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Updated: May 14, 2025
M. Renan, at any rate, does not think this an illusion of Christian prepossessions, a fancy picture of a mythic age of gold, of an unhistorical period of pure and primitive antiquity. Put this view of things by the side of any of the records or the literature of the time remaining to us; if not St.
Renan, amongst the many thinkers on life’s mysteries, tells us that “Life is the result of a conflict between contrary forces.” But to philosophise is useless, and it is still more useless to question life’s seeming anomalies. We can only bow in silence before “what Time in mists confounds.”
The argument, at bottom, is common to all thinkers over-impressed by the sanctity of past experience. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, Taine and Renan in France, Sir Henry Maine and Lecky in England, have all urged what is in effect a similar plea. We must not break what Bagehot called the cake of custom, for men have been trained to its digestion, and new food breeds trouble.
The feeling that he himself was not much wiser in this matter than his wife may have led him to pass over the learned text-books on Chaldean antiquity, and even the volume of Renan which appeared to be devoted to Oriental inscriptions, and take up his other book, entitled in the translation, "Recollections of my Youth."
Phoenician sculptors in the round did not very often indulge in the representation of animal forms. The lion, however, was sometimes chiselled in stone, either partially, as in a block of stone found by M. Renan at Um-el-Awamid, or completely, as in a statuette brought by General Di Cesnola from Cyprus. The representations hitherto discovered have not very much merit.
The more critical want something truer and more natural, something more accordant with the stern realities of life. Renan has some excellent remarks on this in the Preface to his second volume of the Histoire du Peuple d' Israel.
It would suit Renan at least; and surely this, which is so venerable and sanctioned by time in our eyes, would have seemed quite as odd and grotesque a thing if foretold to St. Paul. I feel that, among other good things, Rome, while it gave my childhood notions of dignity, of time and solemn things, kept my eye and fancy on very short commons.
Renan observes that the passage in the authenticity of which he believes is "in the style of Josephus," but adds that "it has been retouched by a Christian hand." We answer, it is plain, from the fact that Josephus entirely ignores both, that the pretended story of Jesus was not widely known among his contemporaries, and that the early spread of Christianity is much exaggerated.
And to me, the pleasure is doubled by the reflection that it is extremely probable that we have the actual terms, the ipsissima verba, used by Christ. It was always supposed that Christ talked in Aramaic. Even Renan thought so.
Saffah is a desert plain in Syria extending east from the lakes of Damascus, and a part of it is covered with these curious stones. Antiquaries like Renan, Ganneau, De Vogué, Waddington and Pierret are sorely puzzled over the writing on them, for the character resembles none that has yet been deciphered.
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