He taught with the simplicity required by his audiences, with interesting stories that insinuated his lessons into the understanding, with pungent aphorisms rather than with reasoned argument, and with similes and metaphors as brilliant as any in literature. The parable form that he used was customary in the East, and some of his fetching analogies had come down to him, perhaps unconsciously, from the prophets, the psalmists, and the rabbis; 64 nevertheless, the directness of his speech, the vivid colors of his imagery, the warm sincerity of his nature lifted his utterances to the most inspired poetry. Some of his sayings are obscure, some seem at first sight unjust,65 some are sharp with sarcasm and bitterness; nearly all of them are models of brevity, clarity, and force.
His starting point was the Gospel of John the Baptist, which itself went back to Daniel and Enoch; historia non facit saltum. The Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, he said; soon God would put an end to the reign of wickedness on earth; the Son of Man would come “on the clouds of the sky” to judge all humanity, living and dead.66 The time for repentance was running out; those who repented, lived justly, loved God, and put their faith in his messenger would inherit the Kingdom, would be raised to power and glory in a world at last freed from all evil, suffering, and death.
As these ideas were familiar to his hearers, Christ did not define them clearly, and many difficulties obscure his conception now. What did he mean by the Kingdom? A supernatural heaven? Apparently not, for the apostles and the early Christians unanimously expected an earthly kingdom. This was the Jewish tradition that Christ inherited; and he taught his followers to pray to the Father, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Only after that hope had faded did the Gospel of John make Jesus say, “My kingdom is not of this world.”67 Did he mean a spiritual condition, or a material utopia? At times he spoke of the Kingdom as a state of soul reached by the pure and sinless 68—“the Kingdom of God is within you”;69 at other times he pictured it as a happy future society in which the apostles would be rulers, and those who had given or suffered for Christ’s sake would receive a hundredfold reward.70 He seems to have thought of moral perfection as only metaphorically the Kingdom, as the preparation and price for the Kingdom, and as the condition of all saved souls in the Kingdom when realized.71
When would the Kingdom come? Soon. “I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine until I drink it new in the Kingdom of God.”72 “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel,” he told his followers, “till the Son of Man is come.”73 Later he deferred it a bit: “There be some standing here that shall not taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in the Kingdom”;74 and “this generation shall not pass till all these things be done.”75 In more politic moments he warned his apostles: “Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.”76 Certain signs would precede the coming: “wars and rumors of war . . . nation will rise against nation . . . there will be famines and earthquakes . . . many shall be offended, and . . . shall hate one another. Many false prophets will appear, many will be misled by them; and because of the increase of wickedness most men’s love will grow cold.”77 Sometimes Jesus made the advent of the Kingdom depend and wait upon the conversion of man to God and justice; usually he made its coming an act of God, a sudden and miraculous gift of divine grace.
Many have interpreted the Kingdom as a communist utopia, and have seen in Christ a social revolutionist.78 The Gospels provide some evidence for this view. Christ obviously scorned the man whose chief purpose in life is to amass money and luxuries.79 He promised hunger and woe to the rich and filled, and comforted the poor with Beatitudes that pledged them the Kingdom. To the rich youth who asked what he should do besides keeping the commandments, Christ answered: “Sell your property, give your money to the poor, and . . . follow me.”80 Apparently the apostles interpreted the Kingdom as a revolutionary inversion of the existing relationships between the rich and the poor; we shall find them and the early Christians forming a communistic band which “had all things in common.”81 The charge on which Jesus was condemned was that he had plotted to make himself “King of the Jews.”
But a conservative can also quote the New Testament to his purpose. Christ made a friend of Matthew, who continued to be an agent of the Roman power; he uttered no criticism of the civil government, took no known part in the Jewish movement for national liberation, and counseled a submissive gentleness hardly smacking of political revolution. He advised the Pharisees to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”82 His story of the man who, before going on a journey, “called on his slaves, and put his property in their hands,”83 contains no complaint against interest or slavery, but takes these institutions for granted. Christ apparently approves of the slave who invested the ten minas ($600) that the master had entrusted to him, and made ten more; he disapproves of the slave who, left with one mina, held it in unproductive safekeeping against the master’s return; and he puts into the master’s mouth the hard saying that “to him who has, more will be given, and from him who has nothing, even that which he has will be taken away”84—an excellent summary of market operations, if not of world history. In another parable workers “grumbled at their employer,” who paid as much to one who had labored an hour as to those who had toiled all day; Christ makes the employer answer: “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with my own?”85 Jesus does not seem to have thought of ending poverty; “the poor ye have always with you.” He takes for granted, like all ancients, that a slave’s duty is to serve his master well; “blessed is the slave whom his master, returning, finds performing his charge.”86 He is not concerned to attack existing economic or political institutions; on the contrary, he condemns those ardent souls who would “take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm.”87 The revolution he sought was a far deeper one, without which reforms could only be superficial and transitory. If he could cleanse the human heart of selfish desire, cruelty, and lust, utopia would come of itself, and all those institutions that rise out of human greed and violence, and the consequent need for law, would disappear. Since this would be the profoundest of all revolutions, beside which all others would be mere coups d’état of class ousting class and exploiting in its turn, Christ was in this spiritual sense the greatest revolutionist in history.
His achievement lay not in ushering in a new state, but in outlining an ideal morality. His ethical code was predicated on the early coming of the Kingdom,88 and was designed to make men worthy of entering it. Hence the Beatitudes, with their unprecedented exaltation of humility, poverty, gentleness, and peace; the counsel to turn the other cheek, and be as little children (no paragons of virtue!); the indifference to economic provision, property, government; the preference of celibacy to marriage; the command to abandon all family ties: these were not rules for ordinary life, they were a semimonastic regimen fitting men and women for election by God into an imminent Kingdom in which there would be no law, no marriage, no sexual relations, no property, and no war. Jesus praised those who “leave house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children,” even those “who make themselves eunuchs, for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake”;89 obviously this was intended for a devoted religious minority, not for a continuing society. It was an ethic limited in purpose but universal in its scope, for it applied the conception of brotherhood and the Golden Rule to foreigners and enemies as well as to neighbors and friends. It visioned a time when men would worship God not in temples but “in spirit and truth,” in every deed rather than in passing words.
Were these moral ideas new? Nothing is new except arrangement. The central theme of Christ’s preaching—the coming Judgment and Kingdom—was already a century old among the Jews. The Law had long since inculcated brotherhood: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” said Leviticus; even “the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself.”90 Exodus had commanded the Jews to do good to their enemies: a good Jew will restore the straying ox or ass even of the “enemy that hateth thee.”91 The prophets, too, had ranked a good life above all ritual; and Isaiah94 and Hosea95 had begun to change Yahveh from a Lord of Hosts into a God of Love. Hillel, like Confucius, had phrased the Golden Rule. We must not hold it against Jesus that he inherited and used the rich moral lore of his people.
For a long time Christ thought of himself purely as a Jew, sharing the ideas of the prophets, continuing their work, and preaching like them only to Jews. In dispatching his disciples to spread his gospel he sent them only to Jewish cities; “go not into the way of the gentiles, nor into the city of the Samaritans”;96 hence the apostles, after his death, hesitated to bring the Good News to the “heathen” world.97 When he met the Samaritan woman at the well he told her, “Salvation is of the Jews”98—though we must not judge him from words perhaps put into his mouth by one who was not present, and who wrote sixty years after the event. When a Canaanite woman asked him to heal her daughter, he at first refused, saying “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”99 He told the leper whom he had cured to “go to the priest and . . . offer the gift that Moses prescribed.”100 “Do everything that the scribes and Pharisees tell you, and observe it all; but do not do as they do.”101 In suggesting modifications and mitigations of the Judaic Law Jesus, like Hillel, did not think that he was overthrowing it; “I came not to destroy the Law of Moses but to fulfill it.”102 “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle VII of the Law to fail.”103VIII
Nevertheless, he transformed everything by the force of his character and his feeling. He added to the Law the injunction to prepare for the Kingdom by a life of justice, kindliness, and simplicity. He hardened the Law in matters of sex and divorce,105 but softened it toward a readier forgiveness,106 and reminded the Pharisees that the Sabbath was made for man.107 He relaxed the code of diet and cleanliness, and omitted certain fasts. He brought religion back from ritual to righteousness, and condemned conspicuous prayers, showy charities, and ornate funerals. He left the impression, at times, that the Judaic Law would be abrogated by the coming of the Kingdom.108
Jews of all sects except the Essenes opposed his innovations, and especially resented his assumption of authority to forgive sins and to speak in the name of God. They were shocked to see him associate with the hated employees of Rome, and with women of low repute. The priests of the Temple and the members of the Sanhedrin watched his activity with suspicion; like Herod with John, they saw in it the semblance or cover of a political revolution; they feared lest the Roman procurator should accuse them of neglecting their responsibility for maintaining social order. They were a bit frightened by Christ’s promise to destroy the Temple, and not quite sure that it was only a metaphor. For his part Christ denounced them in sharp and bitter terms:
The scribes and Pharisees . . . put heavy loads of the Law upon men’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. They do everything they do to have men see it. They wear wide Scripture texts as charms, and large tassels, and they like the best places at dinners and the front seats in the synagogues. . . . But alas for you hypocritical scribes and Pharisees . . . you blind guides . . . blind fools! . . . You let the weightier matters of the Law go—justice, mercy, and integrity. . . . You clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. . . . You hypocritical scribes and Pharisees are like whitewashed tombs! . . . Outwardly you appear to men to be upright, but within you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. . . . You are descended from the murderers of the prophets. Go on and fill up the measure of your forefathers’ guilt! You serpents! You brood of snakes! How can you escape being sentenced to the pit? . . . The publicans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of God before you.109
Was Jesus just to the Pharisees? Probably there were some among them who deserved this castigation, many who, like numberless Christians a few centuries later, substituted outward piety for inward grace. But there were also many Pharisees who agreed that the Law should be softened and humanized.110 Very likely a large number of the sect were sincere men, reasonably decent and honorable, who felt that the ceremonial laws neglected by Jesus should be judged not in themselves but as part of a code that served to hold the Jews together, in pride and decency, amid a hostile world. Some of the Pharisees sympathized with Jesus, and came to warn him that plots were being made to kill him.111 Nicodemus, one of the defenders of Jesus, was a rich Pharisee.
The final break came from Jesus’ growing conviction and clear announcement that he was the Messiah. At first his followers had looked upon him as the successor to John the Baptist; gradually they came to believe that he was the long-awaited Redeemer who would raise Israel out of Roman bondage and establish the reign of God on earth. “Lord,” they asked him, “will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”112 He put them off by saying, “It is not for you to know the times and seasons which the Father has set”; and he gave an equally vague answer to emissaries of the Baptist who asked him, “Art thou he that was to come?” To turn his followers from their conception of him as a political Messiah, he repudiated all claim to Davidic descent.113 Gradually, however, the intense expectatioris of his followers, and his discovery of his unusual psychic powers, seem to have persuaded him that he had been sent by God, not to restore the sovereignty of Judea, but to prepare men for the reign of God on earth. He did not (in the synoptic Gospels) identify or equate himself with the Father. “Why do you call me good?” he asked; “there is none good but one, that is God.”114 “Not as I will,” he prayed in Gethsemane, “but as thou wilt.”115 He took the phrase “Son of Man,” which Daniel116 had made a synonym for the Messiah, used it at first without clearly meaning himself, and ended by applying it to himself in such statements as “The Son of Man is master of the Sabbath”117—which seemed high blasphemy to the Pharisees. He called God “Father” at times in no exclusive sense; occasionally, however, he spoke of “my Father,” apparently signifying that he was the son of God in an especial manner or degree.118 For a long time he forbade the disciples to call him the Messiah; but at Caesarea Philippi he approved Peter’s recognition of him as “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”119 When, on the last Monday before his death, he approached Jerusalem to make a final appeal to the people, “the whole throng of his disciples” greeted him with the words, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord”; and when some Pharisees asked him to reprove this salutation, he answered, “I tell you, if they keep silence, the stones will cry out.”120 The Fourth Gospel reports that the crowd hailed him as “King of Israel.”121 Apparently his followers still thought of him as a political Messiah, who would overthrow the Roman power and make Judea supreme. It was these acclamations that doomed Christ to a revolutionist’s death.