The Man Jesus Was Out of the rebellious Galilee came a hero of the spirit who sought not to reform man, but to transform him. By Max Schoen Overview In The Man Jesus Was Max Schoen carries the reader on an exciting quest in search of the man from Galilee who, once he had spoken, could never be forgotten. From this quest Jesus emerges as the man who lived and died a Jew – the shameless blasphemer of ancient prophets, the militant enemy of Israel’s national existence. Here stands the real Jesus, a hero of the sprit, claiming no divinity, seeking no Messiahship, but raised above ridicule and scorn by an epic vision embracing all men. In freeing the personality of Jesus from the encrustations of religious dogma, in rediscovering the compelling forces of intellect, emotion, history and tradition that produced this genius, Dr, Schoen’s book constitutes much more than a courageous and reverent re-evaluation of the man who preached along the dusty roads of Galilee. It is, as well, a brilliant interpretation of the meaning of Jesus for our modern world. About Max Schoen Max Schoen was born in the Carpathian Mountains of Austria on February 11, 1888, and until the age of 14 was educated exclusively in the Jewish orthodox faith. Captivated by the character of Jesus, he abandoned his rabbinical studies and came to America shortly after the turn of the century. Although unable to speak English, he soon became happily adjusted to the public school system of New York City, and in 1911 received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of the City of New York. His first teaching experience was as an instructor in the high school at Chattanooga, Tennessee, where in 1918 he became a naturalized citizen. He later joined the faculties of East Tennessee State Normal School and the University of Iowa. In 1921, the same year he received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Iowa, he joined the staff of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and from 1925 until 1947 served there continuously as head of the Department of Education and Psychology. In 1947 Dr. Schoen decided to retire permanently to his summer home in Thetford, Vermont, but visiting professorships at Dartmouth College and at Hamilton College have kept him extremely active in academic life. He has published a number of books over the years, and perhaps best known among them are Thinking About Religion, Human Nature, and Human Nature in the Making. Forward Israel came into existence as a religious society, and the history of Israel narrated in the Old Testament is a religious epic: the story of God’s dealings with a people He raised for His messenger to the rest of the peoples of the earth. The New Testament continues this story by introducing the figure of a Galilean peasant-prophet who wandered throughout the land of Palestine announcing the imminent advent of a new social order through the intervention of God and laying down the requirements for memberships in that social order. His teachings appealed to the common people to whom they were addressed, but to the learned in the tradition of Israel his utterances were heresies and blasphemies for which he was condemned. Shortly after the death of this Galilean Jew he became the center of a new religious cult that spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire. The Bible is a historical work; but the history it narrates can be followed with understanding only from the point of view from which it was written. The authors of the various books of the Old and New Testaments were interested only in one theme: the control of the historical process by the Creator of the universe for the accomplishment of His divine purpose for the creature He had made in His own likeness. The account of the public career of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels – the books of the New Testament in which the principal material for a portrait of Jesus the man is to be found – deals entirely with this Jewish conception of history and the role of God’s chosen people in the historical process. In the Synoptic Gospels Jesus does not teach a new religion; he is no Christian. What condemned him to the cross was his departure from the Jewish tradition as interpreted by the recognized Jewish leaders of his time. The portrait of the Galilean in this book is drawn in the colors of the Synoptic Gospels. In Part One the thesis is developed that although the authors of these three records were evangelists and not historians they do nevertheless portray the real Jesus together with a mass of tradition that had arisen about him by the time the earliest of the records was written. Part Two traces the development of the Jewish view of history as the Drama of Redemption, a view that reached its climax in the time of Jesus when hope was high in Israel that the coming of a Messiah sent by God could not be far off. The man Jesus emerges from the impact he made upon this hope, the theme of Part Three. The writing of this book was prompted by reverence for the man Jesus and the conviction that in his spirit and teachings lies the only remedy for the numerous afflictions of the present social order. The aim of the author has been to penetrate to the vision that possessed this man and drove him on relentlessly in the face of the shameful death that awaited him. A man so possessed, so driven by an idea, belongs to no one special period and no one particular place; he cannot be assigned to any one cult, fashion or belief. The attempt to see the real Jesus may therefore offend the Jew who takes pride in being a Jew and also the Christian who glories in his salvation. But Jesus offended the good Jews of his day, and he would likewise offend the good Christians of today were he to appear in their midst with the message he brought to his contemporaries. The Jew forgets, because of what the Christian has done to him in the name of Jesus, that Jesus was a genius of the spirit, and the Christian ignores, because of what he claims the Jew did to Jesus, that Jesus was a Jew. Between the two warring camps the great Galilean is maligned by one and distorted by the other; between them the supreme religious mind of the ages “has nowhere to lay his head.” But Jesus the Jew and genius lives on, and will continue to live on, as a reproach and a promise to his detractors and distorters: a reproach to their blindness and a promise for their enlightenment. PART 1 THE JESUS OF HISTORY Chapter 1: Who Was This Man Jesus? Jesus, born a Jew, lived and died in the Jewish faith. He spoke to Jews, moved only among Jews in a Jewish Palestine, and directed his message exclusively to Jews. Yet neither the Jewish upbringing of Jesus nor his love for his people prevented him from scorning the official representatives and expounders of the Judaism in which he was reared. He spared neither the Scribe, who was the teacher and interpreter of the Mosaic Law; nor the Pharisee, who was the guardian of its purity; nor the Sadducee, who was the protector of its literal meaning. The essential significance of Jesus rests in understanding how this Jew's love for Israel as the chosen people of God can be reconciled with his rejection of the entire tradition that had brought Israel into existence. Jesus came upon the stage of Jewish history at a time when Israel was dispersed among unfriendly and heathen nations and when tradition was Israel's only shield against the encroachments of ungodly ideologies. Outwardly much of what Jesus did and said amounted to the heresy of national suicide, for if any Jew disputed the Torah he might as well deny everything—Yahweh as the God of the Jews, the codes of conduct that had been fashioned through centuries of strife and suffering to govern every Israelite in all of the relations of life. Long before the ministry of Jesus, Israel as the chosen people of Yahweh had incurred both a holy obligation and a holy responsibility. When Israel had seemed lost in the hopeless bondage of Egypt, Yahweh had redeemed Israel and buried the might and pride of its oppressors by closing the sea upon them. He had guided Israel into the wilderness and on Sinai had revealed His law to it. He had led Israel into the land of milk and honey of its ancestors and had built it into a mighty nation. He had caused the colossal grandeur of the Babylonian Empire to crumble into dust for Israel's sake, and had saved it from Antiochus Epiphanes, the madman of Syria, who set out to destroy the Jewish faith in the Torah by forcing adherence to heathen rites. All this Yahweh had done in the past, as Israel's Prophets had foretold, if only Israel would wait, hope, trust, and remain faithful to Yahweh's law. Now under the oppression of Rome and the Idumean Herod, who by making himself king of the Jews had usurped the throne of David, Israel awaited the next and greatest of Yahweh's promised dispensations: the coming of a Redeemer, a scion of the House of David, who would restore the nation of the Jews to the glory for which Yahweh had raised, guided, and protected it.