The author of this book does not pretend to have written such a book; but at least he has tried as far as his capacities can take him, to draw near to that ideal.
Let him state at once with sincere humility that he has not written a “scientific history.” In the first place because he could not; in any case because he would not, even if he had possessed all the necessary learning. He warns the reader, among other things, that this book was written (almost all of it) in the country, in a distant and sparsely settled countryside with very few books at hand, with no advice from friends or revision from masters. It will, therefore, never be cited by higher criticism or by those who scrutinize original sources with a microscope; but that is of little importance compared to the possibility of its doing a little good to a few souls, even to one alone. For as he has explained, the author wishes this book to be another coming of Christ and not another burial.
The author bases his book on the Gospels; as much, let it be understood, on the synoptic Gospels as on the fourth. He confesses that he has no interest in the endless dissertations and disputes over the authority of the four Gospels, over their dates and interpolations, over their mutual relationship, and over their probabilities and sources. We have no older nor no other documents, contemporaneous, Jewish or Pagan, which would permit us to correct them or to deny them. He who goes into all this minute investigation can destroy many doctrines, but he cannot advance the true knowledge of Christ by a single step. Christ is in the Gospels, in the apostolic tradition, and in the Church. Outside of that is darkness and silence. He who accepts the four Gospels must accept them wholly, entire, syllable by syllable,—or else reject them from the first to the last and say, “We know nothing.” To attempt in these texts to differentiate what is sure from what is probable, what is historic from what is legendary, what is original from what has been added, the primitive from the dogmatic is a hopeless undertaking, which almost always ends in defeat, in the despair of the readers, who in the midst of this hubbub of contradictory systems, changing from one decade to another, end by understanding nothing and by letting it all drop. The most famous New Testament authorities agree on only one thing, that the Church was able to select in the great mass of primitive literature the oldest Gospels thought up to that time to be the most reliable. No more need be asked.
In addition to the Gospels, the author of this book has had before his eyes “the Logia and the Agrapha,” which seemed to have the most evangelical flavor, and also some apocryphal texts used with judgment. And finally nine or ten modern books which he had at hand.
It seems to him as well as he can judge, that he has departed sometimes from ordinary ideas and that he has painted a Christ who has not always the perfunctory features of the ordinary holy picture, but he is not sure of this nor does he value any new thing which may be in this book, written more in the hope of having it a good book than of having it a beautiful book. It is rather more likely that he has repeated things already said by others, of which he in his ignorance has never heard. In these matters, the subject, which is truth, is unchangeable and there can be nothing new except the manner of presenting it in a form more efficacious because it may be more easily grasped.
Just as he has tried to avoid the thorns of erudite criticism on the one hand, he has no pretensions, on the other, of going too deeply into the mysteries of theology. He has approached Jesus with the simple-heartedness of longing and of love, just as during His life-time He was approached by the fishermen of Capernaum, who were, fortunately for them, even more ignorant than the author. Holding loyally to the words of the orthodox Gospels and to the dogmas of the Catholic Church, he has tried to represent those dogmas and those words in unusual ways, in a style violent with contrasts and with foreshortening, colored with crude and vividly felt words, to see if he could startle modern souls used to highly colored error, into seeing the truth.
The author claims the right to take to himself the words of St. Paul: “To them that are without law, I became as without law that I might gain them that are without law. To the weak became I as weak that I might gain the weak; I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. And this I do for the Gospel’s sake.”
The author has tried to present not only the Hebrew world, but the world of antiquity, hoping to show how new and how great Christ was compared to those who preceded Him. He has not always followed the chronological order of events, because it better suited his aims, which are not (as he has said) entirely historical, to gather together certain groups of thoughts and facts and to throw a stronger light on them instead of leaving them to be scattered here and there in the course of the narrative.
In order not to give a pedantic look to the book he has suppressed all references to quotations and has used no foot-notes. He did not wish to seem what he is not, a learned bibliographer, and he did not wish to have his work smell, however faintly, of the oil of the lamp of erudition. Those who understand these things will recognize the un-named authorities, and the solutions which the author has chosen when confronted with certain problems of concordance. The others, those who are only trying to see how Christ appeared to one of them, would be wearied by the apparatus of textual learning and by dissertations at the bottom of the pages. One word only must be said here in connection with the sinning woman weeping at Jesus’ feet: although it is generally understood from the Gospel story that there were two different scenes and two different women, the author for artistic purposes has allowed himself to treat them as one, and he asks a pardon for this which he hopes will be easily granted since there is no question of dogma involved.
He must warn the reader that he refrained from developing the episodes where the Virgin Mother appears, in order not to lengthen too greatly a book already long, and especially because of the difficulty of showing by passing allusions all the rich wealth of religious beauty which is in the figure of Mary. Another volume would be necessary for that, and the writer is tempted to try if God grants him life and sight to “say of her what was never said of any woman.”
Those who are experienced in reading the Gospels will realize that other things of lesser importance have been shortened and some others, on the contrary, lengthened more than is customary. Some have seemed to the writer more appropriate than the others for his purpose, which is, to use an expression now out of date and distasteful to sophisticated people, the purpose of edification.