Books: Preface to Androcles and the Lion
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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW >> Preface to Androcles and the Lion
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JOHN THE IMMORTAL EYEWITNESS.
John, moreover, claims to be not only a chronicler but a witness.
He declares that he is "the disciple whom Jesus loved," and that
he actually leaned on the bosom of Jesus at the last supper and
asked in a whisper which of them it was that should betray him.
Jesus whispered that he would give a sop to the traitor, and
thereupon handed one to Judas, who ate it and immediately became
possessed by the devil. This is more natural than the other
accounts, in which Jesus openly indicates Judas without eliciting
any protest or exciting any comment. It also implies that Jesus
deliberately bewitched Judas in order to bring about his own
betrayal. Later on John claims that Jesus said to Peter "If I
will that John tarry til I come, what is that to thee?"; and
John, with a rather obvious mock modesty, adds that he must not
claim to be immortal, as the disciples concluded; for Christ did
not use that expression, but merely remarked "If I will that he
tarry till I come." No other evangelist claims personal intimacy
with Christ, or even pretends to be his contemporary (there is no
ground for identifying Matthew the publican with Matthew the
Evangelist); and John is the only evangelist whose account of
Christ's career and character is hopelessly irreconcilable with
Matthew's. He is almost as bad as Matthew, by the way, in his
repeated explanations of Christ's actions as having no other
purpose than to fulfil the old prophecies. The impression is more
unpleasant, because, as John, unlike Matthew, is educated,
subtle, and obsessed with artificial intellectual mystifications,
the discovery that he is stupid or superficial in so simple a
matter strikes one with distrust and dislike, in spite of his
great literary charm, a good example of which is his
transfiguration of the harsh episode of the Syrophenician woman
into the pleasant story of the woman of Samaria. This perhaps is
why his claim to be John the disciple, or to be a contemporary of
Christ or even of any survivor of Christ's generation, has been
disputed, and finally, it seems, disallowed. But I repeat, I take
no note here of the disputes of experts as to the date of the
gospels, not because I am not acquainted with them, but because,
as the earliest codices are Greek manuscripts of the fourth
century A.D., and the Syrian ones are translations from the
Greek, the paleographic expert has no difficulty in arriving at
whatever conclusion happens to suit his beliefs or disbeliefs;
and he never succeeds in convincing the other experts except when
they believe or disbelieve exactly as he does. Hence I conclude
that the dates of the original narratives cannot be ascertained,
and that we must make the best of the evangelists' own accounts
of themselves. There is, as we have seen, a very marked
difference between them, leaving no doubt that we are dealing
with four authors of well-marked diversity; but they all end in
an attitude of expectancy of the Second Coming which they agree
in declaring Jesus to have positively and unequivocally promised
within the lifetime of his contemporaries. Any believer compiling
a gospel after the last of these contemporaries had passed away,
would either reject and omit the tradition of that promise on the
ground that since it was not fulfilled, and could never now be
fulfilled, it could not have been made, or else have had to
confess to the Jews, who were the keenest critics of the
Christians, that Jesus was either an impostor or the victim of a
delusion. Now all the evangelists except Matthew expressly
declare themselves to be believers; and Matthew's narrative is
obviously not that of a sceptic. I therefore assume as a matter
of common sense that, interpolations apart, the gospels are
derived from narratives written in the first century A.D. I
include John, because though it may be claimed that he hedged his
position by claiming that Christ, who specially loved him,
endowed him with a miraculous life until the Second Coming, the
conclusion being that John is alive at this moment, I cannot
believe that a literary forger could hope to save the situation
by so outrageous a pretension. Also, John's narrative is in many
passages nearer to the realities of public life than the simple
chronicle of Matthew or the sentimental romance of Luke. This may
be because John was obviously more a man of the world than the
others, and knew, as mere chroniclers and romancers never know,
what actually happens away from books and desks. But it may also
be because he saw and heard what happened instead of collecting
traditions about it. The paleographers and daters of first
quotations may say what they please: John's claim to give
evidence as an eyewitness whilst the others are only compiling
history is supported by a certain verisimilitude which appeals to
me as one who has preached a new doctrine and argued about it, as
well as written stories. This verisimilitude may be dramatic art
backed by knowledge of public life; but even at that we must not
forget that the best dramatic art is the operation of a
divinatory instinct for truth. Be that as it may, John was
certainly not the man to believe in the Second Coming and yet
give a date for it after that date had passed. There is really no
escape from the conclusion that the originals of all the gospels
date from the period within which there was still a possibility
of the Second Coming occurring at the promised time.
THE PECULIAR THEOLOGY OF JESUS.
In spite of the suspicions roused by John's idiosyncrasies, his
narrative is of enormous importance to those who go to the
gospels for a credible modern religion. For it is John who adds
to the other records such sayings as that "I and my father are
one"; that "God is a spirit"; that the aim of Jesus is not only
that the people should have life, but that they should have it
"more abundantly" (a distinction much needed by people who think
a man is either alive or dead, and never consider the important
question how much alive he is); and that men should bear in mind
what they were told in the 82nd Psalm: that they are gods, and
are responsible for the doing of the mercy and justice of God.
The Jews stoned him for saying these things, and, when he
remonstrated with them for stupidly stoning one who had done
nothing to them but good works, replied "For a good work we stone
thee not; but for blasphemy, because that thou, being a man,
makest thyself God." He insists (referring to the 82nd psalm)
that if it is part of their own religion that they are gods on
the assurance of God himself, it cannot be blasphemy for him,
whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, to say "I am
the son of God." But they will not have this at any price; and he
has to escape from their fury. Here the point is obscured by the
distinction made by Jesus between himself and other men. He says,
in effect, "If you are gods, then, a fortiori, I am a god." John
makes him say this, just as he makes him say "I am the light of
the world." But Matthew makes him say to the people "Ye are the
light of the world." John has no grip of the significance of
these scraps which he has picked up: he is far more interested in
a notion of his own that men can escape death and do even more
extraordinary things than Christ himself: in fact, he actually
represents Jesus as promising this explicitly, and is finally led
into the audacious hint that he, John, is himself immortal in the
flesh. Still, he does not miss the significant sayings
altogether. However inconsistent they may be with the doctrine he
is consciously driving at, they appeal to some sub-intellectual
instinct in him that makes him stick them in, like a child
sticking tinsel stars on the robe of a toy angel.
John does not mention the ascension; and the end of his narrative
leaves Christ restored to life, and appearing from time to time
among his disciples. It is on one of these occasions that John
describes the miraculous draught of fishes which Luke places at
the other end of Christ's career, at the call of the sons of
Zebedee.
JOHN AGREED AS TO THE TRIAL AND CRUCIFIXION.
Although John, following his practice of showing Jesus's skill as
a debater, makes him play a less passive part at his trial, he
still gives substantially the same account of it as all the rest.
And the question that would occur to any modern reader never
occurs to him, any more than it occurred to Matthew, Mark, or
Luke. That question is, Why on earth did not Jesus defend
himself, and make the people rescue him from the High Priest? He
was so popular that they were unable to prevent him driving the
money-changers out of the temple, or to arrest him for it. When
they did arrest him afterwards, they had to do it at night in a
garden. He could have argued with them as he had often done in
the temple, and justified himself both to the Jewish law and to
Caesar. And he had physical force at his command to back up his
arguments: all that was needed was a speech to rally his
followers; and he was not gagged. The reply of the evangelists
would have been that all these inquiries are idle, because if
Jesus had wished to escape, he could have saved himself all that
trouble by doing what John describes him as doing: that is,
casting his captors to the earth by an exertion of his miraculous
power. If you asked John why he let them get up again and torment
and execute him, John would have replied that it was part of the
destiny of God to be slain and buried and to rise again, and that
to have avoided this destiny would have been to repudiate his
Godhead. And that is the only apparent explanation. Whether you
believe with the evangelists that Christ could have rescued
himself by a miracle, or, as a modern Secularist, point out that
he could have defended himself effectually, the fact remains that
according to all the narratives he did not do so. He had to die
like a god, not to save himself "like one of the princes." *
* Jesus himself had refered to that psalm (LXXII) in which
men who have judged unjustly and accepted the persons of the
wicked (including by anticipation practically all the white
inhabitants of the British Isles and the North American
continent, to mention no other places) are condemned in the
words, "I have said, ye are gods; and all of ye are children
of the Most High; but ye shall die like men, and fall like
one of the princes."
The consensus on this point is important, because it proves the
absolute sincerity of Jesus's declaration that he was a god. No
impostor would have accepted such dreadful consequences without
an effort to save himself. No impostor would have been nerved to
endure them by the conviction that he would rise from the grave
and live again after three days. If we accept the story at all,
we must believe this, and believe also that his promise to return
in glory and establish his kingdom on earth within the lifetime
of men then living, was one which he believed that he could, and
indeed must fulfil. Two evangelists declare that in his last
agony he despaired, and reproached God for forsaking him. The
other two represent him as dying in unshaken conviction and
charity with the simple remark that the ordeal was finished. But
all four testify that his faith was not deceived, and that he
actually rose again after three days. And I think it unreasonable
to doubt that all four wrote their narratives in full faith that
the other promise would be fulfilled too, and that they
themselves might live to witness the Second Coming.
CREDIBILITY OF THE GOSPELS.
It will be noted by the older among my readers, who are sure to
be obsessed more or less by elderly wrangles as to whether the
gospels are credible as matter-of-fact narratives, that I have
hardly raised this question, and have accepted the credible and
incredible with equal complacency. I have done this because
credibility is a subjective condition, as the evolution of
religious belief clearly shows. Belief is not dependent on
evidence and reason. There is as much evidence that the miracles
occurred as that the battle of Waterloo occurred, or that a large
body of Russian troops passed through England in 1914 to take
part in the war on the western front. The reasons for believing
in the murder of Pompey are the same as the reasons for believing
in the raising of Lazarus. Both have been believed and doubted by
men of equal intelligence. Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we
cannot explain, surround us on every hand; life itself is the
miracle of miracles. Miracles in the sense of events that violate
the normal course of our experience are vouched for every day:
the flourishing Church of Christ Scientist is founded on a
multitude of such miracles. Nobody believes all the miracles:
everybody believes some of them. I cannot tell why men who will
not believe that Jesus ever existed yet believe firmly that
Shakespear was Bacon. I cannot tell why people who believe that
angels appeared and fought on our side at the battle of Mons, and
who believe that miracles occur quite frequently at Lourdes,
nevertheless boggle at the miracle of the liquefaction of the
blood of St. Januarius, and reject it as a trick of priestcraft.
I cannot tell why people who will not believe Matthew's story of
three kings bringing costly gifts to the cradle of Jesus, believe
Luke's story of the shepherds and the stable. I cannot tell why
people, brought up to believe the Bible in the old literal way as
an infallible record and revelation, and rejecting that view
later on, begin by rejecting the Old Testament, and give up the
belief in a brimstone hell before they give up (if they ever do)
the belief in a heaven of harps, crowns, and thrones. I cannot
tell why people who will not believe in baptism on any terms
believe in vaccination with the cruel fanaticism of inquisitors.
I am convinced that if a dozen sceptics were to draw up in
parallel columns a list of the events narrated in the gospels
which they consider credible and incredible respectively, their
lists would be different in several particulars. Belief is
literally a matter of taste.
FASHIONS OF BELIEF.
Now matters of taste are mostly also matters of fashion. We are
conscious of a difference between medieval fashions in belief and
modern fashions. For instance, though we are more credulous than
men were in the Middle Ages, and entertain such crowds of
fortunetellers, magicians, miracle workers, agents of
communication with the dead, discoverers of the elixir of life,
transmuters of metals, and healers of all sorts, as the Middle
Ages never dreamed of as possible, yet we will not take our
miracles in the form that convinced the Middle Ages. Arithmetical
numbers appealed to the Middle Ages just as they do to us,
because they are difficult to deal with, and because the greatest
masters of numbers, the Newtons and Leibnitzes, rank among the
greatest men. But there are fashions in numbers too. The Middle
Ages took a fancy to some familiar number like seven; and because
it was an odd number, and the world was made in seven days, and
there are seven stars in Charles's Wain, and for a dozen other
reasons, they were ready to believe anything that had a seven or
a seven times seven in it. Seven deadly sins, seven swords of
sorrow in the heart of the Virgin, seven champions of
Christendom, seemed obvious and reasonable things to believe in
simply because they were seven. To us, on the contrary, the
number seven is the stamp of superstition. We will believe in
nothing less than millions. A medieval doctor gained his
patient's confidence by telling him that his vitals were being
devoured by seven worms. Such a diagnosis would ruin a modern
physician. The modern physician tells his patient that he is ill
because every drop of his blood is swarming with a million
microbes; and the patient believes him abjectly and instantly.
Had a bishop told William the Conqueror that the sun was
seventy-seven miles distant from the earth, William would
have believed him not only out of respect for the Church, but
because he would have felt that seventy-seven miles was the
proper distance. The Kaiser, knowing just as little about it as
the Conqueror, would send that bishop to an asylum. Yet he (I
presume) unhesitatingly accepts the estimate of ninety-two and
nine-tenths millions of miles, or whatever the latest big figure
may be.
CREDIBILITY AND TRUTH.
And here I must remind you that our credulity is not to be
measured by the truth of the things we believe. When men believed
that the earth was flat, they were not credulous: they were using
their common sense, and, if asked to prove that the earth was
flat, would have said simply, "Look at it." Those who refuse to
believe that it is round are exercising a wholesome scepticism.
The modern man who believes that the earth is round is grossly
credulous. Flat Earth men drive him to fury by confuting him with
the greatest ease when he tries to argue about it. Confront him
with a theory that the earth is cylindrical, or annular, or
hour-glass shaped, and he is lost. The thing he believes may be
true, but that is not why he believes it: he believes it because
in some mysterious way it appeals to his imagination. If you ask
him why he believes that the sun is ninety-odd million miles off,
either he will have to confess that he doesn't know, or he will
say that Newton proved it. But he has not read the treatise in
which Newton proved it, and does not even know that it was
written in Latin. If you press an Ulster Protestant as to why he
regards Newton as an infallible authority, and St. Thomas Aquinas
or the Pope as superstitious liars whom, after his death, he will
have the pleasure of watching from his place in heaven whilst
they roast in eternal flame, or if you ask me why I take into
serious consideration Colonel Sir Almroth Wright's estimates of
the number of streptococci contained in a given volume of serum
whilst I can only laugh at the earlier estimates of the number of
angels that can be accommodated on the point of a needle, no
reasonable reply is possible except that somehow sevens and
angels are out of fashion, and billions and streptococci are all
the rage. I simply cannot tell you why Bacon, Montaigne, and
Cervantes had a quite different fashion of credulity and
incredulity from the Venerable Bede and Piers Plowman and the
divine doctors of the Aquinas-Aristotle school, who were
certainly no stupider, and had the same facts before them. Still
less can I explain why, if we assume that these leaders of
thought had all reasoned out their beliefs, their authority
seemed conclusive to one generation and blasphemous to another,
neither generation having followed the reasoning or gone into the
facts of the matter for itself at all.
It is therefore idle to begin disputing with the reader as to
what he should believe in the gospels and what he should
disbelieve. He will believe what he can, and disbelieve what he
must. If he draws any lines at all, they will be quite arbitrary
ones. St. John tells us that when Jesus explicitly claimed divine
honors by the sacrament of his body and blood, so many of his
disciples left him that their number was reduced to twelve. Many
modern readers will not hold out so long: they will give in at
the first miracle. Others will discriminate. They will accept the
healing miracles, and reject the feeding of the multitude. To
some the walking on the water will be a legendary exaggeration of
a swim, ending in an ordinary rescue of Peter; and the raising of
Lazarus will be only a similar glorification of a commonplace
feat of artificial respiration, whilst others will scoff at it as
a planned imposture in which Lazarus acted as a confederate.
Between the rejection of the stories as wholly fabulous and the
acceptance of them as the evangelists themselves meant them to be
accepted, there will be many shades of belief and disbelief, of
sympathy and derision. It is not a question of being a Christian
or not. A Mahometan Arab will accept literally and without
question parts of the narrative which an English Archbishop has
to reject or explain away; and many Theosophists and lovers of
the wisdom of India, who never enter a Christian Church except as
sightseers, will revel in parts of John's gospel which mean
nothing to a pious matter-of-fact Bradford manufacturer. Every
reader takes from the Bible what he can get. In submitting a
precis of the gospel narratives I have not implied any estimate
either of their credibility or of their truth. I have simply
informed him or reminded him, as the case may be, of what those
narratives tell us about their hero.
CHRISTIAN ICONOLATRY AND THE PERILS OF THE ICONOCLAST.
I must now abandon this attitude, and make a serious draft on the
reader's attention by facing the question whether, if and when
the medieval and Methodist will-to-believe the Salvationist and
miraculous side of the gospel narratives fails us, as it plainly
has failed the leaders of modern thought, there will be anything
left of the mission of Jesus: whether, in short, we may not throw
the gospels into the waste-paper basket, or put them away on the
fiction shelf of our libraries. I venture to reply that we shall
be, on the contrary, in the position of the man in Bunyan's
riddle who found that "the more he threw away, the more he had.
"We get rid, to begin with, of the idolatrous or iconographic
worship of Christ. By this I mean literally that worship which is
given to pictures and statues of him, and to finished and
unalterable stories about him. The test of the prevalence of this
is that if you speak or write of Jesus as a real live person, or
even as a still active God, such worshippers are more horrified
than Don Juan was when the statue stepped from its pedestal and
came to supper with him. You may deny the divinity of Jesus; you
may doubt whether he ever existed; you may reject Christianity
for Judaism, Mahometanism, Shintoism, or Fire Worship; and the
iconolaters, placidly contemptuous, will only classify you as a
freethinker or a heathen. But if you venture to wonder how Christ
would have looked if he had shaved and had his hair cut, or what
size in shoes he took, or whether he swore when he stood on a
nail in the carpenter's shop, or could not button his robe when
he was in a hurry, or whether he laughed over the repartees by
which he baffled the priests when they tried to trap him into
sedition and blasphemy, or even if you tell any part of his story
in the vivid terms of modern colloquial slang, you will produce
an extraordinary dismay and horror among the iconolaters. You
will have made the picture come out of its frame, the statue
descend from its pedestal, the story become real, with all the
incalculable consequences that may flow from this terrifying
miracle. It is at such moments that you realize that the
iconolaters have never for a moment conceived Christ as a real
person who meant what he said, as a fact, as a force like
electricity, only needing the invention of suitable political
machinery to be applied to the affairs of mankind with
revolutionary effect.
Thus it is not disbelief that is dangerous in our society: it is
belief. The moment it strikes you (as it may any day) that Christ
is not the lifeless harmless image he has hitherto been to you,
but a rallying centre for revolutionary influences which all
established States and Churches fight, you must look to
yourselves; for you have brought the image to life; and the mob
may not be able to bear that horror.
THE ALTERNATIVE TO BARRABAS.
But mobs must be faced if civilization is to be saved. It did not
need the present war to show that neither the iconographic Christ
nor the Christ of St. Paul has succeeded in effecting the
salvation of human society. Whilst I write, the Turks are said to
be massacring the Armenian Christians on an unprecedented scale;
but Europe is not in a position to remonstrate; for her
Christians are slaying one another by every device which
civilization has put within their reach as busily as they are
slaying the Turks. Barabbas is triumphant everywhere; and the
final use he makes of his triumph is to lead us all to suicide
with heroic gestures and resounding lies. Now those who, like
myself, see the Barabbasque social organization as a failure, and
are convinced that the Life Force (or whatever you choose to call
it) cannot be finally beaten by any failure, and will even
supersede humanity by evolving a higher species if we cannot
master the problems raised by the multiplication of our own
numbers, have always known that Jesus had a real message, and
have felt the fascination of his character and doctrine. Not that
we should nowadays dream of claiming any supernatural authority
for him, much less the technical authority which attaches to an
educated modern philosopher and jurist. But when, having entirely
got rid of Salvationist Christianity, and even contracted a
prejudice against Jesus on the score of his involuntary
connection with it, we engage on a purely scientific study of
economics, criminology, and biology, and find that our practical
conclusions are virtually those of Jesus, we are distinctly
pleased and encouraged to find that we were doing him an
injustice, and that the nimbus that surrounds his head in the
pictures may be interpreted some day as a light of science rather
than a declarations of sentiment or a label of idolatry.
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