Renan's divided portrait, and Chesterton's sharpened paraphrase
Renan even represented the righteous anger at Jerusalem as a mere nervous breakdown after the idyllic expectations of Galilee.
'Nervous breakdown' is Chesterton's characterization, not a verified quotation. Renan's Vie de Jésus first appeared in 1863; the inspected English witness is the later Modern Library text with a translator's preface dated December 1863 and a title-page notice for a 1927 introduction. In chapter XIII, Renan explains the temple confrontation through Jesus's religious sensibility, hostility to commerce, and anger. Chapter XIX more broadly contrasts the earlier cheerful moralist with a later, increasingly otherworldly figure whose demands strain ordinary human attachments. These passages support Chesterton's identification of a divided psychological portrait, but do not themselves call the temple incident a clinical collapse. His rejoinder changes the issue: pity and combativeness need not indicate successive, incompatible personalities if anger answers the injuries compassion perceives.
This is an interpretive dispute about the unity of Jesus's character; Chesterton's compressed wording should not substitute for Renan's actual account.
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