Forgive me for a very long post. Ive become preoccupied with editing a collection of essays written over a fifteen year period on various subjects related to religious faith. I hope to have the volume published on Amazon by the beginning of November. My working title is We Even Saw Figures Tending Fires: Essays Philosophical and Topical From the Pen of a Christian Castaway.
This particular excerpt is drawn from the heart of a piece analyzing the signature work of French historian Ernest Renan (b. 1823): The Life of Jesus. What immediately shocked me in revisiting the essay after well over a decade was how minutely it relates to my personal struggles with the progressive ideologues of todays clergy. My wife and I have been seeking a church in our new surroundings this summer... and our experience has so far been intensely dismaying. Yet the perversion of Christian doctrine that were witnessing has been a very long time coming. As with so many aspects of progressivism it turns out that the demotion of Jesus to an inspired social engineer--an archaic version of Karl Marx--isnt a new idea at all. Its been around for nearly two centuries at least... and progressive thinkers dont seem to be awakening to its absurdity as they continue to blaze the same old trail (littered with ever newer bones).
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Perhaps a best way to re-begin this discussion is at the end. Allow me to tip Renans hand for him by citing a passage near the end of Vie de Jsus:At once theocratic and democratic the idea cast into the world by Jesus was along with the invasion of the Germans the most active cause behind the dissolution of the Caesars labors. On the one hand the right of all men to participate in the kingdom of God was proclaimed. On the other religion was henceforth separated in principle from the state. The rights of conscience removed from political law came to constitute a new force a spiritual force". This force has belied its origin more than once; over the centuries bishops have become princes and the Pope has been a king. The supposed empire of souls has been shown on numerous occasions to be a frightful tyranny making use of torture and incineration to maintain itself. Yet the day will come when the separation will bear fruitwhen the domain of spiritual things will cease to be called a force" and will be called instead a liberty". Arisen from the conscience of a man of the people coming to blossom among the people loved and admired first by the people Christianity bore the stamp of something entirely new which is destined never to be erased. It was the first triumph of the revolution the victory of popular sentiment the uprising of the simple of heart the inauguration of the beautiful as the people understand it. Jesus thus opened the breach in the aristocratic societies of antiquity through which everything will pass. (end of chapter 27)The concepts of dialectical materialism if not the actual terms are all aglow in this building crescendo. Renan will underscore as his work concludes that the life of Jesus was really all about politicsall about the struggle of ordinary people that is against powerful oppressors wearing both crowns and miters. The revolution led by this greatest martyr of the people is quite plainly not to be viewed as one that transforms individual souls in unique and intimate ways; it is rather an epochal social upheaval. It parallels and is indeed a projection of the rise of the masses from that servitude into which primitive human order originally forced them. It is the march of human progress. We have already seen (to return now to beginnings) that Renan presumes to ascribe atheism to Jesus. This if not his first fully extra-textual importation to the savior-portrait is surely the grossest. If I might reiterate in condensation the passage cited in my Section I: Jesus would tell us… that the true believer free of all illusion… should reproduce within himself this celestial apparition and without any millennial dream any chimerical paradise any signs from heavensimply by the rectitude of his will and the poetry of his spiritshould know how to recreate in his heart the kingdom of God!" There can be no further question of genuine historiography here or not in any sense that would be accepted today. Renan rather has commandeered sacred history to erect therein a Nietzschean Superman tragically all alone with the nullity at the heart of all would-be truth yet ecstatically energized by the possibility of unlimited freedom in that void. Indeed Renan takes pains in places to impress upon the reader this image of Jesus-the-madman:
The grand vision of the kingdom of God flashing before his eyes without cease induced in him a vertigo. His disciples sometimes thought him insane. His enemies declared him possessed. His excessively passionate temperament carried him every instant beyond the bounds of human nature. His labor was not one of reason but rather disdained all classifications of the human mind: what he demanded most insistently was faith". This was the word he repeated most often among his inner circle. It is common to all popular movements. No such movement would have progressed if its leader had been forced to win over disciples one after another with solid proofs logically deduced. Reflection leads only to doubt. If the authors of the French Revolution for instance had needed convincing beforehand by justifications of sufficiently developed length all of them would have reached old age without doing anything. Jesus in the same way strove less for settled conviction than for ecstatic capture (entrainement). His disciples sometimes didnt understand him and felt before him a kind of fear. Sometimes his ill humor at all sorts of resistance carried him to commit inexplicable apparently absurd acts. (end of chapter 19)Such passages most often appear with little or no scriptural citation. Inasmuch as crazed outbursts are hardly part of the conventional portrait of Jesus one would have expected more points of reference. Instead Renan seems to veer into the contemporary world (the Zeitgeist of mid-century Western Europe I should say) for justification. We are simply supposed to know that there is no real God that man must therefore create God from himself and that the result will strike bystanders perhaps as unruly ecstasy. Yet in the nineteenth century Renan piously affirms men such as he are indeed beginning to grasp this deepest level of meaning within the Saviors message: The word of Jesus was a bolt of lightning on a gloomy night: eighteen-hundred years have been needed for the eyes of humanity (I ought to say for an infinitely small portion of humanity) to habituate themselves to it" (end of chapter 14). Such a Dionysiac enlightenment transforms human will power into an ascending staircase. Raw arbitrary desire could not describe the upward vector characteristic of progress". The noble savage for instance so beloved of Rousseau Chateaubriand and Renans other romantic predecessors belongs to unspoiled Nature and explicitly believes in an objective pantheistic force. The New Manthe Superman the Saved Manknows that these woodsprites and manitus are illusions" and chimeras". Hence enthusiasm (lit. being in the god") requires that he summon up a god from his own genius. To be sure one detects no libido dominandi in Renans Jesus nor any overtly expressed in Renan himself. The god created ex nihilo will be a decent chap ever mindful of his social obligations.
In our own time a troubled time when Jesus has no successors more authentic than those who seem to repudiate him dreams of an ideal social organizationin many ways analogous to the aspirations of primitive Christian sectsare in a sense no more than the development of the same idea a branch of that immense tree upon which every thought of the future ripens and whose roots and stem will forever be the kingdom of God". All of humanitys social revolutions will be grafted onto this phrase. Yet tainted with a coarse materialism aspiring to the impossible (namely to found a universal happiness upon political and economic measures) the so-called socialist" efforts of our time will remain infertile until they accept as their standard the true spirit of Jesusby which I mean an absolute idealism the principle that the earth must be renounced that it may be possessed. (end of chapter 17)Through the pages of Nietzsche circulates an unsettling honestyan primal awareness at least that unleashing ones inner beast upon the world licenses both righteous indignation and petulant fury both a passionate attraction to justice and a passionate exhilaration in command. The Superman in his pristine form does not justify himself by entering into evidence the good he does his fellow beingsnothing could have inspired greater contempt in Nietzsche. Renans New Man however requires just such a pedigree of respectability. He is not the Prussian philosophers supernova in all its majesty and terror but the supernova explosion seen from safe light-years away and groomed to be the central image of a canvas the central metaphor of an idyll. Poetry in a word (or in one word out of several possible) must illumine Renans objective" analysis: whimsy fantasy romance. Having sanitized the Christ of his chrism Renan finds just another man like himself to whom he may therefore assign motives that resemble what would have brought him to do the same things: an Ersatz psychology anticipating the modern science (not unlike Montaignes lingering over himself to understand humanity). What would I as Jesus do?" Renan seems to ponder. A revealingand deeply disturbingexample of this method" in practice is Renans interpretation of the scene in Johns gospel (12:3-8) where Judas chides Mary over wasting money on perfume for the Teacher. This annoyed Jesus. He enjoyed honors; for honors served his end and substantiated his title as the son of David" (beginning of chapter 23). Renan imagines that he too would have appreciated a rich anointing; therefore the bone of contention is an honor due (rather than say the purity of Marys motive). Yet more disturbing is Renans curious apologia for Judas later in the same chapter. So fluid is the historians own understanding of moral truth apparently (about which more very soon) that the notion of betrayal bemuses him. On his superior sensors Judas registers as someone getting a bad rap:
It is preferable to imagine some sentiment of jealousy some intestine dissension between Judas and the other disciples…. We therefore believe that the maledictions hurled upon him have something of the unjust…. The secret societies of the Party of the French Republic concealed within their bosom much conviction and sincerity and yet denunciations commonly arose from their midst. (chapter 23)The final comment probably explains this entire excursus. In a manner typical of his method Renan views the events surrounding Jesus life through the prism of politics in his own time. If the Teacher and his disciples are a cadre of callow revolutionaries (as they must be) then how can anyone so illuminated by the pure flame of transformation stoop to commit such a base act? Obviously because idealists sometimes quarrel: some see the shining golden parapets of Utopia more clearly than others through the shifting mists of tactical calculation. Judas must have wanted the people to seize weapons or burn buildings or mob the praetorium in their thousands. It was all an unfortunate disagreement about strategy. Following such methodology in his search for Jesus Renan naturally emerges with a delightful young dreamer who scorns riches and allows the nave to attribute divinity to him in their childish way. Within this secularizing of the Savior hides the deification of the Social Gospel: that is the more Jesus loses his divinity the more his mission" itself becomes a god. Vilification of the well-to-do elevation of the poor to victimhood redistribution of wealth dissolution of the individual into a great ascending collective… this is the fabric of the new spirituality. Renan reads Christs mind having methodically" rendered it fully human; there he finds the will and poetry" of someone who shares his own political views. In the crusading brook-no-opposition commitment (will) to a vision of society as it has never existed (poetry) he discovers that misty horizon which neither he nor any other progressive will label the ever-postponed fulfillment of a cultic religionbut which nevertheless is patently just that. For how else may we style the manic tone of the passage below? Reviving the theme of Jesus lunacy" it also suddenly abandons the well-mannered bonhommie of the busy little social worker in favor of something very like fanatical zeal (which it explicitly invokes). One might well say that the gloves have come off and even that Nietzsche is again beginning to peek through the seams:
And yet several of the recommendations that he Jesus addresses to his disciples contain germs of a true fanaticism germs that the Middle Ages would develop in a cruel fashion. Must we reproach him for that? No revolution ever achieves its ends without a little rudeness. If Luther or the agents of the French Revolution had been forced to observe the rules of politeness reform and revolution would never have taken place…. All the greatest strides of humanity have been made in the name of absolute principles. A discerning philosopher would have said to his disciples: Respect the opinion of others and trust that no one is so completely right that his adversary is completely wrong. But the procedure of Jesus had nothing in common with the philosophers disinterested speculation. (chapter 19)One may be reminded of Lenins comment about having to break some eggs to make an omelet or Maos about political power growing out of a guns barrel. The associations seem quite valid and they are not reassuring. For it really should be declared here as a practical consideration of immense moral consequence that Jesus never counsels or condones the forcible separation of people from their property. This indeed would contradict his message. Renan and his progressive heirs are quite right that a Christian must resist excessive ties to the material worlda duty too many Christians misplace; but to measure the quality of this resistance by the amount of pelf transferred to the poor is actually to valorize wealth in a new way. Being so much trash as may be grasped thus" (in the sublime phrase of Shakespeares Brutus) material possessions must not perversely become that which we are obligated to lavish upon the less encumbered. There is virtue in being poorpoor of spirit" if you prefer; but the spirit finds such blessed poverty in its liberation from craving after dross and baubles. The ancient world was in fact fully conversant with the virtue of radical self-sufficiency. Diogenes Laertius reports Socrates as fondly exclaiming on a typical walk through the agora How many things there are of which I have no need!" Non esse cupidum pecunia est wrote Cicero (in the sixth of his Stoic Paradoxes): Freedom from craving is possession of wealth." To be sure the ancients had also heard the favorite cry of urban mobs Wipe the slates cleanno more debt starting today!" The Romans called such proposals res novae or new affairs" (business after a re-boot" we might say). The term carried none of the romance of our revolution": historians like Livy recognized in it the refuge of wastrels adventurers and professional trouble-makers. Yet one is hard put to say that Renans Jesus doesnt resemble this dubious company more than the Stoic teacher and freed slave Epictetus. The problem for Renan is that Epictetus believes in changing nothing but ones personal attitude; he is convinced that the rest is beyond the reach of ones will (ones un-poeticized moral will) and hence represents pure distraction. Renan and his co-religionists cannot rest content with a mere chastening of their own actions and motives. In fact ecstatic visionaries of social change are all too often deaf to the mortifying judgments of conscientious self-analysis. They must transform the worldwhich grand enterprise tends to upstage any serious self-examination. Jesus himself Renan declares in the opening words of chapter 15 returned to Galilee from Jerusalem having completely lost his Jewish faith and in full revolutionary ardor"; and he elaborates four sentences later in a miraculous feat of historical telepathy He knows well that… the kingdom of God cannot be conquered without violence." Note the critical point that the evolving Jesus completely rejects Hebrew law as he nears his apotheosis. Here Jesus seems to anticipate Renans own anti-Semitism one is tempted to say (or to replicate it one is even more tempted to say). Loathing of the Jews (and sometimes of Muslims) is a recurrent theme in Vie de Jsus. Chapter 19 begins with a volley against this accursed tribe for clinging to tradition and resisting the liberated flight of the spirit. The Pharisees were the true Jews" Renan assures us just so that we do not fail to see the big picture as it comes clear. Against the progressive values of the French Revolution stand the oppressive values of bankers and capitalist speculators. Jesus would at last be murdered by the Old Guard as personified in the Jew. I leave students of contemporary progressivism to draw their own parallels with the virulent anti-Zionism of todays Left. Toward the end of his little tome having represented (after his unique fashion) the events surrounding the Crucifixion Renan hammers this Semite-loathing anvil eager that we should plainly behold just what kind of person is responsible for all that goes wrong in the world:
Thus it was neither Tiberius nor Pilate who condemned Jesus. It was the old Jewish party: it was Mosaic law… Four sentences follow which back away from the notion of collective responsibility… and then the following passage sharply reverses direction. Yet nations like individuals bear responsibility. If ever a crime committed then was that of an entire nation it was the death of Jesus. This death was legal" in the sense that its primary cause was a law that contained a nations very soul…. Christianity has been intolerant but intolerance is not an essentially Christian behavior. It is Jewish behavior in the sense that Judaism raised for the first time in religion the theory of the absolute and founded the principle that every innovator even when he supplies miracles in support of his doctrine should be received with cast stoneslapidated by everyone without a trial. (end of chapter 24)Renans equation of Judaism with belief in absolute truth is key. All moral systems must rest either on the assumption that transcending eternal truths exist (whether because they have been revealed as true or because the human heart innately recognizes their truth) or upon the assumption of a truth-in-becoming a vector sanctified by its destinationan end-justifies-the-means" system in short. Judaism for Renan is the epitome of the former and hence fleshes out the Great Adversary. If moral boundary lines cannot be moved to accommodate historical advance then we will never get anywhere. This game of drawing connective lines between ancient history and contemporary politics however can quickly entangle its players in a web. Renan must double back later on the terms of his indictment against the Pharisees explaining that the Sadducees were the true Jews" because they were not simply retrograde to Jesus message of progress but ultra-traditional:
Like Jesus the Sadducees rejected the traditions" of the Pharisees. In a very strange oddity it was these unbelieversdenying the resurrection the oral law the existence of angelswho were the true Jews; or to put it better the old law in its simplicity that no longer satisfied the religious needs of the time. It was they who clung strictly to that law and rejecting all modern inventions cast the devoted in the light of the impious rather like an evangelical Protestant today appears an infidel in orthodox nations. In any case it was not from such a quarter that a lively reaction against Jesus would come. The official priest his eyes turned toward political power and intimately allied with it did not understand these enthusiastic trends. It was the Pharisaic bourgeoisie ratherthe innumerable soferim or scribes who lived off of the science of tradition"who took alarm and who were in reality menaced in their prejudices and their interests by the new masters doctrine…." (end of chapter 21)Why this maneuver? Apparently because the true Jew" is not necessarily the worst Jew". That infamy should belong exclusively to those who pretend to have absolute values yet put a price on everything thus introducing a sleazy relativism into the scale; and the need for this qualification of course is that Renans contemporary targets must be placed squarely before the crosshairs. The modern terminus of the parallel between Jesus biblical enemies and the greedy bourgeoisie must be firmly fixed: the busy after-thought reshuffling of references in this passage occurs at the Jerusalem end to accommodate the Paris end. Louis Napoleons France is the destination to use another metaphor. All roads of historical analysis" must take us there. Hence worship of tradition as a kind of suicidal naivet rejecting every new idea out of hand and clinging to the outdated though it condemn one to sterility and starvation… Renan can let this pass and can even pity it through the eyes of his nineteenth-century Jesus. The true adversaries of Jesus/Progress (and the not-so-true Jews apparently… the New Jews perhaps) are those who traffic in progressive innovation for the sake of sordid profit rather than for the advancement of the human species. Just to clarify yet further Renan concludes this chapter with an exegesis of the render unto Caesar what is Caesars" exchange. This was the utterance that decided the future of Christianity… and laid the basis of true liberalism and true civilization." More true" ideological bloodlinesas opposed to mincing analogies that might muddle the high authority of certain political views (by introducing historical trivia one supposes): Renan would have us remark the invincible antipathy of the legitimate Jesus to all monetary concerns. As crazy as that may sound to compromised bourgeois ears it is the true gospel. The sustained delirium of such moral inspiration having been definitively severed from the Hebrew past whose authority is corrupt beyond redemption (cf. the Sanhedrin) the internal voice of conscience also seems to be silenced in Renans formulations. For its utterances are Pharisaical or at least potentially so: the inner sense of duty must forever fall under suspicion of a mainstream brainwashing at the hands of those pseudo-progressive institutional hucksters peddling old wine in new skins for their selfish advantage. With neither a commandment on a tablet nor a categorical imperative then where does this Son of Man lay his head to find ideological rest and support? The visionarys devotion can only be channeled into further delirium: hence the tendency we see in Jesus (a troubling tendency to Renan since it flirts with charlatanry) to claim divine descent or to allow the claims publication. How does Renans Jesus this punctilious foe of hypocrisy who knows that material reality is the only reality deal with being called the Messiah by the common people and credited by them with performing miracles? How specifically do we absolve him of the charge of being a mountebank (to use a glorious Victorian word)? What about say his taking the credit for bringing Lazarus back from the dead? In the midst of a series of equivocations Renan makes the following defense:
One must remember also that in the impure and oppressive city of Jerusalem Jesus was no longer himself. His conscience through the fault of others and not through his own had lost something of its original limpidity. Desperate pushed to the limit he was no longer master of himself…. The joy of his Jesus arrival could have brought Lazarus back to life. Perhaps also the desire to shut the mouths of those who outrageously denied the divine mission of their friend drew these passionate people Lazarus and his sisters beyond all boundaries. Perhaps Lazarus yet pale from his illness had himself wound up in bandages like a corpse and interred in his family tomb…. (beginning of chapter 22)In other words Jesus (as Renan imagines himthat is as Ernest Renan) must be pardoned for having a native human fallibilityfor he is of course merely human. His enemies were multiplying and magnifying their outcry against his idealistic ambition his friends were inclined to mystify his grand vision in their naive ignorance and… and he more or less let things slide on certain occasions when their slippage strengthened his position. Who could find fault with that? Actually Renan had shaped this argument earlier complete with its several (suspiciously many) exculpatory levels. In the first place (explains chapter 17) the science of medicine was so primitive at the time that anyone whose presence lifted the heart earned points as a healer; many of the miracles were also late accretions to the evolving legend Jesus himself having long died; and finally the Teachers own words make abundantly clear that he did not want his little cures noised abroad as marvels (a species of evidence which would force one to ask why Renan considers some Gospel reports fully reliable and others fully not so). Renans best (as in most honestas in most appalling) defense of his Saviors modus operandi however comes in the chapter preceding that one dedicated to miracles:
Good faith and imposture are two words that in our rigid cf. modern bourgeois Western" conscience are set in opposition as two irreconcilable terms…. History is impossible to comprehend if one does not admit from the start that sincerity has different measures. All great things are done by the people; the people however cannot be led unless one lends oneself to their way of thinking. The philosopher who knowing as much remains apart and holds aloof in his nobility deserves high praise. But he who would take humanity with all of its illusions and attempt to act upon and with it can scarcely be blamed…. There is no great foundation that doesnt rest upon a legend. The only guilty party in that case is humanity itself for wishing to be deceived. (final words of chapter 15)The contemptuous dismissal of an abstract unconditioned aversion to lying as bourgeois squeamishness has grown all too familiar to us postmoderns. When truth is all in becoming the true truth" consists in serving progress. Conversely a meticulous insistence on truth-telling when lies better lubricate the transformation of society is stupid at bestand may even be styled as lying" by a progressive since it delays humanitys advance. One who ministers to the true cause" is thus often morally obligated to lie. And why stop at lying? Hang for a lamb hand for a sheep. Liberated from stodgy bourgeois moral imperatives the progressive may drift fully out to sea. From lying to slander from slander to bribery thence to forgery thence to high treason and thence to mass murder (the mark of the true believer" in times soon to follow Renan): such is the course followed by more than one inspired leader" who would make over humanity entirely in defiance both of its essential nature and of its most honored traditions. To my mind the central contradiction of all progressive thought and of Renans distasteful classic specifically is an abject failure to separate egotism from inspirationto come anywhere close to such separation or even to come so far as to recognize the possibility of a conflict. A well-disposed reader may likely protest that Renan by no means licenses Stalinist or Maoist purges implicitly just because he allows motivators" to bend the truth. How could anyone imagine that he would have intended the portrait of his beloved Jesus to be viewed in such a way? The outrage here though is precisely that the person of Jesusthe only example of human perfection in Western tradition (not excluding the Stoic sage whom Seneca and others insisted was an abstract ideal)should be suborned to serve Renans tawdry political ends. First this figure connives at mistaken impressions… then he tells patent lies in order to seduce his audience. Is it really so hard to picture the migration from saying whatever one will to doing whatever one willparticularly when a mere word incites others to do the deeds? If any lie may be woven to assist the creation of a world that has never existed then why may not any deed be done in the same cause? Is it conscience" that will draw the line? But any functional conscience would have interceded as soon as the imagined worlds fantasy became apparent and would have warned The terms of this world have not been selected by any generation of men. They may well be incompatible with human nature. Proceed cautiously. Persuade others with what thou knowest of truth… but inform thyself more thoroughly lest thou speakst folly." I will end this section as I began it with one of Renans concluding panoramic overviewsa passage resonant with the upward march of history the rise of the underclass and the deity-by-default of grand designs:
Every branch of humanitys development has its privileged period when it attains perfection through a sort of spontaneous instinct and without effort. No labor of reflection can succeed in producing masterpieces of the order created during such moments by such inspired geniuses. What the golden age of Greece was for arts and letters the age of Jesus was for religion…. This sublime figure who continues to preside over the worlds destiny may well be called divinenot in the sense that Jesus absorbed godliness or was adequate to it (to use the scholastic expression) but in the sense that Jesus is the individual who made his species take a great step toward the divine. In its entirety humanity offers an assembly of vile egotistical beings superior to animals only in that their egotism is more deliberate. Yet in the midst of such uniform vulgarity columns occasionally spring up toward the sky and attest to a more noble destiny. Jesus is the highest of these columns showing man the place whence he comes and whither he ought to strive. In Jesus is condensed all that is good and elevated in our nature. He was not impeccable; he vanquished the same passions as we combat. No angel of God comforted him unless it was his sound conscience; no Satan tempted him if not the one he carried in his heart. Just as many of his remarkable aspects have been lost to us through the fault of his disciples so as well many of his faults were probably dissimulated. But never as much as he did has any man made the interest of humanity dominate in his life over the trivialities of self-love…. (final paragraphs of chapter 28)Notice the overt rejection of Jesus freedom from sin. He was a man a very good manthe best of men in that he devoted his life to the betterment of men. What are we to make then of the conscience" which was his good angel? Whence came this conscience? If men are only menvile but deliberate animals that is whose habits result from biology and culture but never from an immutable magnetism to any Jewish" absolutethen what could Jesus conscience be other than a collection of neurological inclinations and cultural inculcations? If he rejected his culture why did he do so? It could not have been because he heard a calling to a higher truth because the immaterial dimension needed to detect such a calling exists in no man according to Renan. And if Jesus therefore decided to infuse into his followers a contempt for proprietary concerns and for labor aimed at acquiring wealth what could have been the origin of this kerygma other than the egotismthe exhibitionism the counter-conformity or the narcissismof a character whom Renan does not hesitate to call maladjusted and even deranged? The tenor of Vie de Jsuss final sentences is amazingly Machiavellian. The loathing of human nature belongs to the pages of The Prince and the thrilling vision of the last chapter shares the moral incoherence of the Roman Dream". If men are merely vile self-seeking cowards then why would they rejoice at and rally behind a leader who promises them freedom? To what uses would they put more freedom other than to plunder more ingnues and fawn upon more potentates? At least Machiavellis ideal prince knows that his piety is feigned his generosity calculated and his justice rigged. What is Renans Jesus but a Cesare Borgia wholly lacking in self-knowledge? And in this extreme spiritual poverty verging upon dementia how are we realistically to interpret him but as a Tiberius without an army?