Note 7 — Chapter VI · THE ART OF CRITICISM
Reading edition
Why turn God Jeshua into a man at all And granted that the Nazarenes, in their anxiety to be parabolical and misunderstood of their readers, wrote Jews when they meant Pagans, was it necessary in the interests of their monotheistic crusade to nickname their One God Jesus, to represent him as a man and a carpenter, with brothers and sisters, and a mother that did not believe in him; as a man who was a Jew with the prejudices of a Jew, a man circumcised and insisting that he came not to destroy the law of Moses, but to fulfil it; as a man who was born like other men of a human father and mother; was crucified, dead and buried; whose disciples and Galilean companions, when in the first flush of their grief they heard from Mary Magdalene the strange story of his first appearing to her after death, still “disbelieved”?7