taught. He is, in short, what we should call an artist and a
Bohemian in his manner of life.


JESUS NOT A PROSLETYST

A point of considerable practical importance today is that be
expressly repudiates the idea that forms of religion, once
rooted, can be weeded out and replanted with the flowers of a
foreign faith. "If you try to root up the tares you will root up
the wheat as well." Our proselytizing missionary enterprises are
thus flatly contrary to his advice; and their results appear to
bear him out in his view that if you convert a man brought up in
another creed, you inevitably demoralize him. He acts on this
view himself, and does not convert his disciples from Judaism to
Christianity. To this day a Christian would be in religion a Jew
initiated by baptism instead of circumcision, and accepting Jesus
as the Messiah, and his teachings as of higher authority than
those of Moses, but for the action of the Jewish priests, who, to
save Jewry from being submerged in the rising flood of
Christianity after the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction
of the Temple, set up what was practically a new religious order,
with new Scriptures and elaborate new observances, and to their
list of the accursed added one Jeschu, a bastard magician, whose
comic rogueries brought him to a bad end like Punch or Til
Eulenspiegel: an invention which cost them dear when the
Christians got the upper hand of them politically. The Jew as
Jesus, himself a Jew, knew him, never dreamt of such things, and
could follow Jesus without ceasing to be a Jew.