Hugh Miller says, “Dickens knows his place.” The gifted novelist did not attempt great characters. Shakespeare did; he was greater than any character he produced; “taller” than any man he “drew.”
When you come to ask whether these four Jews, the evangelists, could have invented the character we know as Jesus you must remember that they had, first of all, in order to do it, to throw themselves outside the sphere of Jewish thought and sentiment. If to them had been granted all personal qualifications the conditions under which they lived made the invention of such a character impossible; they could not breathe the intellectual, social, and moral air in which they lived and do it. For this character, the Jesus of the evangelists, is not in harmony with the essential characteristics of the Jewish race or with the dominant influences of that time; this character antagonizes these characteristics and influences at every point.
Granting--and it is admitting an intellectual miracle that staggers credulity--that these men did meet the first condition for the invention of such a character, and overcame, as no other men ever did in any nation or time, the controlling influences under which they lived, let us ask whether, in view of what they reveal in these writings of themselves, they were capable of such an intellectual and spiritual feat as inventing a drama that should give Jesus to the world.
To have achieved such a result they must have been in breadth, depth, and elevation of intellect capable of thinking out the mighty doctrines that Jesus taught. And this, we may well believe, was the least part of their task.
To me it is incredible that these four men could have thought out the teachings of Jesus. For such thinking they lacked all things that history and philosophy show to be necessary for such thinking.
Why could not Socrates and Plato, great, learned, wise, and good, to whom came more than glimpses of heavenly truths, think out what the Sermon on the Mount contains?
Socrates and Plato, if mere men could do such thinking, ought to have thought out the Sermon on the Mount; for they had every gift that nature could bestow and every opportunity cultured Athens could offer. And they did their best to think out the truths that bind man and God together. They failed; and Plato sighed for the coming of a divine man who would make clear what to him was dark.