In Front | Workbook: Jesus and Ancient Teachers – G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Everlasting Man’

Grab your Workbook Journal!

[Record your answers in the workbook provided at the beginning of this course.]

The passion of Jesus is so important to the Gospels that some scholars have referred to them as “passion narratives with extended introductions.” Lately it has become fashionable to question the importance of the death of Jesus to the Bible story. In his brief account of Christianity in world history the British journalist G.K. Chesterton emphasizes the importance of Jesus’ death by contrasting it with the death of Socrates. He also contrasts the teaching life of Jesus with the wandering Greek philosophers and the teaching lives of figures like Buddha or Confucius. Jesus’ death was not a detail of his story, but its driving focus. In spite of the power and importance of Jesus’ teaching, Chesterton suggests that Jesus’ death was the “most primary thing” he came to do, and the “most definite fact” of his life:

The great conversations which give us our glimpses of the great minds of Socrates or Buddha or even Confucius often seem to be parts of a never-ending picnic; and especially, which is the important point, to have neither beginning nor end. Socrates did indeed find the conversation interrupted by the incident of his execution. But it is the whole point and the whole particular merit, of the position of Socrates that death was only an interruption and an incident. We miss the real moral importance of the great philosopher if we miss that point; that he stares at the executioner with an innocent surprise, and almost an innocent annoyance, at finding anyone so unreasonable as to cut short a little conversation for the elucidation of truth. He is looking for truth and not looking for death. Death is but a stone in the road which can trip him up.

Now compared to these wanderers the life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did above all things consist in doing something that had to be done. It emphatically would not have been done, if Jesus had walked about the world forever doing nothing except tell the truth. And even the external movement of it must not be described as a wandering in the sense of forgetting that it was a journey. This is where it was a fulfillment of the myths rather than of the philosophies; it is a journey with a goal and an object, like Jason going to find the Golden Fleece, or Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides. The gold that he was seeking was death. The primary thing that he was going to do was to die. 

He was going to do other things equally definite and objective; we might almost say equally external and material. But from first to last the most definite fact is that he is going to die. No two things could possibly be more different than the death of Socrates and the death of Christ. We are meant to feel that the death of Socrates was, from the point of view of his friends at least, a stupid muddle and miscarriage of justice interfering with the flow of a humane and lucid, I had almost said a light philosophy. We are meant to feel that Death was the bride of Christ as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love-affair with death.

Source: G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 2007, pp. 200-201.

2. How does Chesterton contrast the life and death of Jesus with the lives of Socrates and other ancient teachers?

As Chesterton frames the importance of Jesus’ death in the Bible story, he emphasizes the power of the plain text of the Bible account. He warns against attempts to “improve” or enhance the Gospel accounts with theological models or explanations:

From the moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket to the moment when the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole story moves on wings with the speed and direction of a drama, ending in an act beyond words ….

Every attempt to amplify that story has diminished it. The task has been attempted by many men of real genius and eloquence as well as by only too many vulgar sentimentalists and self-conscious rhetoricians. The tale has been retold with patronizing pathos by elegant skeptics and with fluent enthusiasm by boisterous best-sellers. It will not be retold here. The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story is like the power of mill-stones; and those who can read them simply enough will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them. Criticism is only words about words; and of what use are words about such words as these? ….

There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech; or in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any words less stark and single-minded than those of the naked narrative even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.

Source: G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 2007, pp. 201-207.

3. What does Chesterton suggest about the significance of Jesus’ death and our ability as humans to understand its deepest meanings?