On the Prospects of Christianity: Bernard Shaw's Preface to Androcles and the LionShaw, Bernard
Religion
On the Prospects of Christianity: Bernard Shaw's Preface to Androcles and the Lion
Shaw, Bernard
Christianity; Essays; Prefaces
Matthew then tells how after three days an angel opened the family vault
of one Joseph, a rich man of Arimathea, who had buried Jesus in it,
whereupon Jesus rose and returned from Jerusalem to Galilee and resumed
his preaching with his disciples, assuring them that he would now be
with them to the end of the world. At that point the narrative abruptly
stops. The story has no ending.
DATE OF MATTHEW'S NARRATIVE.
One effect of the promise of Jesus to come again in glory during the
lifetime of some of his hearers is to date the gospel without the aid
of any scholarship. It must have been written during the lifetime of
Jesus's contemporaries: that is, whilst it was still possible for the
promise of his Second Coming to be fulfilled. The death of the last
person who had been alive when Jesus said "There be some of them that
stand here that shall in no wise taste death till they see the Son
of Man coming in his kingdom" destroyed the last possibility of the
promised Second Coming, and bore out the incredulity of Pilate and the
Jews. And as Matthew writes as one believing in that Second Coming,
and in fact left his story unfinished to be ended by it, he must have
produced his gospel within a lifetime of the crucifixion. Also, he must
have believed that reading books would be one of the pleasures of the
kingdom of heaven on earth.
CLASS TYPE OF MATTHEW'S JESUS
One more circumstance must be noted as gathered from Matthew. Though he
begins his story in such a way as to suggest that Jesus belonged to the
privileged classes, he mentions later on that when Jesus attempted to
preach in his own country, and had no success there, the people said,
"Is not this the carpenter's son?" But Jesus's manner throughout is that
of an aristocrat, or at the very least the son of a rich bourgeois, and
by no means a lowly-minded one at that. We must be careful therefore
to conceive Joseph, not as a modern proletarian carpenter working for
weekly wages, but as a master craftsman of royal descent. John the
Baptist may have been a Keir Hardie; but the Jesus of Matthew is of the
Ruskin-Morris class.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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