Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/343

 —What are we to think of him?

We come now to the most important question of all, namely, what opinion the evidence we possess should lead us to form of the moral character of Jesus, and of the value of his teaching. In considering this subject, we are met at the threshold of the inquiry by the extreme difficnlty of discarding the traditional view which has gained currency among us. Not only believers in the Christian religion, but freethinkers who look upon Christ as no more than an extraordinary man, have united to utter his praises in no measured terms. His conduct has been supposed to present an ideal of perfection to the human race, and his aphorisms to embody the supreme degree of excellence and of wisdom. Some critics, not being Christians, have even gone so far as to assume that whatever items in his reported language or behavior seemed to reflect some discredit upon him could not be genuine, but must be due to the imaginations of his disciples.

All this unbounded panegyric naturally raises in the minds of critics who have freed themselves from the accepted tradition a slight prejudice against him, and this may lead them to regard his errors with too unsparing a severity, and to mete out scant justice to the merits he may really possess. No task can be less easy than that of approaching this question with a mind entirely devoid of bias on the one side or on the other. For my own part, I shall endeavor, if I cannot attain perfect impartiality, at least neither to praise nor to blame without adequate reason.

Before proceeding, however, it may be well to state that I shall not attempt to discriminate between the authentic and the unauthentic utterances of Jesus, but shall take for granted that his reporters—excluding the fourth Evangelist—have in the main reported him correctly. No doubt this position is not strictly true. There must be errors, and there may be grave errors in the record, since those who transmitted the language of their master trusted only to memory. But it is on the whole much more likely that the parables, sermons, and short sayings ascribed to Jesus represent with some approach to fidelity what he really said, than that they, or any considerable portion of