undergone by the Son of God. Paul’s view is that the Redeemer must needs make himself one with those whom he redeems. Since the Jews were not only ‘born of a woman’ but also ‘born under the law,’ the Son of God came down from heaven and placed himself under both these humiliations. Paul, therefore, seems to have regarded the divine birth as taking place in heaven from the beginning, but the human birth as a self-humbling on earth, wherein the Son of God becomes incarnate in the form of the son of Joseph, of the seed of David, after the flesh.”
This had been my inference from Paul’s epistles, as I have said above. But what followed was quite new to me: “You are aware from Paul’s epistles that Christ is regarded by him as preeminently the Seed of Promise, Isaac being merely the type. Well, listen to what Philo, a Jew, somewhat earlier than Paul, declares about the birth of Isaac. Philo says, ‘The Lord begot Isaac.’ Philo describes Sarah as ‘becoming pregnant when alone and visited by God.’ It was God also, he says, who ‘opened the womb of Leah.’ Moses, too, ‘having received Zipporah, finds her pregnant by no mortal.’ All this is, of course, quite distinct from our popular stories of the love affairs of Jupiter. You may see this from Philo’s context: ‘It is fitting that God should converse, in an opposite manner to thatof men, with a nature undefiled, unpolluted, and pure, the genuine Virgin. For whereas the cohabitation of men makes virgins wives (lit. women), on the other hand when God begins to associate with a soul, what was wife before He now makes Virgin again.’ I could quote other instances, but these will suffice. Now I ask you to reflect how such language as this would be interpreted in the west, not only by slaves, but even by people of education, unaccustomed to the language of the east, but familiar with our western stories of the births of Hercules, Castor and Pollux, Bacchus and others.”
I saw at once that the language would be liable to be taken literally. But on the other hand it seemed to me that no disciple of Paul could accept anything like our western stories. Scaurus had anticipated an objection of this kind in his next words: “You must not suppose, however, that Hebrew literature contains, or that Jewish or Christian thought would tolerate, such stories as those in Ovid. Nor will you find anything of this kind in Matthew and Luke, to whose narratives we will now pass. Matthew says, rather abruptly, that Joseph, finding Mary, his betrothed but not yet his wife, to be with child, and intending to put her away secretly, received a vision of an angel and a voice bidding him not to fear to take to himself Mary his wife, for she was with child from the Holy Spirit, and ‘she will bring forth a child and thou shalt call his name Jesus.’ Luke, after a much longer introduction (about which I shall speak presently), says that a vision and a voice came to Mary—he does not mention one to Joseph—bidding her not to fear, and saying ‘Thou shalt conceive and bring forth a child, and shalt call his name Jesus.’ In theory, it is of course possible that two similar visions might come, one to Mary and another to Joseph, bidding both ‘not to fear.’ But Matthew adds something that points to an entirely different explanation: ‘Now all this hath come to pass that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying,Behold the virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a son and they shall call his name Emmanuel’.”
These words I had myself read in Isaiah and had taken as referring to a promise made in the context, namely, that in ashort time—two or three years, just time enough for a child to be conceived and to be born and to grow up to the age when it could say “father” and “mother”—the kings of Syria and Samaria would be destroyed. Accordingly Isaiah says that he himself married a wife immediately afterwards and that the prophecy was fulfilled. Having recently read these words more than once, I was prepared to find that Scaurus interpreted them in the same way. He added that the most learned of the Jews themselves did the same, and that the Hebrew does not mention “virgin,” but “young woman.” “This,” said he, “I heard from a learned rabbi, who added, ‘The LXX is full of blunders, but we are hoping for a more faithful rendering, from a very learned scholar named Aquila, which will probably appear soon’.” Here I may say that this translation has actually appeared—it came out about ten years ago—in quite unreadable Greek, but very faithful to the Hebrew; and it renders the word, not “virgin,” but “young woman,” as Scaurus had said.
It was this very rendering that caused a coolness between me and Justin of Samaria. It happened, I am sorry to say, shortly before he suffered for the sake of the Saviour, in this present year in which I am writing. I chanced to meet him coming out of the school of Diodorus, in his philosopher’s cloak as usual, but hot and flustered, not looking at all like a philosopher. Some people—Jews, to judge by their faces—were jeering and pointing after him in mockery. Justin—furious with them, but also (as I thought) worried and uncomfortable in himself—appealed to me: “I have been contending for the Lord,” said he, “against these dogs. They flout and mock me for demonstrating how fraudulently and profanely they have mutilated the Holy Scriptures, cancelling some parts and altering others, when translating them into Greek.” Then he instanced this very passage, in which he said the Jews had vilely corrupted the rendering of the Hebrew from “virgin” to “young woman.” I would have kept silence; but, as he pressed me to say whether I did not agree with him, I was obliged to reply that I did not; and I added that not only Aquila rendered it thus, but other good scholars, many ofthem Christians. Upon this, he flung away from me in disgust, without one word of salutation, and I never saw him again.
The fact was, he had committed himself in writing, about ten years before, to this false charge against the Jews, and to many other baseless accusations. There was no way out of it now, but either to retract or to face it out. He was a brave man and knew how to face death. But he was not brave enough to allow himself to be conquered by facts. Samaritan by birth, he had something of the Samaritan—but not of the Good Samaritan—in his hatred of the Jews. Had he loved the truth as much as he hated those whom he called truth’s enemies, he would perhaps have gone on to cease from his hate, and would have become no less faithful as a Christian than as a martyr.
Now I must return to Scaurus. “Luke,” said he, “was an educated man, and saw at once that this prophecy about ‘the virgin’ did not apply. So he omitted it. This he had a right to do. It was only an evangelist’s opinion, not a statement of anything that had actually occurred. But there remained the tradition offact, namely, that an angel had appeared and had announced the future birth of a child begotten from the Holy Spirit. Luke regarded this announcement as made to the mother, like the announcements—not the same of course, but similar—made to Sarah, Rebecca, and the mothers of Samson and Samuel. Moreover in Matthew’s account—as I judge from Hermas’s marginal notes—there are many variations, some of which leave it open to believe that the utterance to Joseph (like that to Abraham before Isaac’s birth) referred merely to God’s spiritual generating, so that Jesus, though the Son of God according to the spirit, was yet, according to the flesh, the son of David by descent from Joseph. Luke expresses his disagreement from this view by giving various utterances of Mary and the angel at such length that they may be called hymns or poems. And indeed—if judged liberally and not by the pedantical rules of Atticists or over-strict grammarians—they are poems, by no means without beauty.
“Luke adds another narrative in which he makes the birth of John the Baptist serve as a foil (so to speak) to the birth ofChrist. John, like Christ, was born as a child of promise, after a vision of an angel. But there the likeness ceases. The vision is to the father, not to the mother. The father disbelieves and is punished by dumbness. Elizabeth, the mother, was not a virgin. She, like the wife of Abraham, was barren up to old age. There is no vision to Elizabeth, and no mention of divine generation. If a Jew, Philo for example, were to say to Luke, ‘Your Messiah may have been a son of God and yet son of Joseph (as Isaac was son of Abraham)’ Luke might reply, ‘Read my book, and you will see that it was not so. John the Baptist might be called son of God after this fashion, but Jesus was born in quite a different manner’.”
After this, Scaurus went on to treat of Christ’s pedigrees, as given by Matthew and Luke, shewing Christ’s descent, the former from Abraham, the latter from Adam. These details I shall not give in full. Scaurus had something of the mind of a lawyer and something of the eagerness of a hound hunting by scent, and, as he said himself, when once on a trail he could not stop. “Matthew,” said he, “omits three consecutive kings of Judah in one place and a fourth in another. I pointed this out to my old rabbi above-mentioned, and he laughed and said, ‘My own people do that sort of thing. History is not our strong point. We like facts to fit nicely, and this writer of yours has made them fit. Does he not himself almost tell you that he is squaring matters, when he says that there are fourteen generations from Abraham to David, and fourteen from David to the captivity, and fourteen from the captivity to Christ? This is symmetrical, but it is not what your model Thucydides would call history.’ My rabbi went on to say, ‘A more serious blunder, from our point of view, is that this Christian has included in the ancestry of his Christ a king called Jeconiah about whom one of our prophets, Jeremiah, says, “Write ye this man childless, for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David and ruling any more in Judah”.’ Then, seeing the two papyri lying side by side on the table before me, he added, ‘I see you have another pedigree there, does that make the same blunder?’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘the author was named Luke, a physician, an educated manand a great compiler of documents. He gives quite a different pedigree.’ ‘I am not surprised,’ said my rabbi. ‘If he was a sensible man, he could hardly do otherwise’.”
So far Scaurus. He did not anticipate what I have lived to experience. Quite recently I heard some Christians use this very mention of Jeconiah in an opposite direction, namely, as a proof that Matthew believed Jesus to have descended from God, butnotfrom Joseph after the flesh. In particular, I have heard a young but rising teacher, Irenæus by name, argue as follows, “If indeed He had been the son of Joseph, He could not, according to Jeremiah, be either king or heir, for Joseph is shewn to be the son of Joachim and Jeconiah as also Matthew sets forth in his pedigree.” Then he went on to quote Jeremiah’s prophecy that Jeconiah should be childless and have no successor on the throne of David. And his argument was to this effect, “Christ is the royal son of David. Therefore He could not have descended from Jeconiah, Joseph’s ancestor. Matthew knew this. Therefore Matthew, though giving Joseph’s pedigree, did not mean to imply that Jesus was the son of Joseph.” And this seemed to convince those who heard him! I also heard this same Irenæus, in the same lecture, say, “If He were the son of Joseph, how could He be greater than Solomon, … or greater than David, when He was generated from the same seed, and was a descendant of these men?” After we had gone out from Irenæus’s lecture, I asked the friend sitting next to me to explain this argument to me; for it seemed to me to prove that a man could not be greater than his ancestors. “Ah, but you forget,” he replied, “whatancestors. They wereroyalancestors. How could the son of a mere carpenter be greater than David or Solomon?” It seemed to me that the sinless son of “a mere carpenter” might be greater in the eyes of God than a whole world of such royal sinners. But I found it hard to convince him that I was even speaking seriously!