A Hero With His Posse
If literature is not cosmopolitan when a Japanese-German publishes in the United States in English a book dealing with the life of the great Jew whose deeds and doctrines, recounted in the Greek of the Gospels, serve as the basis of the Christian religion, when is it? Sadakichi Hartmann’s The Last Thirty Days of Christ will sound to the orthodox a good deal like George Moore for irreverence and a little like Anatole France for slyness. Ostensibly the diary of the disciple Lebbeus, also called Thaddeus, it explains the miracles as so many quite rational affairs and ends with Jesus dying like a mortal man in a garden at Emmaus; in the most realistic language it shows Lebbeus asking Jesus if he is to “swipe” the ass on which the Master entered Jerusalem, describing the shapely legs of the Samaritan woman, and recounting with vigour and gusto the pranks of the dusty, naked apostles in the Jordan. Bull-necked Peter, “fierce, stubborn, easily roused, but devoted to the Master like no other”; “flamboyant Judas Iscariot, a strangely magnetic personality”; “sturdy, straightforward James and sad and headachy-looking John”—John being the Boswell of the expedition; doubting Thomas, “a lean elderly crab-apple sort of a man”; “old ‘muffled-up’ Bartholomew, of whose face at no time one could see more than a snivelling nose”; Matthew, “practical, shrewd, determined that something great must be the outcome of all this personal discomfort and marching about”—these and the others are keenly drawn to what may have been life—of course no one knows. The apostles talk metaphysics behind the Master’s back and undertake plans for “something great.” Indeed, the betrayal appears as merely Judas’s scheme for bringing matters to a head and forcing Jesus to call on the “legion of angels” which he had said he could command. Alas, the apostles could not comprehend their Teacher, his humour, his paradoxes, his hyperboles, his strength in tenderness, his nature so rich and full that he could be ascetic without drying up. He stands in this book, wherein the arguments of Renan are made flesh, as a companionable saint—not a god at all—who is still marked off from the intensely human group about him by a mystery and a glory which are Sadakichi Hartmann’s tribute to his power and which in Christian art have been symbolized by the bright aureole around his head.