# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1864_S238
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

238 The Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan.

in its true reality, criticism must expel a series of errors that arise from
the slight capacity of the disciples. They drew him according to their own
conception, and often portrayed him as smaller, while believing that they
were increasing his greatness."

It is the old artifice of the enemies of Jesus which Renan here
repeats. He passes himself off as a friend and admirer of Jesus, and
complains most pitiably that the disciples did not understand Jesus and
did not grasp his greatness. That is why he takes pity on Jesus, and,
under the pretense of depicting his glory, drags him into the dust and
strips him of his divine majesty, putting in its place a grotesque
caricature. He does much the same as Judas, who betrayed the Lord with
a kiss and delivered him up to his enemies.

Since Renan says of the disciples of Jesus: "They were extremely
ignorant and weak of understanding," p. 205, their writings can of
course not be worth very much either. "The gospels may in part be
legends — and this they evidently are, through the miracles and the
supernatural with which they are filled," p. 19; with this reckless
assertion the credibility of the gospels is disposed of. Especially absurd
is what Renan fabricates about the origin of the gospels. "People did not
hesitate to make additions, to combine them according to their own
fancy, or to complete some by means of others. The poor man who has
only one book demands that it contain everything that speaks to his
heart. They lent one another these little scrolls, and each one wrote in
the margin of his copy the parables and stories that he found elsewhere
and that pleased him. In this way there arose, out of an editorial process
carried on by the lower classes of the people themselves, the finest work
in the world. Compilations have no absolute value," etc., p. 25. Extremely
ignorant and feeble-minded disciples and the lower classes of the people
write the finest work in the world — which is, however, after all only a
worthless compilation: in such absurd assertions and contradictions
Renan is inexhaustible.

Renan becomes especially venomous whenever he speaks of the
Gospel of St. John. To be sure, he praises it, in his own way, as "far
more appealing and precise than the synoptic books"; it contains "the
purest, most accurate, and truly evangelical statements," p. 28,
"wonderful flashes, features that really do come from Jesus," p. 34. But:
"Far removed from the simple, disinterested tone, keeping only to the
matter at hand, of the synoptic writings, the Gospel of John constantly
displays the prejudices of the apologist, the sectarian bias of the
partisan, and the intention of proving a thesis and convincing opponents.
Jesus did not found his sublime work upon presumptuous, clumsy,
badly written tirades with little regard for moral sense," p. 33. "We
enter here the barren wastes of metaphysics, the obscurity of abstract
dogma. Here does not blow the spirit