                19 page printout, page 221 - 239
                          CHAPTER XIII

                The Sources of Christian Morality

    Is There a Christian Morality? -- The Stolen Parables --
           The Sermon on the Mount -- Golden Rules --
                 Futility of the Christian Ethic

                 IS THERE A CHRISTIAN MORALITY?

     IN two places in my travels I have encountered a primitive
marriage custom. In a certain district of rural Mexico the nervous
bride must produce her bed-sheets, for the inspection of neighbors,
on the morning after her wedding. If they show not palpable proof
that she had been a virgin until the previous evening, the village
frowns upon her. Friends take back their wedding gifts. The husband
fumes and sulks. And far away, at the other side of the globe, in
rural Bulgaria. I found much the same custom; except that there was
no punishment, and the bride produced her stained sheet in a
general atmosphere of robust hilarity.

     Mexico and Bulgaria: two regions as free from the taint of the
modern spirit as from the smut of our factories and the deadly rush
of our automobiles. There the cheap figure or picture of Christ and
his mother rules the home as it has done in the one case for
centuries and in the other for more than a millennium. It is not
known there that there are Atheists in the world. All the problems
of life are reduced to one: how to wrest a few more cents per week
out of the beautiful soil with the implements of a Polynesian
farmer. ... And so, while Boston or Philadelphia has grown so
sensitive that the mention of bed at a wedding breakfast would be
deemed an unpardonable outrage, and its preachers blush to recall
-- as they love to do -- the licentious hymenatia of a pagan
wedding, really Christian parts of the world still salute marriage
with a candor that belongs to the infancy of the race.

     You may think I have selected two rare instances. No, they are
casual experiences of travel, but I will give two others, from
equally uncontaminated districts of southern Europe. In the one, a
metropolis, unnatural vice is so prevalent that maids are generally
virtuous. In the other, a large and beautiful region, both natural
and unnatural vice are as lightly held as they have ever been in
any history.

     This is the moral paradox of our age. In these regions of
southern Europe and America the world lives as it has lived for the
last fifteen centuries. The faith is as primitive as the plow; and
blushes are as rare as doubts. I have seen the Bulgar at Mass on a
feast-day, his dull bovine eyes for once lit with awe; and I have
seen him intoxicated and entirely unrestrained a few hours later.
That was the universal world of our ancestors during the long
centuries of the Christian dominion; and now we are asked to
believe that Christian morality is the only influence that can
preserve in the world a becoming delicacy of sentiment and
expression in regard to sex.

     In one of the rooms of the Vatican Palace I saw an exquisite
fresco of Alexander VI kneeling, in rapt adoration, before the
Lord, and not far away was a beautiful painting of the Virgin, to
whom he was profoundly devoted. They were painted by Pinturecchio: 

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the wicked, cynical little Pinturecchio. And the model who sat to
him for the Virgin was the golden-haired young girl, Giulia
Farnese, the pope's darling. And I wondered, as I looked, if it was
in this very room that, as old John Buchara, the Master of
Ceremonies, tells us in his private Diary, Alexander sat one night
with Giulia and his daughter, while Cesare Borgia provided one of
his exotic entertainments: and fifty of the loveliest prostitutes
of the Holy City danced naked before them, stooping in every
posture to pick up chestnuts from the floor as their lithe forms
shone in the light of the candles.

     Oh, Rome, you say: the Scarlet Woman. But Rupert Hughes has
shown, in a series of well-documented articles in the "Haldeman-
Julius Monthly" (1925), that sex was almost as rampant in the
supposedly most puritanical of the Puritan periods of America; and
the historian Buckle has shown Calvinistic Scotland had nameless
vices: and ....

     Well, you say, the law is there. These were not Christian
morals, but the most flagrant violation of Christian teaching. Yes,
but let us consider the matter plainly. In those ages of faith, in
those parts of the world where faith still lingers at its purest,
there was, and is, no delicacy about sex; yet men believe without
the thinnest shade of doubt in the moral authority of Christ. He is
God, the stern judge of the living and the dead; just as surely to
Pope Alexander VI and the Puritan wantons as he is to the men and
maids I saw in Mexico and Italy, Greece and Bulgaria.

     Now he is a fading ghost of history. Scholars -- theological
scholars -- have taken from him one by one those terrible insignia
of power and authority which gave to his words a note of stern
command. Historians have dissolved away his human personality until
there remains only an elusive suggestion of a reformer who was put
to death on a cross, as very many were, in Judea some nineteen
centuries ago. Your Christ of divine authority, of shuddering
penalties for sin, failed to rule the hearts of men. Now, you
think, in an age of fearless questioning, of loud assertion of the
right to live, of impatience of rule, your pale ghost of a Jesus is
likely to check the strongest impulses of the race.

     But sex-morality, you say, is only a small part of the
Christian code. There are justice, temperance, truthfulness, love
of one's neighbor, honesty. Quite true. I had merely thought that
you considered Christianity peculiarly effective in checking the
sex-impulses of men and women, and so I ventured to recall how
frankly and unrestrainedly sexual people were and are, where they
believed, or believe, most confidently in the authoritative
character and dire penalties of the Christian ethic. Our generation
is at least not more sexual than any other, but it has one
distinguishing feature: it has very seriously raised the question
whether moral law in regard to sex does not contain spurious
elements. If your ethic was ineffective when none dared raise such
a question, how will it work now?

     But let us take the code of Christian morality in its
entirety; and let us agree that an ethic is a vital need of the
world. Moral law is social law, and social law becomes the more 
imperative in proportion as society becomes more complex and better

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organized. The word "virtue" is the Roman word for "manliness." The
Greek word meant "excellence"; but the Greeks conceived it in an
intellectual sense, and it really meant "wisdom." To us the word is
coming to mean, more and more, "common sense." It will one day be
automatic.

     Society today is, from the moral point of view, in the
disorganized condition in which western America was, let us say,
half a century ago. Men have gone out from the shadow of the old
law and its penalties. They laugh at hell and they patronize God.
For untrained minds the result would be disastrous if the human
meaning of morality were not so frequently and dramatically
expressed. "If there is no God, why can't I do what I like?" is a
question I have had to answer for thirty years. But the answer is
easy. Next morning, perhaps, the maid reads of one like herself who
has been lured to a sea-side bungalow, where fragments of her
burned body are later discovered, or another who has gone for a
glorious week-end and left her fair young frame in some deserted
wood. There is law because there are penalties: not penalties
because there is a law.

     This is the world which you would bring back to Christian
morality. Now let us dismiss the question of sanctions and regard
the code in itself. You are going to offer our world the ethic of
Christ without the fire that is never quenched and the worm which
dieth not. You lay the emphasis on Christian morality: the
sublimest code that was ever given to men, the pattern of life set
by the noblest character -- and so on.

     Candidly, how much do you know about Epictetus or Apollonius?
How much, in the way of precise detail, do you know about Kong-fu-
tse, Lao-tse, Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Epicurus, Dion
Chrysostom, Seneca, or Spinoza? The list might fill a good half-
page. You are positive that Christ was far nobler than all these;
and you will probably admit that you have never heard of some of
them and have not read more than a few disparaging Christian
remarks about any of them. How does the very little which we can
even pretend to know about Jesus make him superior to these?

     The ideal, at all events, is magnificent, you say. I suggest
that you are again repeating an oft-repeated phrase; and I ask you
to try this simple experiment. Take the Gospel of Luke, in which
the figure of Christ is said to appear in its most alluring charm
and most shining nobility, and run over it.

     Let us ignore Christ's words for a moment, and see how he
acted. Nothing in the first three chapters. In Chapter iv he
preaches, and he works two miracles. Nothing out of the ordinary
for a preacher (except miracles). Nothing at all either sublime or
winsome in Chapters v, vi, and vii except that he allows a
prostitute to kiss his feet (which no respectable preacher would
dare to do). In the next chapter other loose women minister to him;
and he snubs his mother. In Chapter ix he declines to ask God to
burn -- as his chosen disciples want -- a village and all its
inhabitants because they refuse him free hospitality: which sounds
rather elementary. In the next chapter he undoes even this by
saying that cities which do not receive his disciples shall be 


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treated worse than Sodom; and in the next three chapters he does
nothing of any note except abuse the Pharisees (four-fifths of the
nation) in fine style. That is more than half the "most beautiful"
of the Gospels.

     In short, any man who will reflect on what he has been saying
all his life, and will trouble to take an hour or two to verify it,
will find that in Luke, which is supposed to depict Jesus at his
best, there is no figure of Jesus at all corresponding to the
pulpit-rhetoric about him. If he was divine, we do not count the
miracles and the casting out of devils. Our age would ask him what
the devils were doing there at all. The glorification of Christ is
really based upon his words, his moral teaching. If you omit the
"sayings of Jesus" from Luke, there remains only the rather
unsympathetic figure of a zealot who calls his opponents "fools"
and "hypocrites" and "wipers," who predicts horrible calamities for
cities which do not accept his teaching, who is gentle with sinners
and harsh with his mother, who says that he has expressly come to
split up families, and so on.

     We turn, then, away from this "luminous model," which does not
exist (and would not be a model if it did, for Jesus is supposed to
have had supernatural gifts), and consider the sayings. Now if, as
I said, the religious reader will rid himself for an hour of the
hypnotic influence of the pulpit, he will begin to wonder how it is
that the most casual remarks of Jesus could be given verbatim by
Luke at least forty years later.

     The record is really remarkable. Mary (Chapter i) seems to
have composed, impromptu, a very creditable piece of poetry and at
once written it down to give to posterity. The short remarks of
devils, invalids, apostles, soldiers, etc., are all at hand for
reproduction fifty years later. The longest speeches of Jesus are
available. All this in an age when, although the enlightened Romans
had a system of shorthand, the Jews certainly hadn't. We may take
it as certain that Mary, Peter, Matthew, etc., could not read or
write. The believer now treasures every word in the Gospels. How,
on reflection, does he suppose that they were kept for posterity?

     But, you say, how could any man forget them?

     They are so sublime, so original, so unique, so superhuman.
And just there I join issue. They are neither sublime, nor unique,
nor original, nor superhuman; for every one of them had been said
already, and it was possible for any educated Jew or Greek to make
a collection or compilation of them.

                       THE STOLEN PARABLES

     The first original feature which will be claimed for the
teaching of Jesus in the Gospels is the use of parables. Here, it
will be said, he differed essentially from the Scribes and
Pharisees. They spent their time splitting hairs. They argued
endlessly with each other about points of law and doctrine. They
paid no heed to the "great multitudes" which hungered for the word
of life; and it was to these that Jesus spoke, in simple moral
stories which all could understand.


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     This idea is, as I have already said, based upon a
misconception of the Pharisees: an idea of them as a comparatively
small and isolated sect, which shows that the Gospel-writer had
never lived in Judea. Historians tell us that the bulk of the Jews
-- variously estimated at three-fourths to four-fifths of the
nation, were Pharisees. Paul, a working man, was a Pharisee. A
Pharisee, was, in the time of Jesus, simply a good Jew who was
zealous for the law. It was mainly the Pharisees who addressed the
people in the synagogues; and they sometimes permitted Jesus to
address them.

     It is still stranger, and shows more plainly than ever that
the men who wrote the Gospels were far removed, both in space and
time, from the Judea of 30 A.D., that the parable was a very
ordinary and esteemed method of teaching in the land. The parable
is a very natural outcome of the mind of primitive races, in whom
imagination is not yet overshadowed by intellect. It is the art of
the Oriental just as sculpture and architecture are the arts of
other nations in an early phase of development. In point of fact,
the parables which are ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels were stolen
by the writers from the Rabbis whom they attacked.

     There is a great deal of quibbling, of partial statement or
partisan misstatement of the truth, in these matters, and I want
the readers to take a broad-minded view. As I shall show in a
moment, most of the parables of the Gospel are actually in the
Talmud, the semi-sacred book of the Jews. Any person can verify
that; although, curiously enough, for it is a point of the greatest
interest, the fact was mentioned only in a few obscure Jewish works
until I drew general attention to it in my "Sources of the Morality
of the Gospels.

     Now, it is entirely certain that a dozen identical parables,
with the same moral and almost exactly the same language, were not
invented separately in the same age and country, by Jesus and the
Rabbis. That is elementary common sense; and, even if some
desperate person maintained that they could be thus thought out
independently, it would still follow that Jesus merely did what the
Rabbis did. The only point for a serious student is: Which borrowed
from the other?

     At the time that the Gospels, as we have them, were written --
the end of the first and beginning of the second century -- there
was, as is well known, a very bitter feud between Jews and
Christians. It is that conflict which tinges the reference to the
Pharisees in the New Testament. Were the Rabbis, in such
circumstances, likely to steal the sayings of Jesus? One can
imagine the derision with which the Christians would treat such an
audacious theft. No early Christian writer accuses the Jews of it.

     But, you may say, this cuts both ways. Would the Christians be
likely to steal from the Jews? Does any writer of the time accuse
them of stealing the parables?

     It sounds plausible until you learn that there were no
Rabbinical writers of the time. You see the force of it. There were
Christian writers (of Gospels, Epistles, apologetic treatises, and 
so on), and they could say what they liked of the Rabbis and, as by

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that time there was a sharp cleavage and few Christians knew what
the Rabbis had said, they could safely borrow Rabbinical sayings.
When you study these matters, you must get entirely away from the
atmosphere of the twentieth century. I am not suggesting that, say,
the writer of Luke sat down one day, with a fountain pen, to
compile a collection of nice things to ascribe to Jesus. It must
not be supposed that he had before him, as I have at the moment, a
lot of books from which he could select his material. He had no
books at all (unless he had copies of the Greek moralists), for the
sayings and parables of the Rabbis were not in writing. All the
material of the Gospels was oral. Stories and sayings went from
mouth to mouth for half a century. The origin of them may have been
quite unknown to the Greek writer of Luke.

     Here an orthodox reader may fancy that he can see a serious
flaw in the argument. If the sayings and parables of the Rabbis
were not committed to parchment by the beginning of the second
century, how is any person going to prove that they existed at all?

     We must glance at the origin of the Talmud. Rodkinson reminds
us in his "History of the Talmud" how, since the canon of the
Jewish sacred books was closed in the fifth century B.C., teachers
confined themselves to commentaries on "the Law and the Prophets";
and they were so zealous in preserving the canon that they wrote
nothing. There were very important schools, in Babylonia and Egypt
as well as Judea, and from about the time of Christ the ordained
teachers were known as Rabbis. There were two very famous Rabbis in
the time of Christ: a rigorist named Shamai and a liberal and
humanitarian named Hillel, who was far more like the Jesus of the
Gospels (without the occasional harshness) than like the Pharisees
of the Gospels. But all teaching and tradition were oral. Except
that some of the Rabbis used notes, it was strictly forbidden to
commit the teaching to parchment.

     But consider carefully the difference between the Jewish oral
tradition and the Christian. The Jewish tradition was handed down
in schools, with a strict educational discipline. The pupils, who
came from all parts of the world, and went from school to school to
compare notes, learned by heart, as a pupil now learns poetry, the
words of the more famous Rabbis. Exactness was just as important as
in any other school. It was precisely the opposite with the
Christian tradition. The atmosphere of the religious circle was as
far removed as possible from that of the school, and there was only
the loosest communication between one center and another.

     After the dispersion of the Jews, however, it was felt that a
systematic record was required, and the famous Rabbi Akiba began
the work in the time of Hadrian: almost at the time when the
Gospels, as we have them, were completed. This body of teaching
was, for the Palestinian Jews, committed to writing in the fourth
century; but scholars can easily distinguish between the older
part, closed in the second century (called the Mishna), and the
later additions, or Gemara. In the Mishna, the oldest part of the
Talmud, we have the sayings of Rabbis from the time of Christ
onward.




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     A learned theologian, Dr. Julicher, has suggested that it was
the example of Christ which set the Rabbis using parables. Apart 
from the fact that, as St. Jerome, who lived in Palestine, tells
us, "it was a common thing for the Syrians to add parables to their
words," Dr. Julicher really evades the point. It is that the
parables ascribed to the Rabbis in the Mishna are largely the same
parables as those ascribed to Christ. I do not know of any writer
who suggests that the Rabbis actually borrowed their parables from
the despised and obscure little sect of the Christians in the first
century! In any case, Rabbi Ziegler has shown that, as any Bible
reader may remember, the parable begins in the Old Testament ("Die
Konigs-Gleichnisse des Midrasch"). Where "three thousand proverbs"
are attributed to Solomon (I Kings iv, 32), the word in the Hebrew
text is really "parables." The "parable of the vineyard," for
instance (Mark xii, 1-9), is obviously based upon Isaiah v, 1-6.

     A comparison of the Gospel and the Talmudic parables, with a
learned commentary, was published in 1912 by P. Fiebig ("Die
Gleichnisreden Jesu"), and I need only translate a few
illustrations from this or from Rodkinson's "History of the
Talmud."

     First let us take a parable of Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, who
was teaching in Jerusalem before the year 70 A.D. Warning his
pupils to be ever ready for death, he says:

          Like unto a king who invited his servants to a banquet
     but appointed no time unto them. The wise among them put on
     their festive garments, and betook themselves to the door of
     the king's house, saying: In a king's house nothing is wanting
     [that is to say, the banquet may be ready today]. But the
     foolish among them went about their work, saying: Can a
     banquet be prepared without trouble? And of a sudden the king
     summoned his servants. The wiser went in unto him, as they
     were, in their festive garments; and the foolish went in unto
     him, as they were, in their soiled garments. Then the king was
     pleased with the wise, but angry with the foolish. He said:
     They who have dressed themselves for the banquet may sit, and
     eat, and drink; but they who have not put on festive garments
     shall stand by and watch.

     With this compare the parable in Matthew xxii, 2.

          The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which
     made a marriage for his son, and sent forth his servants to
     call them that were bidden to the wedding; and they would not
     come. Again, he sent forth other servants, saying: Tell them
     which are bidden. Behold I have prepared my dinner; my oxen
     and my fatlings are killed, and all things are ready; come
     unto the marriage. But they made light of it, and went their
     ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise; and the
     remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and
     slew them. But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth; and
     he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and
     burned up their city. Then saith he to his servants: The
     wedding is ready, but they which were bidden were not worthy.
     Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall 


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     find, bid to the marriage. So those servants went out into the
     highways, and gathered together all as many as they found,
     both bad and good; and the wedding was furnished with guests.
     And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a
     man which had not on a wedding-garment; and he saith unto him:
     Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding
     garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to his
     servants: Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast
     him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing
     of teeth.

     Frankly, this is silly. Never in history did men refuse a
royal invitation and slay the messengers. And then there is the
feast waiting (cattle killed, etc.) while armies go and burn down
the cities which are mysteriously possessed by the guests, and so
on. Sillier still, and far from moral, is the idea that because a
man who has been brought in off the highway does not happen to be
wearing his finest clothes he must be fearfully punished. It is a
phantasmagoria of folly; and I am only astonished that those who
believe in the divinity of Christ did not long ago denounce it as
a Jewish interpolation. The sober part of it is obviously borrowed
from Johanan. "The kingdom of heaven" is, in Christ's language, the
day of death and judgment, so the main idea is the same. But the
parable went round and round among ignorant people until in the end
it reads like a nightmare. We have no reason to believe that it
appeared in Matthew until the last decade of the century.

     The "parable of the ten virgins" looks as if it might have
been inspired by the same Jewish parable; and it is equally far
from being an improvement on the original. The bridegroom who turns
up at midnight, the maids who placidly sleep while the bridegroom
is missing, the refusal of bridesmaids on such an occasion to give
a little oil, the brutal conduct of the groom -- it is another
phantasmagoria of nonsense (Matthew xxv, 1-13). These things are
taught to the children in British schools as examples of the
superlative wisdom and tenderness of Jesus. There are several
parables in the older part of the Talmud which play round the same
idea, but, absurd as much of the Talmud is, they are more sober
than these two Gospel parables.

     Let us take "the parable of the talents." It is told in
Matthew (xxv, 14-28) and Luke (xix, 12-27); and it is told with
such material variations that it is clear there was no written
record of the supposed words of Jesus. In Luke it has the usual
childish details; a "nobleman" goes into a far country to take over
a "kingdom," and so on. It is much the way in which little girls
tell each other stories. In both, however, the main idea is that
God has entrusted man with money to invest, and the original
parable may be one spoken by the Rabbi Elazar ben Arach. His
master, the Rabbi Johanan, had lost a son, and Elazar said to him,
by way of consolation:

          I will tell thee a parable. To whom shall I liken the
     matter? To a man with whom the king hath entrusted a deposit.
     Every day he wept, and cried, and said: Woe is me, when shall
     I be free from this burden and in peace? So thou, rabbi, hadst
     a son ... and he left the world sinless. Thou mayst therefore
     be comforted; for thou hast restored thy trust uninjured.

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     Rabbi Elazar belongs to the end of the first and beginning of
the second century. In my "Sources of the Morality of the Gospels"
I wrongly supposed that he was too late to influence the Gospels.
The fact is that Rabbi Johanan died about 90 A.D., and his loss of
a son must have been some years before that date.

     The closely related "parable of the debtors" (Matthew xviii,
23-34) seems equally to come from a Jewish source, and is far
inferior to the original. The Evangelist makes a servant owe a king
"ten thousand talents"; which is, in modern money, about ten
million dollars, or enough to buy up all Jerusalem! Moreover, the
man promises to pay all the debt, and the king, who at first
condemns him and his wife and children to slavery, suddenly wipes
out the whole enormous debt. The original seems to be a sober story
which is used thus by the Rabbi Jose:

          I will make thee a parable. To what shall I liken the
     matter? To a man who lendeth his neighbor a mina [about $20],
     and appointeth unto him a day of reckoning in the presence of
     the king. And he swore to him on the life of the king. The
     time came, but he paid not; and he came to make his peace with
     the king. And the king said unto him: Thy offense against me
     is forgiven: go thou and make peace with thy neighbor.

     Even here there are little eccentricities, such as taking a
man before the king to pay twenty dollars, but the Rabbi's use of
the story (which was probably common) is much preferable to
Matthew's.

     The belief in the wisdom of Jesus is so rooted that divines
themselves are quite blind to the absurdities of the parables. In
Spence and Exell's "Pulpit Commentary," which is much used by
British preachers, not only is there no note of exclamation or
interrogation at the sum of ten million dollars, but the
commentator solemnly goes on (or advises the preacher to go on):
"The reckoning had only just begun: there may have been other even
greater debts to come!"

     Fiebig is too ready to say that the Rabbinical parable is too
late to have been copied into the Gospels. Both generally drew from
a common stock, he thinks, But no evidence could be given that the
parables were in any gospel before the year 100 A.D. at least, and
those I have given are not later than that. The Talmud, however,
continues to give parables substantially identical with those of
the Gospels under the names of Rabbis of the second and third
centuries, and, since it is quite impossible to suppose that Rabbis
would venture to give in the schools as their own parables those
which any pupil might read in the hated Christian book, it is most
likely that the idea of the parable was an old one, often used, and
the Talmud has preserved it in the form given to it by a particular
late Rabbi.

     There is, for instance, "the parable of the unjust steward"
(Luke xvi, 1-10). It is, like most of the others, full of
absurdities. The "lofty moralist" is represented as "commending the
unjust steward" and urging us to "make friends of the mammon of 



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unrighteousness." The comments of commentators on these things are
amusing. More sober, again is the Talmud version, attributed to
Rabbi Simon ben Elazar (of about 200 A.D.):

          Like to a king who had two supervisors: one set over the
     treasures of silver and gold, and one set over the stores of
     straw. The one who had charge of the straw store was
     suspected, and he murmured because they would not set him over
     the store of silver and gold. Then said they to him: Fool, if
     thou incurrest suspicion in regard to the straw store, how
     canst thou be found fit to take charge of the treasures of
     silver and gold?

     Fiebig here observes that the Talmud parable has little in
common with the version in Luke. The truth is that it has a point
in common with it so material that we must conclude that both drew
from the same source. The conclusion of Luke's amazing moral story
is:

          He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful
     also in much [great]; and he that is unjust in the least is
     unjust also in much.

     This moral has not only no connection whatever with Luke's
version of the parable, but it is precisely the lesson of the
parable as given by the Rabbi, who concludes:

          If the children of Noah were not faithful to the
     commandments given them, how much less would they have
     observed all the commandments of the law?

     The "parable of the workers in the vineyard," one of the most
popular, has a perfect parallel in the Talmud: and the Talmud
version again avoids the perversities of the Christian version. In
Matthew (xx, 1-16) the employer arbitrarily chooses to pay the same
sum to those who had worked only one hour and to those who had
"borne the burden and heat of the day"; and, when the latter
complained, the employer harshly answers: "Is it not lawful for me
to do what I will with mine own?" I do not find that the preachers
who have now discovered that the ethic of Jesus has a wonderful
application to social questions ever use that text. In the Talmud
it runs more reasonably:

          Rabbi Zeira said: To whom shall I liken the Rabbi Bon,
     son of Chija? To a king that hath hired many workers, and
     among them was one who did more worh than was needful. What
     did the king do? He took him, and walked about with him. When
     evening was come, the laborers came to receive their hire, and
     he gave unto this one the same wage as unto the others. And
     the laborers murmured and said: We have worked the whole day,
     and this man hath worked but two hours, yet he hath given him
     the same wage together with us. Then the king said to them:
     This man hath done more in two hours than ye have done during
     the whole day. So Rabbi Bon did more in the Law in twenty-
     eight years than a clever pupil could learn in a hundred
     years.



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     Rabbi Zeira lived about the year 300 A.D., but in the Talmud
the parable is in Hebrew (the later part of the Talmud being in
Aramaic), which means that it is ancient. Apparently the Rabbi
applied to his young colleague, who had recently died, an old
parable of the schools, and Luke used the same. Quite certainly
those two stories come from a common source; and it is just as
certain that no distinguished Rabbi would borrow stories from the
New Testament.

     I have given in my "Sources of the Morality of the Gospels" a
number of further parallels. There are clear parallels to the
parable of Dives and Lazarus, of the lost coin, of the lost sheep,
of the prodigal son, and others. The parable was the favorite
expression of the Rabbis, from the time of Jesus onward, and every
idea in the parables of the Gospels was used by them. In most cases
they used the actual stories. The "originality" of Jesus is a myth.
The "superb" language attributed to him is largely foolish.

                     THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

     Now let us take up the remaining parts of the moral teaching
attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. We may begin with the Sermon on
the Mount, which contains almost a complete summary of the morality
of the Gospels.

     The slightest reflection should suffice to make any open-
minded reader skeptical about this famous Sermon. For centuries the
most learned divines have brooded over it, and written commentaries
and sermons on it, and, until recent years, not one of them ever
expressed a doubt about its being a correct reproduction of a
lengthy discourse by Jesus. Yet the circumstances at once excite
suspicion, or more than suspicion.

     It is not known to Mark, the oldest Gospel; and Luke, who
makes it a Sermon on the Plain, obviously has no account of it in
the least resembling that of Matthew. The setting of the story,
moreover, in Matthew is not impressive. In order to preach a long
sermon to "his disciples" -- only four have been mentioned -- he
goes up "into a mountain" for some mysterious reason. Finally, the
four Galilean fishermen who formed his audience must have been
totally illiterate, and since no one could write the sermon, it
must be supposed to have been miraculously memorized by them. We
have here, in fact, one of the plainest cases in the Gospels of a
late compilation attributed to Jesus. Matthew actually forgets
(vii, 28) that Jesus has (v, 1) left the multitudes behind, and in
the end he makes these the audience.

     Modern divines recognize these weaknesses, and say that it is
not a single discourse, but a collection of sayings of Jesus put in
a dramatic form by the writer of the Gospels. This, they say, does
not in the least detract from its value. The sentiments embodied in
it are superb, unique, etc. Let us see.

     It opens with the famous Eight Beatitudes, "Blessed are the
poor in spirit," and so on. I have noticed that much time is wasted
by clericals and anti-clericals in conflicts over this supposed
glorification of poverty. Divines with a pretension to a knowledge 


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of Greek assure us that what Jesus really says is: "Blessed be the
poor." That is nonsense, for the Greek text, which lies before me,
contains no verb at all. In plain English, this first and much-
quoted sentence of the great sermon is a piece of confusion.
Consistently with other texts of the Gospels, and the tenets of the
Essenians, it ought to be a frank glorification of poverty. But the
writer expressly says "the poor in spirit," or poor-spirited; and
the only plausible meaning we can give to it is "the humble in
spirit." Our age does not want that counsel. It has done
incalculable harm in the past. But, in any case, to say that there
is anything original in a religious moralist commending humility is
quite absurd. The later books of the Old Testament and the Talmud
are full of such passages, and one could cull even from the pagan
moralists a whole anthology of such sentiments. Even material
poverty, if any insist that Jesus meant this, is glorified by them,
Seneca wrote a treatise on it. Plutarch asks: "What disease shall
we say that the rich man suffereth from but spiritual poverty?"
("On Covetousness," iv). Epictetus says: "Any person may live happy
in poverty, but few in wealth and power" ("Fragments," cxxviii).

     The next sentence is "Blessed are they that mourn, for they
shall be comforted": which is almost a quotation from Isaiah (Ixi,
1-2, etc.), or from innumerable verses of the prophets and the
psalms. Every moralist who believes in God makes a commonplace of
the sentiment. So it is with the blessing of "the meek" -- another
disastrous counsel which Christianity impressed upon the world. The
psalms and prophets are full of it, and every Stoic repeats it.
Seneca says: "I will be meek and yielding to my enemies" ("On the
Happy Life," xx, 5). Plutarch writes: "A calm and meek and humane
temper is not more pleasant to those with whom we live than to him
who possesseth it" ("On Restraining Anger," xvi).

     Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius constantly say it. And I admire
it no more in them than in Matthew; but anything less original than
these "Eight Platitudes," as they ought to be called, it would be
difficult to conceive. I have in my other work given many perfect
parallels to each, and could have given scores. Each sentiment is
a moral and religious commonplace, and the language is not a whit
better in the Gospels than that of the psalms, the Rabbis, or the
Stoic moralists.

     After the Beatitudes the writer makes Jesus address his
audience as "the salt of the earth," and "the light of the world,"
and so on. It is obviously meant to be an address to a few chosen
disciples; yet at the close, we are told, "the people were
astonished at his doctrine." The whole passage is a clumsy late
fabrication, for at that time, the very beginning of the career of
Jesus, there was no question of any "persecution." And what would
the four burly fishermen, who had just been recruited in Galilee,
think of hearing that they were "the light of the world"? It was
precisely the title which Jewish pupils gave to their most learned
Rabbis.

     Jesus is then said to have assured his hearers that he
advocated no change whatever in "the Law": the most essential
injunctions of which (sacrifice, etc.) he spent his career in
denouncing. "Till heaven and earth shall pass, one jot or one 


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tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled"
(v, 18). Here Matthew puts into the mouth of Jesus the sentiment of
the Judaizing Christians, and confirms it in the next verse with a
stern threat; and in the very next verse he switches off to the
sentiments of the anti-Judaizing Christians and begins to belabor
the Pharisees -- the model observers of the Law!

     The writer does not even understand them. The old law was, he
makes Jesus say, that you must not kill: the new law is that you
shall not even be angry with your brother "without a cause." A few
verses earlier the lesson was that you must not even be angry with
your brother if you have a cause. Moreover, there is nothing in the
least new about this "new and higher morality." The Pharisees of
the second century must have smiled at it, because precisely the
old law ran (Lev. xix, 18): "Thou shalt not hate thy brother in
thine heart . ... thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge
against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself." And, as I have already said, the Rabbis
quoted in the Talmud and the pagan moralists abound in the same
sense.

     Matthew makes Jesus follow up his counsel by saying that if
you take a gift to the altar and recollect that you have a grudge
against a man, you must "leave the gift before the altar" and go
first and be reconciled. A pretty anachronism! There were no
Christian altars to receive gifts until decades after the death of
Jesus; and men did not take "gifts," but animals to be sacrificed
(which Jesus denounced), to the Jewish altars.

     He goes on to say that the old law was that you should not
commit adultery: the new law makes it a sin even to desire a woman.
But the oldest law precisely was: "Thou shalt not covet thy
neighbor's wife," and the later books of the Old Testament say
exactly what Jesus is supposed to say: "Lust not after her beauty
in thine heart" (Prov. vi, 25), and "Gaze not on a maid ... gaze
not on another's beauty," (Ecclus. ix, 5 and 8). The Rabbis went
even beyond Jesus. "Whosoever," says the Talmud, "regardeth even
the little finger of a woman hath already sinned in his heart"
(Beracbot, 24, 1). Seneca, Epictetus and all the Stoics are just as
stern with us. "It is the intention, not the outward act, which
makes the wickedness," says Seneca ("On the Happy Life," xvi). Our
age is not likely to be moved by these exaggerated pruderies.

     Then there is the "sublime principle," in a matter of vital
human importance, about divorce. Mark and Luke make Jesus forbid
divorce under any conditions. Matthew allows divorce for
"fornication." The result is that the Churches are entirely at
variance on one of the most important of social and moral problems.
The Catholic thinks all divorce invalid; the British Protestant is
sure that a woman commits no sin if she remarries after divorcing
her husband for adultery; the German or American Protestant
genially commits all three Evangelists (if not Jesus) to the flames
and gets a divorce for half a dozen reasons. Verily, our age would
be sadly perplexed if it had not these simple and sublime teachings
of Jesus!




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     I may add that the Jews at the time of Jesus were just as
divided as the primitive Christians evidently were, and Christians
are today. Some Rabbis -- unknown to Matthew -- forbade divorce
altogether; some allowed it for adultery; others admitted many
grounds for divorce. And we are told that it is only from religion
that we can get any clear and firm guidance on sex-questions.

     Several verses on oaths follow: and the writer of the Gospel
again makes a mistake in thinking that the Old Testament and the
Pharisees did not forbid swearing. "Thou shalt not take the name of
the Lord thy God in vain" is one of the Ten Commandments; and more
than one passage of the Old Testament says, like Ecclus. xxiii,
9-11, "Accustom not thy mouth to an oath." There were no civic or
official oaths in Judea; but there is no Christian country that has
not myriads of them. Until recently Christian civilizations
prosecuted any man who acted on Christ's injunction and refused to
take an oath. Less than a century ago men who sought justice in
British courts of law were contemptuously dismissed because they
had scruples about taking an oath. Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus
condemned oaths just as Jesus did. Popes and bishops insist on
them.

     Next comes the famous council that, whereas the old law
permitted one to demand "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth," in the new and higher dispensation you must even turn the
other cheek to the smiter and give the cloak also to the man who
takes your coat.

     Since Christendom is unanimously agreed, and always has been
agreed, that no man of sense would act upon this "sublime teaching"
of Jesus, we need hardly linger over it. But it is necessary to
point out once more that it is certainly not Jesus -- not a Jew of
the year 30 A.D. who said this. For, although the "eye for an eye"
principle is found in Exodus, where it seems to be a fragment of
earlier tribal customs, the later books of the Old Testament say,
over and over again, precisely what Matthew gives as a new law. "I
gave my back to the smiters and my cheeks to them that plucked off
the hair," says Isaiah (1, 6). "Let him give his cheek to him that
smiteth him," says Jeremiah in Lamentations (iii, 30). "If any
demand thy ass, give him also the saddle," says the Talmud (Baba
kamma, 92, 2); and this saying is described as a popular proverb.
"Let him strike thee," says Plato (Gorgias, 527), giving counsel
how to deal with an angry man.

     How futile is the modern excuse that, while the counsel of
Jesus is beyond the range of human nature, it on that very account
evinces a superhuman standard of conduct, and could not have been
thought out by a mere biographer. Like all these ascetic
exaggerations, it occurred to nearly every moralist. The age was
morbid, because old faiths had broken down and men had not yet
knowledge enough to realize their true positions in the universe.
Morbid asceticism arose as naturally as morbid sensuality. Every
single pagan moralist at one time or other praised "passive
resistance. You must smile, they said, when the angry man insults
or strikes you. It is supposed to do him good. Try it.




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     Once, being at lunch in the Harvard Club with the profoundly
Christian Theodore Roosevelt, I remarked, apropos of pacifism (of
which one of the guests had maliciously accused me), that my
principle was: "If any man smite thee on one cheek, smite him
promptly on both." Roosevelt's roar of laughter was not
complimentary to the Sermon on the Mount. His son told me later
that the Colonel had gone around New York for a week telling people
that he had "met a pacifist after his own heart." It is sheer bunk
to pretend to admire these "elevated" counsels.

     I reserve for the next section the equally famous counsel to
love one's enemies, merely remarking here that we have one more
plain proof that no Palestinian Jew ever said what Matthew
attributes to Christ. When the writer speaks of the "eye for an
eye" principle as the Jewish law, he has at least a possible
reference to Exodus though no fair-minded person would quote this
as "the law," when later books of the Old Testament entirely undo
it. But when Jesus is represented as saying in the Sermon on the
Mount, "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy
neighbor and hate thine enemy," we can say at once that it is a
false representation. There is no such passage anywhere in the Old
Testament. The contrary is repeatedly said; and the Rabbis of the
Talmud have, as we shall see, the same teaching. If then, the first
part of the sentence is clearly due to some bitterly anti-Jewish
writer of a later date, so, apparently, is the counsel to love
one's enemies. There was, in fact, as we shall see, no originality
in the counsel. It was a platitude of the super-ethics of the time.

     The modern Christian does not read Plato, Epictetus, Plutarch,
Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. He knows, without reading them, that
the Gospel is far superior to them. He is quite sure of the
originality of Christ without ever taking the trouble to inquire
whether any other moralist ever said the same things. He does not,
of course, read the Talmud, and one may excuse him, for a very
large part of it is tedious, if not ridiculous; though it would at
least teach him that the sayings of Jesus were platitudes of the
Jewish schools in the first century. But he may at least be
supposed to read the Old Testament occasionally; and there is not
a single point of "Christian" morality that is not found in it.


                          GOLDEN RULES

     In every dissertation on the supreme excellence and
originality of Christ as a moralist we are first, and most
triumphantly, confronted with the Golden Rule:

     "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do
to you, do ye even so to them."

     For forty years I have heard or read disputes about this
famous rule. Does it not place Jesus eminently above any other
moralist that ever lived? The opponent answers, no, because Kong-
fu-tse gave the same rule six centuries earlier; and there is then
a long and angry discussion entirely contrary to the teaching of
both Jesus and Kong-fu-tse as to whether the Chinese moralist did
not give his rule in "a merely negative form."


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     Neither side seems to notice that the Golden Rule ends in the
Gospel with this phrase: "For this is the law and the prophets."
The writers of the Gospels, probably Greek Christians, steeped in
the rancor that grew up between Jews and Christians, say some harsh
and untrue things about the Jews. As we saw, they misrepresent the
"old law." They pitch it at a lower note than it really had in
order to make Jesus superior to it and original. But precisely here
where Jesus is said by his modern admirers to be most clearly
original, they claim no originality at all. They make him say that
he is merely recommending them to observe the old law.

     I am not selecting the Golden Rule for special treatment on
the ground of its intrinsic importance. It is trite, obvious,
proverbial all over the world ("Do as you would be done by"), and
so far from being beyond the range of human wisdom that children
quite commonly formulate it as a sensible code of social conduct in
their little spheres. Judge Ben B. Lindsey once told me that, in
dealing with the most refractory boy be had ever had, he had
brought him to his senses only by applying that rule, in a secular
sense. It is so far from being religious, or in any way necessarily
connected with religion, that it is expressly put by Jesus (or the
writer of the Gospel) on a utilitarian basis. The preceding verses
plainly say that you are to give to others and then you may expect
gifts from them. It is a summary of our social or utilitarian
ethic: which Christians affect to despise. But it is a weakly
worded summary, a mere popular phrase.

     A divine would probably remind me that this rule of life takes
a "sublimer" -- how they love that word sublime, and how utterly
misplaced it is -- form in the command: "Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself." Many, at least, incautiously choose this as
the most characteristic saying of Jesus. It is an unhappy choice,
for the sentence is taken verbatim from one of the books of the Old
Testament (Leviticus xix, 18).

     People forget sometimes, in comparing the morality of the Old
Testament with that of the New, that the one covers many centuries,
and reflects very different stages of moral evolution, while the
Gospels represent a single, and much later, stage. You can quote
harsh sayings from the Old Testament; and you can find the
antidote, the parallel with the sayings of Jesus, somewhere else in
the book -- in the later psalms, or Isaiah, or Proverbs, or
Ecclesiastes. Leviticus is by no means so early as its position in
the Bible suggests. It belongs to the fifth century, when the Jews
had been raised to a higher level by the Babylonians and the
Persians. And in a series of counsels or commands, which are quite
parallel with the counsels of the Sermon on the Mount, the priestly
writer lays down the law of brotherly love.

     It is, like so much of this ancient morality, an exaggeration,
It is a psychological impossibility for any man to love another as
he loves himself: that is to say, in practical language, to desire
as keenly for another as he does for himself. Thirty years ago I
was a professor of philosophy (which included psychology) in a
Roman Catholic seminary; and I remember well two Latin aphorisms
which my manual directed me to expound to my clerical pupils. The
first was: The will desires only what is good (to it). The second 


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was: The will desires only its own good. It was an archaic system
of psychology, but on that point the modern psychology of volitions
or desires does not differ. A saint or a reformer may seem to love
his neighbor as himself; but the saint loves at the same time the
reward in heaven which will crown his altruism, and the reformer is
not unmindful of the crown on earth. There is only one possible
form of altruism: the form which finds expression in the Golden
Rule -- enlightened egoism.

     And to that rule one could quote substantial parallels from
the moralists of every civilization. Buddha, if one prefers the
more emotional expression that one must love others as one loves
oneself, far surpassed Jesus. Love, the love of man for man, was an
essential part of his teaching. Indeed, of love of oneself he never
dreamed. His whole mission to the common folk about him was to love
each other and behave as if they loved each other. The Golden Rule,
as such, would have been deemed by Buddha a cold and calculating
expression of the true ideal.

     In China both the great moralists, Kong-fu-tse and Lao-tse,
formulated the Golden Rule. Kong-fu-tse commonly gave as the rule
of conduct certain formulas which were identical in substance with
that of Christ, but a disciple, one day asked him to put in a
single word the essential rule of life. A word, in Chinese, means,
not so many letters of the alphabet, but a single character, or two
characters combined in one. It was solely on this account that
Kong-fu-tse gave his rule in the very short form "Reciprocity," as
it is usually translated. The common statement of Christian
controversial writers that he put it in a negative form is quite
false. Literally, the character he used was the composite character
"as heart"; have one heart with your fellowmen, or behave to them
as you would have them behave to you. Lao-tse, his contemporary,
very fairly expressed the same rule.

     These moralists lived several centuries before the Christian
era opened. By the time the Gospels were written Stoicism had
inspired a large number of moralists of the ascetic type, and the
Greco-Roman world had almost as great a medley of moralities as it
had of mythologies. Golden Rules were given on every hand, and the
sentiment of the Golden Rule of Kong-fu-tse and Jesus was as
familiar as the belief in one God.

                 FUTILITY OF THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC

     Some years ago I wrote a work entitled "The Bankruptcy of
Religion." A few reviewers, lay churchmen, smiled at the title.
Does not Christianity still dominate civilization? But amongst the
many letters which the book brought me was one from an elderly
clergyman of the Church of England, in active service, confessing
his entire agreement with me. He and large numbers of the clergy
were, he said, with a pathetic reference to the economic necessity
which enslaved them to error, Agnostics. And the part of my work
which won his warmest approval was that which claimed a moral, as
well as an intellectual, bankruptcy of the Churches.





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     The world, once it had been compelled to accept the Gospels,
sank rapidly into the Dark Ages, when vice and violence ruled 
Europe. It is another legend or myth of the Churches that
Christianity elevated civilization. Europe sank far lower than it
had been in pagan days.

     The preacher, who knows nothing of moral and social history,
distracts attention from this broad failure of Christian morality
by enlarging upon the multitudes of saints and martyrs that it
inspired. It would be more accurate to enlarge on the number of
legends of forged lives, of saints and martyrs that it inspired.
Martyrs were created by the hundred by the corrupt Roman writers of
the early Middle Ages. As to saints, we will keep a broad mind and
admit that, during the fifteen hundred years of Christian
domination, thousands of men and women have found real inspiration
in the Gospels; as similar thousands found it in the words of
Buddha or of Kong-fu-tse. But this is a trifle compared with the
countless millions whose coarse and violent lives throughout the
whole of that vast period reflected anything but the ideals of the
Gospels.

     Why was this supposed teaching of Jesus so ineffective? I
would agree with the Protestant that much of the blame is due to
the sacerdotal system of the Church of Rome. Certainly I would not
agree with him that there was an improvement after the Reformation.
England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was almost, if
not quite, as immoral as during the Middle Ages. It was only in the
nineteenth century, especially the latter part of the nineteenth
century, that the standard of taste and conduct rose to the level
on which we now live. But the fault lay predominantly with Rome.
Dense ignorance always means coarseness; and the Church was
responsible for the ignorance of Europe. Moreover, the ritual
service, the doctrine of Purgatory and indulgences, the practice of
confession, the mechanical rites of kissing relics and attending
services in an unintelligible language, all tended to blunt,
instead of promote, moral delicacy.

     But the teaching of the Gospels was not even in itself
calculated to help the mass of men. I have said elsewhere that
Jesus was probably an Essanian monk. Such ascetic exaggerations as
are attributed to him were not in those days confined to monks.
Wandering moralists as well as Egyptian and Palestinian monks said
them. Wealthy men like Seneca, emperors like Marcus Aurelius, said
them, as well as slaves like Epictetus. Philosophers like Plato and
Zeno and Plutarch were little less ascetic in their denunciations
of the flesh and its lusts.

     But all moral rhetoric of this kind is bound to be ineffective
with the mass of mankind. Buddha was not more successful in Asia,
on this side, than Plato was in Greece or Jesus in later Europe.
Our blood is as much a part of our nature as is our reason. We feel
the falseness of a philosophy or an ethic that belittles the
pleasure of life and would condemn us, in a world of sunshine and
flowers, to close our eyes to the light and color. Only men and
women of a peculiar nature ever pay implicit attention to such
counsels. The teaching of Jesus was condemned to futility by its
own exaggerations. It is not too hard for human nature; but human 
nature healthily refuses to be ruled by it.

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     The Churches dare not in our age consistently advocate their
Christian ethic. It is a condemnation, root and branch, of all
pleasure. An ethic which puts married folk on a lower level, as
weaklings who cannot scale the heights of superiority, has no place
in the twentieth century. An ethic that preaches that a man must
embrace poverty if he would be really virtuous dare not be urged
from any pulpit in America. An ethic that bids the really just man
turn the other cheek to the smiter is not lofty or sublime, but a
sheer blunder. And these things are essential parts of Christ's
morality, however little they may be obtruded in Christian
morality.

     In fine, the entire atmosphere of the morality of Jesus in the
Gospels unfits it for use in modern times. Efforts have been made
to explain away the belief in hell of the prophet of Nazareth --
ridiculous efforts to get rid of the plain meaning of the Greek
words used in the Gospels -- but no amount of ingenuity will
explain away his belief that the end of the world was near. I
should be disposed, on broad grounds, to believe that this is one
of the few doctrines we can safely attribute to Jesus himself, not
to the compilers of the Gospels. For the source of that belief we
must look toward Persia, not the Greek world.

     It falsifies the entire conception of human life and duty, and
makes the morality of the Gospels quite unsuitable for our time. In
the light of that belief we can easily understand the ascetic
exaggerations of the sayings of Jesus; and we can just as easily
understand how it was that Christian morality never inspired social
justice: which is immeasurably more important than personal virtue.
Not one of the greater problems of life was ever confronted by the
Gospel Jesus or early Christianity. It was left to pagan moralists
to denounce war and slavery. It was left to Agnostic sociologists
to discover that brutal material conditions would be reflected in
brutality of mind, and that a low intellectual level meant
infallibly for the majority of men a low moral level. Our modern
conception of character and the way to improve and strengthen
character has nothing in common with the moral platitudes of
ancient Judea.

     Nor has our personal conception of our rights anything in
common with an ethic which was framed in the belief that God would
shortly destroy the earth by fire and summon the souls of all men
before his throne. In all our rebellions there is one sound note;
we claim a freedom restricted only by the rights of others that we
shall not hurt them. The alternative to that would be anarchy. The
character of our age is that it is increasingly social, and only a
social ethic will meet its needs. Let the platitudes and
eccentricities of the Gospels slumber in the Greek books in which
they were written. In the great light which has broken upon the
world we cast aside the little lamps of long ago. We see our
universe from end to end. We chart our path with a knowledge which
no other age ever possessed. We need no moralists of old times to
tell us how to behave.

                          ****     ****




                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               239
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