Jesus - Man Of Genius

Man of Brains BY J. MiUleton Murry New York and London JF rper CT Bwdwf Publishers 1926 MURRY PRINTED IN T UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FIRST EDITION K-A Talle of Contents PREFACE vii Part One PROLOGUE 3 I JOHN THE BAPTIST 10 II THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 19 III THE TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS 28 IV THE WONDERFUL NEWS 35 V THE MAN IN THE SYNAGOGUE 47 VI THE HEALING OF THE LEPER 53 VII THE HEALING OF THE PALSIED MAN 59 i VIII THE PREACHING OF THE KINGDOM 66 IX THE CHALLENGE TO THE LAW 73 X THE PARTING OF THE WAYS 88 XI THE BOAT AND THE MOUNTAIN 99 XII THE CALL OF THE TWELVE 106 XIII THE MYSTERIES OF THE KINGDOM 113 XIV THE SENDING OF THE TWELVE 123 XV THE FEEDING OF FIVE THOUSAND 144 XVI THE DESCENT OF GENNESARET 151 XVII THE FLIGHT TO THE NORTH 159 XVIII QESAREA PHILIPPI 170 Part Two I THE TEACHING OF JESUS 199 Contents Part Three I THE JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM 235 II THE ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM 271 III THE DISPUTE IN THE TEMPLE 283 IV THE FINAL MESSAGE 303 V MARY OF MAGDALA 322 VI THE LAST SUPPER 336 VII THE TRIAL AND CRUCIFIXION 346 EPILOGUE 365 Preface DO not propose to offer an apology for this book. I wrote it because I needed to write it. The time had come when it had become urgent upon me to make up my mind about Jesus. For reasons which concern myself alone, I desired, if I could, to make him wholly real to myself. The Jesus who is presented in these pages is simply the Jesus who is real to me the Jesus in whose real existence I can, and in whom I do, believe. Because I desired to present him clearly, I have not only excluded, without warning or apology, incidents in the familiar story which I hold to be apocryphal, but I have put aside many sayings and incidents which I believe to be whollyauthentic, because to include them would obscure the narrative. My aim has been simply to estab lish a point of view from which the profound and astonishing unity of the life and teaching of Jesus can be grasped, and my hope is that those who can Preface accept this point of view will find that the authentic sayings and incidents which I have omitted will fall naturally into place without exposition of mine. For more than a century able minds have been at work trying to re-create the Jesus of history. I owe them much yet the debt is less than I imagined it would be when I began this book. I quickly found that there was no consensus of crit ical opinion save on the few points which I had already established for myself, namely, the priority of Marks Gospel, the fact that it had been used by Matthew and Luke in the composition of their Gospels, and the impossibility of regarding the Fourth Gospel as historical. Outside this narrow territory I was surprised to find a welter of con flicting opinions, among which my own appeared to have as good a right to existence as anothers. After a time, indeed, it occurred to me that it might have a better right than some. My training as a literary critic might be the equivalent of the more specialized training of the professor of divinity. For much of my life has been spent in the effort to understand men of genius. And Jesus was above all else a man of genius. Of course there are many Preface to whom he was above all else a supernatural being a God. I cannot share that belief because I do not know what it means. But it is perhaps worth pointing out that those who truly hold it are them selves compelled to some such inquiry and effort at re-creation asI have attempted. For to hold the Catholic Faith that Jesus was very God means also to believe that he was very Man and to believe this is to believe that his life upon this earth must have come to pass in one way alone. No fiat of Omni potence can contrive that a single event should happen in different ways at the same moment Therefore the effort of a century of critical re search to re-create Jesus the man should receive at least the sympathetic attention of those who do verily believe in the God of the Catholic Faith...