Note 17 — Chapter XVII · THE JESUS-FIGURE OF M. LOISY

But it is hardly necessary thus to revert to the question of the ethical originality of the Gospel teaching: the essential issue here is the impossible combination presented to us by M. Loisy as his historical Jesus. Without any sign of misgiving he offers us the figure of a mystic awaiting the imminent end of the old order of things and the substitution of a new and heavenly order, doubled with a moralist deeply preoccupied over certain details of the vanishing life and a prescription for their regulation in the future in which they were not to exist. M. Loisy is, indeed, liable to be censured by the orthodox and the “liberals” alike for his explicit avowal that “It is very superfluous to seek in the Gospel a doctrine of social economy, or even a program of moral conduct for individual existences which were to go on according to the order of nature, in the indefinite sequence of humanity.”17 This seems to overlook the passage (Mt. xxv, 34–46) in which eternal life is promised to those who succour the distressed. Such a rule for conduct does seem to indicate some regard for the continuance of life on the normal lines. It is, we know, a simple adaptation from the ritual of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but it has had from many commentators even such praise for “originality” as M. Loisy has bestowed on the Teaching in general.