Part 12 (2/2)
”In short, I am compelled to think that this Light of Souls, this saving and redeeming spirit, was the loved and loving child of Joseph, the carpenter, and the loyal wife Mary. I believe this, notwithstanding the stories of immaculate conceptions, star-guided magi, choiring angels and adoring shepards that gathered around the birth-night.”
Which is another way of saying that he is ”compelled to believe”
against the evidence, merely because it is his pleasure or interest to do so. This is not very edifying, to be sure. Mr. Jones takes all his information about Joseph and Mary and Jesus from the gospels, and yet the gospels clearly contradict his conclusions. Mary, the mother of Jesus, gives her word of honor that Joseph was not the father of her child, and Joseph himself testifies that he is not Jesus' father, but Mr. Jones pays no attention to their testimony; he wishes Joseph to be the father of Jesus, and that ought to be sufficient evidence, he thinks. We quote from the gospel:
”Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. And Joseph, her husband, being a righteous man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily. But when he thought on these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife; for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.”
Now, if Joseph admits he was not Jesus' father, and Mary corroborates his testimony (See Luke, 1st chapter), Jesus was, if he ever lived, and the records which give Mr. Jones his ideal Jesus are reliable, the son of a man who has succeeded in concealing his ident.i.ty, unless, of course, we believe in the virgin birth. If the real father of Jesus had come forth and owned his son, and Mary had acknowledged that he was the father of her child, what would have become of Christianity?
We hope these clergymen who have dwelt, as Emerson says, ”with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus,” will reflect upon this, and while doing so, will they not also remember this other saying of the Concord philosopher: ”The vice of our theology is seen in the claim...that Jesus was something different from a man.”
We take our leave of the three clergymen, a.s.suring them that in what we have said we have not been actuated, in the least, by any personal motive whatever, and that we have only done to them what we would have them do to us.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Head of a G.o.d with Horns. Museum of St. Germain.]
A LIBERAL JEW ON JESUS
FELIX ADLER, PRAISES JESUS
That it is very easy for scholars to follow the people instead of leading them, and to side with the view that commands the majority, receives fresh confirmation from the recent utterances of the founder of the Ethical Culture Society in New York. Professor Adler, the son of a rabbi, and at one time a freethinker, has slowly drifted into orthodox waters, after having tried for a period of years the open seas, and has become a more enthusiastic champion of the G.o.d of the Christians than many a Christian scholar whom we could name. The pendulum in the Adler case has swung clear to the opposite side. We do not find fault with a man because he changes his views, we only ask for reasons for the change. It will be seen by the following extracts from Adler's printed lectures that he has made absolutely no critical study of the sources of the Jesus story, but has merely, and hurriedly at that, accepted the conventional estimate of Jesus and enlarged upon it. Jesus is ent.i.tled to all the praise which is due him, but it must first be shown that in praising him we are not sacrificing the truth.
Praising any man at such a cost is merely flattering the ma.s.ses and bowing to the fas.h.i.+on of the day.
Let us hear what Professor Adler has to say about Jesus. He writes:
It has been said that if Christ came to New York or Chicago, they would stone him in the very churches. It is not so! If Christ came to New York or Chicago, the publicans and sinners would sit at his feet!
For they would know that he cared for them better than they in their darkness knew how to care for themselves, and they would love him as they loved him in the days of yore.
This would sound pious in the mouth of a Moody or a Torrey, but, we confess, it sounds like affectation in the mouth of the free thinking son of a rabbi. That Prof. Adler enters here into a field for which his early Jewish training has not fitted him, is apparent from the hasty way in which he has put his sentences together. ”It has been said,” he writes, ”that if Christ came to New York or Chicago, they would stone him in the very churches. It is not so.” Why is it not so?
And he answers: ”If Christ came to New York or Chicago, the publicans and sinners would sit at his feet.” But what has the reception which publicans and sinners might give Jesus to do with how _the churches_ would receive him? He proves that Jesus would not be stoned in the churches of New York and Chicago by saying that the ”publicans and sinners would sit at his feet.” Does he mean that ”New York and Chicago churches” and ”publicans and sinners” are the same thing?
”Publicans and sinners” might welcome him, and still the churches might stone him, which in fact, according to Adler's own admission, was the case in Jerusalem, where the synagogues conspired against Jesus, while Mary Magdalene sat at his feet. Nor are his words about ”the publicans and sinners loving Jesus as they loved him in the days of yore” edifying. Who does he mean by the ”publicans and sinners,” and how many of them loved Jesus in the days of yore, and why should this cla.s.s of people have felt a special love for him?
On the question of the resurrection of Jesus, Prof. Adler says this:
”It is sometimes insinuated that the entire Christian doctrine depends on the accounts contained in the New Testament, purporting that Jesus actually rose on the third day and was seen by his followers; and that if these reports are found to be contradictory, unsupported by sufficient evidence, and in themselves incredible, then the bottom falls out of the belief in immortality as represented by Christianity.”
It was the Apostle Paul himself who said that ”if Jesus has not risen from the dead, then is our faith in vain,--and we are, of all men, most miserable.” So, you see, friend Adler, it is not ”sometimes insinuated,” as you say, but it is openly, and to our thinking, logically a.s.serted, that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, the whole fabric of Christian eschatology falls to the ground. But we must remember that Prof. Adler has not been brought up a Christian. He has acquired his Christian predilections only recently, so to speak, hence his unfamiliarity with its Scriptures. Continuing, the Professor says:
”But similar reports have arisen in the world time and again, apparitions of the dead have been seen and have been taken for real; and yet such stories, after being current for a time, invariably have pa.s.sed into oblivion. Why did this particular story persist, despite the paucity and the insufficiency of the evidence? Why did it get itself believed and take root?”
What shall we think of such reasoning from the platform of a presumable rationalist movement? Does not the Professor know that the story of the resurrection of Jesus is not original, but a repet.i.tion of older stories of the kind? Had the world never heard of such after- death apparitions before Jesus' day, it would never have invented the story of his resurrection. And how does the Professor know that the story of Jesus' resurrection is not going to meet the same fate which has overtaken all other similar stories? Is it not already pa.s.sing into the shade of neglect? Are not the intelligent among the Christians themselves beginning to explain the resurrection of Jesus allegorically, denying altogether that he rose from the dead in a literal sense? Moreover, the pre-Christian stories of similar resurrections lived to an old age,--two or three thousand years--before they died, and the story of Jesus' resurrection has yet to prove its ability to live longer. All miraculous beliefs are disappearing, and the story of the Christian resurrection will not be an exception. But Prof. Adler's motive in believing that the story of the resurrection of Jesus shall live, is to offer it as an argument for immortality, and in so doing he strains the English language in lauding Jesus. He says:
”In my opinion, people believed in the resurrection of Jesus because of the precedent conviction in the minds of the disciples that such a man as Jesus could not die, because of the conviction that a personality of such superlative excellence, so radiant, so incomparably lofty in mien and port and speech and intercourse with others, could not pa.s.s away like a forgotten wind, that such a star could not be quenched.”
We regret to say that there are as many a.s.sumptions in the above sentence as there are lines in it. Of course, if we are for emotionalism and not for exact and accurate conclusions, Adler's estimate of Jesus is as rhetorical as that of Jones or Boyle, but if we have any love for historical truth, there is not even the shadow of evidence, for instance, that the disciples could not believe ”that such a man as Jesus could die.” On the contrary, the disciples left him at the cross and fled, and believed him dead, until it was reported to them that he had been seen alive, and even then ”some doubted,” and one wished to feel the flesh with his fingers before he would credit his eyes. Jesus had to eat and drink with them, he had to ”open their eyes,” and perform various miracles before they would believe that he was not dead. The text which says that the apostles hesitated to believe in the resurrection because ”as yet they knew not the scripture, that he would rise from the dead,” shows conclusively how imaginary is the idea that there was a ”precedent conviction” in the minds of the disciples that such a man as Jesus could not die.
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