ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 492, 26 November 1948, Page 11

ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY

THE BIRTH OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. By Altred Loisy. Authorised translation from the French by L. P. Jacks, with a preface by Gilbert Murray, O.M. Allen and Unwin. LFRED FIRMIN LOISY played a leading part in the attempt,made at the beginning of the present century to harmonise the teachings of Roman Catholicism with a dispassionate critical study of Biblical texts and of the historical growth of. Christianity. He met with excommunication for his pdins, and _ subsequently became a freethinker. The Birth of the Christian Religion is a translation of a work written by him at an advanced age, as a sequel to one on the religion of Israel, and as a companion volume to an annotated version of the New Testament. The English reader will be able to form from it a clear picture of this distinguished French scholar’s view’ of the development of Christianity in the crucial period _between the time of Christ and the third century A.D.; but his. conclusions, as here presented, have an arbitrary and dogmatic appearance which might possibly be dispelled by a study of the other two works. : Briefly, Loisy holds that Jesus was a Jewish prophet of whom we know practically nothing except that he went about, first in Galilee and *then in Jerusalem, urging men to repent in view of the close approach of the "Day of the Lord," in which the nations would be judged and God’s reign set up on earth, with himself, Jesus, as God’s Messiah or anointed vice-regent. In Jerusalem he was executed by Pilate as a disturber of the peace-an end to his teaching which, according to Loisy, neither he nor his followers expected. However, some of the latter soon regained their confidence, despite the death of Jesus, that the Day of the Lord would come as he had announced, with -_ installed as Messiah; their ardour generating visions of him as personally returning from the after-world to reassure and direct them. Their belief was carried from Palestine to the Jewish communities scattered through the Roman Empire, making a particularly strong impression on Gentile converts Or prospective converts to Judaism. (continued on next page)

| BOOK REVIEWS (Contd)

(continued from previous page) After a certain amount of disputation, Gentiles were admitted to the Christian fellowship on easier terms than to the Jewish, and brought with them the myth of a God who dies and rises again to bring new life to those who are united with him by sacramental rites. This deity was identified with the crucified prophet who was to return as Messiah; and so, from a minor Jewish sect, a new world religion was born. What is provocative about this reconstruction is, of course, its suggestion that Jesus attached no religious significance to his own death, and that the New Testament’s reiterated assertions that he did so reflect a later generation’s identification of him with the hero of a Gentile myth. If Loisy is right about this, the faith of the New TestamentChurch, to say nothing of later generations of Christians, is something almost completely unconnected with anything that Jesus thought about himself. His grounds for this view are not clearly stated, and there are very few New Testament scholars who share it. The writings attributed to John are, indeed, widely regarded as reflecting Gentile religious influences; but those attributed to Paul-which are full of the idea that the death of Jesus is a source of life to believers-seem to move in the same lateJewish thought-forms which Loisy admits to have been those of Jesus himself, though with modifications introduced by the apostle to meet new problems. (This point is very fully developed in Albert Schweitzer’s book The Mysticism of. Paul the Apostle; and I understand that Professor Knight, of Dunedin, has something in the press on the subject.) Further, the considerations which suggest even to Loisy that Jesus claimed to be the "Messiah-designate" suggests just as ‘strongly that he came to think of his death as a necessary prelude to his

Messiahship.

Arthur N.

Prior