23
June 1863 A.D. J.E.
Renan’s Christ Wasn’t the Bible’s or Churches; Publishes Life of Christ
Graves, Dan. “Renan’s Christ Wasn’t the
Bible’s. Christianity.com. Apr
2007. http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1801-1900/renans-christ-wasnt-the-bibles-11630532.html. Accessed 3 May 2014.
It was heresy pure and simple.
Jesus was a magnetic teacher with a vivid personality and "merely an
incomparable man." None of the supernatural elements in his Scriptural
biographies are true. This was the conclusion of J. E. Renan in his Vie de
Jésus (Life of Christ) which saw publication on this day, June 23, 1863. The Life raised an immediate storm. Atheists said it
did not go far enough in stripping veneration from the person of Christ.
Believers deplored its blasphemous denial of Christ's divinity.
People who wanted the emotion of religion without the substance readily
fell in with Renan's sentimental view of Christ. The Life was read because it
fit the mood of the day. Deism and the skepticism of the French philosophes
were undermining the faith of many. In Germany theologians such as Strauss had
already denied the supernatural element of the gospel on dubious scientific,
textual, and archaeological grounds. The science has changed and new findings
of archaeology, such as the Dead Sea scrolls, have repudiated much of the
"advanced" thinking of the nineteenth century and broadened our
understanding of the world Christ entered, although new skeptical arguments
have taken their place.
The Life also was read because of
Renan's fame as an orientalist. His first work, a history of Semitic languages,
had won him a prize. Through the good offices of Napoleon III he was able to
study in the Holy Land. There a sister, who had been devoted to him, died of a
fever which also almost claimed Renan's life. He had already begun to compose
his controversial account of the life of Christ before he took ill. Now he
finished it.
Renan created a work of stylistic
beauty. In the French, its lure was heightened by poetic passages. Even in
translation its force is not completely lost. "The idea of being
all-powerful by suffering and resignation, and of triumphing over force by
purity of heart, is indeed an idea peculiar to Jesus ..." Yet Renan's
Jesus is not the gospel's. He denied a transcendent God.
Jesus attacked riches. "An
admirable idea governed Jesus in all this, as well as the band of joyous
children who accompanied him and made him for eternity the true creator of the
peace of the soul, the great consoler of life." This of course, is pure
sentimentality and has nothing to do with the terrible resistance Christ met
which cut his soul. The disciples are better described as impulsive men who had
constantly to be corrected by their master than as joyous children. Yet Renan
depicts them in a mist of intoxication. "No one during the course of this
magical apparition, measured time any more than we measure a dream. Duration
was suspended; a week was an age."
And the resurrection? "The
strong imagination of Mary Magdalen played an important part in this
circumstance. Divine power of love! Sacred moments in which the passion of one
possessed gave to the world a resuscitated God!" Thus Renan removed the
divine from Christ, rendering Him down until there was little left but a decent
role model.
Bibliography:
1. Brandes, Georg. Creative Spirits.
Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries, 1967, 1923.
2. Renan, Ernest. The Life of Jesus;
with a biographical sketch by William G. Hutchinson. New York: A. L. Burt Co.,
n.d.
3. "Renan, Joseph Ernest."
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Editors F. L. Cross and E. A.
Livingstone. Oxford University Press, 1997.
4. Ruoff, Henry W. Masters of
Achievement. Buffalo, N.Y.: Frontier Press, 1910. Source of the image.
No comments:
Post a Comment