Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/689

 JESUS 659 Talmud there are about twenty allusions to Christ and the Christians characterized by intense hatred. He is usually spoken of indirectly as &quot; that man,&quot; &quot; the Nazarene,&quot; &quot; the fool,&quot; &quot; Absalom,&quot; &quot; the hung,&quot; &quot; the son of Stada,&quot; &quot; the son of Pandera.&quot; Many allusions to Him are veiled in cryptographs of which the key is in the possession of but few. All the grossest fictions respecting him that He was a seducer (mesith) who had learned magic in Egypt, and had been excommunicated by Rabbi Joshua ben Perachia in the reign of Alexander Jannteus (nearly a century before His birth !), and that He was crucified at Lydda, because no one, during forty days, came forward to give any evidence in His favour are collected in a miserable Jewish tract called the Toldoth Jeshu, which may be consigned to oblivion, because even the Jews now regard it with con tempt and shame. 1 It is, however, remarkable that from these intensely embittered Jewish sources we derive an absolute confirmation of Christ s stay in Egypt, of His Davidic descent, 2 of His miracles, of His disciples, of His excommunication by the Sanhedrin, of His crucifixion on the evening before the Passover, and even of His innocence, for not a single crime but that of working miracles by magic, and claiming divine honour, is, even in these sources, laid to His charge. And thus even from pagan and Jewish enemies we derive all that we want and all that we could expect in the recognition of the historic personality of Christ, and of the chief facts in His outward life. 3. If we had nothing to help us but these allusions, the two great facts of Christianity and Christendom would be an inexplicable enigma. In the Christian sources of information all becomes intelligible. Of these we may dismiss for practical purposes all but the New Testament. From the fathers we derive surprisingly little. A few sayings of which some are very dubious, 3 and of which the most valuable are only variations of those in the Gospels and one or two highly uncertain incidents, 4 are all that we can glean from them. The Apocryphal Gospels help us still less. They are for the most part heavy fictions, the inventions of an indiscriminate curiosity, often grossly heretical, abounding in coarsely-conceived and even pernicious miracles, and dwelling chiefly on imaginary details of the nativity, the infancy, or the last scenes. 5 Their chief value is to set forth by contrast the immeasur able superiority of the canonical Gospels, by showing us what these also might have been if they had been the products of human invention. But it is not the Gospels alone on which we have to depend. We have four works of which the authenticity has never even been assailed by any serious writer, namely, St Paul s four epistles to the Galatians, Romans, and Corinthians. These may truly be regarded as a fifth Gospel, of which the testimony is all the more valuable because it is undesigned and incidental. It is also earlier than that of any Gospel, and is the testimony of one whose personality stands forth with absolute clear ness in the light of history. Further than this, it is the 1 See Gratz, iii. 243; Jost, Gesch. des Judenth., L 405, 414; Wagenseil, Tela Igne,a Satanse (where it is published with a transla tion); Schcittgen, Ilor. Heb., ii. 697. 2 Sanhedr., 43, 1. See Derenbourg, L llist. de la Palestine, p. 349 ; Farrar, Life of Christ, Exc. ii. (vol. ii. p. 475). 3 These are collected in Fabricius, Cod. Apoc. , i. 322 sq. ; Hoffmann, Leben Jesu nach d. Apokryphen, 317-329 ; Westcott, Introduction to the Gospels, Append. C ; and Farrar, Life of Christ, ii. 499. kindled in Jordan at the time of Christ s baptism ; that the vilest sinners were chosen as apostles ; that there was a statue at Paneas of the woman with the issue of blood, &c. 5 They are collected by Fabricius, Cod. Apoc. N. T., 1743 ; Thilo, Cod. Apoc. A&quot;. T., 1832; and Tischendorf, Ev, Apocryph., 1853. They have been excellently translated by Mr B. Harris Cooper (The Apocryphal G osjxls), and Hoffmann has written the life of Jesus as represented in these late and worthless forgeries (Das Lcben Jesu nach d. Apokryphen, 1851). testimony of a man of commanding intellect, and of the highest Jewish culture, who, after the death of Christ, was converted from the most bitter hostility to the most intense devotion, and who bears his witness within twenty- five years of the events respecting which he speaks. And yet, if we had the epistles of St Paul alone, we could find a contemporary testimony to almost every single fact of primary importance in the life of Christ, His birth of the seed of David, His poverty, His Messiahship, His moral teaching, His proclamation of the kingdom of God, His calling of the apostles, His supernatural power, His divine claims, His betrayal, His founding of the Last Supper, His passion, crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and repeated appearances. 6 If we add the testimony of the other epistles, we have further testimonies to almost every fact of import ance in the Gospels, as we have also in the catholic epistles and in the Revelation of St John. It is, however, from the Gospels that our fullest light is derived. They are not, and do not profess to be, full biographies written for the gratification of curiosity, but Ihey preserve for us all that is necessary to explain the origin of Christianity in the life of its Founder. In the first three Gospels, called Synoptic, we have sketches of the life and teaching of Christ of which the latest was probably written within forty years of the crucifixion. No one has ever denied that the representation of Christ in these three Gospels is essentially the same. The view of Him presented in the Fourth Gospel, which was not published till towards the close of the 1st century, is more subjective. It is the spiritual Gospel, the Gospel for the church, and even those critics who deny its Johan- nine authorship admit its value as a very ancient document written by a Jewish Christian of extraordinary genius who had access to the most valuable sources of contemporary information. III. Since, then, it may be regarded as a truth for which the close investigations of historical criticism have only secured more universal admission that the life of_ Jesus was a life of which the main outlines are historically certain, we must now glance at its chronology and duration. It must be admitted that we cannot demonstrate the exact year of the nativity, but critics of all schools are verging more and more towards the acceptance of 4 B.C. as the probable year of Christ s birth. Our present era was fixed (525 A.D.) by a learned Scythian, Dionysius Exiguus, who was an abbot at Rome, and died about 550; but it is now admitted to be erroneous by at least four years. Many methods have been adopted to arrive at the true date ; but all attempts to fix it by the enrolment of Quirinius, the order of the Jewish courses of priests, the consulships mentioned by Tertullian, and the extremely remarkable astronomical conjunction of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in Pisces in the spring of A.U.C. 748, 7 have led to nothing but highly dubious results. We are left with two data which furnish us with an approximation to the accu rate date. One of these is the death of Herod the Great. Josephus tells us that he died thirty-seven years after he had been declared king by the Romans. 8 Now this took place A.U.C. 714, and therefore by the Jewish mode of reckoning the year from Nisan to Nisan, and counting fractional parts of a year as a whole year he must have died between 4 B.C and 3 B.C. Further, we know that there was an eclipse of the moon on March 12, 4 B.C., on which night Herod ordered some Jewish rabbis to be burnt 6 See Rom. i. 3, 4, v. 12, viii. 2, 3, 32, ix. 5, xv. 8 ; Gal. ii. 7, iii. 13, iv. 4, v. 21 ; 1 Cor. vi. 9, vii. 10, xi. 25, xv. 2}assim ; 2 Cor. iii. 17, iv. 4, xii. 12, xiii. 4, &c. See Stanley s Corinthians, pp. 580-589. 7 As calculated by Kepler. According to more recent investigations it occurred in A.U.C. 747. 8 Ant., xvii. 8, 1.
 * E.rj., that the nativity took place in a cave; that a fire was