What is the life of jesus?

Ernest Renan, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Ernest Renan answers

The life of Jesus is, first of all, a historical problem — and one of the most demanding that criticism has ever faced, because the sources resist the very methods one must apply to them. He was a man who lived entirely within the restricted world of Judaism, whose name appears in no Greek or Roman author of his own century, and whose execution Josephus records in a few lines as an event of secondary importance.1

That is the historical residue. And yet from that residue something extraordinary grew. What criticism can affirm without scandal is this: that he passed his youth in Galilee, received no Hellenic education, made journeys to Jerusalem where his imagination was vividly impressed, preached a doctrine hardly orthodox by the standards of the Scribes, and was put to death after an almost triumphal entry into the city at Passover.2

Legend worked over this life, as it works over all great lives, resolving the real figure into an ideal type — but beneath the legend there is history, and the lofty personality is not dissolved by acknowledging the legend that enveloped it.3 The essential work he accomplished was not doctrinal. He was not a founder of dogmas, not a maker of creeds; men became his disciples not by believing this thing or that thing, but by being attached to his person and loving him.4

A few sentences collected from memory, and above all the type of character he set forth — that was what remained. The least Christian men, I wrote, were the Greek doctors who entangled his legacy in puerile metaphysical discussions, and the scholastics who tried to extract a colossal system from what was essentially a spirit infused into the world.5

Now, the objection that always returns: can the historian exclude miracle in advance, or is that a dogma smuggled in as method? Experience — and it is experience, not metaphysical decree — has taught that every miraculous story had its origin in vivid imagination, in complaisant credulity, in ignorance of natural laws; and with all the research that has been made, no miracle has ever been wrought where it could be observed and proved.6

To admit testimony one cannot test is to have no principle by which to refuse any testimony at all. The method does not pronounce miracles impossible; it pronounces them unverifiable, which for a discipline of evidence is the same thing practically. What the method yields, in exchange for what it excludes, is something genuinely more interesting than a catalogue of wonders.

Jesus becomes explicable as a product of one of those extraordinary moral storms that sweep over the human mind at rare junctures — the same conditions that produced the Talmud and the Gospel side by side, the most singular monument of intellectual aberration and the highest creation of the moral sense, from the same seed, in the same generation.7

The real causes that produced him are to be sought not outside humanity but in the heart of the moral world; the laws that resulted in Jesus were not exceptional but the permanent laws of the human conscience applied at one of those extraordinary conjunctures.8 And yet — this is where the historical account reaches what it cannot fully close — the faith, the enthusiasm, the constancy of the first generation is not explicable without supposing at the origin of the whole movement a man of surpassing greatness.9

To have made himself beloved to the degree that after his death they ceased not to love him: that was his great work, and that which most struck his contemporaries.10 Whatever transformations dogma undergoes, the Sermon on the Mount will not be surpassed, and in that sense we remain Christians even when we separate ourselves on almost all points from the tradition that followed.11

Sources

  1. Josephus, born in the year 37, and writing in the last years of the century, mentions his execution in a few lines, as an event of secondary importance, and in the enumeration of the sects of his time, he omits the Christians altogether.
    The Life of Jesus
  2. when we affirm that Jesus passed his youth in Galilee; that he received no hellenic education; that he made a few journeys to Jerusalem, where his imagination was vividly impressed... that they succeeded in getting him put to death, as the sequel to an almost triumphal entry decreed to him by his compatriots
    Studies of Religious History and Criticism
  3. We may admit that legend worked over the life of Jesus as in the case of all poems, resolving the real hero into an ideal type, and yet not deny the lofty personality of the sublime and truly divine founder of the Christian faith.
    Studies of Religious History and Criticism
  4. Men did not become his disciples by believing this thing or that thing, but in being attached to his person and in loving him.
    The Life of Jesus
  5. The least Christian men were, on the one hand, the doctors of the Greek Church, who, beginning from the fourth century, entangled Christianity in a path of puerile metaphysical discussions, and, on the other, the scholastics of the Latin Middle Ages, who wished to draw from the Gospel the thousands of articles of a colossal system.
    The Life of Jesus
  6. experience which nothing has ever occurred to contradict has taught it that every miraculous story had its origin in vivid imagination, in complaisant credulity, in ignorance of natural laws. With all the research that has been made, no miracle has ever been wrought where it could be observed and proved.
    Studies of Religious History and Criticism
  7. they will not be able to take in the fact that the contemporary of Hillel and Shammai was their spiritual brother; that the same seed produced side by side the Talmud and the Gospel, the most singular monument of intellectual aberration and the highest creation of the moral sense.
    Studies of Religious History and Criticism
  8. the real causes that produced Jesus must be sought for, not outside of humanity, but in the heart of the moral world; that the laws which resulted in Jesus were not exceptional and transitory, but the permanent laws of the human conscience applied at one of those extraordinary junctures
    Studies of Religious History and Criticism
  9. The faith, the enthusiasm, the constancy of the first Christian generation is not explicable, except by supposing at the origin of the whole movement, a man of surpassing greatness.
    The Life of Jesus
  10. To have made himself beloved, 'to the degree that after his death they ceased not to love him,' was the great work of Jesus, and that which most struck his contemporaries.
    The Life of Jesus
  11. Whatever may be the transformations of dogma, Jesus will ever be the creator of the pure spirit of religion; the Sermon on the Mount will never be surpassed.
    The Life of Jesus