Ernest Renan

“ Greece has drawn pictures of human life by sculpture and by charming poetry, but always without backgrounds or distant receding perspectives. In Galilee were wanting the marble, the practiced workmen, the exquisite and refined language. But Galilee has created the most sublime ideal for the popular imagination; for behind its idyl moves the fate of humanity, and the light which illumines its picture is the sun of the kingdom of God.
Jesus lived and grew amid these enchanting scenes. From his infancy he went almost annually to the feast at Jerusalem. ”

“ Never did man seize the problem of the future and of his destiny with a more desperate courage, more determined to go to extremes. Not separating the lot of humanity from that of their little race, the Jewish thinkers were the first who sought for a general theory of the progress of our species. Greece, always confined within itself, and solely attentive to petty quarrels, has had admirable historians; but before the Roman epoch it would be in vain to seek in her a general system of the philosophy of history embracing all humanity. ”

“ At the epoch of the captivity a poet, full of harmony, saw the splendor of a future Jerusalem, of which the peoples and the distant isles should be tributaries, under colors so charming that one might say a glimpse of the visions of Jesus had reached him at a distance of six centuries. ”

“ A complete renovation, a revolution which should shake the world to its very foundation, was necessary in order to satisfy the enormous thirst of vengeance excited in it by the sense of its superiority, and by the sight of its humiliation.
If Israel had possessed the spiritualistic doctrine which divides man in two parts -- the body and the soul -- and finds it quite natural that while the body decays the soul should survive, this paroxysm of rage and of energetic protestation would have had no existence. ”

“ Persia, from an ancient period, conceived the history of the world as a series of evolutions, over each of which a prophet presided. Each prophet had his hazar, or reign of a thousand years (chiliasm) , and from these successive ages, analogous to the Avatar of India, is composed the course of events which prepared the reign of Ormuzd. At the end of the time when the cycle of chiliasms shall be exhausted, the complete paradise will come. Men then will live happy; the earth will be as one plain; there will be only one language, one law, and one government for all. ”

“ Except in the French Revolution, no historical center was as suitable as that in which Jesus was formed to develop those hidden forces which humanity holds as in reserve, and which are not seen except in days of excitement and peril.
If the government of the world were a speculative problem, and the greatest philosopher were the man best fitted to tell his fellows what they ought to believe, it would be from calmness and reflection that those great moral and dogmatic truths called religion would proceed. ”

“ This beautiful country has now become sad and gloomy through the ever-impoverishing influence of Islamism. But still everything which man cannot destroy breathes an air of freedom, mildness, and tenderness, and at the time of Jesus it overflowed with happiness and prosperity. The Galileans were considered energetic, brave and laborious. If we except Tiberias, built by Antipas in honor of Tiberius (about the year 15) , in the Roman style, Galilee had no large towns. The country was, nevertheless, well peopled, covered with small towns and large villages, and cultivated in all parts with skill. ”

“ As the cooled earth no longer permits us to understand the phenomena of primitive creation, because the fire which penetrated it is extinct, so deliberate explanations have always appeared somewhat insufficient when applying our timid methods of induction to the revolutions of the creative epochs which have decided the fate of humanity. Jesus lived at one of those times when the game of public life is freely played, and when the stake of human activity is increased a hundredfold. Every great part, then, entails death ”

“ The disabused epicurean who wrote Ecclesiastes thought so little of the future that he considered it even useless to labor for his children; in the eyes of this egotistical celibate the highest stroke of wisdom was to use his fortune for his own enjoyment. But the great achievements of a people are generally wrought by the minority. Notwithstanding all their enormous defects -- hard, egotistical, scoffing, cruel, narrow, subtle, and sophistical -- the Jewish people are the authors of the finest movement of disinterested enthusiasm which history records. ”

“ Buddhism itself, whose origin is in pure thought, has conquered one-half of Asia by motives wholly political and moral. As to the Semitic religions, they are as little philosophical as possible. Moses and Mohammed were not men of speculation: they were men of action. It was in proposing action to their fellow-countrymen and to their contemporaries that they governed humanity. Jesus, in like manner, was not a theologian, or a philosopher, having a more or less well- composed system. ”

“ Two prophets will come to console mankind, and to prepare the great advent. These ideas ran through the world, and penetrated even to Rome, where they inspired a cycle of prophetic poems, of which the fundamental ideas were the division of the history of humanity into periods, the succession of the gods corresponding to these periods -- a complete renovation of the world, and the final advent of a golden age. The book of Daniel, the book of Enoch, and certain parts of the Sibylline books are the Jewish expression of the same theory. ”

“ But in religion it is always the zealous sect which innovates, which progresses, and which has influence. Besides this, the resurrection, an idea totally different from that of the immortality of the soul, proceeded very naturally from the anterior doctrines and from the position of the people. ”

“ Judas had, doubtless, many other principles, which Josephus, always careful not to compromise his co-religionists, designedly suppresses; for it is impossible to understand how, for so simple an idea, the Jewish historian should give him a place among the philosophers of his nation, and should regard him as the founder of a fourth school, equal to those of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes, Judas was evidently the chief of a Galilean sect, deeply imbued with the Messianic idea, and which became a political movement. ”

“ Opposition always makes the glory of a country. The greatest men of a nation are those whom it puts to death. Socrates was the glory of the Athenians, who would not suffer him to live among them. Spinoza was the greatest Jew of modern times, and the synagogue expelled him with ignominy. ”

“ Already at the time of Job it was much shaken; the old men of Teman who professed it were considered behind the age, and the young Elihu, who intervened in order to combat them, dared to utter as his first word this essentially revolutionary sentiment, "Great men are not always wise; neither do the aged understand judgment." With the complications which had taken place in the world since the time of Alexander, the old Temanite and Mosaic principle became still more intolerable. Never had Israel been more faithful to the Law, and yet it was subjected to the atrocious persecution of Antiochus. ”

“ Others, especially the Pharisees, had recourse to the doctrine of the resurrection. The righteous will live again in order to participate in the Messianic reign. They will live again in the flesh, and for a world of which they will be the kings and the judges; they will be present at the triumph of their ideas and at the humiliation of their enemies.
We find among the ancient people of Israel only very indecisive traces of this fundamental dogma. The Sadducee, who did not believe it, was in reality faithful to the old Jewish doctrine ”

“ Worldly and incredulous Sadduceeism might possibly not recoil before such a consequence, and a consummate sage, like Antigonus of Soco, might indeed maintain that we must not practice virtue like a slave in expectation of a recompense, that we must be virtuous without hope. ”

“ God being the sole Master whom man ought to recognize, to pay tithe to a secular sovereign was, in a manner, to put him in the place of God. Completely ignorant of the idea of the Etate, the Jewish theocracy only acted up to its logical induction -- the negation of civil society and of all government. ”

“ From the ruins which remain of its ancient splendor we can trace an agricultural people, no way gifted in art, caring little for luxury, indifferent to the beauties of form, and exclusively idealistic. ”

“ In these days man risks little and gains little. In heroic periods of human activity man risked all and gained all, The good and the wicked, or at least those who believed themselves and are believed to be such, form opposite armies. ”

“ Some, attaching themselves to the principle of philosophical immortality, imagined the righteous living in the memory of God, glorious for ever in the remembrance of men, and judging the wicked who had persecuted them. "They live in the sight of God ”

“ They allowed everything up to the point when they thought it necessary to be severe. It is not recorded that Jesus was even once interfered with by the civil power in his wandering career. Such freedom, and, above all, the happiness which Galilee enjoyed in being much less confined in the bonds of Pharisaic pedantry, gave to this district a real superiority over Jerusalem. The revolution, or, in other words, the belief in the Messiah, caused here a general fermentation. men deemed themselves on the eve of the great renovation ”