The day on which he uttered this saying, Jesus was in reality Son of God. He spoke for the first time the words upon which the edifice of eternal religion will repose. He founded the pure worship of all ages, of all lands, that which all lofty souls will practise until the end of time. Not only was his religion on this day the true religion of humanity, it was the absolute religion; and if other planets have inhabitants endowed with reason and morality, their religion cannot be different from that which Jesus proclaimed near Jacob's well. Man has not been able to hold to it; for man attains the ideal but for a moment. This word of Jesus has been a flash of light amidst gross darkness; it has needed eighteen hundred years for the eyes of mankind - what do I say? for an infinitely small portion of mankind - to grow accustomed to it. But the light will shine more and more into the perfect day; and, after having traversed all the circles of error, mankind will come back to this one word as to the undying expression of its faith and hope.

CHAPTER XV.

THE MESSIAH OF PROPHECY AND LEGEND.

JESUS has now quite lost his Jewish faith, and returns to Galilee full of revolutionary zeal. His ideas are henceforth spoken with perfect clearness. The simple aphorisms of his earlier prophetic career, borrowed in part from the Jewish rabbis before his day, and the noble moral teachings of his second period, lead naturally to a more decided policy. The Law must be abolished; and he is the one appointed to abolish it.' The Messiah is come; and he it is who is the Messiah.2 The kingdom of God is soon to be revealed; and it is he through whom it will be revealed. He knows well that he will fall a victim to his boldness; but the kingdom of God cannot be conquered without violence: it must be established through shocks and rendings.3 The Son of Man after his death will return in glory, accompanied

1 The hesitation of his immediate disciples, of whom a considerable part continued faithful to Judaism, offers serious difficulties to this explanation. But his trial leaves no room to doubt. As we shall see, he was treated by the Sanhedrim as a "deceiver" (misleader). The Talmud gives this procedure as an example of what should be followed against "misleaders" who seek to overthrow the law of Moses (Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin, xiv. 16; Babylonian Talmud, ibid. 43 a, 67 a). Compare Acts vi. 13, 14.

2 The progress of his declarations on this point may be seen by comparing Matt. xvi. 13–20; Mark i. 24, 25, 34, viii. 27–30, and xiv. 61, 62; Luke ix. 18-22.

8 Matt. xi. 12.

J

by legions of angels, and those who have rejected him will be overwhelmed.

The boldness of such a conception ought not to surprise us. Jesus had long regarded his relation to God as that of a son to his father. That which in another would be unendurable pride ought not in him to be treated as a crime.

The title "Son of David" was the first that he accepted,' probably without being accessory to the innocent frauds by which it was sought to secure it to him. The family of David had, as it appears, been long extinct; 2 nor did the Asmoneans, who were of priestly origin, or Herod, or the Romans, dream for a moment that any representative whatsoever of the ancient dynasty existed near them. But, since the last of the Asmoneans, the dream of an unknown descendant of the ancient kings who should avenge the nation of its enemies, worked in every brain. The universal belief was that the Messiah would be a son of David, and, like him, would be born at Bethlehem. The first thought of Jesus was not exactly this. The remembrance of

1 Rom. i. 3. Rev. v. 5; xxii. 16.

4

2 It is true that certain doctors, such as Hillel and Gamaliel, are given out as of the race of David; but these assertions are very doubtful (see Jerusalem Talmud, Taanith, iv. 2). If the house of David still formed a distinct and well-known group, how is it that it never appears side by side with the sons of Zadok, the Boëthusim, the Asmoneans, the family of Herod, in the great struggles of the time? Hegesippus and Eusebius (Hist. eccl. iii. 19, 20) give only an echo of the Christian tradition. 8 Matt. xxii. 42; Mark xii. 35; Luke i. 32; Acts ii. 29-36; 4 Esdras xii. 32 (in the Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopian, and Armenian versions). "Ben-David" in the Talmud often denotes the Messiah (e. g. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin, 97 a).

4 Matt. ii. 5, 6; John vii. 41, 42. This was quite arbitrarily founded upon the passage (perhaps altered) in Micah v. 2: compare the Targum of Jonathan. The primitive Hebrew text was probably Beth-Ephrata.

David, which with most Jews was uppermost, had nothing to do with his heavenly kingdom. He believed himself to be the Son of God, not the son of David. His kingdom and the deliverance which he meditated were of an entirely different character. But the common opinion on this point forced his hand. The proposition "Jesus is the Messiah" led directly to this other proposition," Jesus is the son of David." He allowed a title to be given him, without which he could not hope for success; and at length, it would seem, took pleasure in it, since he performed most readily the miracles asked of him by those who appealed to him by this title.1 In this, as in many other circumstances of his life, Jesus yielded to notions current in his time, although they might not be precisely his own. He associated with his doctrine of the "kingdom of God" all that could kindle the heart and imagination. Hence it is that we have seen him adopt the baptism of John, although it could not be of much importance to him.

One great difficulty stood in the way,—his birth at Nazareth, which was of public notoriety. We do not know whether Jesus contended against this prejudice. Perhaps it did not show itself in Galilee, where the idea that the son of David must be a Bethlehemite was less prevalent. To the Galilean idealist, too, the title "Son of David" was amply justified, if he to whom it was given should retrieve the glory of his race, and bring back the great days of Israel. Did Jesus, by his silence, give weight to the fictitious genealogies imagined by his partisans expressly to prove his royal de1 Matt. ix. 27; xii. 23; xv. 22; xx. 30, 31. Mark x. 47, 52. Luke xviii. 33.

scent? Did he know anything of the legends invented to show that he was born at Bethlehem,2 and particularly of the device that connected his Bethlehemite origin with the census which took place by order of Quirinius, the imperial legate ?3 We cannot tell. The inaccuracy and contradictions of the genealogies lead to the belief that they were wrought out by the popular mind, working independently at different points, and that neither of them was sanctioned by Jesus. Never with his own lips does he call himself "Son of David." His disciples, much less enlightened than he, sometimes magnified what he said of himself, while he usually knew nothing of these exaggerations. We must add that during the first three centuries considerable portions of Christendom obstinately denied the royal descent of Jesus and the authenticity of the genealogies.

5

This legend was thus the result of a wide and wholly spontaneous working of the common thought about him even in his lifetime. There has been no great his

1 Matt. i. 1-16; Luke iii. 23-38.

2 It is curious, too, that there was a Bethlehem some three or four leagues from Nazareth: Joshua xix. 15, and Van de Velde's map. ["It was discovered by Dr. Robinson at Beit-lahm, six miles west of Nazareth."]

Matt. ii. 1-6; Luke ii. 1-4.

The

The two genealogies completely contradict each other, and have little in common with those of the Old Testament. The story of Luke about the census of Quirinius is in defiance of dates (see note on p. 91). legend would naturally fortify itself by this circumstance. were strongly impressed by the taking of a census, which confused their narrow notions; and they long kept the memory of it (cf. Acts v. 37).

The Jews

5 Julius Africanus (in Euseb. Hist. eccl. i. 7) supposes that the kindred of Jesus, after taking refuge in Batanæa, made the attempt to reconstruct the genealogies.

The Ebionites, Hebrews, and Nazarenes, with Tatian and Marcion: Epiphan. xxix. 9; xxx. 3, 14; xlvi. 1; Theodoret, Hæret. fab. i. 20; Isidore of Pelusium, Epist. i. 371, and Pansophium.