Jesus and his Modern Critics

Extract

As our buildings today bear the impress of Greek genius in architecture, and our law in great measure holds the form that was given it under the Roman Empire, so do religion and morals with us still feel the influence of the Jew. Through Christianity that strain of spiritual life which had been nurtured under a great line of Hebrew prophets was taken over to and planted in the new soil of Graeco-Roman life: so that its heroes finally displaced the heroes of classical antiquity and its forms of thought, in part at least, superseded those which belonged by natural inheritance to pagan faith. The beginner of the movement which accomplished this change was Jesus of Nazareth, who thus made himself one of the foremost figures in the world's affairs.

As part of this process of getting itself rooted in a new habitat, and by way of adaptation to alien conditions, Christianity underwent considerable modification of form. First it was worked over into somewhat different shape in the mind of Paul. Petrine Christianity, no doubt, was held strictly within Judaic lines, and was designed only for “home consumption.” The Pauline form introduced changes which better fitted it for a “foreign market.” A later and more profound change was made by those influences which our fourth gospel represents. In this new guise it was such a different thing that it became thenceforth, almost of necessity, a stranger in the house of its birth. These modifications of it, innocently assumed to be its original shape, have lived on till our own day.

And now a new force is being brought to bear upon it whose ultimate effect we cannot wholly measure. The new science of historical criticism has come into this field, possessing an equipment and a determination which blind tradition will be unable to resist. One of the first facts to attract its attention was that change of form which Christianity had undergone in getting itself transformed from Eastern to Western life; and one of its first problems was to retranslate these later versions of its message back into a primitive gospel.