Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/371

 CHRISTIAN SOCIOLOGY. II.

SOCIETY.

of Jesus as anticipating a regenerate society may appear to some as savoring of literalism and to others as a mere modernizing of the simple records of the gospels. Both objections would not be altogether without foundation. There is constant danger that, in the attempt to restate the teachings of Jesus in the terms of today's thought, exposition shall wait too subserviently upon desire. The first century, albeit surprisingly like the nineteenth, was nevertheless not the nineteenth, and Jesus the Jew was not a product of Greek syllogisms and German hypotheses. Nevertheless, were one to come to the words of Jesus unbiased by traditional interpretations, the impression would be inevitable that the goal of his efforts was the establishment of an ideal society quite as much as the production of an ideal individual. At any rate so his audiences thought. They sometimes sought to make him a leader of a revolution; sometimes they endeavored to preempt the chief offices in the future state. At one time they hailed him as the successor of David and carried him in triumph to the temple ; while in the hopes of his followers the chief significance of his return from the tomb and his newly revealed life lay again in the possibility of revolution and the reestablishment of a puissant Hebrew kingdom.

That Jesus did not yield more completely to some of the efforts made by his hearers to hurry the realization of these hopes is less a testimony to their misunderstanding than to his own sagacity. And even if one does not choose to lay much Rh