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The Life of Jesus: Renan

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The Life of Jesus: Renan

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Ernst Renan was neither the first nor the most scholarly critic of the nineteenth century to apply a scientific method to the New Testament, but his Life of Jesus (1863) was the era's most popular.

Extricating the story of Jesus from the miracles attributed to him, Renan portrays a figure that is wholly human, while also exalting Jesus as a moral "genius" and "hero" (notions which Nietzsche condemned as "unseemly"). Blending biography with beautiful descriptions of the landscape and customs of the ancient near east, Renan sets the scene in the mode of a romantic travel narrative, painting "smiling and grand Nature" as the formative influence which elevates Jesus into a kind of implicit noble savage. In Renan's rendering, the Palestinian countryside, which he calls "the fifth Gospel," becomes almost imbued with a magical potency the reverse of his subject.

Albert Schweitzer called Renan's introduction "itself a literary masterpiece," while saying that he "offered his readers a Jesus who was alive.... because Renan had the skill to make them see blue skies, seas of waving corn, distant mountains, gleaming lilies, in a landscape with the Lake of Gennesareth for its centre, and to hear with him in the whispering of the reeds the eternal melody of the Sermon on the Mount."

While denying Jesus' divinity, Renan reconstructs his biography with a disarming admiration. "Love is possible without faith," he says in his introduction, helping to shape a theological debate that involved both Unitarianism and Transcendentalism--evident, for instance, in Emerson's "Divinity School Address"--that took aim at "the great problem of the present age": "to preserve the religious spirit, whilst getting rid of the superstitions and absurdities that deform it."

The Life of Jesus:

For a shorter reading, the following chapters are suggested as optional: 6, 8, 9, 12, 18.

Extracts:

  • "The second work had other cheer— / Started from Strauss, disdained Renan— / By striding paces up to Pan; / Nor rested, but the goat-god here / Capped with the red cap in the twist / Of Proudhon and the Communist." (Clarel, 1.41)
  • "But none / Exceed in flushed repute the one / Who bold can harmonize for all / Moses and Comte, Renan and Paul: / ’Tis the robustious circus-man: / With legs astride the dappled span / Elate he drives white, black, before: / The small apprentices adore." (Clarel, 3.16)
  • "And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings." (Moby-Dick, 86)
  • "So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God." (Moby-Dick, 93)

This meetup is part of a series on The Crescent and the Cross.

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