The Historical Jesus: A Survey of PositionsRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Jesus Christ -- Historicity; Jesus Christ -- Rationalistic interpretations
M. Loisy in turn blenches at a claim in which "raising the dead"
figures as a customary thing, with cures of leprosy and blindness;
and he too falls back on the "spiritual" interpretation, [142] failing
to note the flat fallacy of making the preaching to the poor at once
a contrast and a climax to the spiritual healings, which also, on
the hypothesis, are precisely matters of preaching. The Teacher is
made to say: "I raise the spiritually dead, and cure the spiritually
leprous, deaf, and blind, by preaching to them: to the poor I just
preach." Schmiedel does not see that the preaching of the Gospel to
the poor is added as the one thing that could be said to be done for
them, who would otherwise have had no benefit; and that on his own
view he ought to treat this as a late addition. On the contrary, he
insists that the "evangelists" could not have thought of adding it;
and that it makes an excellent climax if we take the healings to be
purely spiritual.
The rational argument would be, of course, that the first writer did
make the Lord talk figuratively; and that a later redactor, taking
the words literally, added the item of the poor, which he could not
have done if he took them figuratively. But the irreducible fallacy is
the assumption that as a figurative claim the speech is historic, one
order of miracle being held allowable when another is not. Schmiedel
has exemplified his own saying that "with very few exceptions all
critics fall into the very grave error of immediately accepting a
thing as true as soon as they have found themselves able to trace
it to a 'source'." [143] It does not in the least follow that by
substituting spiritual for physical miracle we acquire a right to
claim historicity. And by the claim we simply cancel the "fame"
of the records.
M. Loisy, committing himself to some acts of healing where Schmiedel,
after accepting the general claim, commits himself to none, balances
vaguely between acts of faith-healing so-called and cures of sheer
insanity, and accepts the tradition of
an unfruitful point at Nazareth. [144] "A prophet is not without
honour, save in his own country and among his own kin, and in
his own house," Jesus had said before the disdainful astonishment
of his fellow-citizens and the incredulity of his family; and he
could work no miracle in that place.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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