The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions. J. M. Robertson

knows, such doctrines as those above cited from him are far older than the Christian religion. Five centuries before the Christian era Confucius put the law of reciprocity in the sane form of the precept that we should not do unto others what we would not that they should do unto us. Are we to suppose that the rule had been left to Confucius to invent? Christians who cannot conform to it are not ashamed to disparage the precept of Confucius as a “negative” teaching, implying that there is a higher moral strain in their formula which prescribes the doing to others what we would wish them to do to us. There, if any difference of code be really intended, we are urged to confer benefits in order to have them returned. If no difference is intended, the disparagement is mere deceit. In the ancient Hindu epic, the Mahâbhârata, it is declared that “The Gods regard with delight the man who … when struck does not strike again,” and that “The good, when they promote the welfare of others, expect no reciprocity.” How long are we to listen to the childish claim that moral maxims which in India were delivered millenniums ago by forgotten men were framable in Seneca’s day only in Syria, and there only by one “unique and effulgent” personality, whose mere teaching lifted humanity to new heights? Had no nameless man or woman in Greece ever urged the beauty of non-retaliation before Plato?

      If clerics cannot rise above the old disingenuous sectarian spirit, it is time at least that laymen should. The more historic comprehension a man has of the ancient world, of Plutarch’s world, with all its sins and delusions, the less can he harbour the notion of the moral miracle involved in the thesis of the unique teacher, suddenly revealing to an amazed humanity heights of moral aspiration before undreamt of. And any considerate scrutiny of the logia of the Gospels will inevitably force the open-minded student to recognize multiplicity of thought and ideal, and compel him to seek some explanation. An effort to detach a possible personality by the elimination of impossible adjuncts is the next natural step.