and therefore misleading. Just so, the claim to divinity made by
Jesus was to the High Priest, who looked forward to the coming of
a Messiah, one that might conceivably have been true, and might
therefore have misled the people in a very dangerous way. That
was why he treated Jesus as an imposter and a blasphemer where we
should have treated him as a madman.


THE GOSPELS WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

All this will become clear if we read the gospels without
prejudice. When I was young it was impossible to read them
without fantastic confusion of thought. The confusion was so
utterly confounded that it was called the proper spirit to read
the Bible in. Jesus was a baby; and he was older than creation.
He was a man who could be persecuted, stoned, scourged, and
killed; and he was a god, immortal and all-powerful, able to
raise the dead and call millions of angels to his aid. It was a
sin to doubt either view of him: that is, it was a sin to reason
about him; and the end was that you did not reason about him, and
read about him only when you were compelled. When you heard the
gospel stories read in church, or learnt them from painters and
poets, you came out with an impression of their contents that
would have astonished a Chinaman who had read the story without
prepossession. Even sceptics who were specially on their guard,
put the Bible in the dock, and read the gospels with the object
of detecting discrepancies in the four narratives to show that
the writers were as subject to error as the writers of
yesterday's newspaper.