Chapter XV · THE METHOD OF M. LOISY
Reading edition
Turning away, so to speak, to the Gentiles, we concentrate our case in countering that of the “emancipated” defenders of the historicity of the Founder, as put by M. Loisy, the equal of any of the German or English professionals in scholarly competence, and the superior of some of them in candour. Precisely because Catholicism yields least preparation for the work of critical science, one who slowly makes his way out of it into the “liberal” position is reasonably to be credited with a special capacity for the task. And he is on the whole the most useful theorist for the purposes of the “liberal” school, inasmuch as he is prepared to give up many documentary items to which others needlessly cling. Nonetheless, M. Loisy is a confident champion of the historicity of the gospel Jesus. He does not indeed combine his summary presentment of his case with a discussion of the myth theory—that he is content to put aside in mass with the epithet “superficial”; but he puts his own construction all the more unreservedly.
It is interesting to note his certitudes. No one of his school, perhaps, has more frequently claimed indubitability on points of inference. For instance:—
The advent of Jesus in the time of the procurator Pontius Pilate is a fact as certain as a thousand other facts on the subject of which no one dreams of raising the slightest suspicion; it is not doubtful that he announced the speedy coming of the kingdom of God ... since that idea ... which is the fundamental idea of the preaching of Christ in the synoptics, was incontestably that of his first disciples and Paul....
Great as are the real obscurities of the evangelical history, they are less numerous than they seem, and without doubt also less considerable on the important points.
Paul ... does not say that Jesus predicted his death and resurrection. He does not even say what was the ground for his execution; but it does not seem doubtful that this ground was precisely the announcement of that kingdom of God which the apostles and Paul himself preached.
Paul and the other apostles practised exorcisms in the name of Jesus on certain patients. It is told that Jesus had done the same, and without doubt he had really done it, with still more assurance and more success than his disciples.
He [Jesus] without doubt never frequented the schools of the rabbins.
His family was certainly pious.
One fact is certain, that a seizure was concerted of which he [Judas] was the principal agent.
It was without doubt arranged [at the house of the high priest at earliest daylight] that they should content themselves with denouncing the Galilean prophet to the Roman authority.
Without doubt he [Jesus] expected to his last moment the succour which only death could bring him.
It is certainly brief; but that is because he is content to say only what he thinks there is to say, whereas his predecessors were at more or less pains to embed the thin thread of biography in a large mat of non-biographical material. M. Loisy seems to have become a little confused in the process of prefixing a critical introduction to three chapters of the former introduction to his commentary on the synoptics. “The present little book,” he writes, “does not pretend to be that history which it is impossible to recover.” Naturally not. But it proffers a Life of Jesus all the same.
And so it goes on. “What appears most probable” is that Jesus had already “passed some time in solitude. A time of reflection and of preparation was indispensable between the life of the carpenter and the manifestation of the preacher of the evangel. Pushed to the desert by the sentiment of his vocation, Jesus was bound (devait) to be pursued by a more and more clear consciousness of that vocation.” Thus M. Loisy can after all expand his sources. It was after the imprisonment of the Baptist that Jesus felt he “was to replace him, and by the better title because he felt himself predestined to become the human chief of the Kingdom, there to fill the function of Messiah.” But “almost in spite of himself” he worked miracles. From his first stay at Capernaum the sick were brought to him to heal; and, fearing that the thaumaturg might hurt the preacher of the Kingdom, he left the place, only to be followed up and forced to make cures. “He operated with a peculiar efficacy on the category of patients supposed to be specially possessed by the demon.... He spoke to them with authority, and calm returned, at least for a time, to those troubled and unquiet souls.” As to the greater cures, M. Loisy observes that “perhaps” there was ascribed to the healer the revivification of a dead maiden. On the instantaneous cures of lepers and the blind he naturally says nothing whatever.
The dilemma of M. Loisy here recalls that of Professor Schmiedel over the same problem. The latter, claiming that it would be “difficult to deny” healing powers to Jesus, in view of the testimonies, is fain to argue that the Healer’s personal claim (Mt. xi, 5; Lk. vii, 22; not in Mk.) to have healed the sick, the blind, the deaf, the lepers, and raised the dead, meant only a spiritual ministration, inasmuch as the claim concludes: “the poor also have the Gospel preached to them.” On this view the assumed healing power really counts for nothing; and the last clause, which Schmiedel contends would be an anti-climax if the healings were real, becomes absolutely an anti-climax of the most hopeless kind. One day men will dismiss such confusions by noting that the theory of spiritual healing, an attempt to evade the mass of miracle, is only miracle-mongering of another kind. Are we to take it that regeneration of the morally dead, deaf, blind, and leprous is to be effected wholesale by a little preaching? Did the Christian community then consist wholly or mainly of these?
M. Loisy, committing himself to some acts of healing where Schmiedel, after accepting the general claim, commits himself to none, balances vaguely between acts of faith-healing so-called and cures of sheer insanity, and accepts the tradition of
M. Loisy, it will be observed, here assumes that we are dealing with real cures, and tacitly rejects the qualifying clauses in Mark vi, 5, and Matthew xiii, 58, as he well may. They are indeed stamped with manipulation. “He could there do no mighty work save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk and healed them,” says the first; “he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief,” says the other. Such passages raise in an acute form the question how any statement in the Gospels can reasonably be taken as historical. What were the alleged mighty works done elsewhere save acts of healing the sick? And how many cases for such healing would naturally be presented by one small hamlet? If, again, all the healings were spiritual, what are we left with beyond the truism that sinners who did not believe were unbelieving?
As the modifications produce pure counter-sense, it is critically permissible to surmise that they were lacking in the first copies, and were inserted merely to guard against profane cavils. But as the whole episode is found only in Matthew and Mark, it cannot figure in Dr. Petrie’s Nucleus; and for similar reasons it is absent from the Primitive Gospel of the school of Bernhard Weiss. M. Loisy, recognizing that it is the kind of item that Luke would avoid for tactical reasons, is loyal enough to accept it as historical without the modifying words, and seeks no better explanation than that given in the cited words of Jesus.
For those who aim at a rational comprehension of the documents, the critical induction is that the story was inserted for a reason; and the explanation which satisfies M. Loisy is so ill-considered that it only emphasizes the need. A prophet is likely to be looked at askance by his own people: yes, if he be an unimpressive one; but upon what critical principles is M. Loisy entitled to assume, as he constantly does, that the historic Jesus made a profound and ineffaceable impression upon all who came in contact with him, from the moment of his call to his disciples, and that nevertheless he had not made the slightest impression of superiority upon his own kinsmen and fellow-villagers, up to the age of thirty? How can such propositions cohere? Jesus has only to leave Nazareth and to command men to follow him, in order to be reverently recognized as a Superman: for M. Loisy, it is his mere personality that creates the faith which, after his death, makes his adherents proclaim him as a re-arisen God. Is this the kind of personality that in an eastern village would be known merely as that of “the carpenter,” or the carpenter’s son?
M. Loisy, it is true, claims that Jesus had needed a period of solitude and meditation in the desert to make him a teacher, thus partly implying that before that experience the destined prophet might not be recognizable as such. But is it a historic proposition that the short time of solitude had worked a complete transformation? Was a quite normal or commonplace personality capable of such a transfiguration in a natural sense? That the critic had not even asked himself the question is made plain by his complete failure to raise the cognate question in regard to the marvellous healing powers with which he unhesitatingly credits the teacher, on the strength of the wholly supernaturalist testimony of the Gospels. These powers, according to M. Loisy, were also the instantaneous result of the short period of solitude in the desert. What pretensions can such a theory make to be in conformity with historical principles? Cannot M. Loisy see that he has only been miracle-mongering with a difference?
It is bad enough that we should be asked to take for granted, on the strength of a typically Eastern record of wholesale thaumaturgy, a real “natural” gift for healing a variety of nervous disorders. But a natural gift of such a kind at least presupposes some process of development. M. Loisy obliviously asks us to believe that all of a sudden a man who had throughout his life shown no abnormal powers or qualities whatever, began to exercise them upon the largest scale almost immediately after he had left his native village. Now, whatever view be taken of the cynical formula that a prophet has no honour in his own village, it is idle to ask us to believe that a great healer has none. The local healer of any sort has an easy opening; and the redacted Gospels indicate uneasy recognition of the plain truth that Jesus needed only to heal the sick at Nazareth as elsewhere to conquer unbelief. It was precisely the cures that, in the Gospel story, had won him fame in the surrounding country. M. Loisy has merely burked the problem.
Before such problems, the method of “liberal” accommodation here as always breaks down. To the eye of the evolutionist there is no great mystery. The avowal that the Founder either could not or did not work wonders at Nazareth might serve any one of several conceivable purposes. It might meet the cavils of those who in a later day found and said that nothing was known at Nazareth of a wonder-working Jesus who had dwelt there; even as the often-repeated story of the command to healed persons to keep silence could avail to turn the attacks of investigating doubters in regard to the miraculous cures. Or it might serve either to impugn the pretensions of those who at one stage of the movement called themselves “Nazarenes” in the sense of followers of the man of Nazareth, or to include the birthplace with the family and the disciples in that disparagement of the Jewish surroundings which would arise step for step with the spread of the Gentile movement. Any of these explanations is reasonable beside the thesis that a man gifted with marvellous healing powers, suddenly developed without any previous sign of them, could either find no one in his own village to let him try them, or to recognize them even when applied there, while the country round about, ex hypothesi, was ringing with his fame. And the criticism which puts us off with such solutions is really not well entitled to impute “superficiality” to those who reject it.
Holding by that assumption, M. Loisy is forced to violent measures to reconcile the isolated Marcan mention of “the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon” with the repeated mentions in the closing chapters of (1) “Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses and Salome; who when he was in Galilee followed [Jesus] and ministered unto him”; (2) “Mary the mother of Joses”; and (3) “Mary the mother of James and Salome.” In these closing chapters this Mary the mother of James and Joses and Salome figures first as simply one who followed and ministered to Jesus, then as the mother of Joses, then as the mother of James and Salome, but never as the mother of Jesus. By what right does M. Loisy extract his certitude from the prior text?
To the faithful critic there is only one course open. He is bound to conclude that the passage in chapter vi is a late interpolation, the work of an inventor who had perhaps either accepted or anticipated the Johannine record that Mary the mother of Jesus was present at the crucifixion, but who did not—perhaps in his copy of Mark could not—completely carry out his purpose by making the Mary at the crucifixion the mother of the crucified Lord.
But if we give up the story of the Denial, how shall we retain those which exalt and glorify the Judaizing apostle? If we give up Matthew’s “rock” texts, with what consistency can we take as pure history the episode in Mark in which Peter, first of the twelve, declares “Thou art the Christ,” eliciting the charge to “tell no man of him,” followed by the prediction of death and resurrection, spoken “openly”? The episode in Mark passes into, and in Matthew is followed by, the fierce rebuke to the expostulating Peter, “Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men”—a strange sequel to Matthew’s “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in Heaven.”
This is one of the passages that force the conclusion either that “Mark” had before him the fuller record, in “Matthew” or elsewhere, and turned it from a Petrine to an anti-Petrine purpose, or that a redactor did so. There is no escape from the evidence that we are dealing with two sharply conflicting constructions. The “Blessed art thou” passage and the “Satan” passage will not cohere. Which came first? Had “Luke” either before him? His “Get thee behind me, Satan” (iv, 8; A.V.), addressed to the devil in the Temptation, is ejected from the revised text as being absent from most of the ancient codices; and its presence in the Alexandrine suggests an attempt to get in somewhere a saying which otherwise had no place in the third Gospel. The absence alike of the blessing and the aspersion on Peter sets up the surmise that both are quite late, and that the insertion of one elicited the other.