Note 13 — Chapter XVII · THE JESUS-FIGURE OF M. LOISY

Thus, as regards the Sermon on the Mount, the act of collecting a number of ethical precepts and maxims from the current literature and lore of one’s people and curtly enouncing them, without development, is a proof of supreme moral originality, and is to be regarded as opposing the voice of one’s conscience to tradition. Had the rabbis, then, no conscience? Was their ethic a mere tradition, even when they gave out or originated the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount? Was Hillel but a mouth-piece of the law? M. Loisy must in justice pardon us for avowing that so far he has but duplicated a worn-out paralogism, and that he has evaded the plain documentary fact that the Sermon is a literary compilation,13 and not a discourse at all.