The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity

VII.

THE LAST GOSPEL

The author of the fourth Gospel is unknown, but it is incredible that this wonderful book, wonderful for finish of literary execution as well as for vigor of intellectual conception, was written by a Galilean fisherman; a man of brooding and morbid disposition, whose intemperate zeal earned for him the title "son of thunder;" who, according to Luke, proposed to call down fire from heaven to consume certain Samaritans that declined to receive the master; who, according to the same authority, rebuked certain others that conjured by the Christ's name, but did not join his company; who, through his mother, asked for one of the best seats in the "kingdom;" a man who was most intimately associated with the James described in a former chapter; a man who late in life, had a reputation for intolerance which started a tradition of him to the effect that being in the public bath, and seeing enter the heretic Cerinthus, he rushed out, calling on all others to follow, if they would not be overwhelmed by the ruin such a blasphemer would pull down on their heads. All the traditions respecting John are to the same purport; his constant association with James and Peter, both disciples of the narrowest creed; his advocacy of chiliasm, the doctrine of the millennial reign of a thousand years, as testified to by Ephesian presbyters on the authority of Irenæus; the description of him, reported by Eusebius, as a "high priest wearing the mitre," standing in the order of succession therefore as a hierarch of the ancient dispensation, a churchman maintaining the ancient symbolical rites.

That such a composition as the fourth Gospel was written by such a man, in his old age too, the laws of literary criticism cannot admit. To the present writer the ungenuineness of the fourth Gospel has for several years seemed as distinctly proved as any point in literary criticism can be. To maintain the Johannean origin of the book, it must be assumed that the apostle lived to an extreme old age, nearly double the full three score years and ten allotted to mankind; that his entire nature changed in the interval between his youth and his senility; that, without studying in the schools, he became a profound adept in speculative philosophy; and that by the same miraculous bestowment, he acquired a skill in letters surpassing that of any in his generation, far surpassing that of Paul, who was an educated man, and completely casting into the shade Philo, the best scholar of a former era. All this, too, must be assumed, for there is not a fragment of the evidence to support the bold presumption of authorship.

The book belongs nearer to the middle than the beginning of the second century, and is the result of an attempt to present the Christ as the incarnate Word of God. The author is not obliged to go far to find his materials; they lie ready shaped to his hand in the writings of Philo and the Gnostics of his century. The thread of Hebrew tradition, has, by this time, become exceedingly thin; vestiges of the popular Jewish conception appear, but faintly, here and there. Nicodemus recognizes the divine character of the Christ by his power to work miracles. The Christ respects the tradition which accorded special privileges to the genuine "children of Abraham;" he declares to the woman of Samaria that "salvation is of the Jews;" he announces that eternal life consists in the knowledge of God, and the acceptance of his Son. Moses is said to have written of the Christ. Father Abraham rejoiced to see his day. Isaiah sang his glory, and spake of him. The brazen serpent is a type of his mission to deliver.

For the rest, the conceptions of deity, of providence, of salvation, of the eternal world, are quite different from the recognized Hebrew conceptions – the title given to God sixty times in the gospel, while the word "God," occurs less than twenty, is "Father," and this term is used, not in the sense of Matthew's "Our Father in Heaven," which describes the Old Testament Jehovah under his more amiable aspect, but rather as designating the abyss of potential being, as the term is employed in the trinitarian formula, in which the Godhead is broken up into three distinctions; the declaration "God is Spirit," or, as the language equally well permits, "Spirit is God," intimates that the individuality of God has disappeared, that the idea of deity has become intellectual. The one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm expresses perhaps as mystical an apprehension of God as the old Hebrew thought admits of, but that psalm retains the divine individuality; the limits are nowhere transgressed; it is a sympathetic, regardful eye that searches the secret place, and an attentive mind that notes the unarticulated thought. The intelligence loses no point of clearness in becoming penetrative. But in the fourth Gospel, the individuality is gone altogether. The Father "loveth," but with an abstract, impersonal sympathy; the Father "draweth," but with an organic, elemental attraction; the Father "hath life in himself," and hath given the Son to "have life in himself;" but neither the possession nor the communication of this power implies the bestowal of a concrete gift. The Father "judgeth no man, but hath given all judgment to the Son" – a phrase intimating that he had gone into retirement, had withdrawn from active interest in human concerns, had sunk into the depths of the Absolute. The expression "God is Spirit," taken alone, conveys no idea that is not contained in the Hebrew conception of the formless Jehovah; but when taken in connection with other expressions, it is seen to convey something more, and something different. The formless God may be strictly local; the "Spirit" is diffused.

In this book, the Christ takes the place of God, as the revealed or manifest God; he is the Logos, the incarnate word. "He was with God in the beginning." "All things were made by him." "In him was life, and the life was the light of men." "He hath life in himself." He is the only begotten son, who came down from heaven; he is in heaven. All judgment is committed to him; in him the divine glory is manifest; apart from him is no spiritual life; he is the vine, the door; he is the intercessor through whom prayer must be transmitted in order to be made availing.

The divine presence is taken out of nature, and transferred to the spiritual world; God is made ecclesiastical and dogmatic. Men are saved, not by natural piety and excellence, but by faith in the Christ as the Logos. The whole sum of Christianity is conveyed in this one position: the manifestation of the Divine Glory in the Only Begotten Son. This manifestation is of itself, the coming of salvation, the gift of God's life to mankind. By this, the Christ overcomes the powers of darkness and evil. He has come a light into the world; by him come grace and truth; to believe in him is a sign of God's working. He that cometh to him shall never hunger; he that believeth on him shall never thirst. It is enough that blind men believe; to die, believing in him, is to live; to live, believing in him, is to be saved from the power of death, and made immortal. To believe in him is the same thing as to believe in the Father. Not to believe in him, is to be consigned to spiritual death with sinners; to believe on the Son is to have everlasting life. This idea recurs with monotonous perseverance, some sixty times.

That this conception of the Christ is not original with our author has already been said many times. It had been in the world two hundred years before his day, and had worked its way into the substance of the later Jewish thought. The personification of the divine reason early occurred to the Jews who had been touched with the passion for speculation in the city of Alexandria. Long ago attention was called by Andrews Norton, among ourselves, to bold personifications of wisdom and the divine reason, in the Apocrypha of the Old Testament. "She is the breath of the power of God, a pure influence proceeding from the glory of the Almighty. She is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness." Chapters seven and eight of the Book of Wisdom contain an apotheosis of wisdom as the creative power. In the eighteenth chapter the imagery grows much stronger. "Thine almighty word leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne, as a fierce man-of-war into the midst of a land of destruction." The twenty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus is devoted to the same theme. The Word is described as a being: the first born of God; the active agent in creation; having its dwelling-place in Israel, its seat in the Law of Moses.

Philo pushes the speculation much further. The Logos is with him a most interesting subject of discourse, tempting him to wonderful feats of imagination. There is scarcely a personifying or exalting epithet that he does not bestow on the divine Reason. He describes it as a distinct being; calls it "A Rock," "The Summit of the Universe," "Before All Things," "First-begotten Son of God," "Eternal Bread from Heaven," "Fountain of Wisdom," "Guide to God," "Substitute for God," "Image of God," "Priest," "Creator of the Worlds," "Second God," "Interpreter of God," "Ambassador of God," "Power of God," "King," "Angel," "Man," "Mediator," "Light," "The Beginning," "The East," "The Name of God," "Intercessor." The curious on this subject may consult Lücke's Introduction to the Fourth Gospel, or Gfrörer's Philo, and he will be more than satisfied that the Logos of the fourth Gospel is the same as Philo's, and has the same origin.

Christian scholars who admit this have been anxious to break the force of the inference, by allowing the similarity of the conception and then supposing the evangelist to have stated the doctrine that he might stamp it as heresy. But he nowhere does stamp it as heresy. He puts it boldly on the front of his exposition and constructs his whole work in conformity with it. Instead of refuting it or denouncing it, he carries the idea out in all its applications, supplementing it with a completeness that Philo never thought of.

The Logos becomes a man; "is made flesh;" appears as an incarnation; in order that the God whom "no man has seen at any time," may be manifested. He has no parentage; is not born, even supernaturally; he passes through no childish passages; receives no nurture in a home; has no experience of growth or development. The incident of his baptism by John in the sacred river is carefully excluded, that whole episode, so important in the earliest narratives, being dismissed in the phrase, "Upon whom thou shalt see the spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he that baptizeth with the Holy Ghost." John says of him: "This is he that, coming after me, is preferred before me, for he existed before me." "I saw the spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him." "I knew him not, but came, baptizing with water, that he might be made manifest to Israel." "I am a voice crying in the desert." Every word negatives the notion that the Logos received consecration at the hands of a prophet of the old dispensation. He is pre-existent; he comes from heaven; he is full of grace and truth; of his fulness all have received, grace upon grace.

The temptation is omitted for the same reason. The divine word cannot, even in form, undergo the experience of moral discipline. The bare suggestion of evil taint is foreign to him. He must not come near enough to evil to repel it. A dramatic scene in Matthew represents the conflict between the Messiah and the Prince of the World; a conflict inconceivable in the case of a divine being who is, by nature, Lord of the entire spiritual universe, – whose mere appearance dispels the night.

Even the story of the transfiguration, which in some respects would seem admirably illustrative of the logos theory, is omitted, probably for the reason that Moses and Elias are the prominent personages in it.

As a thing of course, the agony in the garden of Gethsemane is unmentioned. A suggestion of it occurs in a previous chapter, (XII. 27), but in another connection, and for an opposite purpose, namely, to extort a tribute to the glory of the Logos.

The cross on which the Word is suspended, is transfigured into an elevation of honor. On it the Son of God endures no mortal agony; by it he is "lifted up" that he may "draw all men" unto him. His crucifixion is a consummation, a triumph. He mounts, shows himself, and vanishes away. The suffering is an appearance of suffering. The shame is turned to glory. The tormentors are agents in accomplishing a transformation. The god passes, without a groan or an expression of weakness; clear as ever in his perceptions, seeing his mother and the beloved disciple standing together, he says: "woman, behold thy son; son, behold thy mother." Knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, he said "I thirst;" having received the vinegar, he remarked "it is finished," bowed his head, and gave up the ghost. From his dead form issue streams of water and blood, a last sign, as the conversion of water into wine was the first, that the dispensation of Law, symbolized by John's water baptism, and the dispensation of the spirit symbolized by wine and by blood, were both completed in him.

The resurrection of the Christ is not described as the resurrection of a body, but as the apparition of a spiritual form. It is not recognized by Mary through any external resemblance to a former self, but through a spiritual impression; it stands suddenly before her, forbids her touch, is not palpable, and as suddenly disappears; the Logos ascends "to the Father;" returns, bringing the spirit that he had promised; enters the chamber where the disciples are gathered, the door being carefully closed from fear of the Jews, enters without opening the door, is visible for an instant, and is no more seen; re-enters for the purpose of giving palpable demonstration of his reality to the doubting Thomas, who, however does not accept it, receives the skeptic's homage and again disappears.

These apparitions and occultations are frequent in the gospel, the Christ's outward form being only a façade, removable at pleasure. The numerous comings and goings, hidings, disclosures, presences, absences, are accounted for on this supposition, better than on any other. He goes up to the feast at Jerusalem, not openly, but "as it were in secret," veiled, disguised. He comes before the crowd many of whom must have been familiar with his person, but is unrecognized; he discloses himself for a moment, speaks exciting words that raise a tumult, and then, at the height of the turmoil, becomes invisible. "They sought to take him; but no man laid hands on him, for his hour was not yet come." On a subsequent occasion his hearers, intensely aroused by his language, took up stones to cast at him; but he "hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by." His enemies sought to take him, but "he escaped out of their hands." Having spoken, he departs, and hides himself; but again, without apparently changing his locality or absenting himself for any period, he is again heard proclaiming his mission.

There is no history in this book. The incarnate Word can have no history. His career being theological, the events in it cannot be other than spectral. He is not in the world of cause and effect. His actions are phenomenal; the passages of his life do not open into one another, do not lead anywhere; nothing follows anything else, nothing moves; there is no progress towards development. The biography is a succession of scenes, a diorama. There are no sequences or consequences. Stones are taken up, but never thrown; hands are uplifted to strike, but no blow is delivered. The movement to arrest is never carried out. The miracles are not deeds of power or mercy, they are signs, thrown out to attract popular attention, demonstrations of the divine presence; sometimes merely symbolical foreshadowings or interpretations of speculative ideas, as in the case of the turning of water into wine at the "marriage feast;" the opening of the blind man's eyes, signifying that he was come a light into the world; the resurrection of Lazarus, a scenic commentary on the text, "I am the resurrection and the life." These are pictures not performances. None of them are mentioned in the earlier traditions, for the probable reason that they never occurred, never were rumored to have occurred. They were designed by the artist of the fourth Gospel, for his private gallery of illustrations. The artist was a Greek Jew who took Hebrew ideals for his models, but he was sometimes obliged to go far to find them. The hint for the conversion of the water into wine, may have come from the legends of Israelite sojourn in Egypt, where Moses, the first deliverer, turned water into blood, the mystical synonym of wine; Elisha may have furnished a study for the elaborate picture of the blind man's cure, and Isaiah may have supplied the motive for it, in his famous prophecy that the eyes of the blind shall be opened. The studies for the grand cartoon of Lazarus were made possibly while the artist mused over the stories of Elijah raising the son of the widow, or of Elisha reviving one already dead by mere contact with his bones.

In the veins of the Logos flows no passionate blood. His language is vehement, but suggests no corresponding emotion; the words are not vascular. Certain superficial peculiarities of these discourses are noticeable at once, their length, their stateliness, their absoluteness, their loud-voiced, declamatory character, their oracular tone. But little scrutiny is required to discover that they are monotones; that their theme is always the same, namely, the claims of the Christ; that they unfold no system of moral or spiritual teaching, proceed in no rational order, arrive at no conclusions; that they contain no arguments, answer no questions, meet no inquiring states of mind; that they resemble orations more than discourses of any other kind, but are unlike orations, in having neither beginning middle nor end, in quite lacking point and application, in proceeding no whither, in simply standing still and reiterating the same sublime abstractions, without regard to logical or rhetorical proprieties.

This being discovered, the conclusion follows swiftly, that the divine Logos could not discourse otherwise. His addresses, like his deeds, are designed to be revelations of himself; expressions, not of his thoughts, but of his being, not of his character, but of his nature. They are the Word made articulate, as his wonders are the Word made mighty, as his form is the Word made visible. A human being, seeking to convince, persuade, instruct mankind, will from necessity pursue a different course from the divine Reason presenting itself to "the world." Its very audiences are impersonal, consisting not of individuals or of parties, but of abstractions labelled "Jews," who come like shadows, so depart.

So unhuman is the Christ, so entirely without near relations with mankind, that when he has left the world, a substitute may be provided for him, in the shape of the Holy Spirit, another personality proceeding from him and his Father, and appointed to complete his work; to reprove the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment; to guide the disciples into all truth; to bring to their remembrance all that had been said to them; to comfort them, and abide with them for ever. The idea loses itself in vagueness at times, now being identified with the Christ, now appearing as a Spirit of Truth, now being an indwelling presence, now an effluence from the Logos. But all the while something like an individual consciousness is preserved; the spirit is as palpable as the Logos himself was. Here is already the germ of a trinity maturing within the bosom of the Hebrew monotheism. The process has been simple; the consecutive steps have been inevitable. But in the process the solid ground of Judaism has been left; the massive substance of the ancient faith has been melted into cloud.

How entirely nebulous it has become under the action of speculative mind is strikingly apparent on examination of the ethical characteristics of the fourth gospel. The concrete virtues of the ancient race, the honest human righteousness and charity have disappeared, and in their place are certain spectral "graces" which have quality of a technical, but little of a human sort. That, according to the Logos doctrine men are saved, not by natural goodness or piety but by faith in the Christ, is written all over the book. But this is not the point. It is not enough that character has no saving power, it is dispensed with; and instead of it, something is set up which possesses none of the elements of character. The compact principles of human duty which hold so large a place in the Old Testament scriptures, and are so essential in the earliest Messianic conception, are not found here, at all. The sermon on the mount is omitted. The beatitudes are unmentioned. The parables are not remembered. There is no chapter in the book that bears comparison in point of moral vigor or nobleness with the twelfth chapter of Romans, or the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians. Humanity has shrunk to the dimensions of an incipient Christendom. The men and women whom the Jesus of Matthew addresses, to whom Paul makes appeal, are men and women no more; not even Jews by race, not even a knot of radical Jews; they are "disciples," "believers," "brethren." Christians, not fellow men, are to love one another. "So shall ye be my disciples, if ye have love one for another." "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples." Of the broad human love, the recognition of brotherhood on the human ground, duty to love those who are not disciples, there is not a word. The common faith, not the common nature, is the bond. The promises in the fourteenth chapter, the warnings in the fifteenth, the counsel in the sixteenth, the consecration in the seventeenth are all for the believers, not for the doers; for the doers only so far as they are believers, and within the limits of the believing community. The tender word "love" shrinks to ecclesiastical proportions. "If a man love me he will keep my words; and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our abode with him;" but the words are not words of exhortation to practical righteousness, they are words of admonition against unbelief. "If ye love me, keep my commandments;" but the commandments are not the wholesome enactments of the Hebrew decalogue, but a bidding to "walk by the light while ye have the light," "to do the will of Him that sent me," which is "to believe on him whom He hath sent." "He that believeth not is condemned already in his not believing in the only begotten Son of God." There is no sweeter word than "love;" there is no more comprehensive law than the law of love; but when love is changed from a virtue to a sentiment, and when the duty of practising it is limited to members of a doctrinal communion, the practical issue is more likely to be sectarian narrowness than human fellowship.

As the speculation rises the spectral character of the morality becomes more startling. The so-called epistles of John carry the Logos idea considerably further than the gospel does. The mission of the Logos is more sharply discriminated. He is described as a sin offering. "He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin." "He was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him is no sin." The word "manifested" is the key to the doctrine. "The Son of God was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil." It is the same conception as in the gospel; the Prince of Light confronting the Prince of Darkness, shaming him and attracting away his subjects. The anti-Christ now comes into view; the sin unto death is named; the second advent is announced, though not according to the millennial anticipations of a former day. "He that denieth that Jesus is the Christ is a liar." "Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God." "Every spirit which confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God." Belief or unbelief in the incarnation of the Logos is made the test of one's spiritual relationship, marking him as a candidate for eternal felicity in the realm of the blessed, or as a victim of endless misery in the realm of Satan. Thus the very heart of natural goodness is eaten out. Of virtue there remains small trace. A great deal of very strong language is used about sin, but sins are not particularized. Sin, as an abstraction, a principle, a power, a force, a deep seated taint in the nature, ineradicable except by the infusion of a new spirit of life, is represented as the dreadful thing; and Love, another abstraction, is raised to honor as a spiritual grace, equally unconnected with the human will. "Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is Love." The words have a deep and tender sound. But the consideration that "the beloved" are those only who confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, that all others are the reverse of "beloved," causes that neither the depth nor the sweetness remains. The love does not mean compassion, or pity, or good-will, or helpfulness; it has no reference to the poor, the needy, the sick, sorrowful, wicked; it has no downward look, is destitute of humility, is as far as can well be from the love described by Paul in his perfect lyric. It is, we may say, the opposite of that, being a quality that distinguishes the elect from the non-elect, and makes their special election the more sure.