Page:Origin of Paul's Religion.djvu/169

 could Jesus, with His humility and sobriety and strength, ever have lapsed so far from the path of sanity as to assume the central place in the Kingdom of God?

Here, again, radical minds have drawn the logical conclusions. The Messianic consciousness, they say, is an example of megalomania; Jesus, they say, was insane. Such is said to be the diagnosis of certain alienists. And the diagnosis need cause no alarm. Very likely it is correct. But the Jesus who is being investigated by the alienists is not the Jesus of the New Testament. The liberal Jesus, if he ever existed, may have been insane. But that is not the Jesus whom the Christian loves. The alienists are investigating a man who thought he was divine and was not divine; about one who thought He was divine and was divine they have obviously nothing to say.

Two difficulties, therefore, face the reconstruction of the liberal Jesus. In the first place, it is difficult to separate the natural from the supernatural in the Gospel picture of Jesus; and in the second place, after the separation has been accomplished, the human Jesus who is left is found to be a monstrosity, with a contradiction at the very center of His being. Such a Jesus, it may fairly be maintained, could never have existed on earth.

But suppose He did exist, suppose the psychological impossibilities of His character be ignored. Even then the difficulties of the historian are not overcome. Another question remains. How did this human Jesus ever come to give place to the superhuman Jesus of the New Testament? The transition evidently occurred at a very early time. It is complete in the Epistles of Paul. And within Paul's experience it was certainly no late development; on the contrary it was evidently complete at the very beginning of his Christian life; the Jesus in whom he trusted at the time of his conversion was certainly the heavenly Christ of the Epistles. But the conversion occurred only a very few years, at the most, after the crucifixion of Jesus. Moreover, there is in the Pauline Epistles not the slightest trace of a conflict between the heavenly Christ of Paul and any "other Jesus" of the primitive Jerusalem Church; apparently the Christ of Paul was also the Christ of those who had walked and talked with Jesus of Nazareth. Such is the evidence of the Epistles. It is confirmed by the Gospels. Like Paul, the Gospels present no mere teacher of