The Real Jesus?

Reading the Gospels Without Prejudice Isn't So Easy

A discussion going back centuries concerns the relationship between Scripture and Tradition. Does the text of the Bible, taken by itself, teach the same thing as the tradition which has interpreted it? Or has tradition supplemented or even distorted the teaching of the text? And what would Christianity look like if it were based on "the text alone"?

In two powerful old books, literary giants George Bernard Shaw and Gilbert Keith Chesterton took up this question. Shaw's discussion is found in the Preface to his play Androcles and the Lion (1912); Chesterton's appears in The Everlasting Man (1925).

Early in the Preface (in the section "The Gospels without Prejudice") Shaw writes:

When I was young it was impossible to read [the Gospels] without fantastic confusion of thought. . . . When you heard the gospel stories read in church, or learnt them from painters and poets, you came out with an impression of their contents that would have astonished a Chinaman who had read the story without prepossession.

Shaw's "Chinaman" has never read Augustine, seen Christian art, or heard Christian hymns, and thus reads the Gospels "without prepossession," deriving their meaning from the text alone. No European Christian historical clutter obscures his view. He reads with fresh eyes and thus "without prejudice." If we want to know what the Gospels teach about "the history and views and character of Christ," we have to approach them with the Chinaman's cultural detachment.

Chesterton proposes something similar. In his second chapter ("The Riddles of the Gospel"), speaking of the problem posed by centuries of tradition, he writes: "There is a psychological difficulty in seeing those well-known words simply as they stand and without going beyond what they intrinsically stand for." To see the Gospels afresh, we must make an effort to read them as if we were "an imaginary heathen . . . staring at [them] for the first time."

With this fundamental agreement over approach, we might think that Shaw and Chesterton would end up with similar interpretations of Jesus, but in fact their readings are far apart.

An Anti-establishment Figure

Shaw's analysis does not, in fact, stick to the mere words of the Gospel, but imports extra-textual notions. In order to read the Gospels accurately, he says, we must first learn "the history of religion." Thus, in the section "The Religion of the Minority—Salvationism" he explains the origin of the idea of Atonement in terms of current theories on the origin of sacrifice, and in the section "John Barleycorn" he explains the origin of the Eucharist in pagan myths about eating the body of a god to gain eternal life. So Shaw does not read the Gospels "without prepossession"; he reads them with the mind of an educated European of the early 1900s—something his hypothetical Chinaman would never do.

Yet Shaw does sometimes set aside his modern filter and read the Gospel stories as they stand, and his purely textual conclusions are interesting. He finds Jesus to be a remarkably tolerant and inclusive person, defying the conventions of respectable society by fraternizing with the poor, the outcast, women, and tax collectors. Jesus criticizes wealth and rank and is abrasive to religious leaders. From such facts Shaw builds up a picture of Jesus as an anti-establishment figure, an early socialist, feminist, and egalitarian who anticipated the most progressive modern thought (especially Shaw's own thought). Whereas the historical Christian tradition tamed the teaching of Jesus to incorporate it into a conservative social order based on wealth and power, the Gospels, if read "without prejudice," undermine that old marriage of Church and State to open up a new vision of human freedom and equality.

The Most Merciful Face

Chesterton's use of the Gospels is quite different. He sees a difference between the bare text and the later tradition, but does not use that difference to undermine tradition. Rather, he uses it to invert the view of Jesus and the Church popular among modern intellectuals. He writes:

We have all heard people say a hundred times over . . . that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful . . . lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character.

This view, Chesterton retorts, is "very nearly the reverse of the truth":

[The Church's portrait of Jesus] is very much more specially and exclusively merciful than any impression that could be formed by a man merely reading the New Testament for the first time. A man simply taking the words of the story as they stand would form quite another impression . . . certainly not merely an impression of mildness.

Chesterton highlights some of Jesus' "outbreaks of wrath," including his turning on Peter "as if he were the devil" and his sinking of Bethsaida "lower in the pit than Sodom." He goes on, however, to point out that such episodes are rarely part of the Church's presentation of Jesus, and then to justify that choice:

The figure in the Gospels . . . utter[s] in words of almost heart-breaking beauty his pity for our broken hearts. . . . they are almost the only kind of words that the Church in its popular imagery ever represents him as uttering. That . . . imagery is inspired by a perfectly sound popular instinct. The mass of the poor are broken, and the mass of the people are poor, and for the mass of mankind the main thing is to carry the conviction of the incredible compassion of God.

What would be the result, Chesterton speculates, if Church imagery matched the Gospel presentation of Jesus?

[T]here is something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath. There is something insupportable even to the imagination in the idea of turning the corner of a street or coming out into the spaces of a marketplace, to meet the petrifying petrifaction of that figure as it turned upon a generation of vipers, or that face as it looked at the face of a hypocrite. The Church can reasonably be justified therefore if she turns the most merciful face or aspect towards men.

A Temporary Concession

Chesterton's remarks are fair, but still leave us wondering what to do with the harsh Jesus of the text. Chesterton never tells us. Shaw, on the other hand, does tell us: the harsh side of Jesus is required to found the radical new social order; one does not overthrow wealthy and powerful hypocrites with gentle manners. Chesterton's discussion of "Jesus from the text alone" seems to end with a question, whereas Shaw's account closes with an answer.

So did Shaw understand Jesus better than Chesterton? No, because Chesterton was not trying to offer a full account of Jesus. His sharp distinction of text from tradition, unlike Shaw's, was only a temporary concession, to expose the error of the liberal anti-clericals, who misused the distinction and thus misunderstood both Jesus and the Church. Had Chesterton's book been aimed directly at Shaw's Preface, he would have offered a fuller reading of the Gospels, and surely would have answered Shaw by relating the Jesus of the Gospels coherently to the Jesus of the Church.