Christ in Art. Ernest Renan

The Last Supper, 1909.

      Oil on canvas, 86 × 107 cm.

      Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

      This sense of a living organism has not hesitated to be guided in the general structure of the narrative. The reading of the gospels is enough to show that their authors, though they had in their minds a very just plan of the life of Jesus, were not guided by very rigorous chronological data. Papias, moreover, tells us so expressly that the expressions: “In those days”, “after that”, “then”, and “it came to pass that”, etc. are simple transitions designed to connect the different stories. To leave all the materials furnished to us by the evangelists in the disorder in which tradition gives them, would no more be to write the history of Jesus than one would write the history of a celebrated man by giving promiscuously the letters and anecdotes of his youth, his old age, and his prime. The Koran, which also presents to us in fragments the different periods of the life of Mohammed, has yielded its secret to an ingenious criticism; the chronological order in which these fragments were composed, which has been discovered with approximate certainty. Such a readjustment is much more difficult for the gospel, the public life of Jesus having been shorter and less crowded with events than the life of the founder of Islam. However, the attempt to find a clue by which to guide our steps in this labyrinth, cannot be taxed with gratuitous subtlety. It is no great abuse of hypotheses to suppose that a religious founder begins by adopting the moral aphorisms which are already in circulation in his time, and the practices which are most prevalent; that, when more mature, and in possession of his full powers, he takes pleasure in a species of calm, poetic eloquence, far removed from all controversy, suave and free as pure sentiment. He gradually becomes exalted, excited by opposition, and ends in polemics and strong invective. Such are the periods which have been distinguished in the Koran. He adopted with an exquisite tact by the synoptic, supposes an analogous progress. Read Matthew attentively, and there will be and in the distribution of the discourses, a gradation strongly analogous to that which we have just indicated. There will be observed, moreover, the difference in forms of expression of which we make use when we attempt to explain the progress of the ideas of Jesus. The reader may, if he prefers, see in the divisions adopted in this regard, only the sections indispensable to the methodical exposition of a profound and complex mind.

      If the love of a subject may assist in its comprehension, it will also be recognized that this condition has not been wanting. To write the history of a religion, it is necessary, first, to have believed it; and secondly, to believe it no longer implicitly; for implicit faith is incompatible with sincere history. But love goes without faith. Because we do not attach ourselves to any of the forms that captivate human adoration, we do not renounce the enjoyment of all that is good and beautiful in them. No passing vision exhausts divinity; God was revealed before Jesus, God will be revealed after him. Widely unequal and so much the more divine, as they are the greater and the more spontaneous, the manifestations of the God concealed in the depths of the human conscience are all of the same order. Jesus cannot therefore, belong exclusively to those who call themselves his disciples. He is the honor that every man carries in his heart. His glory cannot be lost to history and his legacy and following are made more real by showing that history would be incomprehensible without him.

      Graham Sutherland, Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph (First Cartoon), 1953.

      Oil on gouache on board, 201.9 × 110.5 cm.

      Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry.

      The Young Christ

      Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Holy Family, c. 1607.

      Oil on canvas, 117.5 × 96 cm.

      Collection Clara Otero Silva, Caracas.

      His First Impressions

      Jesus was born in Nazareth, a small town in Galilee, which before him was unknown. All his life he was designated by the name of “Nazarene,” and it is only by an awkward detour that the legend succeeds in fixing his birth at Bethlehem. We shall further on see the motive of this supposition and how it was the necessary consequence of the Messianic character attributed to Jesus. The precise date of his birth is unknown. It occurred under the reign of Augustus, towards the year 750 of Rome, probably sometime in the years before 1 C. E., when most Western peoples place his birth.

      He came from the ranks of the people. His father Joseph and his mother Mary were in moderate circumstances, artisans living by their toil, a very common condition in the East, which is neither ease nor want. The extreme simplicity of life in such countries, by removing the demand for comfort, renders the privilege of the rich almost useless and makes all voluntarily poor. The town of Nazareth, in the time of Jesus, did not, perhaps, differ much from what it is today. We see the streets in which he played when a child, in these stony paths or small squares which separate the dwellings. The house of Joseph, without a doubt, closely resembled those poor shops, lighted by the door, serving at once for the work-bench, as kitchen and as bedroom, having for furniture a mat, some cushions on the ground, one or two earthen vessels and a painted chest.

      The family, whether the product of one or more marriages, was rather numerous. Jesus had brothers and sisters, who seem to have been younger than he. All remain unknown, and it appears that the four persons who are named as his brothers, and among whom one at least, James, attained great importance in the first years of the development of Christianity. Mary, indeed, had a sister named Mary also, who married a certain Alpheus or Oleophas (these two names appear to designate the same person) and was the mother of several sons who played a very considerable part among the first disciples of Jesus. His second cousins, who adhered to the young master, while his real brothers were opposed to him, assumed the title of “brothers of the Lord.” The real brothers of Jesus, as well as their mother, had no importance until after his death. Even then they do not appear to have equalled their cousins in consideration whose conversion had been more spontaneous, and whose character appears to have had more originality. His sisters married at Nazareth, and there he spent his early years. Nazareth was a little town, situated in a fold of land broadly open at the summit of the group of mountains which closes on the north the plain of the Jezreel Valley. The population was from three to four thousand. It is quite cold in the winter and the climate is very healthy. The people are friendly and good-natured; the gardens are fresh and green. Antoninus Martyr draws an enchanting picture of the fertility of the environs, which he compares to paradise. Some valleys on the western side fully justify his description. The fountain from which the life and gaiety of the little town formerly centred has been destroyed; its broken channels now only produce a turbid water.

      Having attained a better idea of what constitutes respect for origins, one shall desire to substitute authentic holy places for the mean and apocryphal sanctuaries which were seized upon by the piety of the barbarous ages, it is upon this height of Nazareth that it will build its temple. There, at the point of advent of Christianity, and at the centre of action of its founder, should rise the great church in which all Christians might pray. There also, upon this soil in which sleeps Joseph the carpenter, and thousands of forgotten Nazarenes, who have never crossed the horizon of their valley, the philosopher would be better situated than in any other place in the world, to contemplate the course of human things to find consolation for their uncertainty, to find faith in the divine object which the world pursues through innumerable dejections, and notwithstanding the vanity of all things.

      The Education of Jesus

      This nature at once smiling and grand, was the whole education of Jesus. He learned to read and write, no doubt according to the method of the East, which consists of putting into the hands of the child a book, that he repeats in concert with his little school-fellows until he knows it by heart. It is doubtful, however, whether he really understood the Hebrew writings in their original tongue. The biographies make him quote from them in the Aramaic tongue; his principles of exegesis, as nearly as we can make them out from those of his disciples, closely resembled those which were current at that time, and which compose the spirit of the Targums and the Midrash.

      The schoolmaster in the small Jewish towns was the hazzan