OPINION IS SLOWLY coming to the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth is the greatest spirit in recorded time. Very early they proclaimed him divine, and now for nearly two thousand years all sorts and conditions of men have studied him and talked of him. But very few, so far as I know, have even tried to see him as he was. He was so sweet and so great that even after twenty centuries the jury of his peers has not yet been formed, nor the final verdict pronounced. As I have loved him without adoring him, I contribute here my voice to the final decision, and describe besides how I came to my belief, and the effect it had upon my conduct.
In my portrait of Renan, I have told how, towards the end of the century, Sir Charles Dilke had given me an introduction to him, and Dilke was one of the few Englishmen who spoke French as well as he spoke English: his commendation therefore had some weight. At first, Renan received me with great kindness and almost immediately began to ask me how his Life of Jesus was appreciated in England. I said that it was regarded as the best life- much better than Strauss's: but again and again he came back to the matter with a desire of praise which seemed almost childish to me, and an invincible disdain of any criticism, however well founded, which sometimes provoked me.
Every time I came to Paris for some years, I went to see him, and after a couple of visits he began to treat me with a sort of condescension, which was really due to the fact that I had never told him fully what was in my mind about his work. At length I resolved to do this.
One day, I have forgotten how, he provoked me and I said to him: 'Master, what was the ordinary language that Jesus spoke?' 'Aramaic,' he replied,
'the common Jewish dialect of Hebrew.' 'I have always hoped,' I said, 'that he spoke Greek ordinarily, though of course it may have been Latin.'
'Oh no,' said Renan, 'he only spoke one language; he was quite uneducated, so far as we know.'
'What does it mean,' I said, 'when on the cross he cries, 'Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?' That's Aramaic, isn't it?'
'Yes,' said Renan, 'surely.'
'Then they go on to say in the Bible, 'which being interpreted means, 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?' ' It is surely plain from this that he usually spoke another language, which did not need to be interpreted, and that here on the Cross in his mortal anguish, he fell into the language of his childhood, and they therefore translated it.'
'I see your inference,' cried Renan; 'strange that I had never thought of that before; where did you get the idea?'
I smiled, but it almost made me tell him that I had gotten hardly anything from his Life of Jesus, often as I had looked into it.
There are many little touches in the Bible which seem to make the Master plain to me. If I had another life to live, I would learn Aramaic and Hebrew and try to do what Renan failed to do: give a real portrait of the greatest man who ever wore flesh.
When his mother and father left him as a boy, and finding that he was not with them, returned to Jerusalem and discovered that he bad been in the synagogue, he said to them: 'Wist thou not that I must be about my Father's business?' This and the remark afterwards that his mother kept all such sayings in her heart seemed to reveal him to me as extraordinary, even in boyhood.
It has always seemed strange to me that Jesus called his disciples, and as many as twelve. Most able men have two or three who cherish their sayings and love to be with them, but we have no record of their selection by the teacher: usually it is the disciples who choose. The story seems to me a little difficult to understand because it is very unusual, and so far as I can discover, not symbolic.
A little later Jesus will not see his mother or his brethren, nor acknowledge the claims of kinship. There is a possible, even a likely explanation of this: when he engaged his disciples and began his independent career, he first went back to Nazareth, we are told, but his assumption of authority annoyed the people and 'filled them with wrath.' 'Is not this Joseph's son?' they asked. 'And have we not his brothers and sisters here with us?' And he had to hide from the indignation of the people.
We are told expressly: 'Neither did his brethren believe in him.' His friends and kinsmen, indeed, appear to have shielded him by saying, 'He is beside himself'; and their excuse, I imagine, so wounded him that later he refused to see them, declaring that 'Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister and mother.'
Again, later, we have the estrangement from his mother in a more pronounced form. 'A certain woman of the company,' according to St. Luke, lifted up her voice and said unto him: 'Blessed the womb that bore thee and the paps which thou has sucked!' But he said: 'Yea, rather, blessed they that hear the word of God and keep it.' '
It is extremely difficult to see him through the mist cast about him by his biographers. He begins his Sermon on the Mount with a series of aphorisms such as young men of talent are accustomed to make, some of them intensely characteristic: 'Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth'- surely the strangest prediction ever made to the children of men!
And later, the encouragement:
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you.
Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.
Then the most beautiful of all:
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
But after these superb phrases, which seem to show us the very spirit of the young prophet, come verses which one cannot understand at all:
Agree with thine adversary quickly, whilst thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.
Verily I say unto thee, thou shall by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.
This childish morality, based on fear, is out of time with the rest of the chapter; it was perhaps some youthful expression of submission to authority.
Jesus returns to the theme again toward the end of the chapter, and lifts it to new heights:
Ye have heard that it hath been said, thou shall love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.
And again the ineffable word which remains as a commandment: Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
But the point which first made him clear to me was the revelation of his physical weakness. Why did he fall under the cross? Most men would find it easy enough to carry the cross, which was of dried wood and wasn't very heavy. The first time I saw one was in the Russo-Turkish war of '76–77, when the Turks had crucified some of their opponents; these crosses one could have carried a long time without any difficulty, with one end over one's shoulder and the other trailing on the ground.
But the chief proof of his weakness is that he is said to have died on the cross within a few hours; at this, we are told, 'Pilate marvelled'-and well he might, for most men can endure the torture of the cross for days; and it was to convince themselves that he was really dead that a soldier put the spear into his side and 'forthwith came there out blood and water.'
Now if he were dead, he must have been dead for some time, the time at least necessary for someone to go to Jerusalem and see Pilate and return again to Calvary with the order to test the apparent death. If he were dead for a couple of hours, surely nothing would come out of a wound save a little moisture; I therefore draw the conclusion that he had fainted merely and afterwards came to, and through the care of the women who loved him, was able to show himself to his disciples; but the crucifixion had broken him, and the dreadful doubt-'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' — and soon afterwards he died.
As I told Renan, I disliked his insistence on the personal beauty of Jesus.
Mohammed was said by every one to be astonishingly good-looking, with splendid eyes, but no disciple at the
