Seeing Jesus as One deflects Modern attempts to deconstruct Him

I AM scarcely exaggerating when I say that an incident, which I have related perhaps too often, came as a sort of revelation to me. A young chauffeur once asked me what I thought of Sunday cinemas. He approved of them; he had been to one, and seen a film representing the Life of Christ. "If I'd not been to that cinema," said he, "I might not so much as have heard of Jesus Christ." "Jack," I said, "how is that possible? You're 22!" Well, his parents had died when he was a child; the Board School hadn't mentioned Jesus Christ; the garage assuredly had not taught him about that Life. At 22 the lad knew nothing of our Lord. "Why," I added, "do you use His name so much to swear by then?" "Why," he retorted, "does your sort say By Jove?" "I don't know; they don't mean anything particular by it." "No more do I," he answered, "when I says Christ."

It would be out of place were I to insist on the appalling nemesis that has befallen Britain which claimed, once, to have restored the pure Gospel, to have re-established the rule of the One Mediator, and has now lost Gospel alike and knowledge of its Savior. No one, I fancy, will maintain we are any more a Bible-reading nation.

At least, the Bible-Christian of an earlier generation knew much about our Lord, His words and works, His lovableness. The heavy-burdened knew they could turn to Him; they went, and He gave them rest. In a thousand ways the Church has ever kept Christ and Christian intimately linked; super-eminently, by the Communion of His Real Presence in the Eucharist. But through the Gospels we at least learn about Him, and that is why no Congress like this one could dream of omitting to speak of the Person of Jesus Christ, of whom the Old Testament prophesied, towards whom the New looks back, union through whom with God is the aim and scope of divine Revelation.

Thirty, or even twenty, even ten, years ago, the writer of a paper such as this might have felt more seriously embarrassed than I need -- embarrassed, at any rate, for at least two reasons which are no more so cogent, if at all.

Today we can safely say that the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth is outside dispute. Even before the nineteenth century, Dupuis and Volney asserted that the gospels were a mere tissue of astral myths, symbols, allegories. They possessed no historical foundation in a human life. These men were grotesquely unscientific: but while Bruno Bauer saw in Christ merely an ideal figure, a sort of visionary "anti-Caesar" created by the social misery of the underclasses in the Greco-Roman world, he seemingly supported his thesis with scientific argument. Kalthoff also argued that the person of Jesus was a literary fiction created to support an ideal conception of "Christ," the King needed to be head of a longed-for Kingdom; J. M. Robertson supposed Him to have been the hero of a semi-pagan, semi-Jewish miracle-play; Jensen considered the Gospels to be a Judaised version of the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh; B. Smith and A. Drews thought that the stories about Jesus were invented to consolidate a mystical faith in Christ, and so on. Erbt regarded the Gospels as a solar myth; and Niemojewski perceived that in Matthew Christ is a solar deity, in Luke a lunar deity, that Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, Herodias and Salome are the constellations of Aquarius, Scorpio, Cassiopeia and Andromeda respectively, and that the Cross is the Milky Way. I have chosen these names to show how this school has toppled over into nonsense; I need scarcely refer you to M. J. Lagrange's Sens du Christianisme (translated into English by Dr. W. S. Reilly, S.S.) for the refutation of all this, when M. Guignebert, an extreme rationalist, has, in his Probleme de Jesus, made us realize that criticism is not likely to pursue this path. The future need not trouble itself over that problem.

What has ruined so much of this sort of theorizing at the base is, partly, the tremendous swing-back of criticism in the matter of dating the Gospels, and of their authenticity. Doubtless this is in great measure due to Harnack; and the work he has done on the Lucan writings affects both Gospel and Acts; and though St. Matthew is still more disputed than St. Mark, and St. John than either, it remains that a Catholic, who would have looked a fool in learned eyes if, thirty years ago, he had maintained the traditional dates and authorships, can do so now and find himself practically coinciding with the conclusions of much independent scholarship. As for St. John, I will quote as symptomatic no more than that a sentence lately written by a reviewer of Bishop Gore's Epistles of St. John in the Oxford Magazine: "[the writer] is inclined to think that ... the Johannine authorship [will] become, like Bentley's digamma, no longer a prophetic vision, but a doctrine to be held by all sane men." If this holds for the Epistles, a fortiori it holds for the Gospel.

As for St. Paul, I have never been able to drive myself into that state of mind which accepts as his the four "great" epistles, Romans, Corinthians I and II, and Galatians, and rejects or doubts the others, especially Colossians, Philippians, or Ephesians. I feel with Dr. Headlam, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, that "Ephesians is Pauline through and through, and more even than Romans represents the deepest thoughts of the Apostles, and to [doubt its integrity] shows an incapacity to form a judgment of any value in critical matters."[1] So for the others.

As for the reliability of our New Testament, I consider that the different rationalist schools have defeated one another. Thus I think that the French schools, like Loisy's, however unsatisfactory in other ways, have at least discredited the sort of "liberal protestant pastor" whom Harnack, for example, sees to underlie the Gospel portrait of our Lord; and that Germany has disproved those of its own schools, and Loisy's school, who picture a merely eschatological Christ, a Jewish enthusiast expecting an imminent end to the world, preaching an interim religion and founding no Church which should outlast his generation. Many of the arguments which demolish the "mythical" explanation of Christ to which I alluded, defeat too the syncretist schools which imagine that Greek, Asiatic, Egyptian and other rituals and formulas conspired to create the infant Church, which proceeded then to reconstruct its historical memories of Jesus to suit itself. For a review of this situation I again recommend Lagrange's Sens du Christianisme.

St. Paul in particular I wish to emphasize as reliable. Not only he could proclaim, quite generally, that if he himself or an angel from heaven preached anything which did not coincide with what he always had preached, he must be held anathema, but you clearly see that at all points he had resort to the original apostles, men far less intellectual or imperial-minded than he, tested his own Gospel by theirs, checked it, was acknowledged as not deviating from it, and was commissioned by them to preach it. Throughout the New Testament, its authors and its heralds, there is spiritual and doctrinal solidarity; Paul is not against Peter, nor the Synoptists alien to St. John.

Our knowledge of Jesus must be the knowledge given by the New Testament, massively and as a whole.

Now taking the New Testament as a whole, it might be more scientific to display what was the faith preached to and believed by the earliest Church as deduced from the earliest documents, i.e. some of St. Paul's letters whether his earliest of all was Thessalonians or (vid. Westminster Version, Galatians) the Galatians. You would there see the whole Christian Faith of Trinity, Incarnation, Redemption, and the Church, not exactly codified and asserted as such, but what is far more significant, alluded to, almost en passant, as familiar and known. This is far better evidence for the universal Christian faith, as being something that can be presupposed and taken for granted, than any series of protests or new definitions. But I would rather outline the portrait of Christ as it first showed itself to His contemporaries, and study the documents which, if not as they stand the earliest, yet portray the earliest period, and do so with such simplicity, such coherence, such naiveness of realism yet transcendence of doctrine, as to make any unsophisticated reader certain that the picture is true to life.

The public life of Jesus began tacitly. The fierce ascetic Baptist cried aloud; the city thronged out to him. But mingled in the crowd, Christ came, indistinguishable. And when He began, in His turn, to preach, His message too seemed unoriginal -- the Coming of a Kingdom. It was the ancient Jewish hope; Christ, like any prophet, you would at first have said, is come -- is sent - has for His work to announce just that; and to that, sends those who group themselves around Him. But gradually, through the parables, through the discourses, the notion of the Kingdom develops itself as beyond anything that Old Testament vision had described. Is it for the Jews, or to be world-wide? Contemporary, or for the future? A gradual growth, or catastrophic? Within the soul, or visible, material? To be earned, or to be received, free favor from God, who alone can give it? The enigma is insoluble till you perceive it is all of these things. It has begun; yet it is not consummated; from Judea it arises, but its limits are the world's and the temporal shall extend into eternity. It is a pearl to be bought by every sacrifice; yet it is God's gift to His beloved; it is a city on a hill, a lamp on a lampstand; yet a leaven working secretly; a hidden grain, germinating through heat and cold, rain and wind and sleep, suddenly, some day only, to dazzle you by a field full of vivid green.

Alas, it may be resisted; it is forced on none; the guests refuse their invitation, swine would but trample on the Pearl; to the end Jerusalem refuses her Savior's brooding wings: nay, even within the Kingdom's net there are good fish and bad; in its field, tares grow within the wheat, only at long last to be cast forth, back to the barren sea, or to burn.

However, you may perceive more and more that the emphasis lay on the changed heart; for its sake, the exterior and material existed. Pharisee, Scribe, were -- well, if not wholly wrong, at least not right enough: the triumph of the Kingdom was the essential alteration of the fountain of the soul's life, a complete annihilation of separative self-love; a purification of far beyond mere behavior; an assimilation to the perfection of the Father, in favor of which all that might prevent it must be abandoned, hand cut off, eye plucked out; riches at least be feared; home, parents, perhaps abandoned; nay, a Cross be shouldered and carried every day. This new heart, our Lord makes clear, is to succeed precisely in proportion as it approaches, by a special route, to the divine Perfection. Impossible conception even for the highest of Hebrew seers! It was the Hebrew prerogative to insist on the unapproachableness of God, however deep His condescension towards His elect. "My thoughts are not as your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith Yahweh. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts." But Christ re-reveals the Father. This is not the place to relate in detail that radical revelation. Enough to say that He shows God to be such in tender intimacy and homeliness of paternal love as to offer to the individual soul a new access based on a new relationship possible or actual. But how, a Jew, hearing this from Christ's lips, might ask, how can You give that revelation so as to convince us of its reliability? In many ways our Lord offered His guarantees: prophecy fulfilled in Himself; Messianic miracles worked, in God's name, by Him. But, for us, at least, and for all who "heard" Him, who "came to Him," most cogent of all is the terrific asseveration.

All things are given over to me by my Father,
And no one fully knows the Son save the Father,
Nor does any one fully know the Father save the Son,
And he to whom the Son may choose to reveal Him.
(Matt 11:27; Luke 10:22)

The unique revelation is rooted in the unique relation of Jesus Himself to the Father. Herein our Lord transcends even that title, Son of Man, known by now to be at least Messianic, which He appropriates altogether to Himself; herein He says more than that, as in the Parable (Matt. 21:28, and 22:2), He is the exclusive son and heir, and indicates that all the Prophets are servants, as of the Father, so of Himself; more even than when (Mark 13:32) we see that He exalts Himself so high that the very angels are below Him. He asserts a perfect reciprocity of knowledge between Himself and the Eternal and Infinite Father of all things, and therefore one of nature; and not because He is Messiah is He to be called "Son of God," but because He is one with God, He can reveal Him to the world and save it.

Herein is the explanation, at last, of why in an unshared way our Lord speaks of God as "My Father"; and of Himself as The Son in a unique and essential way, the more noticeable for His insistence, throughout, upon God's Universal Fatherhood and the brotherhood of all mankind in Him.

Christ is the co-equal son of the Father, and to men He offers a gift that is divine.

Do not fear that this transcendent revelation will spoil for you the Humanity of Jesus. Read the Gospels, and you will never forget Bethlehem and Mary and her baby: the shepherds, the starlit flight: Jesus at His carpentering; the sick at sunset; the children in His arms; Olivet, Gennesareth, nor Gethsemane, and the fear and the heartbreak; the frightful struggle of a life against its imminent violent ending; the scourge, the crown, the carrying of the Cross, the nails; the ultimate proof of humanity, His Death. So tenderly, so gently through all the tiniest, most customary things of life, as through its tremendous ultimate necessities, is the vast revelation given, that without fear of -- I will not say, alas, refusal, but of frightening us by His due glory, He can place Himself at the center of the world, and say: "Come unto ME, all ye that labor, and are heavy laden; take My yoke upon you and learn of ME, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and you shall find rest for your souls."

Do not imagine that Paul is any more foreign to our humanity than are the first three Gospels. At any rate, it is Hebrews that tells us we have not merely some High Priest, who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but that Christ was tested at all points, just as we are, though without sin. To me, Paul, through and through, was permeated with the humanity of Jesus -- especially Christ crucified, Christ with whom he was co-crucified, co-buried, Christ who emptied Himself by taking the form of a slave and becoming in the likeness of men; and being recognized by His fashion -- what we could see of Him, as man, humbled Himself [yet further] by becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.

And it is John who tells us of that which his eyes had seen, his hands had handled, in many an exquisite incident left unrecorded by the Synoptists; of the midnight talk with Nicodemus; of Jacob's well, and how our Lord let Himself sink there, exhausted -- sedebat sic with no less tenderness than Mark when he relates how Christ slept in the storm-tossed boat, His head upon a pillow. Read and re-read the washing of the Feet and the discourse and the prayer of Thursday evening; in no literature has a human love so pure, so strong, so unutterably intimate been told of.

But what Paul cries to the world is more than that. Through Christ, existing before all creation, all creation came to be, and in Him its true existence is, and from Him. For God, who in many ways and fragments had revealed Himself of old, summed up that revelation in the person of a Son, the exact Image of God the Invisible, His Effulgence, Light from Light, the Impress of His substance, as stamp corresponds to seal -- Jesus is the Lord -- is Yahweh, and Heir of all things. So for John. In the beginning existed that Word which is the Father's thought and the adequate expression of that thought; He was along with God, and He was God. He shared God's glory before the world was, and thence into our world proceeded, and thither from our world returned; "Whoso hath seen Me, hath seen the Father," "The Father remains in Me and I in Him," "I and the Father are one thing."

Pre-existence then, and Incarnation: but Incarnation, why?

That we might, says Paul, be co-risen, co-heirs, co-glorified, co-kings with Him; that we might, says St. John, "have life in His name," "have life," says our Lord Himself, "and have it more abundantly."

It is Paul's clear doctrine that to the race was given, in the person of Adam, a supernatural life, implying a supernatural union with God and a destiny of eternal, supernatural happiness. Adam, by his sin, lost it, and we, incorporated with him, lost it too. "In Adam, all died." By a new incorporation, with a Second Adam, who has that life, and life, not by favor, this time, but by nature, we are to recover it. "In Christ shall all be made alive." In Christ -- a tiny phrase, yet used 164 times, in those letters of St. Paul which remain to us. For all is in it. Herein is Redemption, hereby Glorification. Christ, by His obedience unto death, nailed to His Cross the handwriting that was against us, and by His resurrection proved that when we incorporate ourselves with Him, we do so with that which is Immortal. Forthwith springs into existence the complement of Christ -- "the Church which is His Body, the Plenitude of Him who thus completes Himself." "You are Christ's body (collectively), and [individually] His members ... unto the building up of the body of Christ into a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the Plenitude of Christ ... who is the Head" (Eph. 4:12). Of this mystic Christ, the Spirit is as it were the soul; "He who adheres to the Lord is one Spirit" (i Cor. 6:17). This Spirit is our principle of cohesion, of vital action; we live in Him (Gal. 5:25), walk in Him (Gal. 5:16), under His impulse take the shape of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18), "I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me," even as I am in Him.

I have no space to speak of Paul's other metaphors -- expressive of that union of Christian and Christ which is no metaphor -- that one, but many-chambered house (like John's sanctuary in the Apocalypse, wherein each living pillar is inbuilded into the whole) -- the union of Spouse and his beloved. It is impossible to exaggerate the reality of the inpouring of Christ's life into our life. Impossible, too, even to outline adequately St. John's promulgation of the same truth. We must be born again -- from above -- have God's creative spirit inbreathed into us. We must receive God's free gift of living water so that it becomes in us a fountain leaping up into Eternal Life, and overbrims ourselves and gives life to the world. The restoration of the paralytic to life, nay, of dead Lazarus to life, is nothing compared to that leaping forth of human life into the life of super-nature, a new life compared with which the best of the old is as death. And how appropriate this Life? Again, by union with Him who gives it, because He has it, and has it, because He is it. "I AM the resurrection," "I AM the life," "No man cometh to the Father save by Me." By Christ's own life are we nourished: the patriarchs ate bread from heaven, but they died; He that eateth my bread shall never die -- for I am the Bread from Heaven, and that bread which I shall give for the life of the world, is my Flesh -- He that eateth my Flesh and drinketh my Blood HATH Eternal Life -- he remaineth in Me and I in him. As ... I live by the Father, so He that eateth me, shall live by Me, that as Thou," He prays to the Father, "art in Me and I in Thee, so they may be in Us ... one thing, as We are one thing, I in them, and they in Me, that they may be made complete into one." The Eucharist could not nourish the only life for whose sake it exists, were it anything less than the Living Christ, really and truly present for the "deification" of our souls.

I cannot bring myself to finish this paper without recalling the Apocalypse in which John sees focused as it were to a point the remaining history of the world -- the destruction of the great pagan anti-Christian Empire, and the final destruction of sin and all that resists the triumph of our Lord.

There are those who find this book's presentment of Him harsh, or at least austere to the point of being terrible; at the outset He is seen endued with the raiment, surrounded with the symbolism, proper to Yahweh in the Old Testament; as the book proceeds, He rides forth as a Conqueror, a Triumphator; He wields a sword, His clothes are drenched in blood.

But not untrue to himself is the Apostle of Love. Read the most tender even when most stern letters to the Seven Churches, which are set in preface to the book. See in what terms Christ promises His intimacy to the victorious soul. The Conqueror shall be given a white tessera, or badge, and on it a new name written, that no one knows save Him who gives and him who receives it -- the new self -- the new way of existing, to which the new name belongs, and which comes through, which is, the supernatural union of Christ and Christian. On the pillars of the new Temple are written three Names, the Name of God, the Name of the New Jerusalem, and "My own new Name." The soul is sealed as God's, and it is an integral part of that divine Church that Christ has built, and -- unfathomable condescension of God who will not only give, but accepts -- without the incorporate Christian Christ Himself were less, the self of His Plenitude were imperfect; He wins His new self whereby He is the Church's head, thanks precisely to the fidelity and victory of the Church's members; He too has a New Name.

Last of all He says, "Behold, I am standing at the door and am knocking: if a man hear My voice and open the door, then I will enter in to him and I will eat with him, and he with Me." Heart has met heart, and it is enough. After all the visions, the high hymns of praise, the thunders of many waters, the whole book calms itself into the Church's expectant humble prayer, Come! "Yes," He answers, "Behold I come quickly." "Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Amen." For though, as St. John elsewhere says, "to as many as receive Him, to them He gives power to become sons of God," and "we are called children of God, and so in fact we are," yet it remains true that the manifestation of this present reality is for the future, and though heaven is even now in us, by grace, we are not yet, by glory, in our heaven. We can say truly, both "I am at home here, in my Father's house," and, "For thee, oh dear, dear country, mine eyes their vigils keep."

The Jesus of Nazareth is the Jesus of Holy Communion and the Judge of the world, and our reward eternally.

In the New Testament then we are shown a human life of which a child can understand the lovableness and the beauty, with which the poorest, the unhappiest, the sick and the sinner can enter into the most intimate sympathy; a baby; a working-man; a man of loneliness and fear; of friendships, of hopes, and of heart break; a man, in all this, untainted, never once selfish, never untrue. And we are shown that this same man is the Son of God made man, that thereby He might knit us men into Himself, and thereby into God, and thus into unity with one another, becoming one bread of many grains, one Vine, with Him for stem, ourselves for branches, alive with one leaping sap, that is the Spirit who inhabits us. All then, most assuredly, is recapitulated into Christ, as St. Paul says; brought to a head in Him; all the desire of the ages, and all force for the future.

There are those whose duty it is to study the Christ of Dogma: those who essay to discover, through old documents, the Christ of History: those, and in our country they are many, who, despairing, it may be, of attaining to either of these, content themselves with the Christ of Experience. I should have to ask pardon of you, even more humbly than I do, after these brief, fumbling words about the Son of God made man, had I wholly failed to show you that these three are the same; and that the Jesus of Bethlehem and Calvary, the God-man of theology, and the Christ of our Communions, our Captain, Comrade, and Lover, are One, and the Life of our whole soul.

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1. As quoted by Fr. C. Lattey, in Back to Christ, p. 18.

By Rev. C. C. Martindale, S.J., M.A.