To all such reminders the present-day expert will reply, belike, that he does not need them. He, profiting by the past, can commit no such errors. And yet, however right the present members of the apostolic succession of truth-monopolists may be, there is an astonishing likeness in their tone and temper over the last heresy to that of their predecessors, down to the twentieth generation. Anger and bluster, boasting and scolding, snarl and sneer, come no less spontaneously to the tongues of the professional defender of the present minimum of creed than they did to those of the full-blooded breed of the ages of the maximum, or of Calvin and Bonner. From the defence of the “real presence” of the God to that of the bare personal existence of the Man is a long descent; but there is a singular sameness in the manner of the controversy. As their expert ancestors proved successively the absolute truth of the corporal presence in the wafer, or the humanity of the Son against those who dubbed him merely divine, or his divinity against those who pronounced him merely human, or the inerrancy of the Gospels against the blasphemers who pointed out the contradictions, or the historic certainty of the miracles and the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection and the Ascension against the “materialists” who put such Christian myths on a level with Pagan, so do the expert demonstrators of the bare historicity of the now undeified God establish by vituperation and derision, declamation and contempt, the supreme certainty of the minimum after all the supernatural certainties are gone. Even as Swiss patriots undertook to demonstrate “somebody” and “something” behind the legend of William Tell when it had ceased to be possible to burn men at the stake for exposing the apple-myth, so do the descendants of the demonstrators of the real presence now go about to make clear the real existence.

I speak, of course, of the ruck of the vindicators, not of the believers; and Professor Schmiedel and M. Loisy, I trust, will not suspect me of classing them with men many of whom are as hostile to them as to the thesis which those scholars seek by rational methods to confute. Professor Schmiedel has even avowed that a proof of the non-historicity of the Gospel Jesus would not affect his inner religious opinions; and such high detachment has been attained to by others. That civilized scholars credit, and might at a pinch maintain in debate, the historicity of the Gospel Jesus as calmly as they might the historicity of Lycurgus against its impugners, I am well aware. And to such readers, if I have the honour to obtain any, I address not a warning but an appeal. There is an attitude towards the problem which incurs no reproach on the score of tone and temper, and which will naturally recommend itself all the more to men of real culture, but which yet, I think, only illustrates in another way the immense difficulty of all-round intellectual vigilance. Let me give an example in an extract from a rather noteworthy pronouncement upon the question in hand:—

I am not here concerned to ask whether the closing words are the expression of an orthodox belief; or what orthodoxy makes of the further proposition that “With St. Paul it is quite different. He is a saint without a luminous halo.” The idea seems to be that concerning the saint without a nimbus we can get at the historical truth, while in the other case we cannot—a proposition worth orthodox attention. But what concerns the open-minded investigator is the logic of the words I have italicized. It is obvious that they proceed (1) on the assumption that what non-miraculous biography the Gospels give is in the main absolutely trustworthy—that is to say, that the accounts of the disciples and the teaching are historical; and (2) on the assumption that we are historically held to the traditional view that the Gospel sayings originated with the alleged Founder as they purport. It is necessary to point out that this is not a licit historical induction. Even Canon Inge by implication admits that not all the Gospel sayings have the quality which he regards as certifying authenticity; and on no reasonable ground can he claim that the others must have been “invented by the disciples.” The alternative is spurious. No one is in a position to deny that any given saying may have been invented by non-disciples. In point of fact, many professional theologians are agreed in tracing to outside sources some tolerably fine passages, such as the address to Jerusalem (Mt. xxiii, 37; Lk. xiii, 34). The critics in question do not ascribe that deliverance to inventive disciples; they infer it to have been a non-Christian document. Many other critics, again, now pronounce the whole Sermon on the Mount—regarded by Baur as signally genuine—a compilation from earlier Hebrew literature, Biblical and other. Which then are the “great” sayings that could not be thus accounted for? Without specification there can be no rational discussion of the problem; and even the proposition about the exegetic function of “faith and love” affects to be in itself rational.

The plain truth would seem to be that Canon Inge has formed for himself no tenable critical position. He has merely reiterated the fallacy of Mill, who in his Three Essays on Religion (pp. 253–54) wrote:—

Ein historischer Kopf hatte er nicht, is a German economist’s criticism of Mill which I fear will have to stand in other fields than that of economics. The man who wrote this unmeasured dithyramb can never have read the Gospels and the Hebrew books with critical attention; and can never have reflected critically upon his own words in this connection. The assumption that “the fishermen of Galilee” could not have attained to thoughts which are expressly alleged to have been put forth by an untaught carpenter of Galilee is on the face of it a flight of thoughtless declamation. Had Mill ever critically read the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, he must have been aware that the main precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, which are presumably among the unspecified objects of his panegyric, were all there beforehand. Had he taken the trouble to investigate before writing, he could have found in Hennell’s Inquiry (1838), which popularized the old research of Schoettgen; in Nork’s Rabbinische Quellen und Parallelen (1839); and in Les Origines du Sermon de la Montagne by Hippolyte Rodrigues (1868), a copious demonstration of the Jewish currency of every moral idea in the Christian document, often in saner forms. And he ought to have known from his own reading that the doctrine of forgiveness for injuries, which appears to be the main ground for the customary panegyric of the Sermon, was common to Greeks and Romans before the Gospels were compiled. From the duty of giving alms freely—which is repeatedly laid down in the Old Testament—to that of the sin of concupiscence and the wrongness of divorce for trivial causes, every moral idea in the Sermon had been formulated alike by Jews and Gentiles beforehand.1 And if it be argued that the compilation of such a set of precepts with a number of religious dicta (equally current in non-Christian Jewry) is evidence of a special ethical or religious gift in the compiler, the answer is that precisely the fact of such a compilation is the disproof of the assertion in the Gospels that the whole was delivered as a sermon on a mountain. A sermon it never was and never could be; and if the compiler was a man of unique character and qualification he was not the Gospel Jesus but the very type of which Mill denied the possibility!

That the Gospel ethic is non-original becomes more and more clear with every extension of relevant research. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, written between 109 and 106 B.C. by a Quietist Pharisee, is found to yield not only origins or anticipations for pseudo-historic data in the Gospels but patterns for its moral doctrine. Thus the notion that the Twelve Apostles are to rule over the tribes in the Messianic kingdom is merely an adaptation of the teaching in the Testaments that the twelve sons of Jacob are so to rule.2 There too appears for the first time in Jewish literature the formula “on His right hand”;3 and a multitude of close textual parallels clearly testify to perusal of the book by the Gospel-framers and the epistle-makers. But above all is the Jewish book the original for the doctrines of forgiveness and brotherly love. Whereas the Old Testament leaves standing the ethic of revenge alongside of the prescription to forgive one’s enemy, the Testaments give out what a highly competent Christian editor pronounces to be “the most remarkable statement on the subject of forgiveness in all ancient literature. They show a wonderful insight into the true psychology of the question. So perfect are the parallels in thought and diction between these verses [Test. Gad, vi, 3–7] and Luke xvii, 3; Matt. xviii, 15, 35, that we must assume our Lord’s acquaintance with them. The meaning of forgiveness in both cases is the highest and noblest known to us—namely, the restoring the offender to communion with us, which he had forfeited through his offence.... We now see the importance of our text. It shows that pre-Christian Judaism possessed a noble system of ethics on the subject of forgiveness.”4

Here the tribute goes to a Pharisee; in another connection it redounds to the other butt of Christian disparagement, the Scribes. As our editor points out, the collocation of the commands to love God and one’s neighbour is even in Luke (x, 25–27) assigned not to Jesus but to a Scribe. But this too is found in the Testaments. “That the two great commandments were already conjoined in the teaching of the Scribes at the time of our Lord we may reasonably infer from our text,5 which was written 140 years earlier, and from the account in Luke.”6 And here too, a century before the Christian era, we have a Jewish predication of the salvation of the Gentiles,7 in the patronizing Jewish sense.

It is only for men partly hypnotized by sectarian creed that there can be anything surprising in these anticipations. The notion that Sacred Books contain the highest and rarest thought of their respective periods is a delusion that any critical examination of probabilities will destroy. Relatively high and rare thought does not find its way into Sacred Books; what these present is but the thought that is perceptible and acceptable to the majority, or a strong minority, of the better people; and it is never purified of grave imperfection, precisely because these never are. Perfect ethic is the possession of the perfect people, an extremely rare species. The ethic of the Testaments, which is an obvious improvement on that of average Jewry, is in turn imperfect enough; even as that of the Gospels remains stamped with Jewish particularism, and is irretrievably blemished by the grotesquely iniquitous doctrine of damnation for non-belief.

Such asseverations as Mill’s, constantly repeated as they are by educated men, are simply expressions of failure to comprehend the nature and the possibilities of life, of civilization, of history. The thesis is that in a world containing no one else capable of elevated thought, moral or religious, there suddenly appeared a marvellously inspired teacher, who chose a dozen disciples incapable of comprehending his doctrine, and during the space of one or many years—no one can settle whether one or two or three or four or ten or twenty—went about alternately working miracles and delivering moral and religious sayings (including a doctrine of eternal hell-fire for the unrepentant wicked, among whom were included all who refused to accept the new teaching); and that after the execution of the teacher on a charge of blasphemy or sedition the world found itself in possession of a supernormal moral and religious code, which constituted the greatest “moral reform” in the world’s history. The very conception is a chimera. In a world in which no one could independently think the teacher’s moral thoughts there could be no acceptance of them. If the code was pronounced good, it was so pronounced in terms of the moral nature and moral convictions of those who made the pronouncement. The very propagandists of the creed after a few generations were found meeting gainsayers with the formula anima naturaliter Christiana.

Christianity made its way precisely because (1) it was a construction from current moral and religious material; and because (2) it adopted a system of economic organization already tested by Jews and Gentiles; and (3) because its doctrines were ascribed to a God, not to a man. Anything like a moral renovation of the world it never effected; that conception is a chimera of chimeras. While Mill, the amateur in matters of religious research, who “scarcely ever read a theological book,”8 ascribed to Christian morality a unique and original quality, Newman, the essentially religious man, deliberately affirmed with the Rationalists that “There is little in the ethics of Christianity which the human mind may not reach by its natural powers, and which here or there ... has not in fact been anticipated.”9 And Baur, who gave his life and his whole powers to the problem which Mill assumed to dispose of by a dithyramb, put in a sentence the historic truth which Mill so completely failed to grasp:—

And a distinguished Scottish theologian and scholar has laid it down that