Charles Guignebert

Charles Guignebert (1867 - 1939)

Charles Guignebert was a professor of Church history at the Sorbonne. He wrote the book "Jesus" in 1935, which was eventually translated into English in 1956. He believed in the “historicity of Jesus,” men like Paul-Louis Couchoud, Benjamin Smith, John Mackinnon Robertson, Peter C. Jensen, Albert Kalthoff and Arthur Drews.

None of these writers and scholars had the advantage of Nag Hammadi material, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the extensive advances in archaeology. Some of Guignebert’s arguments may not be as valid today but that would not mean he would agree with the mythicists.

Charles had followed in the shadow of Alfred Firmin Loisy who was a French Roman Catholic priest, professor and theologian generally credited as a founder of Biblical Modernism. While they were critics of traditional views of the biblical creation, their biblical criticism of Sacred Scripture appeared after centuries of persecution, indoctrination, scattered and competitive reformation and theological undermining of any ideas that would decrease the power of the Catholic Church or the Church of England or even the Greek orthodox.

Once religion became "what you think about God" the vanity of men drives our thinking toward what psychologists call cognitive immunization. Personal pride and the fear of of the pain that comes from Cognitive dissonance keeps the masses mentally bound to one ideology or another.

Rationalism is a belief or theory that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response. But if your fact are limited by design or by default your conclusions may be false. Yes we live in a cause and effect universe but eating of the tree of knowledge may produce results the vain man calls rational but are not.

Guignebert believed his approach was more scientific rather than confessional concerning Christian history. But his "scientific " perspective was limited to his persona point of view. He actually concluded with his narrow scholastic view that "We know nothing at all of the personality of Jesus, scarcely anything of the facts of his life, little as to his teaching, and can only speculate as to his career."

He viewed “The gospels" were "texts of propaganda, calculated to organize and authenticate the legend represented in the sacred drama of the sect by making that legend believable, and to conform it to the mythology of the era.”

That may be partially true with Matthew who clearly tried to write to the skeptics of Hebrew communities. But the gospels were both a record and repository of the basic history but more important the doctrines or teachings of Jesus. While there are differences in the reporting of the gospel they are certainly as accurate as modern media reporting today if not more so.

Guignebert makes numerous outlandish assumptions and conclusions based on testimony which by its nature is incomplete. Concerning the events at Gethsemane, he writes, "That the incident was dramatized after the event, and was even, in the main, entirely imaginary, there can be no doubt, for who could have seen, heard, and reported it, when the only ones who might have witnessed the scene were asleep?"

There is no way to know the details of the events. They are not reported. We know people were awake and fell asleep and were awakened from that sleep but there was no detail reporting of what they saw while they were awake or dozing off. These types of conclusions are fallacious unwarranted conjecture and certainly not scientific.

A major problem that arises in understanding these documents of antiquity is understanding the politics, laws and psychology of the participants within the text. There were factions at the altar of God and like politics or religion of today fact do not always matter.

Without a thorough understanding of the sciences of politics, laws and psychology Guignebert concluded that "The Last Things which Jesus expected did not happen. The Kingdom which he announced did not appear and the prophet died on the cross instead of contemplating the expected Miracle from the hill of Zion. He must then have been mistaken ... Jesus' dream ... ended in failure."

These statements show a compete lack of understanding of the kingdom and how it worked. The Apostles had thousands of Jews accept Jesus as the anointed king, the Christ on Pentecost. Those Jews repented of the system of Corban that made the word of God to none effect. They stopped the covetous practices that sought benefits by men of authority taking from their neighbors and started caring for one another in pure Religion. They no longer prayed to the Fathers of the earth for their free bread. They worked daily in the government temple dividing bread from house to house saying there is another king one Jesus. The only failure is with the modern Christian who does not see nor seek the kingdom of God, The Way, nor its righteousness of God.

Because he read accounts from different perspectives and does not understand some of the basics he again imagines "the Jesus of John seems quite a different person from the one implied by the Synoptic tradition. He is in every way different---his character, his behavior, his consistently harsh attitude towards the Jews, and the tone of his discourses, which are solemn and lofty exhortations never understood by his hearers, and full of profound meditations on the eternal Christ instead of the familiar teachings about the coming Kingdom and the conditions of entrance to it."

The Gospel of John is uniquely different than those of the first three Gospels. But this has almost entirely to do with the perspective of the source of those Johannine Scripts. If someone does not understand the message of the first three they can easily be confused by the fourth Gospel to say nothing of Paul's epistles to those Christians who were already doing what Christ said and had stopped doing what the Pharisees said was okay that was making the word of God to none effect.

Modern Christians cannot see the covetous practices have made them merchandise as predicted by Peter. They do not see that the voice of the people have rejected God and Jesus as the Christ so how can they understand the simplicity of the Gospel of the Kingdom.

Because of their lack of knowledge they appropriate the Divine and fashion Him in their own image and call their faith in that image belief in God and Jesus.  Even the definition of religion had changed for Guignebert a hundred years before so he wrote, "In all probability the Gospel writer was only concerned with the religious aspect of this sequence of events in time. Bearing this in mind, it is easy to explain the insuperable divergence which appears between the Synoptic chronological scheme of the events of the Passion and the Johannine scheme, while admitting that the former is lacking in clearness and coherence."

John never even mentioned the word religion but once it is understood to be in accord with James' version of Pure Religion both the Johannine Scriptures and the Epistles of John begin to come together with a deeper meaning along with the Kingdom of God and His righteousness which we are told to seek.

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