Modern Skepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society
Religion
Modern Skepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society
Church of England; Skepticism; Skepticism -- Controversial literature
Let us observe the steps of the process by which the metamorphose
must have been effected. It is, say my opponents, very uncertain
whether the historic Jesus ever attempted to perform a miracle. But
according to the conceptions of the times, His followers thought that
the Messiah ought to have performed them. To supply the defect, they
invented a mass of miraculous stories, and in their fond credulity
thought that Jesus had actually performed them, and thus the delusion
of His miraculous wonder-working was propagated in the Church. But all
experience proves that mythic and legendary miracles are grotesque. Yet
those in the Gospels are all sober ones, and stamped with a high moral
tone. They must therefore have undergone a succession of developments
before they could have assumed their present form. Still a Jewish
Messiah has yet to be transformed into the Jesus of the Evangelists.
After a while a happy thought occurs to these uninstructed Jews. They
determine to invest the Teacher with whom they had habitually conversed
with a character at once divine and human. The mythic faculty is
again invoked, and the human Jesus, by the aid of development after
development, gradually assumes the aspect of the divine Christ. In
a similar manner they feel that the moral aspect of the Messiah of
their fondest expectations must undergo a change, and in due time the
triumphant King becomes the meek and the lowly Jesus, and the morality
of Pharisaism becomes that of the New Testament.
Few persons are at all aware of the enormous difficulties which would
have beset any persons who, whether consciously or unconsciously, set
themselves to metamorphise a Jew of the year 30 into the Christ of
the Gospels. Familiarity with the character induces numbers to think
that poets or fabulists, inventors of myths and legends, might easily
have created it. To form a correct estimate of the difficulty, it is
necessary to transport ourselves out of the nineteenth century into the
Jewish atmosphere of thought and feeling of the century which preceded
the Advent. A starting-point it must have had. There could have been no
other than it.
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