Last Days at Capernaum

154:4.1On this same Sat­ur­day night, in Ca­per­naum a group of fifty lead­ing cit­i­zens met at the syn­a­gogue to dis­cuss the mo­men­tous ques­tion: “What shall we do with Je­sus?” They talked and de­bated un­til af­ter mid­night, but they could not find any com­mon ground for agree­ment. Aside from a few per­sons who in­clined to the be­lief that Je­sus might be the Mes­siah, at least a holy man, or per­haps a prophet, the meet­ing was di­vided into four nearly equal groups who held, re­spec­tively, the fol­low­ing views of Je­sus:

154:4.21. That he was a de­luded and harm­less re­li­gious fa­natic.

154:4.32. That he was a dan­ger­ous and de­sign­ing ag­i­ta­tor who might stir up re­bel­lion.

154:4.43. That he was in league with dev­ils, that he might even be a prince of dev­ils.

154:4.54. That he was be­side him­self, that he was mad, men­tally un­bal­anced.

154:4.6There was much talk about Je­sus’ preach­ing doc­trines which were up­set­ting for the com­mon peo­ple; his en­e­mies main­tained that his teach­ings were im­prac­ti­cal, that ev­ery­thing would go to pieces if ev­ery­body made an hon­est ef­fort to live in ac­cor­dance with his ideas. And the men of many sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions have said the same things. Many in­tel­li­gent and well-mean­ing men, even in the more en­light­ened age of these rev­e­la­tions, main­tain that mod­ern civ­i­liza­tion could not have been built upon the teach­ings of Je­sus—and they are par­tially right. But all such doubters for­get that a much bet­ter civ­i­liza­tion could have been built upon his teach­ings, and some­time will be. This world has never se­ri­ously tried to carry out the teach­ings of Je­sus on a large scale, not­with­stand­ing that half­hearted at­tempts have of­ten been made to fol­low the doc­trines of so-called Chris­tian­ity.