Impresiones de un rabino sobre la Pasión de Oberammergau

him a century or two later for certain doctrinal and polemical and vengeful reasons, of which I shall speak in my next discourse, there was nothing that Jesus ever preached or taught that had not the heartiest endorsement of the Rabbis of Israel. Not a precept had he ever uttered that had not proven him a Hebrew of Hebrews. His every word breathes of the religious and moral and social atmosphere of his time. His every as is the translation into deed of the aspirations of the pious and cultured Jew in the days of Palestine's bondage under the cruel Roman. His every declaration to the people is a restatement of his fundamental position that he had not come to make common cause with the Gentile, but to preach to Israel; that he had not come to antagonize nor to destroy, but to fulfil; that he had not come to remove as much as a jot or tittle of the Law and the Prophets, but to preserve their institutions and to conserve their spirit. His every admonition to the people was a reiteration of the teaching of Moses to worship the One God, and to love Him with all their heart and soul and mind, and to love their neighbors as themselves. His every teaching with regard to the Scribes and Rabbis, members of the Sanhedrin, was that they sit in Moses’ seat, and whatsoever they bid that should be done. His very manner of teaching, his

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aphorisms and quotations, his parables and illustrations, is the manner of the Rabbis of his time. Not a reform principle that he taught, which they had not taught; not a ceremonial abuse to which he objected, which they had not objected to; not an ethical lesson that he enjoined, which they had not enjoined; not a prayer that he offered, which they had not offered; the very "Lord's Prayer" was a specimen of the kind of prayer they prayed; the very "Golden Rule" was the Rule taught in every school.

Or perhaps this fiendish hatred of the Rabbis against one of their own was due to Nor his healing.the reports that had reached them of the wondrous miracles he had wrought in healing the sick, in ridding afflicted ones of evil spirits, in awakening people out of trances. Making due allowance for exaggeration—the invariable concomitant of popular glorifications of popular heroes—there was nothing in his cures that could give offense, that, on the contrary, could not but give delight. There was nothing in this that to the Rabbis could even seem strange. Rome's cruelty, the Herodian outrages, fear of the approaching national catastrophe, intense excitement, had made it an age of widespread and deep-seated nervous disorders, an age of all sorts of delusions, hallucinations, hysterias, catalepsies, which, as the Rabbis themselves had

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experienced, yielded quite readily to the sympathetic, soothing look, word, touch, treatment of men of such large magnetic and spiritual powers as Jesus proved himself to have possessed.

What, then, could the motive have been of a hatred as fierce as that which the Passion Play exhibited on the part of the RabbisNo motive—all invention. against Jesus? The answer is quite simple: as a historic fact, there was as little hatred as motive. There is not one word of truth in all these trumped-up charges against the Rabbis, in all the gospel-recorded bitterness of Jesus against the Scribes and Pharisees, or of the Scribes and Pharisees against Jesus. There was as little knowledge of it as there was cause for it at the time of his fatal collision with the Roman law, and Rome's cruel interpreters and executers of it. And there was no knowledge of it, as we shall see in our next discourse, till a century or two later, when in the interest of policy, and for the sake of propagation of the new creed in the Roman Empire, and because of hatred of the protesting Jew, the Roman had to be cleared of the guilt of having killed the Christ he was asked to worship, and the Jew had to be charged with having been the Christ-killer, because he refused to accept him as his Saviour.

In the light of history, let us follow the fate

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of Jesus a little further, before we return to Makes preparation for his seizure.the Passion Play. He knew that his last hour had come. Sorrowing yet more for the faithful twelve than for himself, he tells them delicately that his end is nigh; but they understand him not. At any moment the Roman might appear, and well he knows what would follow. He has himself to get ready, but above all he must get his disciples out of the way. If the Romans come upon them unexpectedly, they will seize him and nail him upon the cross as a deterrent example to other "would-be Kings of the Jews," and mercilessly mow down his devoted disciples. He is ready to die a martyr's death, but the others must not suffer because of him. He must bid them flee to Galilee. He must withdraw from them on some plea, must send one of the trustiest of them, one who had proven his executive ability as treasurer of the little band, Judas of Kariyoth, to make his whereabouts known to the Romans, must bid him to do quickly that which he is to do, so that but the Master alone might die, a martyr to the cause, so that by his death the others might be saved. Better that one die for all than that all should die for one. Such was to be his vicarious atonement. Thus was he to take upon himself the sins of those who had believed in him.

Sad and stirring as this story is of his last

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hours on earth, how marred it has been by shameful admixtures of anti-Jewish theologicalIntroduction and description of Judas Iscariot. venom of a century or two later! How different this tearful story in the Passion Play! All that dramatic art and diabolical villainy could gather together are crowded into a climax of treachery that stands unrivalled in the whole range of the world's fiction. It is the pièce de resistance, without which the Passion Play would have been deprived of the most exciting of its dramatic interest. Here angel and miracle are introduced. Here the heavy villain, Judas Iscariot, plays his part, and to the bitter end. His very garb, look and gait are calculated to arouse bitterest hatred. Yellow robe, the emblem of envy and treachery; a money-bag in his girdle, to serve as emblem of the Jew's greed of gold; sharp, restless eyes; shaggy hair; a haggard face; a snake-like glide;—an appearance so repulsive as to prove at once the historic impossibility of the character, since a nature like that of the noble-minded and pure-hearted Jesus could never have attached to himself in closest intimacy a character whose very presence dripped poison, whose very voice spoke hypocrisy, whose very eyes sent daggers’ thrusts. Everything that is vile in human nature is pressed into that one character of Judas Iscariot. He is covetous, dishonest, mean, rapacious, cunning,

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treacherous. While yet associating with his Master, while yet breaking bread with him at the common table, he is selling him to the priests and scribes for filthy lucre, for thirty shekels of silver, for about twenty dollars. While yet his Master hails him "friend," and offers his cheek to him for the kiss of friendship, there is back of him an armed mob of Jews, to whom that kiss is the signal for laying violent hands upon the friend who had so implicitly trusted his disciple.

It was a difficult rôle, but Johann Zwink was equal to it. And of him it may be truly Dramatically thrilling.said that he was about the only actor in that whole cast of some eight hundred players. A human being of heart and soul could never feel such a part, could but act it. And he had only to think of the type of Jew as represented by Church Fathers in the early centuries, as pictured by fanatics during the Dark Ages, as held up for derision and persecution during the Middle Ages and among modern Anti-Semites, and he had all the models he needed for that miserable character, which—although each of the other disciples was a Jew as was the Master himself—was so enacted as to convey the impression that Judas alone typified the nature and the way of the Jew. At one of the vilest parts of the traitor's acting, a locomotive close by gave a terrible shriek. To me this

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modern engine-shriek, in the midst of a piece of ancient-day mendacity, sounded like a modern protest against this villification of one of the disciples of Jesus. A lady near me shuddered—did she shudder at the baseness of the Jew?

And that same Johann Zwink had played the part of St. John during the preceding two decennials. What a change from St. JohnBut no basis in fact., the most beloved of all the disciples of Jesus, to Judas, the most execrated of all men! But as unlike as the real character of Johann Zwink, the decorator of Oberammergau, is to the Judas of his impersonation, so unlike was the real Judas of Kariyoth to the Judas Iscariot of the Passion Play or of the gospel stories. There is not one word of truth in all this treachery attributed to him. Examine it from whatever point of view we may, contradiction and disproof are the invariable results.

Examining it scripturally, we have no record of "the treachery of the kiss" in the gospel of St. John, which, as the record of theScripturally false. most beloved of Christ's disciples, the bosom friend whom Jesus took to his heart, purports to be one of the most faithful of all the accounts of the life of Christ. We have glaring contradictions as to the end of Judas between St. Matthew and The Acts. We are told of Christ's announcing his approaching

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seizure and end before yet any knowledge of Judas’ treachery is had. We are told of Christ's washing the feet of Judas, calling him friend, eating the Paschal meal with him, and all this with full knowledge that Judas is in the meantime bargaining for the Master's destruction. We are told of Jesus having often and publicly taught in the Temple, and of his having made a public entry into Jerusalem, and yet it required a traitor's kiss to point him out to members of the Sanhedrin who have come to arrest him.

Examining it theologically, we are confronted by the difficulty of Jesus, as is doctrinallyTheologically false. taught, knowing all things from the beginning of time, reading the hearts and minds of all men, and yet accepting that viper for his closest associationship, choosing him for one of his disciples, for one of the elect, permitting the other eleven to run the chance of being corrupted by this miscreant.

And there is that other difficulty, that of Christ knowing of the treachery about to take place, and yet doing nothing to prevent it; on the contrary, urging it on by stinging words. Even if Christ's crucifixion had been pre-ordained, as is doctrinally taught, would it not have been Christ-like to have held up to Judas the enormity of the crime he was about to commit, to have conquered his wicked intention by showing him that the

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martyrdom had to be suffered, treachery of not, and thereby to have made a saint of one about to become the blackest of criminals, and all for the paltry sum of twenty dollars Such a triumph over a trusted disciple could not but have been easy for a Christ, seeing how many other sinners he is reported to have turned from the evil of their way! How should later preachers hope to convert sinners in the name of Christ, when Christ himself could not convert one of his own trusted friends? Having it in his power to prevent the crime, and not doing it, may be well enough for dramatic purposes, but is all wrong for the morals of a Saviour, for the theology of a God. If, according to the Divine plan, the treachery had to be committed, if just in that way Christ's death had to be effected for the salvation of mankind, then the guilt ought to be laid against the theology rather than against Judas. If that was the Divine plan, did not Judas do what had been ordained to be done? Unless my common sense has deserted me, I cannot possibly come to any other conclusion than this: If the treachery of Judas was infamous, the theology that necessitated it was infinitely worse.

Examining it historically, we have the fact of a bishop of the early Christian Church, a century after Christ, named Judas, whichHistorically false.

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name, if the treachery had then been known, would have been as impossible as it is impossible for a Christian, Jew, or American to name his son, respectively, Nero or Pharaoh, or Guiteau. Moreover, we have the fact that—excepting one slight and contradictory notice in a fragment of Papias, and a spurious reference in the New Testament Apocrypha—the early Christian literature, so rich in lore on other characters, good or bad, makes no mention of Judas, which could never have been the case if so fertile a story for moralizing purposes had then existed. Next we are told of the bargaining, for the treachery-price, going on on the Paschal night before the assembled Sanhedrin, and of Judas, together with a number of the members of the Sanhedrin, leading an armed Jewish guard against Jesus, on that same sacred night, when, in the first place, Rome at the time permitted no Sanhedrin sessions; secondly, even if it had permitted, no Sanhedrin session could be held, according to Jewish Law, on the sacred Paschal night; thirdly, there was no armed Jewish guard to arrest any man, and no right to punish, even if there had been an armed guard to arrest; fourthly, the Paschal night, when the place of every Jew was in the privacy of his home for the Passover celebration, was of all nights the most impossible one for Jews to be prowling

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about in the outskirts of the city, in search of a prisoner, while for the Roman it was the best night possible for quietly seizing and dispatching a traitor, without creating a needless commotion among the people.

Examining this Judas-treachery story in the light of third century polemics, its origin and motive become quite intelligible.Invented for polemical purposes. Judas stood to the Roman as the name of the hated Judean, the name Jew being in the Roman language Iudæus, and in the Greek language Ioudaios. The name of Judas, the Maccabee, had been the battle-cry with which the Judean had rushed against the Roman. Judas, the Galilean, had led the zealots in a revolutionary onslaught on the Romans. Rome had bitter memories of the name of Judas. No other name could waken in her as bitter a hatred and contempt as this. No other name could lend itself more helpfully than that of Judas, in branding the hated and obdurate Judean with the guilt of treason that was connected with the death of Christ. It was a well-aimed dart,—and it hit the very heart. And within the Jew's heart that poison-tipped and hatred-barbed dart has remained to this day.

Let us turn from this horrible falsehood of polemical fiction to history once more, and take yet one glance of Jesus, before the Christ's agony and arrest at Gethsemane.forenoon part of the Passion Play is ended. He is

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all alone in the Garden of Gethsemane. His followers are dispersed. His disciples are scattering. He is on his knees, and in the throes of agony. His whole frame shakes with emotion. His doom is nigh. And yet would he live—his people is still oppressed, and he still so young. He opens his lips, and prays: "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; if not, then not as I will but as Thou wilt." Oh, how human is all this, how unlike a death-struggle of a God! And yet, how divine because so human!

A second time and a third time he prays: "Father, if this cup may not pass from me except I drink it, Thy will be done." He has his answer. Not his, but God's will is done. The Roman is upon him. Bravely he steps forward, and, without a tremor in his voice, says: "I am the Jesus of Nazareth whom ye seek." He is bound—but not bowed. He is a Roman prisoner—but a Jewish patriot still. His career is ended. He is on the road to the via crucis, to the way of the cross.

It was a large crowd, yet a silent crowd, that wended its way from the great hall at How will it end?the noon-hour recess. Deep sorrow seemed spread over every face. The rapid pace seemed checked; the head seemed bowed. Walking along and thinking, I remembered having read in a German paper of some one

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having been overheard saying, as he came away from the Passion Play at the noon recess: "The play is not so bad; I wonder how it will end." That one presumably did not know much of the end of Christ. But we Jews know it, and know it well. It has been etched into our souls, burnt into our flesh with fire and sword, with garrote and gibbet, on the rack, at the stake, in the Ghetto. Well I knew how the play ended, and yet, when I considered the falsity I had listened to, the hatred and the malice I had seen enacted, when I reflected upon the wrong that has been done to us, I could not but ask myself: How will it end? When will justice be done to the Jew?

IV

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[decorative border]

In the Afternoon

"The Lord is merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and in truth; He shows kindness unto the thousandth generation, forgives sin, yet will He by no means clear the guilty."—Exodus XXXIV, 6-7.

"Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God: I strengthen thee, yea, I help thee. . . Behold, ashamed and confounded shall be all who were incensed against thee."—Isaiah XLI, 10-11.

"And this commandment have we from him (Christ): he who loveth God loveth his brother also."—I. John IV, 21.

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father and mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." Words ascribed to Christ.—St. Matthew x, 34-37.

"These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them saying, Go not into any way of the Gentiles, and enter not into any city of the Samaritans."—St. Matthew X, 5.

"And he said unto them: Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned." Words ascribed to Christ in St. Mark XVI, 15-16, but generally admitted to be spurious.

NOT far from Oberammergau, almost within sight of it, is the beautiful town of A mediæval miracle.Ettal. That little village enjoys a distinction that is accorded to none of the other mountain hamlets. It is the ancient

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seat of one of the most celebrated of Benedictine convents. Vast are the buildings of the Brotherhood, magnificent is the architecture of its convent-church; yet it is neither the one nor the other that gives Ettal its proud distinction. Its glory lies in having had a miraculous origin, in having within the sanctuary of its church the very statuette of the Virgin Mary which had located that convent-site. When Ludwig, the Bavarian, some six hundred years ago, was about to start for home from Rome, where he had been crowned Emperor, an angel, clothed in a Benedictine garb, presented him with a statuette of the Virgin Mother of God. This precious treasure the pious Emperor carried in his arms all the way from Rome to his native lands. When ascending the mountain-road of Ettal, the statuette suddenly grew heavier and heavier, till at length neither he nor his powerful charger could carry it any further. Here was clearly a miracle, and but one interpretation of it: it was at Ettal where the statuette wished to remain, where the Virgin desired a convent to be established, and a shrine to be consecrated to her. Upon the question being directly put to it, the statuette nodded assent; and to that nod Ettal owes its fame.

Leaving Ettal, and pursuing our road within the Bavarian mountain-forests, we suddenly light upon an old Germanic hut,

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the dwelling-place of the Hundings of the An old Germanic myth.Volsung Saga, made famous by Wagner's Nibelung tetralogy. There stood the mighty oak into which Wotan, chief of the gods, had buried the sword to the hilt, which none but Sigmund, the brave Volsung's son, could withdraw. There was the starting point of those marvelous and mythical deeds that are treasured in the rich storehouses of the Volsung Saga and of the Nibelungenlied.

A convent located by a statuette of the Virgin Mary, a hut and forest once the trysting-placeBelief in the supernatural once common. of gods and demi-gods, a town celebrated for its decennial representations of the sufferings and death of a Son of God —all three within close proximity of each other—what better theme for a mind given to meditations on subjects such as these! Here, within a radius of but a few miles, the Orient and the Occident, the North and the South, the Christian and the Heathen, are brought together in their myths and legends, to demonstrate, as it were, how prone man has been in all ages and in all climes to people the earth with supernatural beings, to ascribe to men superhuman powers, or to assign miraculous origins to natural events.

But the age of supernatural happenings has passed, and, in critical minds, also the beliefNo longer held, except for Passion Play. in their ever having happened. Wagner has created widespread interest in the Icelandic

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[paragraph continues] Eddas and in the Germanic Sagas, but has neither found nor implanted a belief that the gods and the demi-gods, the valkyrs and the norns, of which he sings, ever had existence. Poets still find rich themes for their muse in the quaint lore of the Mediæval Church, but never a trace that the miraculous with which it teems ever occurred, The Passion Play of Oberammergau, however, that deals, from first to last, with the supernatural and the superhuman, with a Heaven-descended, miracle-working, death-resurrected, Heaven-ascended, Virgin-born Son of God, this, and this alone of all the three, we are asked to accept as absolute fact, as holy truth.

Here is, sure enough, a double standard of belief regarding the supernatural. Only the miraculous of the Scriptures is to beAnd for Scriptural miracles in general. accepted as truth, that of any or all other literature is to be discarded as fiction. When we read in the Northern legends of gods appearing in the guise of men, when we read of heroes conquering, single-handed, whole legions of evil spirits, making themselves invisible at will, walking the waters, sailing through the air, passing unscathed through fire, when we read of a dove descending from the sky to turn a swan into a beauteous youth, or of a pilgrim-staff bursting into leaves and blossoms, or of a statue of stone

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nodding its head in approval of the spot where it desires a sanctuary to be erected to itself,—when of these we read we are told to class them with the tales of the Arabian Nights. But when we read of a Holy Ghost manifesting itself in the form of a dove; of angels appearing in the sky to intone a song of joy at the birth of a God; of a star showing the way to the manger in which the newborn Deity lies cradled; of that Deity performing, in the guise of man, marvelous miracles, such as walking the water, flying through the air, feeding the thousands on a few loaves and a few little fishes, withering a tree by a mere curse, expelling devils out of men and driving them into swine, restoring the dead to life, ascending in the flesh and blood, after burial, to take his seat in Heaven as God, the Son, at the right hand of God, the Father,—when of these we read, we are told that we must believe them as absolute truths, or take the consequences of being eternally damned, after death, for disbelieving them, and, if Jews, of being also eternally persecuted before death.

It was with some such thoughts as these that I made my way back to the Passion Play After above reflections witnessed continuation of sufferings of Christ.hall, after the noon recess. My heart, that had been very heavy at the close of the forenoon part of the play, looked painfully forward to the afternoon part. I knew what I had to

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expect, judging from the viciousness I had seen enacted on the part of the Jewish hierarchy and the teachers and leaders of Israel, in their plotting and conspiring against the noble Jewish patriot, against him, whom deluded zeal had unwisely proclaimed "King of the Jews" in the capital of a Roman province, at a seditious time; against one, who had in nowise offended against the Jews, nor against the Law of Israel; all of whose teaching and preaching and yearning had been Jewish, and solely for the Jew; who had been animated by but one desire,—a desire, which not a Jew at that time but wished to see fulfilled,—that of restoring Israel to its independence, and freeing Palestine from its cruel oppressor, and sweeping it clean of the Roman heathen, and in which aspiration and unwise proclamation lay the head and front of all his offending, for which he was made a Roman prisoner in the dead of the sacred Passover night, to be speedily despatched in the morning as a traitor upon the Roman cross, before the Passover pilgrims and the residents of the capital could learn of the seizure, before they could run to the rescue of their brother, or rise in revolt against the Procurator, as had occurred divers times before.

I had not long to wait. The very opening of the afternoon part represented one of the

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[paragraph continues] High Priests on the balcony of his house, in Jesus led before High Priest and abused.the midnight hour, thirsting for the blood of the patriot of Nazareth, unable to sleep until he shall have feasted his eyes on the sight of that miscreant in chains. His feverish craving is soon satisfied. The victim of his hatred is led before him,—not led, but crowded, pushed, jostled by an infuriated mob of Jews. There is but one disappointment, that the prisoner's disciples had been permitted to scatter and escape. Insolent questions are put by the High Priest to Jesus. He disdains to answer them, excepting the one in which he is asked to give an account of the pernicious doctrines he had taught: "I have spoken openly," replies he, "men have heard me; let them tell thee what I have taught." For this dignified answer, he is cruelly smitten in the face, to which Jesus righteously answers: "If I have taught wrong, tell it; if not, why smitest thou me?" This is more than the High Priest Annas, whose name might more worthily have been Haman, can endure. He bids them take the culprit out of his sight, and to afford that delectable treat, of seeing Christ in chains, also to Caiaphas, the other High Priest.

We see the unfortunate prisoner dragged Representation of High Priest modelled after Roman Popes.through the streets of Jerusalem, amid mockery and abuse. We see him brought before Caiaphas and before the assembled Sanhedrin.

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[paragraph continues] Caiaphas is the younger High Priest of the two, very cleverly acted by the village beadle of Oberammergau; but not a whit inferior is he to Annas, in hatred against the unoffending son of his race, faith, nation. If the picture of the Jew, as represented by fanatics of the early Church, of the Dark and Middle Ages, of the modern Anti-Semites, served Johann Zwink as a model for his Judas Iscariot, then the pictures of some of the Popes of Rome, at and before the dawn of the Reformation, must have served Sebastian Lang as a model of Caiaphas,—those Popes, whose hands were red and whose souls were black with the blood and poison of assassination; those Popes, who inundated the soil of Europe with the blood of the innocent; those Popes, who founded and operated the Inquisition and Torture Chambers, and intoned Te Deums for such massacres as that of St. Bartholomew night; those Popes, who sickened Christianity with the stench of their open voluptuousness and public immoralities; who made a public jest of the religion of that very Christ whose apostolic successors they professed to be; who made a traffic of their religion for the money with which to indulge their luxuries and riotousness; who kept their iron hands relentlessly on the hearts and souls and minds of the people; who

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made of Rome a Babylon and of St. Peter a heathen temple; those Popes, who tortured and strangled and burnt the prophet Savonarola; who tortured and burnt the saint Huss and the philosopher Bruno; and who would have tortured and strangled and burnt the reformer Luther, if his time had not grown a little too enlightened for mental serfdom, if the people's spirit, at that time, had not grown a little too bold for spiritual oppression.

But we must return to Caiaphas, the High Priest, and to the Supreme Court of the Jesus subjected to mock trial.nation, which had assembled in the sacred Passover night to sit in capital judgment upon a Jewish culprit. A mock trial is entered upon. Witnesses are called, and serious indeed are the charges they bring against Jesus. He has been heard declare that, if they would tear down the Temple, he would restore it in three days. He is accused of having spoken disrespectfully of the Rabbis, and of having taught, in regard to the ceremonial law, contrary to their teaching. He is accused of greater crimes still, of having been seen eating with unwashed hands, and of having associated with publicans and sinners and Samaritans; of having permitted the hungry to pluck ears on the Sabbath, of having actually healed the sick on the Day of Rest. He is accused of still greater crimes, of the greatest of all conceivable crimes, of

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having arrogated to himself the right of God in forgiving sin, of having committed blasphemy in calling himself the Messiah of Israel, the Son of God.

The High Priest is horror-stricken. He rends his clothes as a sign of the nation's humiliation and contrition at the blasphemyCondemned to death. of one of its sons. "He is guilty of death!" shouts the High Priest. "He is guilty of death!" re-echoes the mob. "He is guilty of death!" decrees the Sanhedrin, and turns him over to a guard for safe-keeping till the break of day, when the Tribunal is to proceed with him to the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, for the Roman's execution of the criminal condemned by them.

I have called it a mock trial, and my voice may probably have indicated somewhat of a tone of amusement while narrating this so-calledNot acted nor witnessed as mock trial in Oberammergau. judiciary proceeding of the Supreme Court of the nation, whose president, historically, was the distinguished and peace-loving Gamaliel, and one of whose foremost members was the noble Jochanan ben Saccai. But, as for the impersonators of it at Oberammergau, nothing could have been further from their minds than that they were enacting a mock trial, or that there was any illegality or no legality at all in the whole trial, or that it never was, and never could have been, an historical fact. There was an

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earnestness, a naturalness of malice in their performance that cast a pall over the thousands of spectators. On the one hand, the calm dignity of the prisoner—bound but not bowed, silent and yet most eloquent of innocence; on the other side, the envenomed hierarchy, and the chief tribunal of the nation, and the mob, raging against him like a maddened sea against a well-secured lighthouse, it was a spectacle to stir even the most callous, to move even a heart of stone.

Analyzing my feelings, I found them stirred by two emotions: one was the pity one The trial a fabrication, like Blue Grotto.naturally feels for the wronged in any play on any stage; the other was a curiosity to know how many of that audience could penetrate that crudely-woven web of falsehood, that had been maliciously drawn in front of the Roman to conceal the real offender; a curiosity to know how many could understand that, the offense of Jesus having been solely a political one against Rome, the Jews had as little cause as they had right, to proceed judicially or otherwise against him, more especially as that offense against Rome had had for its intention the deliverance of the Jew. The preceding afternoon I had seen some of the spectators in the celebrated Blue Grotto, near Oberammergau, back of the Linderhof palace of the ill-fated Bavarian King. I had no doubt but that they

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had been as profoundly impressed as I had been by the magnificent naturalness of that stupendous piece of imitation, of that bold fabrication of fiction. Did these same people, I wondered, perceive that the whole trial they had just listened to, even though drawn from the gospels, was, like unto the grotto they had seen the day before, a bold fabrication of fiction, the machination of malicious Jew-haters, whose cunning and self-interest had counselled the exculpation of the guilty and the incrimination of the innocent.

I wondered also whether some of that audience had seen the Hunding hut, and had learned that even that was all imitation, allAnd like Mediæval miracle and Germanic myth. fabrication, and that the story of the nodding Virgin-statuette at Ettal was all fiction, the invention of Benedictine monks in the financial interest of their order and convent. If they had, I wondered whether they had better reason for believing that trial to have been true, seeing how the whole procedure, in its ignorance of Jewish law, history and institution, proves itself a bungling fabrication of a later age, that had gain for its object, malice for its motive power, vengeance for its tools.

And I wondered also whether any of them had ever heard the remark Prof. Huxley had made, when told as a definition of a lobster,A blunder, like that exposed by Huxley. that it was "a red fish that swam backward,"

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said he, "the lobster is neither red, nor a fish, nor does it swim backward—all the rest of the definition is true." If they had, then had they seen in that trial an illustration of the kind of error Huxley had so cleverly exposed. With the exception that that trial, from first to last, was not Jewish; that, being a trial for a capital offense, it could not, at that time, have been conducted by Jews according to Roman interdiction; nor that any of the charges brought against the accused constituted capital offense or any offense at all, according to Jewish Law,—with these exceptions, all the rest of the trial was true.

We are told of two High Priests; there could never be more than one, at one time, Every detail of trial false.in Israel. The one is named Annas; Jewish literature knows of no High Priest by the name of Annas at the time when Jesus is said to have stood in trial before him. Of the other, Caiaphas, it has as little knowledge as High Priest in Israel as has the gospel of Mark, the oldest of the four gospel stories, or has the gospel of Luke a knowledge of a trial before Caiaphas. Not until some two hundred years after the death of Jesus do we find in Jewish literature the name of a Joseph of Caipha. Josephus mentions a Joseph as High Priest at the time of Pilate. The addition of the words "who is also called Caiphas" in no wise clears the

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difficulty, knowing only too well how the work of the Roman-pensioned Josephus, dedicated to Vespasian and Titus the destroyers of Jerusalem, written in Rome and for Romans, had additions and subtractions made to it and from it, by later hands, to suit ulterior purposes. The trial is held in the High Priest's palace—no penal case in Israel could ever be tried in any other place than the legal seat of the Sanhedrin, which at no time in the history of Israel was in the dwelling of the High Priest. The trial is held, and the verdict of death is pronounced on the Passover night—according to Jewish Law, no trial could be held in the night, least of all on the Holy Passover night, nor could a sentence of death be ever pronounced on the same day on which the trial was held. Jesus was condemned for having differed from the Rabbis, and for having spoken disrespectfully of them—a guilt that was one of the commonest and most harmless occurrences in those days of free speech, of schools and sects of widest divergence, from the almost atheistical Sadducees to the extremely orthodox Essenes, both of which had broken with the Rabbinical Law and had spurned the authority of the Rabbis. He is condemned to death for irreligious actions and for blasphemous sayings; there is not in the whole compendium of the Talmudic Law, an

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enactment, a decision, a decree, that could even by the farthest stretch of an orthodox imagination construe as heresy or blasphemy anything that Jesus ever did or said. There is not in the whole history of Israel, from Moses to Jesus, a single case on record of any one ever having been put to death because of differing religious views. Only he who cursed God by the ineffable name of Jehovah, and who seduced others into cursing God, and enticed them to idolatry, was a blasphemer according to Jewish law, and guilty of death. Unbeliever that Robert Ingersoll was, not even he, having never cursed God nor enticed men to idolatry, could have been condemned to death by Jewish law, as a blasphemer, much less those thousands of godly and valiant thinkers, who were done to death at the stake, in the torture-chamber, during the Dark and Middle Ages, by the Christian Inquisition, even for but slightly different opinions on doctrines and dogmas of the Church.

But what of the gospels in which this trial and the other fabrications previously touched Is it not so recorded in inspired Scripture?upon are recorded? What of the phrase "Gospel Truth "? Are not these accounts given in the New Testament, and has not the New Testament, as well as the Old Testament, been written by the hand of God, or by the hand of man under the dilation or inspiration of God?

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It is too late a date in the history of our mental progress to postulate a supernatural origin for either the New or Old Testament. Theory of inspired Scripture no longer tenable.The very shortcomings of the writings themselves, their own frequent, flagrant contradictions, their conflict with historic and scientific facts, their occasional childish, absurd, even pernicious, teachings, show only too plainly the hand of man with all the limitations of the age in which it wrote. And when to this we add the fanatical spirit that characterized the Councils, in which the canonicity of the New Testament writings was established, the intrigues, the partisan passions, the bitter feuds, the personal encounters, that determined which writings should and which should not constitute the Holy Scripture, and when we consider when and how and by whom and under what spirit and with what motive some of these Scriptures were composed, it becomes a matter of scientific and philosophic necessity to re-emphasize our old-time objection to the old-time teaching with regard to the gospels that they are divine in origin, supernatural in essence, miraculous in evidence.

If Jesus himself ever committed any of his sayings and doings to writing, not a line of it has come down to us or was ever known toNo contemporaneous biography of Jesus. have existed. If the Disciples ever wrote anything of the life of their Master, not a line of it has come down to our day. Not one of

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