to be found about his life and development before his ministry. Yet it is clear that when he entered upon his ministry he felt called to do so, and it is clear that such a mission develops slowly. What do we know of the long years while Jesus was thinking and feeling and praying, the years while the life was ripening which he afterwards preached and finally sacrificed? Under what circumstances he was developing, what he was doing, what influences impressed themselves upon his life and thought before he was thirty—what do we know about it? Nothing! The episode from Jesus' childhood, when he remained in the temple listening and asking questions of the learned men there, only emphasizes our lack of knowledge. For if Jesus in his childhood was so eager and mentally so keen, what was his mind doing during the eighteen or twenty years which followed that episode? Luke tells us "And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man." 1 That is all we know about the growth and development of Jesus' life an mind. Was his inner life dormant or non-existent a these years? Did he not grow at all? Had his idea no sources whatsoever, no development of any kind were they utterly uncorrelated with the lives of his felow men? What was Jesus, a phantom abstractly e. isting in a vacuum, or a historical personality really living and suffering in a given time and place?

There can be but one relevant answer to the question: Jesus was a historical personality. We all live and die and most of us are forgotten. Personalities

1 Luke 2:52.

who are remembered, whom written records of human existence cannot overlook and our memory cannot forget, are personalities whose individual lives greatly affected many lives. A personality in other words acquires historical importance when it deals with the many, when its ideas, actions, words are understood by the many, affect the many. If a multitude gathers around one, it means that what the one is teaching is of interest to so many individuals that they form a multitude around him.

The more limited is our knowledge of the one, the more important is the light that may be shed by the many. The many seldom present difficult problems, for it is never very difficult to find out what in a given situation they had in common. What were their common conditions of existence, what were their common hopes, what were their fears, interests, purposes? Once we find that out, the reactions of the many are not difficult to understand. The particular historical conditions under which Jesus developed, lived, ministered and died are bound to help us understand his life and hence his teachings more intimately. How the Greeks or the Romans, the Gauls, the Goths or the Slavs at various times conceived and pictured to themselves Jesus and his teachings is an interesting problem in itself. It is the history of Christianity, it is the story of Jesus in the course of human history. The history of these interpretations of Jesus is a history of assimilations, in a sense a history of mankind. But it is not the history of mankind that interests us here. These interpretations can only confuse us. Nor

are we interested in a composite picture of Jesus in history throughout the ages of faith. What we are searching for is that definite, concrete, historical Jesus who can give coherence to his teachings. Our quest is the historical truth. Let us therefore go to the documents; but let us be clear in our mind as to their value.

For historical truth is not a bundle of documents. Documents are the raw material, but not the structure. Historical truth is such a constructive insight into a given situation as to carry with it conviction of real life. Social life is then moving within its conditions of existence; and personalities, in their words and deeds, are correlated with their fellow men and appear in their historical, that is, their representative capacity.

CHAPTER II

IN the year seventy after Christ the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, Jerusalem was sacked, and the population either slain, crucified or sold into slavery. It is estimated that over a million and two hundred thousand perished. Josephus tells us about the destruction of Jerusalem that "the multitude of those that therein perished exceeded all the destructions that either men or God ever brought upon the world." 1

The conventional history usually begins this war on August sixth of the year 66, when the Romans and other Gentiles were massacred by the Jews of Jerusalem. This date is so artificial that Mommsen for instance suggests A. D. 44 as the year from which the Jewish-Roman war might better be dated.

It has been customary to put the outbreak of the war in the year 66; with equal and perhaps better warrant we might name for it the year 44. Since the death of Agrippa, warfare in Judea had never ceased, and alongside of the local feuds, which Jews fought with Jews, there went on constantly the war of Roman troops against the seceders in the mountains, the Zealots, as the Jews named them, or, according to Roman designation, the Robbers.2

1 Josephus: Jewish Wars, VI, 9, 4.

2

Mommsen: The Provinces of the Roman Empire, v. 2, p. 221-222. (New York, 1887.)

But to date the beginning of the revolt against Rome with the death of Agrippa in the year 44 is also quite arbitrary. For the revolt had been brewing and repeatedly breaking out here and there long before that. If we should follow the opinion of a contemporary historian, Josephus, we should have to date the beginnings back to the revolt of Judas, the Galilean, or Judas, the Gaulonite, to whose revolutionary activities and doctrines Josephus attributes all the ensuing misfortunes of the Jewish nation, which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. The occasion of that uprising was the census of Quirinius for taxation purposes in the year 6 A. D. Josephus tells us that one Judas, the Gaulonite, with a Pharisee named Saddouk, urged the Jews to revolt, both preaching that "this taxation was no better than an introduction of slavery, and exhorting the nation to assert its liberty." Josephus proceeds to inform us about these men and their doctrine:

All sorts of misfortunes sprung from these men, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree; one violent war came upon us after another . . . . the sedition at last so increased that the very temple of God was burnt down by their enemies' fire.1

Toward the end of the same chapter he gives us some information about the so-called philosophy of Judas, the Gaulonite or the Galilean, as well as of his follow

ers.

These men agree in all other things with the Pharisaic notions; but they have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that 'Josephus: Antiquities, XVIII, 1, 1.