THE LIFE OF JESUS.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18896, 11 January 1927, Page 11

THE LIFE OF JESUS.

UO THt ID1T0» or VEX fRI3S. Sir,—Your Saturday contributor Mr A. H. Grinling last week gave us a very interesting account of a new Life of Jesus, by Mr Middleton Murry. There is one line of literary criticism which I looked for in the article and did not find. There have been dozens of Lives of Jesus, good, bad, and indifferent. Till the cud of Time they will probably continue, for the attractiveness of the subject is inexhaustible. But the authors of these Lives will either be fair or unfair to the New Testament. They will sit down to write with their minds already mado up and their theories and prejudices formed, and adapt the Now Testament to them, or they will be honest and scrupulous in their literary judgments and, above all, take the book as it is. Somo publishing firms have reduced our classical fictiou to diminutive proportions, and you may buy "Vanity Fair" or "Pickwick" with much of the philosophy omitted. This seems to me unfair to the great dead, as well as to their readers. So with the New Testament. Mr Middleton Murry' and others like him will not have the supernatural at any price, and where they find it in the New Testament they endeavour to explain it away or ignore it. Renau and Sir John Seelcy—both' very great writers—did this, and no one would regard either of them as authorities on New Testament literature. Secondly, an author of a Life of Jesus with any literary sense of proportion has to discus 3 the claims which Jesus made. They are the very point of tho 'story. Yet often a sort of .shyness seems" to steal over our _ writers when they approach the claims of Jesus. The influence of the supernatural, on our writers is very interesting. When the writer on St. Francis of Assisi comes to the "stigmata," 'or on St. Joan to the "voices," it,is most fascinating to see how gingerly they walk. Why, these things, Sir, are just tho most important things, and so it is with tho claims of Jesus. I will not only say that they are the most important things about Him/they are the most important things' about the literature we call the Gospels—a' literary man simply must deal with them. He is not inside the hook and does not breathe its atmosphere otherwise. Jesus claims that He will judge mankind, that He existed before Abraham, that He is the Truth, that He and tho Father are ono. To expatiate on His moral beauty and lightly skate over these claims is prejudice, it is lack of proportion in •literary judgment, as-if ono were to review a novel and ignore the ruling passion of the hero. I am glad that Mr Middleton Murry tells us that Jesus is a sinner, and that Mr Grinling records it. That is decisive. Perhaps that is meant to be a discussion of the claims and a refutation of them. At all events it means that Jesus-is not to be worshipped without idolatry and that He is no Saviour from sin.—Yours, etc., _„„„,_ CHARLES PERRI. St. Michael's, January 10th.