Religion: Gospel According to Erskine

Since Matthew, Mark, Luke and John first wrote it down, the story has been retold by many a brash biographer (notably: Ernest Renan, George Moore, Emil Ludwig). But the original Gospel story still stands four-square against all comers. Undaunted by the experience of his predecessors,* Columbia’s Professor Emeritus John Erskine, who has already tried his hand at fiddling with Greek myths where Homer nodded (The Private Life of Helen of Troy, Penelope’s Man), last week came forward with a new version of the Gospel story (The Human Life of Jesus; Morrow; $3).

At the outset, Professor Erskine phrases his own belief with ambiguous care: “I call this book The Human Life of Jesus not because I don’t believe in him, but because I do.” But readers will soon see that Professor Erskine is not a Christian, in the strict and simple sense of the word —he is a humanist.

Of the 18 years between Jesus’ visit to the temple, where His questioning astounded learned men, to His baptism in the Jordan, little is known. Dr. Erskine speculates: “Whether, as some people would like to believe, he ever married and had a son, is an irrelevant question. What is pertinent is his capacity for love and his genius for parenthood. . . . It seems to me clearly indicated in all the meetings of Jesus with women who were not his relatives that somewhere in his life, in some episode of which we are told nothing, a woman had hurt him deeply.”

Social-minded, says Author Erskine, is the word for Jesus, and a key to His character. His presence at the wedding at Cana shows His human warmth: He “shared the happiness of his friends. He began and ended his ministry, he carried it out at every stage, in examples of social-mindedness.”

In using parables, Jesus was “a great artist, a superb storyteller, a born dramatist. . . .” In performing miracles He revealed “a God of love.” But the author, who shies away from the supernatural, does not believe that Lazarus was raised from the dead. Lazarus’ relatives and friends and the Gospel chronicler may have believed it, but “there is nothing [in the Biblical account] that compels us to believe that Lazarus was literally dead.” Lazarus may have been brought “back to health” by Jesus’ “power of mind and will” and by “the therapy of his own abundant vitality.”

There is a fashionable note of modern psychiatry in the Erskine interpretations. The man with palsy was really only suffering from “worries and regrets.” He was cured by “something in the speech, the manner, the personality of Jesus.”

Dr. Erskine’s smooth rationalization of the Resurrection: “The miracle . . . was in the transformation of the apostles. The spirit of Jesus went with them all their days, until it seemed that in them he was risen from the dead.”

* Dr. Erskine is inclined to be charitable toward one of them: “. . . St. John, when he wrote his version of the Gospel, was an old man, a very old man indeed, and … he was using incidents in the life of Jesus, not in the interest of biographical accuracy, but to illustrate a doctrine.”