Christ in Art - Ernest Renan Temporis

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      Christ on the Cross, mid-12th century.

      Gilded bronze, 22 × 21.5 × 3.9 cm.

      Musée du Louvre, Paris.

      Composite Icon with the Crucifixion, Christ in the Sepulchre, Saints and Gospel Scenes, 11th-12th century.

      State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

      Literary history furnishes, moreover, another example which presents the closest analogy with the historical phenomena that we have described, and which serves to explain it. Socrates, who, like Jesus, did not write, is known to us by two of his disciples, Xenophon and Plato, the first corresponding by his limpid, transparent, impersonal style, to the synoptic, the second reminding us, by his vigorous individuality, of the author of the fourth gospel. To set forth the Socratic teaching, must we follow the Dialogues of Plato, or the Memorabilia of Xenophon? There can be no doubt in regard to this; the whole world cleaves to the Memorabilia, and not to the Dialogues. Does Plato, however, teach us nothing in regard to Socrates?Would a careful critic, in writing the biography of the latter, neglect the Dialogues Who would dare to maintain that? The analogy, moreover, is not complete, and the difference is in favour of the fourth gospel.

      The author of this gospel is, in fact, the better biographer. As if Plato, although attributing to his master fictitious discourses, knew most important things in regard to his life, of which Xenophon was entirely ignorant.

      Without pronouncing upon the material question, what hand traced the fourth gospel, and even while inclining to believe that the discourses at least are not by the son of Zebedee, we admit, therefore, that this is really “the Gospel according to John,” in the same sense as the first and second gospels are really the gospels “according to Matthew,” and “according to Mark.” The historical sketch of the fourth gospel is the life of Jesus as it was known in the school of John. It is the relation which Aristion and Presbyteros Joannes gave to Papias without telling him that it was written, or rather attaching no importance to that peculiarity. I will add that, in my opinion, this school was better acquainted with the external circumstances of the life of the founder than the group whose memories made up the synoptic gospels. It had, especially in regard to the sojourns of Jesus at Jerusalem, data which the others did not possess. The adherents of the school treated Mark as an indifferent biographer, and had invented a system to explain his hiatuses. Certain passages of Luke, in which there is an echo of the Johannic traditions, prove, moreover, that these traditions were not entirely unknown to the rest of the Christian family.

      These elucidations will be sufficient, I think, to show, in the course of the narrative, the motives which were determined to give the preference to one or another of the four guides which we have for the life of Jesus. Upon the whole, I accept the four canonical gospels as authentic. All, in my judgment, date back to the first century, and they are substantially by the authors to whom they are attributed, but in historic value they are very unequal. Matthew clearly deserves unlimited confidence as regards to the discourses; he gives the Logia actual notes from a clear and living memory from the teaching of Jesus. A splendour at once soft and terrible, a divine power, if I may use the term, italicises these words, detaches them from the context, and renders them easily recognizable to the critic. He who attempts the task of forming a regular composition out of the gospel history possesses, in this respect, an excellent touchstone. The real words of Jesus will not be concealed. As soon as we touch them in this chaos of traditions of unequal value, we feel them vibrate and they come spontaneously, and take their own place in the narration, where they stand out in unparalleled relief.

      Andrea Mantegna, The Resurrection of Christ, side panel of the San Zeno altar, c. 1457–1459.

      Tempera on wood, 71 × 94 cm.

      Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours.

      The narrative portions grouped in the first gospel about this primitive knot, do not have the same authority. There are in them many legends of a rather flaccid contour, sprung from the piety of the second Christian generation. The gospel of Mark is much firmer, more precise, less cumbered with fables of later insertion. Of the three synoptic, this has come to us the oldest, the most original, that to which fewest subsequent elements have been added. The material details in Mark have a precision which we seek in vain in the other evangelists. He is fond of reporting certain words of Jesus in Syro-Chaldaic. He is full of minute observations coming without any doubt from an eyewitness. Nothing opposes the idea that this eyewitness who evidently had followed Jesus, who had loved him and known him intimately, and who had a living remembrance of him, was the apostle Peter himself, as Papias says.

      As to the work of Luke, it clearly has less historic value. It is a second-hand document. The narration is more mature. The sayings of Jesus are more premeditated, more composite. Some teachings are carried to excess and falsified. Writing out of Palestine, and certainly after the siege of Jerusalem, the author indicates places with less precision than the two other synoptic; he has a wrong idea of the temple which he imagines to be an oratory, whither men went to perform their devotions. He softens details, endeavouring to reconcile different accounts and he tones down passages which had become embarrassing from the standpoint of a more exalted idea of the divinity of Jesus. He exaggerates the marvellous, commits errors of chronology, he ignores Hebrew entirely, quotes no word of Jesus in this language, and calls all localities by their Greek names. We feel the compiler, the man who has not seen the witnesses himself, but who works upon texts, and allows himself to do great violence to them in order to reconcile them. Luke probably had before him the biographical collection of Mark and the Logia of Matthew. But he takes great liberties with them; sometimes he fuses two anecdotes or two parables into one. Sometimes he decomposes one into two and he interprets documents according to his personal understanding. He does not have the absolute impassibility of Matthew and Mark. We are able to say certain things in regard to his tastes and his peculiar tendencies: he is a very precise devotee, he makes it important that Jesus performed all the Jewish rites, he is an exalted democrat and Ebionite, that is, thoroughly opposed to property, and persuaded that the day of the poor is at hand, he is especially fond of all the anecdotes which place in relief the conversion of sinners, the exaltation of the humble and he often modifies the old traditions to give them this turn. He admits in his first pages legends in regard to the infancy of Jesus, told with these long amplifications, those canticles, those conventional methods which form the essential character of the apocryphal gospels. Finally, there are in the account of the last days of Jesus some circumstances full of tender feeling and certain words of Jesus of a delicious beauty, which are not found in the more authentic narratives, and in which we perceive the work of legend. Luke probably borrowed them from a more recent collection, the main object was to excite religious feeling.

      Great reserve has of course been necessary in regard to a document of this kind. It would have been as uncritical to neglect it as to employ it without discrimination. Luke had before him originals which we do not possess. He is less an evangelist than a biographer of Jesus, a “harmonist,” after the manner of Marcion and Tatian. But he is a biographer of the first century, a divine artist, who, independently of the materials which he derived from more ancient sources, pictures to us the character of the founder, with a happiness in feature, and an inspiration in the whole, a relief which the other two synoptic do not have. His gospel has the greatest charm for the reader, for to the incomparable beauty of the common ground, he adds a portion of art and composition which singularly increases the effect of the portrait without seriously injuring its truth.

      Andrea Pisano, South Portal Door, 1330–1336. Gilded bronze.

      San Giovanni Baptistery, Florence.

      Francisco de Zurbarán, The Veil of Saint Veronica, c. 1635.

      Oil on canvas, 70 × 51 cm.

      Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

      Upon the whole, we may say that the synoptic compilation has passed through three stages: first,

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