SHOLEM ASCH'S PICTURE OF JESUS

Some twenty-six years ago, within a year of my arrival in this
city, I found myself one evening addressing a Jewish audience; and, with
the temerity of youth or the tactlessness of inexperience, I made bold
to introduce a reflection which had no direct connection with the sub-
ject of my address. This was an expression of my profound regret at the
continued estrangement of the Jewish people from Jesus, whom I charac-
terized as without doubt, and beyond any possibility of comparison or
measurement, the greatest figure that people had contributed to the world.
The chairman of this meeting was a rabbi; and I distinctly recall his
rather painful efforts to be tactful when, in thanking me for my address,
he mildly insisted that "There will, of course, be differences of opinion
between us as to who is the greatest Jew."

On another occasion, when speaking in a synagogue in Detroit, I
noticed the names of a number of famous Jews of ancient and modern times
painted (if I remember rightly) on the inner side of the dome which sur-
mounted the building. The most conspicuous feature of this list to me
was the absence from it of the name of Jesus. I later discussed this
matter with a learned rabbi who was my personal friend. He answered that
of course the time would come when the name of Jesus would be given its
proper place in such a list, but that public opinion among present-day
Jews was not yet ripe for it.

This was a decade or more ago. One may begin to hope, however,
that the "ancient grudge" between the Jewish people and the memory of him
whom all the rest of mankind regard as their greatest glory, is now near-
ing its end. For one thing, a thorough study and appraisal of Jesus by
Jewish scholars has now for some years been under way. This may well be
regarded as in part a contribution to, and in part a result from, that
kindlier feeling between Jews and Christians which is one of the best
signs of the times in all the lands that are still civilized. It is one
of the unlooked-for happy by-products of the hideous persecution of Jews
by the gang in Europe who are also, as far as they dare, persecuting
Christians,--because they know that their brutal tenets can have no chance
of prevailing unless Christianity also is destroyed. Jews and Christians
have been drawn together by the necessity of fighting a common enemy. It
is our duty to see to it that the friendship thus inspired shall last af-
ter the enemy has been conquered.

It is now thirty years or more since a learned and valuable study
of the Synoptic Gospels was written by an eminent Jewish scholar at Cam-
bridge University in England, the late Professor Montefiore. More re-
cently, in 1926, there appeared an enlightening volume entitled "Jesus
of Nazareth, His Life, Times, and Teaching," by Dr. Joseph Klausner, Pro-
fessor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Dr. Klausner wrote his book
in Hebrew, and it was translated into English by a Church of England schol-
ar, Dr. Herbert Danby, Canon in Residence at St. George's Cathedral in
Jerusalem. The chief value of both these works lies in the use made by
the authors of those Talmudic and other Jewish sources of information about
the period and background of Jesus which Christian scholars in general have
never sufficiently explored.

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prove Jesus a mythical character receives no countenance from authorities familiar with the Jewish sources of information about the times and the land in which he lived. The only Jew to my knowledge who has written a book upholding this myth-theory is the late Georg Brandes. He was indeed a great scholar and critic of Shakespearean and nineteenth-century literature, but he knew nothing about the period of the origins of Christianity, either from Christian or Jewish sources; and consequently his book on the subject is worthless. Dr. Klausner, indeed, pours well-deserved scorn upon the myth-theory.

But much more interesting, and of greater immediate importance than works of critical scholarship (which are intended only for special students, and therefore destined to small circulation) is the publication, by a Jewish author, of a great romance based upon the career of Jesus. Mr. Asch gives the following account of his enterprise:-

I made my first trip to Palestine in 1907, and it was during that visit, while on the way from Joppa to Odessa, that I conceived the work that has become "The Nazarene." With characteristic youthful exuberance, I at once started to write, but it was not long before I realized that I had years of research and effort ahead, if I was to give the story the significance I envisioned. This was to give a true picture of a world we have forgotten; and every detail of life was to be as true as a man could make it, whether it concerned the spectacular entertainments of the high priests and the wealthy Romans, or the surging masses of the oppressed populace.

Having been educated in the orthodox tradition with the thought of some day becoming a rabbi, I was already familiar with the time of Christ as it is presented in the Talmud and other Jewish sources, but I saw that every available source would have to be studied at leisure in the original, if this great story--the greatest story of all time--was to be synthesized and placed in its true frame. In 1914, I returned to the Holy Land and travelled its length and breadth in the footsteps of the Man whose story I still planned to tell. Since then, I have made several other visits, each time adding something to my knowledge.

But in a sense I was only an instrument in the telling of the story. I read and I dreamed dreams, and the novel grew slowly. When it came to putting it down, I discovered some notes that dated from that second visit--notes I never used. Thirty years is a long time, and in thirty years the story I had wanted to tell was no longer mine. "The Nazarene" had written itself. It was as if I were retelling a story which had been told to me a long time before.

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I would draw the reader's attention particularly to the dates in the above statement. These should be especially commended to the attention of those men who, according to their advertising boosters, produce "immortal masterpieces" every six months. It is perhaps as well that these "masterpieces" generally disappear from sight and memory within the next six months after their appearance. The glorious work of Mr. Asch has been, as he tells us, on the anvil for thirty years. This long concentration of the author's whole being upon the theme is one of the many reasons why the book will last, and will be read with as much delight and instruction a hundred years hence as it is being read to-day. I shall endeavor to put this vaticination into some lasting form, in the hope that it will meet the eyes of our descendants a century from now. I invite them to laugh at me if my forecast proves false, or to give me posthumous felicitations if it proves right; and I do this in no fear of incurring their laughter.

Despite the fact that the English version we read is a translation from Mr. Asch's Yiddish, the work reads not like a translation but like an original. The translator, Mr. Maurice Samuel, is a remarkable master of English. With wonderful skill he has adapted his style, wherever necessary, to the modes of speech employed in the King James Version of the Bible. The result is that many passages from the Gospels, which are introduced at intervals, seem to form an integral part of the web the author weaves. They do not constitute, as Biblical passages cited in modern books commonly do, a series of patches, the superb beauty of which contrasts painfully with their context.

The machinery of the story is ingenious, although unavoidably romantic. We are first introduced to a violently anti-Semitic Pole, by name Pan Viadomsky, who has won the reputation of a great but eccentric and unscrupulous scholar. This man, despite his anti-Semitic phobia, forms the acquaintance of a young Jew to whom he finds himself irresistibly drawn. The secret of this attraction develops as their acquaintance grows. It is then disclosed that Viadomsky is actually a reincarnation of one Cornelius, a Ciliarch (or commander of a thousand) in the Roman army in the time of Tiberius. This man, an old fellow-soldier of Pontius Pilate's, had been Hegemon (or military Commandant) of Jerusalem during the period of the teaching of Jesus. He it was who arrested Jesus, insisted upon his dangerousness, and thus persuaded Pilate to condemn him. This man it was, too, who supervised the crucifixion of Jesus, and wreaked his hatred upon the dying martyr by giving him vinegar instead of water to drink.

The tie that binds him in his latest avatar as Viadomsky to the young Jew is the fact that he recognizes him too as a reincarnation: that of one Jochanan or John, whom he remembers from antiquity as a pupil of the famous Rabbi Nicodemus, the golden-hearted Pharisee who became a friend, and in large measure a follower, of Jesus.

The story is thus somewhat of a variant upon the old legend of "The Wandering Jew." This time it is the wandering Pagan. But he wanders not as a continuous body over the centuries, but rather as a continuous personality through successive embodiments. Viadomsky has also obtained possession (by crooked means, it is implied) of a hitherto un-

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known source for the Gospel history. This is an ancient Aramaic manu-
script, composed by none other than Judas Iscariot, which tells the story
of Jesus and his company of disciples down to the time of their departure
from Galilee for the last journey of Jesus to Jerusalem.

By means of these devices, the author is able to present the ca-
reer of Jesus as narrated from three distinct points of view. We have it
first as involved in the reminiscences of a Roman military officer, who,
despite personal friendships among leading Jews--especially the High
Priestly family--had for the Jewish religion all the scorn of a Pagan
outsider who knew little about it and never understood it. In the sec-
ond place, the story is told from the standpoint of an Apostle of Jesus,
whose final "betrayal" of him had, as we shall see, a meaning entirely
different from that which Christians have usually supposed. Finally,
the events of the last months of the life of Jesus, including the ter-
rible tragedy in which it culminated, are recounted from the point of
view of a pious pupil of the most eminent Pharisaic Rabbi of the time.
Both pupil and master look upon Jesus with the utmost reverence, and the
younger man hopes that he will prove to be the Messiah sent by God to
effect the redemption of Israel.

The author thus manages to tell the whole story as though from
the lips of contemporaries and eyewitnesses. Being a great literary
artist, he has succeeded magically in making that vanished world live
again, in all its colorful variety, with infinite details of its man-
ners and customs, costumes and observances, its storms of party passion,
piety and fanaticism; and in re-creating with incomparable clearness and
freshness the impressions produced by the superb genius of Jesus upon
every class of men.

The writer's scholarship is magnificently utilized without ever
being obtruded. He knows with expert intimacy every detail of the Jew-
ish life of the time, every shade of doctrine in the conflicting points
of view of the various Jewish parties, and the full extent and effects
of the deep resentment created among Jews of different classes and
schools by the worldliness and greed, the nepotism, and the perpetual
extortions of the High Priestly family.

Mr. Asch also recognizes and proceeds upon the truth that the
denunciations of the Pharisees by Jesus cannot have been so sweeping
and unqualified as the writers of the Gospels imply. The Pharisees,
indeed, were the most pious and most ethical party among the Jews of
the period. Doubtless, however, like all parties, they were disgraced
by some unworthy representatives; and it must have been against these
that the denunciations of Jesus were fulminated. With excellent judg-
ment and taste, the author puts this explanation of the situation into
the mouth of the Pharisaic Rabbi Nicodemus.

We are first introduced to Jesus in his native Galilee. There
we see him inspiring the common people by that marvellously picturesque
and original speech to which Dr. Klausner testifies. We see him spend-
ing an evening in his mother's house with his disciples. Here Jesus
complies with all the observances prompted both by filial love for his
mother, and by scrupulous respect for the commands of the Jewish tradi-

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tion. We also see him working a number of those faith-cures which the imagination of his reporters afterwards magnified into miracles, signs and wonders. Dr. Klausner's work throws an interesting side-light on this problem. Galilee, he reminds us, had recently been over-run by the plagues of war, and had suffered a long period of depression and unemployment. Such conditions always produce a large number of those psychopathic cases of war-shock and inward maladjustment which lend themselves to successful treatment by the faith-cure method. There is no reason to doubt that not Jesus alone, but other men of powerful personality and spiritual eminence were able to effect such cures.

We are also enabled to follow the controversy which arose among the masses concerning who and what Jesus was: whether he was merely another great Rabbi, or a Prophet, or that still more elevated and mysterious emissary of God whom the popular imagination had been hopefully expecting for nearly two hundred years; that is, ever since the Book of Daniel was written.

Again, we behold, through the eyes of the Roman Cornelius, that banquet in the palace of Herod Antipater at Machaerus at which "little Salome," then only ten years old, was egged on by her mother to demand the head of John the Baptist as the fulfilment of Herod's rash promise to give her whatever she should ask if she would dance for him. And we accompany this same Cornelius, with a brother officer, in mufti, to a hilltop near the Galilean Lake, from which Jesus delivers a discourse wherein the whole body of his teaching is summarized. In other words, we are present at the delivery of the Sermon on the Mount. This way of stating the matter is no exaggeration. The wizardry of the author's art is such that one seems really to see the speaker, and feel the pressure and hear the comments of the crowd around him, and to hear those immortal words as though for the first time.

One of the marks of rare genius in this book is the penetration which enables the author to divine the state of mind of a Pagan polytheist when brought face to face, for the first time in his life, with an ethical religion, and to realize the utter bewilderment occasioned in his mind by what he learns of the Jewish God. The idea of an imageless deity is to him an incomprehensible paradox. However, he takes refuge in the thought that, mysterious as Jehovah may be, the gods of Rome--Jupiter, for example--are more powerful than he: a fact that he holds to be demonstrated by the respective positions in the world of the Romans and the Jews:-

> When I looked down on the roof of the Holy of Holies, which rose into the sky above all the other buildings of the Temple, and reflected that under it was concealed that unknown God which, according to the Jews, rules over the destinies of the world, a strange feeling came over me. I was quite certain that our gods were more powerful, Jupiter, for instance, with his thunderbolts. There the proof of it was, the things he had done to the followers of the other. And still the unknown in the Jewish God made me uneasy. A God who does not embody a single

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passion, who contains everything within Himself,
and yet cannot be represented. He does not in-
carnate a single human quality, He fills the en-
tire universe--and yet He stands above it and
enslaves to Himself a people which worships Him
with the extremest measure of devotion and love.
Who is He, this Jewish God?

Yet, however he may be mystified by the Jewish religion, this
Pagan warrior has a shrewd eye to any influence which, if spread among
the populace, might menace the interests of the conquerors. He quite
clearly and rightly discerns that such people as Jesus, though they
preached nothing but love and abhorred all recourse to violence, were
far more dangerous to Rome than open rebels of the Barabbas type who
sought to organize armed resistance. These rebels, he says, only want
to drive us from Judea; but the effect of the spread of the teachings
of Jesus would be to convert the entire world into one huge Judea; and
that would be the end of Rome and the destruction of the Empire.

The document which purports to be the narrative of Judas
Iscariot occupies a hundred and seventy pages of the nearly seven
hundred of which this book consists. Alike in content and in style,
it has all the air of being a genuine translation of an ancient docu-
ment. It could only have been produced by one who is both a thorough
scholar and a superb literary artist.

Perhaps the most enlightening part of it is that which re-
counts in vivid detail the visit paid by Jesus and his little company
to the territories of Tyre and Sidon. Here is laid before us with
great picturesqueness and exactness, the life of Pagan antiquity, with
all its greatness, artistic, commercial, and military; but also with
all its coarseness and cruelty, its brutal slavery and debasing idol-
ary. These things we are made to behold as they appeared to the eyes
of contemporary pious Jews, and as judged by their ethical and spiri-
tual standards. Their horror at the spectacle accounts for that ex-
treme abhorrence of idolatry to which we referred recently when dis-
cussing the story of Elijah.

Still deeper, however, is the admiration aroused in the read-
er's mind by Mr. Asch's wonderful gift of creating into living and
abundantly individualized characters what in the Gospels are little
more than "shadows of names." One of these is Joseph of Arimathea,
the wealthy landowner, who in the Gospels is only referred to because
he provided the tomb for the burial of Jesus. Mr. Asch depicts him
as a learned and cultured Jewish layman, who is the strongest and most
generous of the supporters of Nicodemus. This Joseph has spent many
years in the study of Greek philosophy, only to return, in mature life,
to the faith of his fathers, with a deepened recognition of its spiri-
tual superiority. Another is the fascinating character whom our author

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calls "Miriam of Migdal,"--the Mary Magdalene* of the Gospels. Miriam is developed into a character of fascinating mystery, whose career has made her acquainted with the speculations and the superstitions of many peoples, and who brings into her converted life a rich treasury of knowledge serviceable for the relief of various forms of suffering and sickness. Again, in the Gospels, Simon of Cyrene, and his two sons Alexander and Rufus, are mere shadows, Simon being introduced solely because it was he who carried the cross for Jesus to Golgotha, after its burden had caused the tortured and almost exsanguinated sufferer to collapse beneath it. But, next to the mysterious central figure of the story, the most perfectly delineated of its characters is the superb one of Nicodemus.

Every critical reader, however, will realize that Mr. Asch's solution of the difficulty of presenting the character of Jesus is the high-water mark of his achievement. Jesus is always shown as seen through the eyes of others, and in terms of the impressions he produces upon them. To the High Priestly party, and especially to the crafty old diplomat who is its senior member, Jesus is the cause of enormous fear, by reason of his boundless influence upon the multitude. To the shrewd Roman Commandant he is an object of loudly expressed contempt. But this contempt, too, is the mask for a secret fear; and the old Pagan campaigner has to confess that he is almost carried off his feet and enslaved by the spiritual magnetism of Jesus the first time he hears him speak.

To the rich and aristocratic Sadducean party, Jesus, like all their opponents, is a heretic, because he adheres to the school of Hillel. He believes in a heavenly Messiah to come from God, and in a life for each man after death. Since both of these doctrines were absent from the classical Judaism of early prophetic times, there was an arguable case for the conservative Sadducees. But to all other parties and classes in Palestine--to learned men like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, and still more to the poor and ignorant, who found in his discourses an unspeakable and hitherto unknown consolation--Jesus is an object of love and wonder, of awe and boundless reverence.

We must now consider certain points in which Mr. Asch, as a scholarly spokesman of the Jewish tradition, presents a picture of Jesus which necessarily departs far from the conception of him entertained by orthodox Christians. This is inevitably the case, in spite of the fact that from beginning to end the author's own deep reverence

*Some little difficulty may arise for the general reader from the fact that he is accustomed to the Greek forms of these Aramaic names. These are naturally used in the Gospels, since they were written in Greek. Mr. Asch invariably gives transliterations of the original Hebrew or Aramaic forms. However, most people will find little difficulty in recognizing the slight variants of familiar names, such as Judah Ish-Kiriot, Kaifa for Caiaphas, and Hanan for Annas. They will also easily recognize K'far Nahum as Capernaum, Gat Shemen as Gethsemane, Eliezer as Lazarus, and the like.

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for his hero is implied.

To cite one point in illustration: Mr. Asch makes no allusion whatever, throughout his long volume, to the myth of the Virgin Birth. Jesus is simply, naturally, and (as I hold) rightly presented as the son of Joseph and Mary, and the eldest of a considerable family. At the time at which the story commences, Joseph is dead, and the youngest son is a mere boy. Jesus himself, as the eldest son, had, in accordance with the established Jewish rule, carried on the family trade and earned the household income for some years. Nor had he relinquished it in order to enter upon the ministry to which he felt himself called until his younger brothers had learnt the trade from him, and become able to carry it on independently.

I trust that I shall not wound the feelings of any reader by speaking without circumlocution of the "myth" of the Virgin Birth, I speak thus plainly because every test of unbiased scholarship shows that this story was entirely unheard of for many years after the death of Jesus. It was certainly unknown to Paul. There is not so much as an allusion to it even in the very late Fourth Gospel. The only reference that document makes to the birth of Jesus is in the phrase, "The Word was made flesh." No mention is made of either of his parents, nor is there any hint of anything miraculous about his nativity. Moreover, this same Fourth Gospel (chapter vi, verse 41) represents the Jews as saying of Jesus, "Is not this Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?" And not by so much as a syllable does the evangelist suggest that this was not the case.

There is also no trace of the Virgin Birth story in Mark, which is the oldest of the four Gospels; and there is every indication that it formed no part of the original text of either Matthew or Luke, to which it was later added with such clumsiness that passages contradicting it remain standing in the older parts of the text.

This story, moreover, quite plainly comes from a Gentile source. Not only is there no instance of such a legend in the entire range of Jewish tradition, but the very idea of a divine element entering into the life of humanity in such a manner was revolting to the Jewish type of piety. On the other hand, such stories were by no means inconsistent with Pagan notions of the reverence due to the gods; and among the Pagans such legends abounded. The statement, for instance, that Plato had no human father, but was a son of Apollo by a human mother, is recorded by Plato's own nephew.

There is one important matter, however, concerning which I believe that Mr. Asch, as also Dr. Klausner (whom in this he seems to follow) is in error. They both hold that Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah, and proclaimed himself as such. According to Mr. Asch's narrative, it was the claim of Jesus to this office which caused the High Priestly party (albeit in an unlawfully convened, and therefore incompetent, session of the Sanhedrin) to declare Jesus guilty of a blasphemy worthy of death, and on this score to hand him over to Pilate for sentence and execution.

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Now I can see no means of refuting the thesis of those profound
modern scholars who deny that Jesus either believed himself to be, or
proclaimed himself as, the Messiah. One's reasons for holding this
view can hardly be given in detail in a single lecture. I would refer
the reader interested in the matter to the splendid chapter on "Theories
of the Person of Jesus" in James Martineau's "Seat of Authority in Re-
ligion," and to chapter X of Nathaniel Schmidt's great work, "The Proph-
et of Nazareth." Here he will find this view supported by irresistible
arguments. I can only claim to be the non-specialist follower of these
masters, and to have applied for myself, as thoroughly as I could, the
critical methods of Paul Schmiedel, whose profound study of the Gospels
in the "Encyclopedia Biblica" should be read and mastered by anybody
who desires to understand them.

The essential consideration is this: Our Gospels were compiled
at intervals from at least thirty to at least seventy years after the
death of Jesus. The first three of them were all put together by men
soaked in the conviction that Jesus had not only been, but had declared
himself to be, the expected Messiah. They were incapable of doubting
this. It followed that, in all good faith, they inevitably read this
conviction back into everything Jesus was reported to have said and
done. If, then, we find in such records only one or two statements
which are radically inconsistent with this belief, we must attach cru-
cial importance to them. They have the highest conceivable
of being a genuine part of the original tradition, because they cer-
tainly would not have been invented by writers who believed the oppo-
site of what they assert or imply.

Now all parties to this controversy are agreed that the prin-
cipal passage bearing upon it is the announcement by Peter at Caesarea
Philippi, "You are the Messiah" (or "the Christ", as the term "Messiah"
was rendered in Greek). Let us then consider this episode as it is re-
lated in the oldest of the Gospels. I give here the relevant passage
in the eighth chapter of Mark as I believe it to have stood originally:-

27. Then Jesus and his disciples went away to
the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way, he
questioned his disciples and said to them,

"Who do people say that I am?"

28. They said to him,

"John the Baptist; others say Elijah, and others
that you are one of the prophets."

29. And he asked them,

"But who do you say that I am?"

Peter answered and said to him,

"You are the Christ."

30. And he warned them not to say this about
him to anyone.

32. He told them this plainly. And Peter took him
aside and began to reprove him for it.

33. But turning and seeing his disciples he re-
proved Peter, and said,

"Get out of my sight, you Satan! for you do not
side with God, but with men."

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From this quotation I have omitted verse 31, which I believe to
have been a later interpolation. It reads as follows:-

31. Then he explained to them for the first
time that the Son of Man must go through much suffer-
ing, and be refused by the elders and the high priests
and the scribes, and be killed, and rise again three
days after.*

Now on what grounds is this verse to be considered an addition to the
original text? I answer, for the plain reason that when the things
which Jesus is here alleged to have prophesied began to happen, the
men to whom they had thus been carefully predicted and explained (more
than once, as is implied by the words "for the first time") were over-
whelmed with astonishment by every episode which occurred. All the
narratives of the trial and crucifixion show that they were a total
surprise and a hearttrending disappointment to the disciples. Nor had
they the remotest idea that he would "rise again" until their own vi-
sions engendered the belief that he had done so.

"That we may rely on this," says Martineau, "I conclude, because it is the story told by the oldest Evangelist alone." In Matthew and Luke, although passages survive to show the people generally discussing whether Jesus was John the Baptist, or Elijah, or one of the Prophets, there is no such question among the Apostles. The compilers of these two Gospels assume that all of them from the first recognized him as the Messiah. They have collectively testified to this before the Caesarea Philippi episode.** But if this had been so, there would be nothing startling in the announcement made by Peter on that occasion, and singularly little point in the remarkable fact that Jesus peremptorily orders him and all of them to keep this opinion to themselves, and actually calls Peter "a Satan" for expecting his leader to enact the rôle of a triumphant conqueror instead of that of a suffering martyr.

The entire question of the Messiahship is passed over in silence
by the author of the Fourth Gospel, who presents Jesus from the outset
as a being of higher nature and dignity than the Messiah was expected
to be: no less, indeed, than the eternal Logos of God, the Divine Rea-
son through which the world was created and sustained.

The whole conception of the Messiah was, of course, a mere dream,
indulged in by the popular Jewish imagination as a partial compensation
for its agelong bitter suffering under foreign domination. Oppressed
peoples under such conditions always sigh for and dream of a liberator;
and they expect him to come by magic or miracle if they see no chance
of a deliverance by human and natural means. The folklore of many peo-
ples tells of visions of the return of some King Arthur or Barbarossa to

*The above verses are quoted from Professor Goodspeed's "American
Translation" of the New Testament.

**E. G., Matt. xiv 33.

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destroy their enemies and set them free.

In Judaism this doctrine, which is first clearly propounded in the novel or romance called the Book of Daniel, represented a sad decline from the great prophetic conception of the exemplary role of the suffering nation, and its ultimate influence in converting the whole world to righteousness. Any reader who has followed the critical elucidation of the Gospels will be convinced that the attribution of the Messiahship to Jesus has merely thrown a cloud about him, which greatly increases our difficulty in seeing clearly what in truth he was, and in distinguishing his genuine teachings from the apocryphal elements which were blended with them, in all simplicity and ingenuousness, by his honest but incompetent reporters.

This misinterpretation, however, detracts nothing from the value and charm of Mr. Asch's handling of the story. We must admit, too, that as a literary artist he has every right to utilize material from the Gospels which he may himself regard as unhistorical. It seems unfortunate, however, that in this matter he should have followed Klausner rather than Schmidt and Martineau, because the establishment of the critical position taken by these and other authorities would do much to dissolve what remains among contemporary Jews of their old prejudice against Jesus. That prejudice was originally based upon the belief that Jesus had falsely and blasphemously claimed to be the Messiah, and thereby had deceived and led astray many of the Sons of Israel. The antipathy thus arising was, to be sure, immensely deepened by their manifold persecutions at the hands of Christians. This, however is a chapter in history of which all Christians are now deeply ashamed, and which many of them are endeavoring to expiate by humane and fraternal treatment of the countless Jews who are now being treated so outrageously. If the change of feeling thus brought about could be reinforced by a demonstration--preferably by Jewish scholars--that their old ground of antipathy to Jesus himself rested upon a complete misconception, nothing would remain to hinder them from taking a just pride in him as the glory of their nation.

One must admit, however, that nothing could be more dexterous than the use Mr. Asch has made of this erroneous idea concerning the relation of Jesus to the Messianic doctrine. For, through this, according to him, we are brought to the dénouement and true explanation of the story of Judas Iscariot. Judas, in common with all the disciples of Jesus, was convinced that his Rabbi was the Messiah. But they all had one fixed idea as to how the Messiah was to act: He was to bring down the wrath of God and fire from heaven upon the ungodly oppressor, destroy that oppressor's power, release Israel from its thralldom, and usher in the millennium.

Now even those who believe that Jesus claimed to be the expected emissary from heaven must find some way of explaining, if they can, the extraordinary fact that he never had any such notion of the part he was to play. From an early period of his ministry, he clearly expected martyrdom. Could there, I ask, be stronger evidence than this that he never fell into the fanatical self-deception of supposing himself to be the Messiah?

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All this, however, was over the heads of his followers at the time. Judas, blind in his faith, and weary of awaiting the ever-expected and ever-delayed deliverance, decides to force the hand of Jesus. And so he "betrays" him to the High Priest party, with the sole purpose of bringing about a situation in which Jesus will be compelled to declare himself, and to act as Judas supposes the Messiah necessarily must act.

The "betrayal," therefore, was not an act of treachery, but one of blundering good faith. Nicodemus, who shrewdly suspected what was about to happen, did his best by repeated arguments and messages to dissuade Judas from his insane purpose. He repeatedly cites from the Scriptures warnings against measuring God by the standards of men. He even displays the remarkable insight of declaring that the mission of Jesus was not to do the work of the Messiah, but to carry to all the peoples of the world that treasury of spiritual and ethical truth which had hitherto been the monopoly of Israel.

Judas, however, has reached that stage of infatuation at which a man cannot be saved from himself. But no man was so horrified and distressed as he by the tragic outcome of his blunder. In utter remorse and despair, he flings his informer's reward back into the teeth of those who had paid it, and rushes away to commit suicide. One of the most touching passages of the great story is that in which Nicodemus and his pupil, returning from the burial of Jesus, see the corpse of Judas hanging from the tree, and Nicodemus prays for mercy upon his soul.

But I should exceed every limit if I endeavored to point out all the multitude of beauties and excellences in Mr. Asch's incomparable story. Hence I can but break off abruptly, with the positive and confident assurance that this book is a new star of the first magnitude in the literary heavens. It is an exaltation and a joy for ever.

--After the foregoing address the following sonnet by Matthew Arnold, "The Better Part," was read as "Closing Words":--

Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,
How angrily thou spurn'st all simpler fare!
"Christ," some one says, "was human as we are;
No judge eyes us from Heaven, our sin to scan;
"We live no more, when we have done our span."--
"Well, then, for Christ," thou answerest, "who can care?
From sin, which Heaven records not, why forbear?
Live we like brutes our life without a plan!"

So answerest thou; but why not rather say:
"Hath man no second life?--Pitch this one high!
Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to see?--

"More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
Was Christ a man like us? Ah! let us try
If we then, too, can be such men as he!"

Typed and Mimeographed by Birdie Reeve, 1525 East 53rd St., Chicago, Ill.

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