Chapter XVII · THE JESUS-FIGURE OF M. LOISY

It is the same, finally, with the story of the original evangel as with the story of the tragedy; M. Loisy fails to come within sight of historicity in the one case as in the other. Having fallen back on the thesis, so popularized by Renan, that faith in the necessary resurrection of the Messiah created the legend of the empty tomb and the divine apparitions, he proceeds to formulate the Teaching which had created the faith. The historic creed of Christianity is thus figured as a pyramid poised on the apex of a hallucination; but we are assured that the hallucination resulted from the greatness of the Personality of the slain Teacher.

Concerning the nullity of the original evangel he is quite unwittingly explicit when he is resisting the myth theory; albeit in the act of contradicting himself:—

So that the doctrine of an immortal or resurrected Christ was the sole doctrine of the Apostles. There was no other evangel. And this doctrine, which had just been declared to be born of the personal impression made by Jesus on his followers, is also the doctrine of Paul, who had never seen Jesus.

Thus helped to a definite conception, we turn to the ethic, which we have seen to be in the main a compilation from Jewish literature. This fact M. Loisy admits, only to deny that it has any significance:—

At other junctures M. Loisy is ready to see how the doctrines of sections and movements in the later Christian Church were introduced into the Gospels. He will not admit of such an explanation here. Does he then see a supreme moral inspiration in the Montanists and other Christian sectaries who set their faces against the sexual instinct? Has he forgotten the text in Malachi (ii, 14–16), vetoing a heartless divorce? And has he never heard of the saying of Rabbi Eliezer, echoed elsewhere in the Talmud, that the altar sheds tears over him who puts away his first wife? Is the moral originality of the Gospel teaching to be established by merely ignoring all previous teaching to the same effect?

Such teaching is, in point of fact, quite undeserving of praise for “spirituality,” inasmuch as it in effect recommends benevolence as a way of securing eternal life. He who succours the distressed on the motive so supplied is plainly a long way below the Good Samaritan or the simple compassionate human being of everyday life. But this is really the ground-note of all the Gospel ethic. The Beatitudes are promises of compensatory bliss; and, indeed, in a system which founds upon immortality there is no escape from this kind of motivation. The Pagan appeal, made alternately to nobleness and to concern for good repute among one’s fellows, is clearly on the higher plane, and would tend to maintain, so far as mere moral appeal can, a nobler type of human being. It is not even clear, in the light of the general Judaism of the doctrine of the Kingdom, whether “one of these my brethren” can mean more than “one of the faith.”

Well may M. Loisy say that the episode is a thing “found ready made”; it has certainly no place in the original document. But it was “made” by a later hand, and it was inserted either by him who made it or by him who “found” it. It is the work of a Gentilizer, aiming at Jewish priests and Levites, and in a less degree at the scribes, whom he treats as comparatively open to instruction. It is part of the Gentilizing propaganda which evolved the story of the mission of the Seventy, and it is naturally inserted after that episode. But to admit that to be a work of redaction and to call the parable a genuine Jesuine utterance is only to give one more distressing illustration of the common collapse of the simplest principles of documentary criticism under the sway of conservative prepossession. M. Loisy retains the parable of the Good Samaritan as Jesuine simply because he feels that to abandon it is to come near making an end of the claim for the moral originality of the Gospels. It is probably from a Gentile hand, though it may conceivably have come from an enlightened Jew.