The Man of Galilee. Atticus G. Haygood

speaking of the sort of work historians and biographers do, but of pure creative work; the thinking out of a character never described by another and that never lived. For the theory we are now considering is that Jesus never lived; that he is only the product of the dramatic genius of these four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

      Now, you will conclude when you have considered it, that very little, if any, of this sort of work is ever done. Perhaps we should hesitate to affirm that such creative work is impossible, but it may well be doubted whether any character in any fiction or drama of any sort, by any writer in any age, is a pure invention. Is there not for every character in fiction as well as in history a man somewhere, in some form? some facts in actual life that furnish the materials for the conception and delineation of that form of life that the writing presents to us? Is there in any writing any character that has not intellectual descent from some life actually lived, or in some way other than by creative processes brought into the writer’s thoughts?

      Consider Shakespeare’s plays. Life furnished the materials; his heroes and heroines have real men and women back of them. Take Milton’s Satan. He is very like Milton in force and sublimity; but the poet did not create the character. His Satan is a composite work from Bible hints and heathen mythology. This Satan had lived in the thoughts of men before that Milton took him in hand.

      Only think how difficult, if not impossible, it must be to think out a perfectly new type of character, a type that has nothing in life to stand for it. It would be like trying to conceive of a sixth sense. Back of legends the noblest and the ignoblest there is some form of life or some form of fact. It may be that all ideas even not revealed have their type or origin somewhere in nature or in life. Whether with hand or brain man works upon materials furnished him; man creates nothing; man is created.

      But there was in no nation whatever—and these four men knew the Jewish nation only with any fullness of knowledge—any character, any life, any facts, that could have so much as suggested Jesus. They were shut up to Hebrew history, and that could furnish no materials to the evangelists for the construction of such a character. It was not suggested by the Hebrew prophets; for it is evident that the disciples did not understand these prophecies as pointing to Jesus till after he had lived his life, till his mission was ended. Nay, with all the backward-shining light of his life no four men in the world to-day could, without the actual story, construct the character and life of Jesus out of what the prophets say.

      There has been a good deal of fanciful writing concerning certain characters in the Old Testament history, considered as types of the Messiah. Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David—even magnificent and profligate Solomon and the coarse, dull Samson have been set forth as types of the true Son of man. Adam himself has been discussed and portrayed in this connection. Some of these men were among the greatest and best of the human race. But whatever they were as types of the Teacher, Prince, and Saviour foretold by the prophets, there was nothing in these men that could have suggested the invention of the Christ of the evangelists.

      So far as the predictions in Hebrew prophecy may be urged as accounting for the conception of Jesus by the evangelists, they not only did not understand them so as to make such use of them, they misunderstood them, and, in common with their people, supposed that they foretold another and altogether different character than that of the Jesus of the gospels. Jesus had to live and die before they could understand the prophets as referring to him; it was he who unlocked their meaning. The whole Christ is not in the prophets—could not be; words could not manifest him; he had to live to be known.

      Non-Christian Hebrews are to this day looking for a different character to appear and fulfill the prophets. The “Jews’ Wailing Place” in Jerusalem tells travelers of our time how they cling to an interpretation of the prophets that excludes the lowly Nazarene, of whom the evangelists have told us.