With equal zeal they either prove or they disprove his existence.
They affirm or question the authority and the reliability of the evidence presented to us by the gospels.
They doubt or reverently uphold the absolute trustworthiness of the letters written by the apostles.
But that is not all.
Every single word of the New Testament has been most carefully submitted to the acid tests of philological and chronological and dogmatic criticism.
Wars have been fought and countries have been devastated and whole nations have been eradicated because two eminent expounders of the Scriptures happened to disagree upon some difficult point in the Apocalypse or the Acts which had nothing at all to do with the ideals of Jesus.Mighty churches have been built to commemorate certain facts which never took place and terrific assaults have been made upon certain events which are of undeniable truth.
Christ has been preached to us as the Son of God and he has been denounced (sometimes with incredible violence and persistency)as an impostor.
Patient archaeologists have dug deep into the folklore of a thousand tribes to explain the mystery of the Man who became a God.
The sublime,the ridiculous and the obscene have been dragged into the discussion with a wealth of texts and sources land clauses and paragraphs which seemed absolutely irrefutable.
And it has made no difference.
Perhaps the early disciples knew best.
They did not write,they did not argue,and they did not reason overmuch.
They gratefully accepted what was given to them and they left the rest to faith.
Out of this loving inheritance,we must try to reconstruct our story.
Herod was King,and a bad King he was.
His throne stood based upon murder and deceit.
He knew no principles,but he had an ambition.
The memory of great Alexander was still alive in western Asia.
What a little Macedonian prince had done,three hundred years before,a more powerful Jewish king might do to-day.
And so Herod played a game of cold and brutal calculation and worked for the greater glory of the house of Antipater and cared for neither man nor God,with the sole exception of that Roman governor by whose grace he was allowed to hold his nefarious throne.
A thousand years before,such despotism might have gone unchallenged.
But much had changed in this world,as Herod was to experience before the hour of his miserable death.
The Romans had definitely established order in the lands around the Mediterranean Sea.At the same time,the Greeks had charted the unknown vastness of the soul and in their scientific pursuits had endeavoured to reach a logical conclusion about the nature of Good and Evil.
Their language (greatly simplified for the convenience of those who lived abroad)had become the tongue of civilised society in every country.
Even the Jews,with their violent prejudice against everything foreign,fell victim to the spell of the handy Greek alphabet.
Although the authors of the four gospels were without exception of Jewish parentage,they wrote their books in Greek and not in that Aramaic vernacular which in turn had taken the place of the old Hebrew ever since the return from the Babylonian exile.
To counteract the influence of Rome as the acknowledged centre of the universe,the Greeks of the Hellenistic era had concentrated their forces in a rival city,called Alexandria after the inevitable Macedonian hero.It was situated at the mouth of the river Nile and not far removed from that famous centre of Egyptian civilisation which had been dead for many centuries before Jesus was born.
The Greeks,brilliant,unsteady,but of insatiable curiosity,had carefully examined and clarified all human knowledge.Furthermore,they had passed through every possible experience of success and failure.
They could remember their golden age when,single-handed,their little cities had defeated the hordes of the mighty Persian kings and had saved Europe from foreign invasion.
They could recall (how could they help it?)other days when,through their own selfishness and greed,their country had fallen an easy prey to the better organised power of Rome.
But once deprived of their political independence,the Greeks had gained even greater fame as the teachers of those same Romans who had conquered them only a few years before.
And having tasted of all the joys of living,their wise men had come to the conclusion (with which we are already familiar from the author of that book called “Ecclesiastes”)that all is Vanity and that no life can ever be complete without that spiritual contentment which is not based upon a cellar full of gold or an attic replete with the riches of the Indies.
The Greeks,who based all their conclusions upon strict scientific reasoning,did not take much stock in vague predictions about the future.
They called their intellectual leaders philosophers or “friends of wisdom”rather than prophets,as was the common use among the Jews.
There was,however,one great point of similarity between such men as Socrates in Athens and the Unknown Prophet in Babylon.
They both strove to do whatever was right according to the inner conviction of their own souls without regard to the prejudices and the gossip of their fellow-townsmen.
And they earnestly tried to teach their own ideas about righteousness to their neighbours,that the world in which they found themselves might become a more humane and reasonable place of abode.
Some of them,like the Cynics,were as severe in their principles as those Essenes who dwelled in the mountains of Judaea.
Others,called the Epicureans and the Stoics,were more worldly.They taught their doctrines in the palace of the Emperor and were often used as private tutors to the wealthy young men of Rome.
But all of them shared one common conviction.They knew that happiness was entirely a matter of an inner conviction and not of outward circumstances.
